Back To School Everyone!

With September literally around the corner...like Saturday...that means Labor Day and school starting...at least in the Pacific Northwest.  I know most of the country has already started school.  Okay so I am even more excited about this Fall/Back-to-School season because after almost two years I am starting classes again!  I mainly had to start because I was going to be dis-enrolled if I did not register by a specific date but I feel like even though my world is still crashing down around me and I have control of NO aspect of my life, I want to throw myself into my school work and hopefully get my degree finished in the next couple of years.

I had a phone conference with one of my student advisers several weeks ago and decided to update my degree plan.  My original degree plan was BA in Psychology with Concentration in Child Psychology.  My current degree plan is BA in Psychology (shocker...no change there).

Now there are a couple of differences.  First is the obvious drop of the concentration.  There is no longer a concentration offered in psychology and I am okay with that to be honest.  Second is that while under my previous plan I had completed my General Requirements and had started on my Core Requirements but the new plan has added a few classes and changed the classes for the Social Science requirements (my Intro to Psych and Intro to Social Psych are now part of my Core classes and no longer satisfy the General).  Third, and MOST important, Statistics was required under my previous plan and is NOT REQUIRED under the current plan!  Hallelujah!!!  The moment that my adviser said that it is not a required class, I had made up my mind to switch to the current plan ASAP!!!

I had, however, already signed up for Statistics so I found my last 16-week course and dropped Stats for my one and only Lit class...English Lit: Beowulf to 18th Century.  I am really excited to start and class starts Monday!  With my knee injury I see my work schedule becoming lighter until it gets better and plan to it into high gear!  As soon as I see my syllabus Monday, I will figure out if I will be enrolling in my next course during my lit class or after.

That is the beauty of a strictly online school.  Classes start the first Monday of every month.  It does not matter if there is a holiday or not.  We do not have your typical semester or trimester like normal schools.  You sign up for classes when you want them and when you do not want to take a class you do not have to.  Now I will have to take a look at the required classes now and figure out my schedule but I am definitely going to continue to take my classes through June.  Keep my school year September through June and have July and August as my summer vacation.  That is what I love about my school.  Depending on how many classes I have left I hope to be done in the next two years.  Fingers crossed...

Now it is 11pm and I am going to try and crash and get a little bit of sleep.  I have to work at 9am but only until Noon and then I have my MRI for my knee tomorrow evening at 5:30pm.  If I cannot find a carpool buddy I might be driving alone and sitting in rush hour traffic by myself.  So good night y'all!

Until next time!

It Is THIS Kind of Day

Have you ever had one of those days when no matter what you do, all you want to do is sit in a corner, rocking back and forth, smacking your head and sucking your thumb until someone comes to rescue you from yourself...or until you pee your pants and just cannot sit in your own filth any longer?

I am so having one of those days!  I swear that this weekend is going to double the amount of gray hairs that I already have to work so hard to cover.  They are just going to take over my entire head.  I suppose that means I will be able to try going blonde again sooner...I mean if I am completely gray the upkeep will be a lot easier than with this dark brown/black mop that I currently have right?

As I try and figure out how to round off this post, I notice I have 20 minutes left until my lunch break is over and I did not even get a chance to ready my Nook (I am currently reading "Pillars of the Earth"...and it is AMAZING...just sayin').  Seriously though...only 20 minutes left?  Where did the other 40 minutes run off to?  It does not seem like my lunch should be almost over!

I am supposed to be off work around 7:30pm tonight.  If I have not updated my status on Facebook or Twitter by 7:45pm, send a search party because there is a good possibility that I am balled up in the fetal position somewhere crying for my mommy.

Until next time!

Damn Technology

Who here is good with technology?  I mean who can totally geek out and figure anything out...video game console, computer/laptop, cameras/video cameras, cell phones, iPod/iPad/iPhone...you get the point.  Okay, here is my issue.

A year and a half ago, I upgraded from my Crackberry (with the track ball that quite working) to a Droid 2.  The only thing I found that I liked about the Crackberry was that I could turn my phone off every night and my alarm would still go off.  Over the course of the last 20 months I have discovered:

~ Every other day I need to turn off my phone and turn it back on otherwise when I make a call or someone calls me, I get no dial tone or I cannot hear anything on the other end.
~ The screen freezes to the point where you have to take the battery out and reset it and turn it back on.
~ The camera and video camera do not like to work all the time and it is always when you see something totally awesome that it will not work.
~ They do not make indestructible cases because it has a slide screen.

Example of the camera: I get home last night and find that the douche bag has parked his truck in the center of the driveway...so I guess that was his way of telling me I am parking on the street...I wanted photo graphic evidence to prove his douche bagginess...oh and tonight I took three awesome pictures of three hot air balloons with skydivers weaving in and out of them and not a single one actually saved...mother effer!

I am very accident prone so I always purchase a case for my phone.  I bought a case for my phone and not even a few days went by and I accidentally knocked it off the arm of the couch and it fell about a foot and a half to the CARPET and BROKE!!!  Seriously?  WTF!  Reinforce that damn plastic silly companies!

I will never again buy another phone with a slide screen.  If this dang phone came with an indestructible case then maybe my first Droid 2 would not have had the screen shatter when it decided to leap out of my hand and have a screen-to-shop floor fight...and the screen lost!

The pictures that I took tonight were awesome and I swear when I took them, they showed up in the little preview screen and if anyone knows how to get them to show up I would love to share them!  I know the skydivers were not actually weaving between the hot air balloons but the elevation of both it just looked like it!

Alright...time for this little lady to catch some sleep!  Until next time!

Why Am I Not Surpirsed?

**NEWS FLASH**  I GOT HURT!!!  Shocker, right?  I will pause while you ponder over this statement...and finish laughing AT me...as I do not know exactly HOW I got hurt.  Here is a quick little review of events that occurred on August 12th:

6:30am - Wake up and get ready for CMY5K color run.
7:15am - Dressed in all white, leave house.
7:20am - Stop for a grande Pike drip coffee at Starbucks only to discover five minutes down the road that the lid leaks and I am wearing all white...managed to keep the coffee off of me though!
8:00am - Arrive at Magnuson Park in Seattle for the race.
9:00am - Run starts!  Waves of 150 people are sent every three to five minutes.  There were four waves and I was in the third.
9:20am - (may have been sooner or a little later) ran through the first "Splash Zone" of yellow and had a dude pitch powder right up my nose.
9:40am - Finished with the run and participated in the first color cloud!
10:50am - After wiping down with some baby wipes in the parking lot and changing, I made it home to shower.
11:30am - Registered for Heroes Mud Run 5K/15 obstacles on September 8th here in Snohomish
3:00pm - Start work
7:00pm - Right knee starts to feel sore so I take 800mg of ibuprofen
11:00pm - Tried to swing leg into bed and slightest bend in knee put me in tears and the decision was made to go to the doctor the next day.

Please note that the times are as accurate as I can remember them to be but may vary some (pausing for confused laughter here).  So last Monday I went to the VA clinic.  I called that morning to see if there was anything available that day and the lady said she would fax over a same-day visit request and that the clinic would call me.  When I did not hear anything within the hour, I decided to drive down there.  I mean I had to do some labs anyway so I might as well just go and sit there until I could be seen right?

I pee in a cup and literally sit for less than five minutes and get taken back by a nurse.  She informs me that my request for an appointment was just received (almost two hours after I had originally called).  My doctor was on vacation so I saw the physician's assistant and after I thought he was killing me by moving my knee around, he wrapped it in a couple ace bandages, gave me a Rx for Vicodin, told me to come back for Xrays in the morning and I went home.

Xrays showed NOTHING...no breaks or bone fragments floating around...so the PA's thought of a possible torn meniscus really stuck with me.  I called every day for the rest of the week trying to find out what my next step would be but everyone kept telling me that I had to wait for my doctor.

I planted my ass in the clinic on Monday morning and planned on staying there until I got some answers.  I was seen by a nurse because the PA was gone and the only answer I got was that since my doctor had not seen me, she wanted me to continue to see the PA...so I could have originally had some sort of answer about the next step last week.

Yesterday I received a phone call saying that a request for physical therapy was put in.  No one mentioned pt to me but since I went through all this once before with my shoulder, I know they want to try pt first to see if it helps with the pain and I am all for it...HOWEVER the EARLIEST I can get an appointment is October 15th...ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?

A little later I get a phone call from one of the nurses at the VA clinic saying that the PA wants to cancel my appointment for today because he does not think it is necessary.  I said no...I want to be seen and told her about physical therapy being almost two months away and that he mentioned possible MRI and I want to see him so that we can figure out what the next step is so I know and I can inform my boss.

My appointment was productive.  I should hear from Orthopedics by next Wednesday to schedule an appointment for an MRI and they will let me know if it will be with contrast (which it will because you have to have contrast to see a tear...again...my shoulder surgery is helping me understand the steps here) and 48 hours before my MRI I have to get blood drawn to make sure that my kidneys are working properly and will be able to handle the contrast for the MRI.

Unfortunately when I laid down to take a nap this afternoon, I ended up getting sick and just as a natural reaction I bent my knees to throw up and now my knee is KILLING me.  On the plus side, I can now take my pain pills every four hours instead of every six hours.  So now that I am all doped up, I am going to finish watching a movie and then pass out!

Until next time!

When Everything Seems To Be Going Wrong...



Lucky enough to get this shot!




Morning fog makes for breath taking sun rise pics.





It was the calm before the snow...all that snow we had in January.

 


Just another morning at work!




Leaving work one night and I just happened to have my camera.




Another beautiful sunset in the Snohomish Valley!



The sun setting behind Mount Index.



That is snow at Lake Serene in August.



Pain Killers + Blogging = ???

There is a 99.9% chance that this post will make absolutely no sense.

There is a 87.45% chance that this post will be nothing but rambling and run ons.

I hurt my knee...bad!  It is way different than any other time I ever tweeked my knee.  This very much screws up my plans.  I get off work at 3pm on Sunday and am off until 9am Friday morning.  I was supposed to hang out with this guy that I have been kinda sorta seeing the last couple months on Monday and Tuesday.  Now that my knee is all messed up, I cannot really go anywhere.

While chatting with my mom and telling her how we had planned on possibly doing a mini road trip...just something small and over night but now that my knee is all jacked I am not going anywhere.  I asked my mom if it would be okay if he came over and helped me pack up my room since we are moving and she said yes.

I talked to him briefly tonight and he said that it sounded like something that would be helping my mom and that he would have to think about it.  I cannot bend my knee without being in extreme pain and I really need the help and he seriously has to think about it!?!  WTF!  He apparently does not want to spend that much time with me if he is not willing to help me when I really need it.  No...he has to think about it.  So not cool!

Then there is this guy that I do not know very well but I want to know him and I am so attracted and I have told him so and I have it on good authority that he is attracted to me.  I felt like such an idiot a few months ago because it took me like a month to realize that he was flirting with me and by the time I realized it, he had started seeing someone...well since that time he had started seeing someone else...WHEN WILL IT BE MY TURN?  I mean really!  Short of stripping naked in public, what do I have to do to get is attention?

Okay...now that I have gotten that off my chest, I believe it is time for me to pop some meds and crash! Until next time!

Expectations Are Bad M'Kay!

Recently, while walking in a park along the river, I was asked to clarify a statement I had previously made.  When I asked what I needed to clarify, I was asked to clarify what I meant by going into relationships without expectations and how that differs from hoping for things.  My answer was very easy!

I said, simply, that I hope to spend time with you at least once a week.  If it happens, it happens.  If it does not, then it does not.  No harm, no foul!  It is not until you expect things to happen that you risk getting yourself and/or your feelings hurt.  He asked for an example.

Example:
My boss said in the spring that he was going to hire someone to help out on the line for the summer.  After talking to multiple people and being told that there is always three people working the line in the summer (long hours, split shifts, people do not get burnt out as quick), I felt confident in making plans.  I signed myself up for an all day training to obtain a new Zumba license and I got excited to attend my family's annual camping trip/boat races.  The day of my training was sneaking up on me and no one had been hired so I worked out a way to stay late the day before so that way I could attend my training the next day and go to work late.  I was stressed and pretty confident that I had a lot of gray hairs sprout around that time!  My family's camping trip was around the corner and I realized that no one was going to be hired and I was not going to be able to go camping and see my family.  I was very disappointed.  I was hurt.  I was let down.  It was something I was looking forward to doing and ended up not being able to go.

When you expect things, you get let down and hurt when they do not happen.  That is why when it comes to relationships, be it business, friendly, or personal, I go in with next to no expectations.  I learned real fast that even though I try to plan my lunch at work and I expect to take it around 1:30pm, I know that it is rare to actually get to take my lunch on time or when I want.  The only time I expect something from a friend is when it has been agreed that something will happen or whatever and that they follow through and do not blow it/me off.

That kind of goes for personal relationships also.  When a date was made to go to a local AA baseball game because there were fireworks after the game, I expected to stay the entire game.  I got a little irritated when my date said we might have to leave early because it was getting late.  Irritated is not the right word...I was a little hurt.  I love fireworks and I have not been to a baseball game (major league or minor league) in over two years.  I told him that he was more than welcome to stay but if he really felt that he had to leave, I would find a way home.  I would call my mom and wake her up if I needed to but I was going to stay for the fireworks regardless of the fact if he stayed or left.  He stayed.

With all that I have lived through and experienced, it may seem harsh that I do not expect anything from anyone because I truly do not trust that I will not be let down.  I have put too much trust into people who have done nothing but let me down over the years and I am sick of it.  Call it a wall that I have built but I just want to have fun and not expect anything less than.

Now that my pain killers have finally made me drowsy (four hours after being taken), I am going to crash since 6am is going to come way too soon!

Until next time!