Last summer break - surreal feeling

Well it's official!  I am enjoying summer vacation!  It's my last summer vacation at that, but still exciting!  Tuesday morning I took my last final in EBM.  All of my finals went well, and I ended up making a B+ and 3 A's  :-D.

We celebrated at Zinnie's on Madison Ave. to cheers to finally being done!!!

Some of the girls from class - interviewed with the girl in the blue shirt :)  still good friends!

Gym buddies on the right.  Having fun at Zinnie's.  They had drink specials for SCO students!

Since it's officially summer, here are our plans!!

We will be driving to Cincinnati, OH to enjoy King's Island theme park!  I haven't been to a theme park in about 4 years, so this will be a ton of fun!  In addition, my aunt got us a deal on a nice hotel.  So we'll be able to stay somewhere decent for an affordable price!

We're going to Florida for my grandmother's 90th birthday celebration! That will be a great time to see my family and get everyone together for a milestone birthday!!

Unfortunately, Tyler has night classes for is auto mechanic school from 6-9pm M-Th, and starts his long-term sub position August 8th, so he won't be able to come home to NC with me when I come home in August.  Hopefully, some of our friends will be able to take trips our direction, since I will be really busy studying once school starts back up at the end of August for me.

Tyler's long-term sub position will run from August to October, so if anyone want to come visit, October would be a good time!

Finally - good news. I got the North Carolina Health Science and Math loan again!!!  I'm so thankful for God's provision.  I will have to practice in NC to pay back my money, but I LOVE North Carolina, and cannot wait to practice in my wonderful home state!  The forgivable loan/scholarship is $13,900 a year towards my funding!  It's very, very helpful!  Now I need to make a trip to SCO's financial aid office to pay back some of the loan money I already accepted before NC knew whether or not they would have funding for this loan.

Until next time, I will be reading (Harry Potter thanks to my friend Keri for letting me borrow the books), relaxing by the pool, and enjoying doing things for myself!

God is so good!  I have so much to thank Him for - a wonderful husband, great friends, forgivable loan money, supportive family, and success beyond measure :)

Long time no post

To all who keep up with this, my sincerest apologies go to you.  I've been super busy with this crazy summer session.  It's only a month and a half long, but in this month and a half we have a lab for Theory and Methods and 3 courses (Evidence Based Medicine, Systemic Pharmacology, and Pathology).  Everything is moving so fast, and I feel like I'm running a marathon.  It will be over in 2 weeks however, and then I will have time to relax.  I have no idea what real time to myself feels like any more because even when I have a break, I'm thinking about upcoming tests, practicals, or papers, and it's difficult to just relax.

We have gotten some things done around the apartment though, so I wanted to share some pictures of the progress.  A while ago we bought some patio furniture as part of a gracious house-warming present from my parents.  Here is a picture of that.  It's really simple, but perfect for our small patio.

Two chairs and a small table.  That's all we need right now for us, but we can bring out more fold up chairs for extra seating when we have people over!

We haven't had much time or money to really decorate it, but there are some small things we've done here and there.

Lilies we got a Lowe's.  The flowers have since fallen off with all the rain and hot weather, but I have faith that they will come back and be pretty again

We found this jewel at Michael's for 50% off! :)  I want to get some more colorful wall decor to make our patio fun and colorful - perfect for entertaining!

  

We also got a pantry for the kitchen/dining room.  We were putting our food one of those bathroom decor pieces that goes over the toilet for extra storage.  It was tacky because it couldn't hold much and obviously, showed all of the unorganized food for everyone to see.  We're glad to have everything contained :)

Pantry!  It's a lot skinnier than I had expected.  The vase on the top is from decoration shopping with Tyler's mom, and the picture was given to us from some of our close college friends as a wedding gift.  It's a picture of the gang on the beach during spring break!

Now onto some more fun things other than home improvement.  Last Wednesday, some of our friends who live in houses on Mud Island hosted an "Around-the-World" party.  Each house represented a different country/ continent and served drinks and food accordingly.  Tyler and I missed the first two because he doesn't get out of class until 9pm, but we made it to the final 3: Italy, Mexico, and the Caribbean!  (The first two were Asia and Canada).  It was also Bryan's birthday, so later in the night when most people had left, we got some ice cream cake out to celebrate his big day :)

Bienvenidos a Mexico.  Tequila sunrises and corona were served along with chips and a guacamole dip!

Caribbean decorations at Erinn's house

Bryan's ice cream cake!

All the girls enjoying hunch punch in the "Caribbean".  There were little umbrellas in the drinks, so you might see some girls decorating their hair with them :)

The gang!

On Friday, we had a baby shower for Kristal.  She is in our class and expecting a little baby boy in September!  We played "Pregnant Twister" where you stuff balloons in your shirt and play twister.  I won!  :)  It was a pretty intense game.  The shower was a lot of fun and everyone chipped in on some nice gifts for the mother-to-be (and father-to-be of course... however, he didn't have much care for the baby things that weren't sports related haha). 

I made crinkle cookies from the Hershey's recipe book I got for Christmas.  They were super easy and DELICIOUS!  Everyone at the shower loved them!  Yeah for being able to at least bake - still working on the cooking!

Mom-to-be with the funniest present of the night.  One of our fellow classmates took all the handouts from our most annoying class this summer (Evidence Based Medicine) and used them to wrap her present for Kristal.  We're not done with the class... haha

Getting ready for pregnant twister

I HAD to put this picture up.  So when Tyler gets full, he can jut out his stomach and make himself look pregnant.  Who do you think is farther along?!  (unfortunately, the black in the fireplace behind Kristal makes it hard to tell how big she is, but she's coming along, and we're all excited!!)

So around the hard work and studying, I'm still trying to have fun.  But at least Theory lab is learning and fun!  We've been learning how to use the slit lamp.  It's basically a telescope that lets you see a very magnified view of the eye, and depending on how you angle the light, you can create a cross sectional view of the front part of the eye! It's amazing the detail you can see.  We also use very powerful lenses to be able to see the retina and optic nerve.  There's a 78 diopter lens and a 90 diopter lens that we use to look at the back of the eye and scan the retina for any bleeding or irregularities.  We just had the 78D practical and I will have the 90D practical next week.  I'm getting to school a little bit earlier than classes start to practice with a friend.  An unfortunate reality even though the views are awesome is that you have to be dilated in order to easily find and view the optic nerve, macula, etc.  So, needless to say, I feel like I've been dilated more often than not this summer, which doesn't make bright lights fun.  Let me just say that prescription sunglasses were the best investment I've ever made!

But now I need to go study for pharmacology.  I really like the class.  The information is interesting and the teacher is a breath of fresh air to the teachers we have earlier in the day that literally make my blood boil!  However, the list of drugs we need to know is unreal!  So I will be studying, studying, studying 24/7 until the big test on Monday!  Only 14 more days!!!!!  :-D

Memorial Day Weekend!!

Wow!  We've had a great weekend so far!  Last night (Saturday) we went with Erinn, Joey, Keri, and Nathan to an Irish pub called Celtic Crossings.  We had a lot of fun just having some drinks and hanging out with some good friends of ours!  Then, after we were done we decided to walk around a little bit.  The bar is right in the University of Memphis area, so there are some interesting mom and pop shops around.  Just down the street there was a cat shelter with cats running around.  Keri and Erinn love cats, so they had a GREAT time looking in the window.  All of them were adorable!

This morning, Tyler and I helped volunteer with fellow FCO (Fellowship of Christian Optometrist) members at St. Luke's United Methodist church, also by the U of M area.  We served breakfast for the homeless working from 7:00-9:00am.  It felt really good to serve the community and I think that's something I've been missing out on.  I live for the joy in your heart you feel when you brighten someone else's day.  It just keeps me going, and I was very thankful for the opportunity to serve this morning.

We came back and napped because I would say we only got 4.5 hours of sleep before having to wake up to serve.  Then at 1:00pm, we went over to our neighbor's apartment (next door) to have a Memorial weekend cookout!  We brought baked beans, Pringles, and our own drinks, while the neighbors took care of the meat, buns, and condiments.  It was wonderful getting to know them.  Also, since we are the only two apartments on the 3rd floor, we've made an agreement that the 3rd floor open area outside our apartments can be like a community place for plants or patio furniture, especially since the sunlight for the plants changes on our back patios.  The plants can get more sunlight if we're able to put them in the right spot :)  They had a couple of their friends over, too, who live at an apartment complex down the road.  It was nice to actually "break the ice" and meet.

Finally, we went to Lowe's to get a ceiling fan and a nice plant for our back porch.  We've been trying to make our porch somewhere we could go out and sit.  We got a burgundy lilly plant.  I'm excited because they're perennials and grow very tall with lots of blooms!  I cannot wait to see them bloom (pictures to follow)

AND THE BEST NEWS OF THE WEEKEND!  Tyler passed his praxis tests with flying colors!  :-D  He was worried because they were very difficult, but he did fantastic.  Hopefully, this means he can get his TN teaching license soon!  Yeah for a great weekend of fun and success!    

Just a few updates

We are staying in Cordova!!  We've spent way too much time looking at other places and NOTHING compares to the place we have now.  Our kitchen is larger than anything I've seen and we have 1312 sq. ft for $850/mo.  Everything closer to school would be a huge down grade in size for a higher price.  Nothing we saw seemed worth the move.  So we're staying :)

We met with Connie today, the lady who is in charge of managing the apartment complex, and she assured us that changes were going to be made.  We gave her a list of things that we wanted done to our place, and things we noticed about the complex in general.  She is going to send someone to fix our kitchen and bathroom floors at the beginning of June, and we're going to shop for some things to finish getting our apartment just the way we like it.  We started decorating in the fall, but I didn't finish everything because (1) we weren't 100% sure of how our finances would look at the end of the school year, and (2) we didn't want to do too much to then have to move it all.  But now that we know we're staying, we're finishing up our "bar" (to be called "Mitchell's Tavern... Hillsborough St. bar pun totally intended),  going to paint the headboard to match the rest of the furniture that I painted back in November, get a free-standing pantry for the kitchen, get a light fixture for the living room, and finish hanging some wall decor.

Another thing we're excited about is Tyler's new way to spend his time in Memphis!  Starting Tuesday, he will officially be a student in Southwest Tennessee Community College's Auto Mechanic Program :-D.  I've NEVER seen him this excited about anything since we moved here.  The classes will take up the entire summer, but, he will have a week off where we're hoping to travel home.  However, please feel free to visit us in Memphis!  His classes will be from 6-9pm at night.  And as long as I can get to the end of June with my mini summer term, I will be able to get stuff done around the apartment for good!

Finally, with staying here, we're looking forward to really getting to know our neighbors.  Our next door neighbors moved in relatively recently and we would like to spend more time with them.  They seem really chill, so I'm sure maybe a few double dates or something would be fun.  Also, there's a dental student who lives below us with his girlfriend.  We're hoping to really get to know them.  They have 2 big dogs and like to spend their time at the local parks, so maybe we could go enjoy a few days at the park with them :-D

I truly believe that everything happens for a reason.  I know God has his reason for keeping us in Cordova, I just haven't really figured out why yet.  Maybe because the womens' bible study is run by Mrs. Newman at the Newman's home (Dr. Newman was the teacher for Theory and Methods; his wife runs the FCO bible study for women).  They live in Cordova, so I love that she's only 7 minutes away on Saturday mornings for a home-away-from-home fix.

Well, I'm about to go study.  First 2 tests of the summer term are next week!  One on Wednesday and one on Friday.  I also have a quiz tomorrow and 2 lab practicals the weeks after next!!!  These classes are moving at the speed of light, so I better go!

Promised Pictures

Tornado by Rhodes College! 

The promised picture of Mississippi River flooding

SO HIGH!

New Hair :)

Starting again with second year classes

Second year classes began yesterday!  We have a short mini-term over the summer where we take 3 classes and a lab.  The 3 classes are Evidence-Based Medicine, Pathology, and Pharmacology.  The lab is a Theory and Methods lab.  Everything is condensed into about 6 weeks of classes!  It will be an intense summer.  I'm not quite ready for it.

Tomorrow (Friday) we don't have classes due to graduation!  Tyler and I are going to drive to Southaven, MS and try to look at a couple of apartments down there, and maybe one or two by school.  We have to let our apartment know by Wednesday whether or not we're moving.  It's going to be a stretch with the few options we have, but if we decide to stay in Cordova, I will let you know.  If we do decide to stay, I have many plans in the works to finish decorating and get to know our neighbors really well.  However, if we don't, we have a TON of packing to do. 

Yesterday was a good mail day!  I got the lunch box I had been waiting for from Lean Cuisine and a new Macy's gift card to replace the one I got for Christmas that got hacked!!  So exciting :)

We also took a trip to LA this past weekend to visit Tyler's brother, Andrew, before he goes off to Alaska in about a week.  We had a great time!  When we got there Friday, we got sushi and then went out to some clubs in Hollywood.  Saturday we spent the day seeing some great sights in the area, then went out again that night.  We got In-N-Out burger for dinner, which I had never had!  It was wonderful.  Sunday, we went to Ruyon where we were able to hike to a high point where you can look out and see all of LA, including the famous Hollywood sign on the mountain!  It was a very cool site for sure!  I also got to do a little scaling/rock climbing on some small rock walls along the trail - first time ever for this :)  Monday, we had to fly home, but I'm glad we picked the flight that we did because James Marsden was on our plane!!  I didn't get any pictures (because I didn't want to disturb him or be "that girl"), but it's still a pretty memorable moment for me!

Funny car parked while we were getting a tour of some famous places... had to take a picture

Santa Monica Pier

Out on Saturday Night

Pretty flower design in the foam of my honey vanilla latte from Urth Cafe, an organic coffee shop Andrew took us to on Saturday morning.  Andrew's coffee had a bird design in the foam!

One of the views from our hike on Runyon

Hollywood sign!  :)

 

 

Finally, I got my hair cut and colored on Tuesday.  Right now it needs to grow out a little bit, but I'm in love with the color and the change!!  I went to the Paul Mitchell School where students get to practice on customers what they've learned in the classroom.  Obviously, it's a risk, but it's REALLY cheap.  They were running a special that day for $5 cuts, so for everything I did, it was only $30!  I've been highlighting my hair since senior year in high school.  Then it was more blond and I just highlighted it for my senior portraits.  I really liked how it gave my hair some definition and continued highlighting it.  Well, when I started being able to tell a big difference when my roots began to grow out, I realized that I probably wasn't that blond anymore - my hair had gotten darker.  So I figured, why not darken my hair?  So I did.  It's now a dark honey blond color.  I don't want to take a picture yet because I got side bangs, and they're WAY too short right now.  I want them to grow out a little, and then I will share :) 

Until next time, it's time to hit the books... again! 

Year One - check! :)

And it's official!  My first year is complete!  Second year courses begin May 18th.  The year ended quite well.  4 A's, 1 A-, 1 B+, 1 B, and 1 C.  And yes, if you added those together, that would be 8 classes!  This finals week was the most difficult 8 days of my life!  But I'm very, very happy to be done.

Saturday and Sunday I did almost nothing but sleep and eat!  I'm assuming my body was on a combination of caffeine withdraw and sleep deprivation.  Today we went looking at various apartments closer to school.  We went to one pretty equidistant between where we live now and SCO.  It's by the University of Memphis, and we would absolutely LOVE this place.  We met some girls who were on the dance team at U of M and showed us their place.  It was nice and very affordable.  We're going back tomorrow at noon to see a couple of vacant apartments with the same leasing company.  I will let you know how it goes.

Until we actually move though, we are potentially housing flood victims at our apartment.  As the mighty Mississippi continues to rise, threats of evacuation have already come to many people.  I just hope that the rising waters can be contained.  I took some picture the other day.  I will try to post them here soon. 

We're going to LA this weekend to see Tyler's brother!  I'm so excited.  I've never visited California before and the last time we saw his brother was in October for Sandra and Bradford's wedding.  It will also be our last opportunity to see him before he goes to Alaska. 

Until next time - I will be relaxing, and it feels so good :)