I need some help!

I need some suggestions on books to read. I have this habit of devouring books like nothing else. When I finally got a hold of the Twilight series, I read all four of the books in 3 1/2 days. Then I turned around and read them again. I'm one of those people that have to have a book to read. I read every spare moment I can get. I usually just grab a book off my bookshelf and read it once again. When I go to the library, I can never find a book. I have some books on hold, but I'm stuck in a rut. Please help me find some books to read!

The First Shot

Yesterday was my first "official" day of clinicals. Like I said before, I'm on the neuro ward, so our patient had a stroke. It was sad, she had some memory problems. We were constantly reminding her that she was in the hospital and that we were taking good care of her.

Everytime I go into the hospital for my clinicals, it gives me a new appreciation for the health that I have and also for my family. I hope that when I get old and in the hospital, I'll have family there to visit me.

On some exciting news, I finally gave my first shot! And yes, Shanda, it was on a real patient. It was just a flu vaccine, but my clinical instructor said "alright, Tiona, you're giving her her vaccine." And my mind went completely blank. I couldn't remember anything I'd been taught about giving shots. Luckily, it came in a prefilled syringe, so I didn't have to deal with drawing it up. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. And no, I didn't tell my patient it was my first time.

On some other 'exciting' news, it's a test week for Carl. He's been doing nothing but studying all day, with some breaks for Mario Kart. These weeks have always been a joy for us...(yes, I'm being sarcastic)

Hurricane Ike

As you may know, Hurricane Ike swept through Texas this last weekend, devasting the area. Well, we also got hit by it, just not as bad. We got no rain, but we did get wind. Lots of wind. The wind was 50 mph, with gusts up to 74 mph. This went on for about 4 hours! The news people said the wind was at tropical storm strength and the gusts where Hurricane strength. It knocked down thousands of trees and 3 people were killed by trees falling on them. There was a few fires that started, which were a blast for the firefighters to fight, I'm sure. It also knocked out power to over 600,00 customers. The power company said that at one point, they had over 90% of their customers without power. Luckily, neither our power nor the in-laws power went out. Schools were canceled on Monday and many were canceled today due to power outages. I heard a handful of people this morning say they were still without power and somebody said it would be a week until they had power! Here's some pictures I took of the area around our apartment.

This is our "backyard" the next morning. Luckily, no trees fell, but it was mess! Still is, as a matter of fact. It's just littered with leaves and tree branches.

Another view of our backyard. I think the people next to us had a rake and kind of cleaned their part up. Can you tell?

This is the building in our community which probably had the most damage. Many houses in the area, including Colleen's and Arlyn's, are missing shingles. You could tell which way the wind was blowing. Does anybody know a good roofer?

I think this is the building across from us. You can barely see the shingles pulling up on the side. If you click on the picture, it'll be better.

This is the edge of our pond. All that mushed down stuff? It used to be standing straight up, about 3 feet tall.
And this is what is now inside our pond, along with the goldfish, the occasional duck, and who knows what else. Yes, those would be garbage cans. Lots of garbage cans. There was more, but you can't see them in the reflection.
This is one of the trees that fell at the entrance to the apartments. I think that at one point, it was blocking the road, but they moved it. Which is good, because it's the only road in and out of the apartments.
This is what's left of that tree. It's a good thing that it feel the way it did, because there are some power lines nearby. Also, this is just a cool picture.
We actually saw this broken flagpole before the winds got really bad.
The trees on either side of this one were perfectly fine, but the wind just snapped this one right in half. As you can see, huge branches fell off.
I know this isn't a good picture, but the traffic light was out and the drivers were having a hard enough time trying to figure out a 4-way stop without having me try to cross the street.
This is at Thomas More University. It's a Catholic school right by our house. It's a good thing I got this picture, because they cut this down not to long afterwards.

I have some more pictures, but on Aryln's camera. We went for a drive after the storm passed to see what had happened. There's a street(Oakbrook) by their house that was just beautiful; it's lined with flowered pears for a few miles and I loved it. I counted all the trees that were destroyed and came up with 44 destroyed trees and 37 good trees. When Carl and I left their house, it was really eerie. Nobody had power. Carl made the comment that it was a good thing he knew the roads so well, because he didn't recognize anything. We left at about 11:30 at night and didn't see any lights from the time we left Colleen's house until the time we reached our house. Colleen warned us to gas up that night because a lot of the gas stations wouldn't have power and it would be horribly to try and find an open gas station. We went a little bit out of our way to find a gas station that has electricty. We passed 11 gas stations that didn't have power and finally found one that had power.


Well, sorry this post was so long. It was a fun storm, although it did a lot of damage. I'm glad that we are all safe and that we have power and that not too many people got hurt.

Just a Quickie

Here's just a quick update on us. I started my clinicals last week. I'm back at St. Elizabeth Hospital, which is nice because it is right up the road from us. I'm on a Neuro ward, so we get all the people recovering from strokes, neck and back surgeries, alcohol withdrawals, and mental status changes. It should be interesting. What I'm really exciting about is that I get to spend one day in the emergency room, one day in out-patient wound care, one day observing a surgery, and one day with IV therapy. So it should be a lot of fun.


On another fun note, Carl's parents bought us our Christmas present early. And it's a Wii!

They wanted to get us one for Christmas, but didn't think they could find one around Christmas, so got us one now. We really like it. We got Mario Kart for it. It's a lot of fun.

Well, that's really all I have time for right now. Just a nice little update!

Problems with my Clips

Alrighty, when I went out to Utah in June, Amber showed me how to make these cute clips and headbands for little girls. However, I have not been able to duplicate them. These are great pictures, but they'll have to do.

The first time I made them, I used the clip on the left and it worked great. However, I thought the clip was too big for a baby's wispy hair. It would work for the headband, but when you tried to just stick it in the hair, I didn't think it would work so well.

So, the next time, I wanted a smalled clip. However, all the clips that were medium sized had stuff on them, so I bought the clip on the right. When I put the ribbon on like Amber taught me, the clip wouldn't close. I experimented with a couple of different things, but nothing worked. With all the glue, the colored plastic finally fell off the clip, so I just glued the flowers right on the clip. I thought it was okay, but all the clips fell off.

I also have some clips like these. Do you think these would work? I need some suggestions!

Melissa, I just got my flowers from Wal-mart. I take the flowers apart and find I can get some really cute ones. I've also seen cute flowers from the dollar store.

Take me out to the ballgame

Late Friday night, Carl and I went to the Reds game against the San Francisco Giants. We got tickets through the medical school so we sat by a big crowd of drunk people. It's always an adventure! Most of the group showed up about 2nd inning and left by the 7th because, as they so loudly put it "We're sick of paying $7 a beer! We're going someplace cheaper!" I kind of got the feeling they weren't there for the baseball game...

We parked across the river at our friends house and walked to the ball park. This is the view from the bridge. You can see the Great American Ball Park and some bridges going across the river.


This is taken from the same spot, but a closeup of the ball park. It's right on the river!

This is the view from our seats. The bridge you see if the one we walked across, called the "Roebling Bridge" It's a cool bridge. See the funky building with the sloped roof? Yes, it's fully built. Our friends live right next to it. The fun thing is, this picture is taken in Ohio and you're looking in Kentucky.

Okay, you could see the players much better in real life. That's just my camera's view. Unfortanely, many of the players don't wear those nice pants that make their butts look hot.


And, suprisingly, the Reds won! We got to see a grand slam in the 3 innings and a good game.
After the game, they put on an awesome fireworks show. It lasted a good 15-20 minutes with lots of fireworks.

You'll notice they're missing the "S". They randomly put up the S later on. I think they had they're firework mislabeled.


On Saturday, we bought a DVD holder because our DVD's no longer fit in our little entertainment center. And I built it all by myself! (okay, Carl helped a little bit.) And it hasn't falled down yet! These are some hair clips I made for my new baby niece. Amber wanted to see some pictures. However, I can't get the clips to work. I tried the baby clips and it won't work. Any hints, Amber?

We need some hobbies!

We love our apartment. When we were looking for apartments, it was an adventure for us. It was our first time looking for apartments and, I'm ashamed to admit, we didn't really know the best way to go about it. We looked at some around my school and actually put a deposit down on one. We decided to look at other apartments while we could still get our deposit back to make sure that we were getting the best deal.

That's when we decided that looking on the internet is not the best place. Surprisingly, very few apartments actually put things on the internet and those that do never have the actual price of the apartments.

However, we found one that looked to be way out of our price range, but we decided to go anyway. And, of course, fell in love with the apartment. It has two bedrooms, 2 baths, a decent kitchen, 3 walkin closets, a porch with a fantastic view, a swimming pool, beach volleyball, a workout room, and even tanning beds. Plus, with the apartments providing water and cable, it was someplace we could afford.

However, we got new owners. And they brought new changes. Change number one was that no more free water. When they built the apartments, they didn't build they in a way that they could easily split up the water. This was why the other owners just paid for it; they didn't want to deal with the hassle of splitting up the bill. The new owners have some company that does some formula that makes it so we (with only 2 people living in the apartment) don't pay as much as the people across the hall (with 4 people and a dog) but we still worry we're getting a crappy deal.

Then they randomly decided to throw in sanitiation and garbage disposal in on top of the water. grrr....I guess that's what you normally pay with your water bill, but still!

So last week, Carl and I come home to a nice note that basically says that we were informed when we signed our year lease that the cable contract was going to change (we weren't). The new owners didn't like that they were providing "free" cable to the residents and so were going to work out a new contract with the cable company. They finally decided to basically increase our rent by $40 MIDCONTRACT in exchange for cable. They say that they weren't happen with the outcome, but make sure to point out that this was about a $25 savings compared to what we would normally be getting.

Understandably, Carl and I were upset. We talked to his parents and found out how much they were paying for their cable. (they have the same cable we have, minus the HBO.) They were paying about $45 dollars. We got online and found out that to get all of the channels we currently get, plus the HBO package (which includes like 10 more HBO channels than we get right now) was only about $40. And shouldn't the apartments be getting a group package seeing how there's about 150 apartments? Basically, the apartments are ripping the residents off.

Carl talked to them on Monday, told them they were ripping us off, and said that we couldn't pay the extra $40 a month. So, they're disconnecting our cable on Sept. 1. I told Carl we need to find some new hobbies, because we won't have TV anymore. We'll just have to watch a lot of movies I guess...

On some different news, school started for me yesterday. I think this is going to be a harder semester, with lots of pointless homework. Wish me luck!