blah blah blah

It's been a while!  Work has been busy - trying to analyze many many water samples from Iceland...some DNA work, measuring phosphorous...sigh.  Jon came back today after a month of field/play...he will be back for a scant week then he and most of the lab are off to Portland for the Ecological Society of America meeting.  So that will leave me holding down the fort for a week alone.  Things are less stressful that way, and I'll have the various girls to keep me company.  

Dan comes home so soon!  19 days!!  Soon it will be August and his return home will speed by like no one's business.  Right now I'm awaiting comments from Brian on my two chapters, and in the meanwhile I've been formatting the thesis and thinking about the presentation when the time finally comes.  It's been hard to figure out what story I want to tell other than "this is just a formality, please just give me my Master's, it's taken way too long."  Presentations are always a little tricky for me.  Sometimes they turn out well, other times they bomb.  The successful ones seem to be the presentations that I am genuinely excited about.  To be excited about it I need a good story that I enjoy telling to others.  Right now there's a bit of staleness surrounding the whole ordeal.  But at some point a light bulb goes off in my head and it'll all come together.  I just have to hope that comes sooner than later.  

So I took my stitches out early last week.  I watched a couple youtube videos and it didn't seem all that difficult - make sure things are sterile, lift the stitch with tweezers, snip between knot and skin, pull out string.  Sometimes with the odd angle of the chin stitches I couldn't easily see where the knot was and so there was a little finessing involved.  But I'm happy to say they all came out without consequence.  That saved me a trip to the ER and a long wait for a nurse to do the same thing.  DIY to the extreme....  So now I just have to contend with scabs.  Do you remember how annoying scabs are?  They get itchy, they get flaky, you try your best not to pick at them, but then you pull on a sweater and half of a crispy cornflake is ripped from your skin.  ouch...and then I stare at my scabs...if there is the tiniest sliver of daylight between scab and skin, guess who's fingernail is fiddling with that...

The scab process is so very slow.  I have a good many of them so I can focus my attention to the various scab islands littering my body...The knee scab is the worst.  How many times have I banged my knee on something just today which smarted like no other??  Well, twice if you must know...it wasn't even a hard bump...just enough for my body to remind me "HEY!!  We're working on this area, please keep away okay?!  This is very delicate work and you've just ruined it all and so now we're back to square one - are you happy?!?"

Sigh...I think it's clear Dan needs to come home soon so I can stop typing out this diarrhea of the mind... 

pictures...mostly of Hannah..no scar pictures yet, accumulating the montage...

For fun, (for me) Hannah dreaming...

shooter in custody - whew!

details are slowly leaking in....

xo

good one chau....

sigh...so many things to share today!....

1) 1 month left until Dan comes home and the family is reunited!  yeah!!!

2) I am watching little Herman now - we snuggles quite well on the couch...Hannah is jealous, but oh well, it makes her a bit more snuggly as well...

3) Shooting in a downtown bar in Tuscaloosa late last night? Crazy, not many details right now, but it's a bar I've only been to once during the day, it's in an area called Temerson Square where they concentrate a lot of bars.  The city has been making a push to move the bar scene from "The Strip," which is the part of University St that is close by the UA, to downtown where there is less of a concentration of residents...

4) So...the good news is, I'm ok and on the mend!  The less good news at least yields a good story, not the best story, but a good story - not related to the shooting above (directly anyway)...sigh...

I walked the dogs last night to the park near city hall...it's a nice quiet park with not a lot of foot or car traffic.  The dogs ran around some (Herman on the leash because he is a major major flight risk) and I guess by "dogs" I mean just Herman because Hannah was totally pooped by the time we got to the park.  

While walking home, we walked by Kyle Office Solutions, just a couple blocks away from home, and spied a couple feral kittens..black as night and unsuspecting of the dogs...Hannah loves to chase them for a bit, and then they sneak into a crack that she can't get her big honking head in, so I encourage the behavior most times (bad owner...bad owner)...for whatever reason, I underestimated her excitement along with the added confusion of having Herman in on the chase...cats separate (the one Hannah was after actually ran full force into the glass door at Kyle Office Solutions, fell down, shook its head, then ran for the bushes - that was actually pretty funny and the most vivid memory I have of the whole ordeal), a split second later the dogs have circled around me in opposite directions chasing the two cats and I am down on the sidewalk, both leashes in hand.  Why did I not let go of the leashes?  I just don't know...

Glasses flew off somewhere, dogs are bewildered and standing around panting.  Thankfully my chin helped stop my fall.  I quickly got up and assessed the situation - dogs, a-ok, cats - not caught nor killed, glasses...um...somewhere...finally found after stooping over and blindly groping at shadows...blood... dripping...from....where? scrape on the left knee and left elbow, bleeding but not gushing, mild scrapes on my right hand...blood dripping onto my shirt, and skirt....head ok, blood.....ah! from the chin that broke my fall...no biggie...nothing broken, just a little sore, so I hobble home with dogs in tow, blood still dripping - yikes!  chin is a mess, but doesn't hurt too much...so I try to stop the bleeding with my t shirt sleeve and slowly get home, trying to look away when cars drive by so they don't think I'm a complete freak.  That's all anyone needs - to stumble upon a confused asian girl in the south walking a 70 lb dog and a 5 lb dog covered in blood...not the best Monday night I've had...

When I finally get home I ditch the dogs and make my way up to the stairs to start the cleaning process...flip on the light and look in the mirror - oh boy...the "small scrape" I though was on my chin is actually a 2 cm gaping wound...this is beyond bandaids and cotton swabs.  So...do I go to the emergency room? Wait until morning?  I quickly decide a chin wound is nothing I wanna mess with - there's no easy way for me to clean it myself so I say bye to the pups, grab a wash towel to stop blood from dripping all over myself, and drive to DCH (Druid City Hospital) by the University.  Adrenaline eases off a bit and things start getting sore.  Finding parking at the ER is never all that easy..maybe because you're at the ER and likely hurt, confused, panicked, emotional, etc...anyhow, I finally get myself situated and walk into the ER and I try to hide the blood covering my body as families are in the waiting room staring at me.  I fill out some paperwork and wait in a chair, texting feverishly to folks while waiting to keep myself looking busy and avoid eye contact with others...at this point it's 10pm, a lot of waiting goes on (not until about 11:30 do I find the remote for the TV in my room to check out about 10 minutes of some random TLC show - Four Houses?  Didn't watch it enough to understand the premise but something about women in Dallas being catty with each other's houses and their design techniques)...Four stitches later on my chin, and two on the elbow, and a lot of gauze and a tube of Polysporin later, I'm ready to be discharged at 12:30am...sigh..what a night..all I want to do is go home, try to clean off the blood off of my new skirt, and hit the hay.

Just before that happens I go to walk out the exit where the metal detector is and find security guards at the exit with worried faces.  I walk up and one security officer says "Can I help you Ma'am?"  confused, I just answer - "I am just trying to leave, my car is parked out in the ER parking."  The two security guards hum and ha for a bit and one tells the other "Go ahead, let her leave," then he turns around and says "Ok, once you leave the building go straight to your car and get the he-- outta here.  We have a shooter on the loose and the hospital is on lock down."  My thoughts: WTF?!?!  a shooter? like here in the hospital? like in the next county over?  Details please??  He mentioned it was in downtown so at least I knew to avoid that area.  As I walk through the doors, the "Ma'am" security guard tells me "I see you hobbling there, but once you go through these doors go straight to your car as fast as you can and go home"...yes, me the gimp...hobbling about..sigh..

I got home just fine, hearing sirens in the distance and I came home to excited pups and just hit the hay.  Just now we're getting more details about the shooting - an isolated incident - not just a random shooting, even though 17 folks were shot, thankfully no one was killed.  A few updates here...what an eventful night...

 I took multiple pictures of my various wounds...I'll probably post those up soon on an album all on its own, lest those who are queasy or eating a meal want to stay away...wounds are cool! scars even better!!

xo for now

p.s. the wound is on the underside of my chin, so hardly visible, lest Dan thinks he's got a horribly disfigured girlfriend now...

Yippee!!

Well I sent off another draft of Chapter 1 and 2 to Brian, so I feel like I've accomplished something this weekend!  Yeah!!  

It's been hard to keep focused, but words of encouragement from friends, loved ones, and strangers have been helpful (note: no strangers have given me words of encouragement, but what if we did that?  Next time walking down the street and you pass someone just say "Keep it up! You're doing great!".  Would you just get a strange look?  Would they run away from you or start a fight?  Let's hope no fighting...but it might just help the world go 'round...

The weather has been much more bearable the past week, though I wouldn't protest if the temperature wanted to drop down to the low 80s.  This weekend I have been watching one Miss Foxy Brown.  She weighs only about 30 lbs, is a black husky mix, loves water, and is FAST!  Hannah and her have been getting along well - Hannah stayed with Foxy and her owner Jamie while I was in Iceland earlier this summer, so they know of each other.  I've taken the two girls to the Quad to chase squirrels, and to Lake Tamaha which is a man-made lake made for The Retreat - a large housing complex populated mostly by undergrads....  No pictures, but pretty great to see Foxy run and jump in the lake FULL SPEED while Hannah stops short and barks at her to return to land...Hannah got in up to her ankles, then her doggie knees, and then while jumping up and down barking at Foxy out of complete frustration, she slipped and jumped a little too far into the lake and had to swim for the bank with the look of "holy crap" fear in her eyes.  There were a couple random dogs just running around the lake and Hannah dealt well with them - I guess if you live at The Retreat you can let your dog loose without worry.  Odd, I thought...

Anyhow, Foxy has A LOT of energy, so I try to run her hard so she's tired and will sleep through the night.  Hannah needs about 1/8th of the exercise to be completely pooped - a sign that she is getting old, getting fat, getting lazy, or all three.  The fat and lazy is probably my fault...

Soon Eve will be coming over with Herman - a pug beagle mix of some sort.  He'll be staying with Hannah and I for the whole week!  How very exciting!!  Having >1 dog in the house is always fun - Hannah gets jealous and is more engaged, the dogs tire each other out from just looking at each other, and I have another fake person to talk to...yes, I talk to Hannah often while living alone, and make up conversations between Hannah and Foxy - don't judge me....

anyhow, not a whole lot aside from work, thesis, garden, and dogs these days...We won at trivia last week!  Trivia Night at the Mellow Mushroom is definitely the highlight of my week - probably the combo of pizza, trivia for gift certificates, and cheap beer that really does it.

ho hum..here are some pictures, enjoy!

xo!

The whole US is hot...

Hi!!

So I ran out of our simple green cleaner, and after the 4th of July BBQ at the house with 5 dog, including a very drooly 8 year old Boxer, the floors needed some TLC...I found this DIY natural wood floor cleaner and decided to give it a shot since I had all the ingredients...I used the 1st recipe since I have no castille soap (I think this is the same as Dr. Bronners though?), and I used olive oil for the "oil"...made a double batch for the mop and it turned out well!!  the fresh lemon smells quite nice, although next time I will probably strain the lemon juice since I'm finding bits of lemon pulp on the floors...ah well..next time...

The oil adds an interesting finish...not really sticky, but feels like a residue, I guess that's good for polishing the floors?  As it dries more and more it just feels "clean"...if that's even a thing...all in all, I'd do this again...Walking on the oiled floor is kinda giving my feet a massage and moisturizing them so that's cool..

So let's see, these pictures will give you a brief look into the utterly exciting life of Hannah and I of late...and by "utterly exciting" I mean "sweaty".  Like most of the US, Alabama is keeping us hot.  But at least I still have power and am nice and safe.  

Here's my awful filming of Rose Towers going down - part 1 and part 2...Here is a better one from the school paper, and you can google Rose Towers Implosion for countless others...I don't know which one is the best one...but seeing it in person was pretty awesome.  It was really impressive how the construction company set things up and  that it went so smoothly - right at 8am on the dot and the debris aftermath fell in the footprint of the building.  So cool!  You totally felt the explosions reverberate in your chest.  When I grow up I want to blow up old buildings!!

all for now, I gotta write the thesis...it's been stumpin' me of late!!  argh!!

xo,

ct