embrace the heat

Feels like summer!!

Summer is my favorite time of year. All 3 of the other seasons make me depressed, tired, anti-social, and the anything-below-80-degree-weather makes my bones hurt. Winter clothes make me feel claustrophobic, and it annoys me when most of my sisters are in GREAT moods in the winter. I have no idea how 50 degrees (ie, freezing) can be at all appealing. Last month, when the first warm day hit, I wanted to sing and party. Like magic, I was immediately in a better mood, I had a ton of energy, and just felt a lot happier. Seriously...be my friend in the summer. I'm really nice for several months in a row.

Good things happen in the summer: No school, family vacations, spontaneous road trips, flowy skirts, flipflops, swimming, rain, Sonic happy hour, daylight savings time (!!!!!), church picnics, and sun tans. Seriously, what's not to LOVE?

Call your local congressman and tell them to make daylight savings time our standard time. I mean, come on, is there even one good thing about looking out the window at 5pm in the winter and seeing a pitch black sky? It's no wonder depression and suicide go up in the winter--they've taken away the sun! I say, put it back. Is there one bad thing about looking outside at 9pm in the summer and still being able to see everything? The world would be a better place if we would all get a little more sun.

This summer has been/will be a busy one for us! Early next month, I'll be starting a nurse aid course that will enable me to get a really nice, steady job in a hospital this fall. It's a 3 week course, and at the end I'll take the state exam, and then I could immediately start a job at any hospital. The nursing shortage is so great right now that you can basically just pick which floor to work on and what kind of hours you work. They're that desperate for people to work. I will hopefully cash in on that desperation and get a job at a hospital very close to our house, and my first choices for floors are labor & delivery or newborn ICU. I eventually would like to go into midwifery, so it would be nice to start there and get a feel for things. Taking this course will be helpful in several ways: 1) I will get a job that I think I will be good at and think I will enjoy, 2) I will be able to make sure that I can do that kind of work even in my weakened physical state, and 3) I will be able to get references from RNs that will boost my chances of being accepted into clinicals at the nursing school. So I'll take this course, and if the Lord wants me to continue in this nursing track, I know everything will fall into place.

I told you a few weeks ago about the nerve blocks that my neurologist gave me in March. I was seriously shocked that they actually helped! I mean, I don't mean to sound like a pessimist, but I thought this would be just another thing to check off the list of things we've tried. In the few days/weeks after the injections, I began to feel slightly better each day. The constant pain in my head/neck actually lessened a bit, but the biggest difference was in my energy/stamina/tiredness levels. If you're around a lot, you know how bad I get after an hour or two of doing *anything*. But with these shots, I was able to keep going all day without feeling like I needed someone to shoot me. And the best benefit: I cut my pain med doses down by a third! That is huge, people. Huge.
Anyway, the last 2-3 weeks have been terrible again--the shots have worn off now. :( Back to normal doses of meds, back to banging myself against walls to try to relieve the pressure pain, back to...everything. But my doctor said it's been a suffienct amount of time and he's going to re-do the shots this Wednesday morning at 8am. Awesome. So I'm looking forward to better days next week!

Shelley and I are trying to convince Mom and Dad to get us a second piano. Every big, musical family has more than one piano, right?? Maybe not, but that doesn't matter. We have these awesome 4 hands/2 piano duet books that are sitting on our music shelves, collecting massive amounts of dust. And we love to write/arrange duets ourselves, but we can't do it on one piano! One of our favorite things to do is to match up classical pieces with hymns or praise songs with the same chord structures. Then we arrange them so that we can play them at the same time, on 2 pianos. Think of all the fun we could have if we just had....one more piano. Mom said that to do that, we'd have get rid of the couch in the green living room. Y'all don't mind sitting on the floor when you come over, do you? Didn't think so. ;)

Well, here's to a great 90degree summer! Smile!