This blog has moved!

I am merged this blog with another blog that I have so if you are here and I failed to send you the link to the new blog, email me at "kenorris at gmail dot com" and I'll send you the invite. For now it's private, hence the needing a link from me! Hope you enjoy the new blog as well!!

Happy 4th of July

OK, so it's only the 3rd of July but since I'm working the holiday I thought we'd blog "celebrate" today. I was supposed to have a week on my own but it turns out when Mike made his plane reservations to Indiana for a wedding, he made them for a month prior to when he meant to. So he got to the airport to get his boarding pass and they told him there was nothing they could do for him. Unfortunately for him, he missed time at home, but fortunately for me, we get to spend the weekend together! (Maybe I should make plane reservations from here on out...)

I worked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week so yesterday was a lazy day to catch up on much needed rest. Mike started working on putting rocks out on the portion of the lawn he calls the hell strip - the grass/weed area between the sidewalk and the road. Every year that area becomes an awful overgrowth of nothing more than weeds. We talked about sodding but that's a lot of sod so we instead decided on rocks (pictures to come) which makes me very happy - I HATE pulling those weeds every year.

Today I ran errands while Mike did more rock work and then off to a burrito party for dinner and back home early since I have to work tomorrow and Monday then start getting ready for my trip to Kansas to see my sister, mom, and nephew next weekend!

Seriously this is June!!

This one won't have lots of info in it - just a quick minute to say something to Mother Nature: It's June 12th!!! I'm all for not-so-hot weather, but couldn't we stick to the 70s and 80s as opposed to rainy and low 50s?!? The sun hasn't peeked out all day long and as soon as I let the dog out this morning I realized it felt more like February or March instead of June. Seriously?!?

That said, it was a nice surprise to be cost contained (too many nurses scheduled, not enough patients) this morning and I have spent a very lazy day in the house. It was especially nice because I was scheduled for 5 days in a row so I broke up my stretch right in the middle. Mike is working on a design for his 2nd paying job with a 3rd on the horizon and I have been catching up on reading and researching on the Internet. Now off to run random errands I probably don't need to do but it's time to get out of the house. I was about to head to the Y until I realized that they all close at 7:00 on Saturdays. What, doesn't anyone want to work out on Saturday nights? Or am I just a weirdo?

I hope everyone is having a fabulous weekend. I'm off to work in the morning!

Summer work projects

OK, so I have been away from the blog - again - for a long time. But it's been because we have been doing crazy things to our yard! Well, that is what is was recently at least. We have a list of things we'd like to do and the biggest of those was to expand our back yard. If you remember a year ago we sodded the backyard and seeded the side yard. Well this year, we decided to enclose the side yard up to the front porch so 70% of what we seeded last year is now part of the back yard. These are not the best quality pictures because I took them with my iPhone (the battery in my good camera died so this was all I had) but this will give you a good idea. Click on the links I put in for previous entries to remind yourself what the yard looked like before.

Looking from the side yard at the new fence

From the backyard along the new fence looking back towards the garage

From the patio looking at the new fence - you can appreciate the meadow grass and wildflowers the best here, I think

Also I have gotten my garden up and running for the year. I don't know how it will do but we are going to try to put a sun blocker up that will filter out 30% of the sun since it gets SO hot on the back concrete pad. This year I have planted 4 types of sweet peppers, 3 types of hot peppers, parsley, 3 kinds of tomatoes, sugar snap peas, broccoli, 2 kinds of lettuce, and cucumbers in the back raised bed. I'm also trying some container planting for my herbs - cilantro, basil, rosemary, and thyme - as well as a pot for strawberries. I'm not sure if you can appreciate in the pictures below quite how the basil and cilantro have taken off, but basically I'm giving it away to people at work because there is so much of it.

I won't bore you with what is what, but just know it's a lot that may or may not actually survive

The cilantro is in the right and left corners and the basil is in the back corner

My strawberries!!

So as we do more projects, I'll post more pictures. But for now just be content with the fact that I promise I will have more to post soon - and I think I'm going to change the name of the blog in the next month or two so be on the lookout!!

Crazy Cat Antics

Behind the armoire used for food storage in the dining room is a vent that we have yet to finish and yet to put a register cover on. Did you ever think about what may be down this hole??

Here's a clue...

Can't figure it out?? Here's a closer view --

Still can't figure it out? Well here's a funny story...

We were on our way out of town for a New Year's up in the mountain when it occurred to me that I had not seen my pager for work since the night before. I knew exactly where it was when I last saw it and when I asked Mike he said the same thing - on the table in the dining room. We didn't have enough time to look really hard for it but I look in all the places I could think of and I still couldn't find it. So I did all I could and decided I would send a text to people at work so they knew to get me on my cell phone if they needed me and I would get back to looking for the pager when I got home.

But before I could even let them know where to find me, I got a text saying "Going on ECMO". For those of you that don't know, I am training to be an ECMO Specialist as part of a new program we are starting in the PICU. I will look for a good link soon but a quick overview is that ECMO (extra corporeal membrane oxygenation) is used for patients as a heart-lung bypass to give the heart and/or lungs sufficient time to heal when they are too sick to function on their own. There are 5 of us going through training right now and up until this point, we have only had theory and practice circuits to train on. So the fact that there was an actual patient was very exciting. That said, there was a case going on and I was up in the mountains trying to enjoy my new year's weekend. I spent well over a day trying to figure out if I would need to come back early and if so, how I would make it back since we carpooled with a friend to get to the mountains... and let's not forget that my pager (which received a page at the same time as I received my text message) was still MIA.

So, I assumed when I got back to Denver (after deciding to not come back because the 24 hours wouldn't gain me much and I'd get just as much experience later in the weekend and week since the patient would probably be on pump for a few days at the least and there would be many people vying for time at the pump) I would hear my pager periodically beeping to tell me I missed a page. So we get back to Denver on Saturday and I proceed to tear the house apart looking for it. I went so far as to go through the trash and the recycling just in case it had gotten thrown away... to no avail. I had made plans to work Saturday night so I needed a nap Saturday afternoon and just as I was falling asleep I thought I heard a chirp... but it never came again.

I paged myself again from work that night (now that I knew my pager number... yes, I didn't actually know it, I had to look it up) but didn't think much more about it until I was sitting at the table when I got home this morning and thought I heard a chirp again. This time, I remembered my pager number and decided that I was going to page myself to see if I could hear it. I wasn't holding much hope since I had looked and looked, but it was worth a shot since I kept hearing these "mystery" chirps throughout the house.

Lo and behold, the pager went off!!! It sounded mysteriously like it was coming from my armoire so I opened it and looked behind all the food... not there. Then I paged again and I was certain it was coming from my bedroom on the other side of the wall... nope. One more time and I just knew it was coming from the mechanical room downstairs just under the armoire... still couldn't find it. All at once it dawned on me as I paged one more time, pulled out the armoire, and listened at the open vent cover..... So take one more look at the picture and see if you can see what I'm trying to show you:

The best I can figure out is that either Oliver was walking on the table while we were out one day (because honestly, Moose doesn't walk on the table but Oliver most definitely does) or Trucker knocked it off when he stole my cookies from the table (that's another story, of course) and then one of the cats, Moose, I think, was playing with it like a toy and knocked it down the vent. I still don't know exactly how we will get it from there, but Mike assures me when he gets home from work today he'll figure out a way. Until then, it's off to bed - and to laugh at silly cat antics. They sure are lucky we love them!!

Happy New Year!

Hi all. I know that we have been lax at keeping this up for the past few months, and I'm sure there is plenty to update you on, so one of my New Year's goals is to be better at updating my blog. As I have mentioned before, it's hard when there is nothing cute to talk about that kids are doing, or no more house projects to update anyone on, but even if I update twice a week, that will get me in to the habit for the future when we do have more interesting fun information to share.

So from Mike and I to you, happy holidays and a joyful and healthy new year!

For the 5 people who haven't lost faith in my blogging abilities...

...I share with you the pictures of snow!!! I know, it's been well over 2 months since you have last heard from me, but here I am again. I am going to make a very concerted effort to be better at this whole thing and add to the blogosphere rather than just enjoying what others are sharing.

Apparently it is big news that Denver is getting up to 2 feet of snow over the past couple of days. I, however, have been at work a lot of this time so haven't gotten to enjoy much of it. Here are some pictures, though. We went out and played with Trucker in the snow this evening and got some video so I'm working on editing that to put it together (I have never edited video before so that may take a little bit). When I measured with a tape measure in the backyard this afternoon I got measurements anywhere from 15 - 18 inches. I'm not sure that I was all the way to the ground and I think the official measurement was closer to 2 feet, but I'll just go with what I measured. Needless to say, I didn't get snow like this growing up! And by the way, Atlanta would be shut down for days with snow like this!! But man is it fun!

View of the house from the corner

Trucker didn't quite know what to do with himself - or where to go to the bathroom - when I first let him out because the snow was so high