From the doggies

We had an ice storm last night and today school is closed.

Tyler is in Houston until tomorrow night. He has been there since Monday.



Now I gotta go shampoo my carpet.

Job Outlook

I got an e-mail from my school with some job outlook links on it.

I love this chart from this website:

Click on picture to enlarge

My career is number one. Tyler's career is number fifteen. I love the fields we're in

I also loved this article on CNN.com. Tyler's career is number two in his field. And mine is number five.

What economy problems!? :-)

31 Birth Days

One of the bloggers I follow and love dearly is in need of some help. She has a wonderful project she's working on for newborn babies and I wanted to pass on the word along to all of you!

Her name is Kelly McCaleb. She's calling her project 31 birth days. She's an LDS mom who has been struggling with secondary infertility for five years. The following is her profile description: "i believe in family. i believe in simplicity. i believe in vintage goods and handmade lovlies. i believe in reading. i believe in good food. i believe in cozy homes, bubble baths, and pajamas. i believe in honest expression. i believe in the power of mothers to shape nations. i believe in the gentle toil of the needle. i believe in god. mostly, i believe in being happy."

So check out her post about it here for the help she needs, and join her in this wonderful project.

Thank you!

A day full of good news!

1. I started my very last semester of nursing school today!

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2. I found out that I no longer will have clinical on weekends! I was supposed to do clinicals on weekend only, but the hospital was able to find us more preceptors and now only one of us will be need to do weekend clinicals. Someone else volunteered.

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3. Tyler got paid today for the first time with his brand new salary. I like it!

4. Tyler also got paid his referral bonus today!

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5. I was able to convince the dean of communications that she should let me substitute my public speaking class from Florida for the required speech one in Texas. I walked all over campus talking to people and walking papers over to people. I told you I gave a good speech! I didn't need the class.

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6.I dropped out of the speech class! I only got 70% of my money back, but it sure as heck beats taking the class!

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7. I returned the speech book.

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8. We learned that for the next four weeks we're getting lunch from nursing recruiters from the different hospitals in the area. Apparently they love our students.

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9. I got home to happy doggies.



Seriously! Life is awesome today. And really most of the time. Tyler's gone to Houston for training. He comes home tomorrow night. I miss him, but everything was so happy today that I'm not even bothered. Tomorrow I have hospital orientation all day. I'm at the hospital that I really want to work at, so I'm super excited!!!!

I'm back!

I arrived home safe and sound last night. Florida was wonderful, albeit a bit warmer than I'd like. I had a lovely time shopping with my mom daily, and I'm not even joking. The only day we didn't shop was on Sunday.

I'll be back later with a few pictures and stories. For now I gotta go give a speech and prepare for class tomorrow.

Meanwhile check out this article on LDS Living.

Tootles!

Why do I always do this!!

When we moved to Texas in 2006 I had a heck of a time transferring credits. Why? Well because Texas is weird. They require six credit hours of Texas Government and History and another six of US government and history. I retook several classes and fought a few others to get credit. I even took all those government classes!

I applied to nursing school three times before I got in and started it. One of the support courses for the program was speech. I got points towards my nursing school application for my speech class taken in Florida the summer before we got married. I was good.



That is until i got my nursing degree plan and they said that I was missing a speech class. Why crazy lady in the admissions office who has already given me trouble for a chemistry class that was a PRE-REQUISITE for nursing school, and said AFTER I was in my second semester in nursing school that the chemistry class wasn't good, why must you torture me!??? You see I've come to talk to you several times now about classes and I'm starting to get really annoyed. You know I was out of school a full semester waiting to start this darn nursing program and now that I'm at the end of it I'm missing Speech!! SPEECH!!! You tell me that my class in Florida was Public Speaking and it's a higher class that the DANG SPEECH CLASS!!!! Are you freaking kidding me??

Now fellow readers... this is true. I have not been able to win the fight yet. I am kind of stuck since I am not in Texas and can't go down to the admissions office and ring some people's necks. I've been told by my professors that this has happened before because of the Communications department chair person. So much so that for the new nursing class they've taken speech out completely out of the requirements and just have a humanities requirement. Well nursing instructors I have over THIRTY humanities classes because I have taken over 120 credit hours and I have an Associates in Arts from this same college. No bending rules for me huh!!??!! Right. Because you've also changed the amount of clinical hours, and that whole thing so changing the catalog date on my degree plan would still make me unable to graduate!!!!

You see I've known about this speech class since last semester, but I've been kind of hoping if I didn't do anything about it, it'd just disappear off of my degree plan. But no... it's still there. I checked it tonight. Why did I wait until the very last minute to think that daydreaming and wishing it'd go away wouldn't help??? I know why.... because I didn't want to go argue for the tenth time about transfer credits! And because I'm terrified to find out that I have to take Speech! And because I'm stupid.

So I'll register. I'll attend the first day of class, and then I'll march into the admission office and give them a speech alright.

PS: Prayers appreciated. lol

Things we've done/happened since we got home

After arriving home from Utah we've done a few things!

Here we go in picture happiness

1. We got a new TV. Thanks to Christmas money.


2. We celebrated New Years at home... playing the Wii on the new TV. (excuse the hair dos and no make up, we were home all day and went nowhere)



3. We had freezing rain. (this is the tree in front of our house)

4. We got too many Wii games that made things messy.

So I had Tyler fix it

And along the way tortured April.

Our finished product. Nursing text books on the bottom and Wii stuff on the two drawers.

5. We went out for dinner at El Chico and got super yummy desserts.

Fried Ice Cream

Mini Chocolate Brownie, Raspberry something, and mousse goodness

6. Tyler got a promotion and a nice raise! This actually happened the day we got to Utah, but I forgot to tell you guys/gals. Tyler is a rocking software engineer.

7. I flew to Florida to visit my family.

I have been spending my days shopping with my mom.

We had dinner with some of my parents friends at fancy schmancy restaurant in Miami called Il Gabbiano. It cost them a fortune. I drove due to other people's wine consumption.

I had Gnocchi for dinner and this yummy flourless chocolate cake for dessert.

And I FINALLY got some soft serve chocolate ice cream!!!!!

Please note we're at a mall and I hold a Macy's bag. I wasn't kidding about the shopping.

I will be back in Texas on Tuesday. School starts on Thursday.

Utah Trip: Day Eleven (Sunday)

We went to church in the morning with Tyler's parents. We mostly packed before we left, so it was nice.
After sacrament we stopped by Kim's house to say goodbye and ran to Hilton's to drop off the borrowed ski pants that were never used.

We headed back to the Winmill's and finished packing. We left for the airport, dropped off the rental car, and got in our plane.

I slept the entire time. Seriously. As soon as I sat on the plane. Tyler took these pictures:


It was a nice flight. Much better than the way there. :-)

We got home around 10pm and were greeted by very very very happy doggies. We missed them so much. We had a great trip, but it felt nice to be home.

Utah Trip: Day Ten (Saturday)

We were supposed to go skiing again today, but Tyler forbade me. I had a pretty bad night of coughing my guts out and woke up feeling pretty crappy. It would have also still be really hard to get up to the resorts with our little car.

Tyler ended up going to visit Sonya and Carlos while I stayed and slept longer. He met them right when he got home from his mission and they're really sweet.

Once he got back, the plan was to go to do sealing at the Bountiful temple where we were sealed. We made it up there, but ended up not going in because I wasn't feeling the greatest and was very hungry. We just walked around the temple grounds and took cute pictures of us. It was beautiful with all the fresh snow.







So after spending some time there we headed to Salt Lake because I was craving Mexican at a place I didn't know what was called. We drove around forever trying to find it and never did. So we ended up at PF Changs. Neither one of us had ever been to it, but I always heard really good things about it. We had to wait 30 minutes to be seated and while we waited the place continued to get packed with people and 15 minutes before we got seated we heard the wait time was 2 hours!! And people were waiting! Tyler and I were thinking that the food must be pretty darn good for people to wait that long. We had a special they had and got 2 soups, 1 appetizer, 2 entrees, and 2 mini-desserts. I got beef broccoli and Tyler got almond and cashew chicken. It was good chinese, but we both agreed that it wasn't the best we've ever had. We agreed that Chef Chen by our house in Texas and Golden Dynasty in Ogden were much better. It was still fun to go and try it out though.

In the middle of our meal his family called and said that everyone was over for cake and ice cream since his mom had made two apple cakes that day for his birthday. He had some of both before we went to the Bountiful temple and we had no idea people were coming over for it. We felt bad, but we didn't know. We got home around 8:30pm and Kim was gone already because of kid's bedtimes. We hung out and watched another Christmas movie for the rest of the evening.

Utah Trip: Day Nine (Friday)

Tyler's Birthday

We had a very busy day for Tyler's birthday. He turned 28! Bear with me with the million of pictures. We were supposed to go skiing, but things were shut down because of snow (read... we couldn't get up to the resorts with our little Ford Focus)

We started out the day by taking a trip to insta care. Since I spent the entire day before sleeping, I was feeling much better, but I knew I still needed some antibiotics. I told Tyler that if the wait was one hour or more then we'd leave and I'd just go to the doctor when we got back. Seriously. By then I had been sick for eleven days... what was another 3 or 4?? nothing. The wait was 60 minutes and I was suspicious of that even because there were lots of people there. Instead we headed over to Costa Vida for some lunch!

We then headed back to his parents house and picked up his mom so we could go to the Salt Lake City temple. We did a session with her and it was lovely. I really enjoyed having my mother-in-law with me during the session. And the live session is always fun.

We then headed to the Gallivan center to meet the rest of the family and to go ice skating outdoors!!! I was super excited that everyone came to do this activity with us and it was fun!

The family

Bryan, Kim, and Lisa

Lisa and Kali

Caden and Kim

Tyler's foggy glasses

After ice skating we headed over to The Pie Pizzeria. We were lucky enough to have Ron, Rita, and Erin and fam join us there. We had some seriously yummy pizza.

Carole and Kyle

Kyle and Bryan

Winmills and Denos

Lisa and Marissa

Kim, Caden, and Jace

his (fresh tomatoes) and hers (bacon and green olives)

Tyler didn't get a cake on his birthday or sung happy birthday. We are now even for my birthday. It was not intentional. He asked his mom to make him apple cake and we swept her away from cooking to go to the temple. He got cake the next day (two of them).

It was an amazing day. We really enjoyed ice skating with everyone and Tyler said it was his favorite day of the entire trip.