Showing posts with label rabbits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rabbits. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Catching Up

I'm way behind on blog posts. I've been pretty busy over the past 2 weeks or so, so I'll try to catch up with as much as I can remember, in the order that I remember it.

First up - Easter weekend. On the Friday before Easter I headed up to Anacortes to my friend Mugs house. She's a very crafty person, as you can tell if you look at her blog. I strive to be crafty, but I'm not very creative on my own, and for some reason, any time I attempt a craft, it never looks like the example I copied it from. I had been reading Mugs' blog and saw that she had made some fun Easter cards. I love rabbits, and have an insane collection of them (I know most people know me for my cats, but I've actually had rabbits since I was 4, and I have a huge collection of figurines, stuffed rabbits, decorations and other random things - well over 500 rabbit things) and her Easter cards were made with some really cute rabbit stamps. Once I told her that I loved the stamps, she invited me over for some Easter craftiness. We ended up making some egg holders using green card stock and the bunny stamps. I know that I am clearly not creative on my own because this was actually a fairly easy project, yet its something that I never would have thought of on my own. Another way to tell that my crafting ability is less than stellar is the reaction of my husband when I came home with my projects that afternoon. Mugs had made an example egg holder which she gave to me along with the ones that I made. I came home excited about my creations and showed them to Mr. V. He promptly picked up the only egg holder that I did NOT make and said "This one is my favorite!" Needless to say, he felt pretty guilty when he realized that he didn't compliment my own creations.

I really liked the egg holders though, so I made some more once I got home with my own stamps. I'm not as excited about them as I was about the original ones, because my stamps weren't as cute (in my opinion). I had a bunch of rabbit stamps from my rabbit collection that I used, but I really liked the ones that my friend had, so that sent me on an ebay search for them. She had gotten them in the dollar bin at Michael's, which I checked out, but there weren't any left. I managed to find all 3 of the stamps on ebay. Of course, they weren't $1 each. They were $2 each, plus $2.50 shipping. I did yell at ebay in an attempt to explain to the computer that these stamps should only cost $1, but since the computer obviously can't understand me, I sighed, and bought all 3 of the stamps at their raised cost.

Here are some pictures. The first picture has all of the egg holders that I made with my friend. The second picture has the ones that I made once I came home.



Later on that day, I went to Mt. Vernon for yet another post surgery doctor's appointment. Back in January when I had the cast taken off my face and the stitches removed from my nose, I noticed that there was this bump of skin on the left side of my nose that looked really bad. It looked like a stitch had pulled too tightly and created a type of skin flap. Gross, I know. I asked the doctor about it because it was really bothering me cosmetically (It didn't hurt but I hated the way it looked). He assured me that it was nothing but scar tissue and that it would go away eventually. I was still annoyed by it, but I listened to him and left the issue alone. About a month later, I had another follow up appointment. By this time a lot of the swelling in my nose had gone down, which made this bump look even larger and more annoying to me. I pointed it out to him again. Again, he told me it was scar tissue and I would have to patient because not all of my swelling had gone down and I was still healing. Fine. For the next month this stupid piece of skin on my nose drove me crazy. I know that my surgery was ultimately to fix my sinuses. But he also did the small amount of cosmetic work mixed in with that. So to me, I saw no reason why I had to have this obnoxious, ugly skin bump on my nose. I stopped myself from getting annoyed about it by telling myself that I could breathe better now and that's what was really important, but still...on my next doctor's visit, I pointed it out to him AGAIN!

I thought that the bump actually looked bigger this time around. But since he said it was nothing but scar tissue, I had just assumed that as the swelling in my face continued to decrease, this thing just looked bigger because everything else around it looked smaller. This time around, he actually looked at it though. During the previous appointments he just glanced at it, assured me that it was scar tissue and then ignored my complaints. This time he looked closely. Then he seemed to get concerned. He moved me into a different room so he could look at it under a magnifying glass. And what did he find??? NOT scar tissue. Apparently, I was right. It was bigger. And it had nothing to do with the swelling. It was bigger because it WASN'T SCAR TISSUE!! It was a dissolveable stitch that had never dissolved when it should have! It was slowly getting infected, which was why the bump was getting bigger. So what should have been a simple, quick doctor's appointment turned into me laying on a table, while the doctor stuck a huge needle in my face to numb my nose. (Too bad he couldn't numb me before he put the needle in because that thing hurt like hell...and it didn't help that I saw how big the needle was.) Then he cut open the bump, drained out the infection, cut out the stitch, cut off the leftover skin from the bump, stitched it back up, and then said to me "I'm really glad that you pointed this out to me. If you hadn't, that could have turned into a really bad infection." Now don't get me wrong. I like this doctor. I think he did a good job on my surgery. He fixed things that my previous doctor hadn't even been willing to fix. But seriously?? I pointed this out to him 2 months ago!!! Ugh...I was so annoyed. So I went home with a newly stitched up, bloody nose (at least it looked bloody, but it was just where he had cut it open), and guess what? Now I have no bump there. I have no scar tissue, nothing. Just a flat surface like I wanted originally when I pointed this out to him! This was definitely not a fun way to end my day.

The next day Mr. V and I headed off to a friend's house for an Easter dinner on the day before Easter. After dinner, the ladies dyed Easter eggs while the guys played video games. When we were done dying the eggs, we presented the eggs to the guys and asked them to pick their favorite just for fun. Mr. V had already learned his lesson from picking the wrong egg holder the day before, so he managed to never chose an egg, and just declare that he "liked them all equally". The other guys followed suit and refused to pick an egg for fear that they would pick one that their wife didn't make.

Here's a picture of myself and my friends Mrs. M and Mrs. S :-) and our eggs. Then a picture of the guys absorbed in their video game. Then a picture of the guys "judging" the eggs. I love the judging picture because they were VERY intent on choosing the correct egg so it took them a while to fully analyze them all.




There's lots more to update about but I guess I've rambled enough for this particular post! I'll update again later tonight or tomorrow with stories about the rest of my week :-).

Monday, November 3, 2008

Life in Washington

People have been telling me for quite some time now that I need to start a blog. I've avoided it for various different reasons, but I have realized that this may be the easiest way to get info about my life out to people. I find myself spending way too much time writing email after email describing the same thing over and over to several different people. I would send the exact same email to everyone at once but there always seems to be one little piece that just wouldn't make sense if I sent it to everyone. Now maybe people can find out about my life, and I'll just respond to the personal things in emails, making my time spent on the computer much less.

So where to start? I suppose I really went MIA to people around the time of my wedding, so sit back and relax as I recount the past 6 months of my life :-).

June 14th, 2008: I married my best friend in St. Augustine, Florida. I learned that it IS possible to throw a wedding together in exactly a month. Everything turned out wonderfully, with the exception of the photographer, which I will not get into because it will ruin my current good mood.

June 15 - July 10, 2008: This time was spent frantically packing up our entire apartment which was filled with everything from our entire lives since the husband and I seem to both be insane pack rats. Husband is a Navy pilot, therefore this frantic packing was done to pick up our entire lives and move across the entire country to Washington state. Husband also refuses to have the military move his stuff anywhere in the continental United States, even though they do it for free. He has declared that it is far better to do a full DITY move (Do It Yourself move for those who have no need to know military acronyms), which the military will pay you for, and then bank a good deal of money. I'd be all for this method if the packing didn't take 2 straight weeks and one day of panic because the moving company was coming to pick up our truck and we still weren't finished packing it. This has now been our second DITY move (1st was from Corpus Christi, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida) and I hated it and complained about it every bit as much as I did with the first move. I vowed to never ever move myself again, no matter how much money I make in the end. (That is, until we got the final payment from the military. I will now happily do another DITY move, although I am sure I will hate it and complain about it just as much. But that money sure is nice in the end!)

July 11-29: Amazing road trip across the United States. This is something that I have ALWAYS wanted to do and any time I have "I hate the Navy" moments I have to tell myself that this trip wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the Navy. We left JAX and stopped in Georgia to visit my mom. We then drove on through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and finally Washington. We stopped at some amazing places such as Yellowstone National Park where we saw the famous Old Faithful geyser. We spent 4 days in South Dakota discovering a state that I tend to forget even exists, only to learn that it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Given the chance I would go back to South Dakota in a heartbeat and I feel like I should apologize to anyone who ever heard me rant and rave about how I wasn't going to have a real honeymoon, and instead would spend that "normal" honeymoon time in South Dakota. I have to admit - it was probably the best "honeymoon" ever. We saw some crazy, yet interesting things all along the way. We saw the official home of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois. We accidently stumbled across Metropolis on a bathroom break, and found a giant 15 foot statue of Superman in a historic downtown, along with a Superman museum. Apparently the state of Illinois actually voted and declared Metropolis as THE official home of Superman. I find places like this incredibly amazing and interesting because I would have never in my life thought to go to Metropolis, Illinois. Maybe I'm just a nerd, but I love stumbling across the weird and unknown places out there in this country! We saw a ghost town in Montana (Garnet) which involved a 2 mile VERY steep drive up the side of a mountain on a gravel road large enough for one car, but with 2 way traffic on it. The ghost town was very cool (history nerd here), but I will forever be mad at my husband for taking the 2 mile steep drive instead of the 8 mile drive on the other side of the mountain. Not only was the road too small, but it had no guard rails and my car was not getting good traction. When we got to the top I proceeded to burst into tears and have a full blown panic attack, while yelling at my husband and swearing that there was no way in hell I was driving back down that mountain. I am very thankful for the employee who directed us to the 8 mile, much less steep road on the other side. Husband didn't do very well with my anxiety attack and had the nerve to say to me "I thought you drove off the side of the mountain back there. You were behind me and your car was fishtailing and then I didn't see you anymore" BEFORE we found the alternative route back down.

I'm including links to the pictures of my trip because I could write for hours and still not tell the entire story. The final state of the trip was obviously Washington. I was less than thrilled about moving out here, but when we stopped at the Washington welcome center, what did we see? Rabbits! Everywhere!! For those of you that know me well, you know how much I love rabbits. The welcome center had domesticated rabbits (obviously the offspring of a rabbit that someone dumped outside) hopping everywhere. I of course took tons of pictures, fed them an apple and decided that my life in Washington was going to be good. In my mind, the rabbits were a good sign :-). I just chose to ignore the fact that as soon as we crossed over the Casade mountains, it instantly started raining, and the sky turned grey. I'd rather focus on the cute happy rabbits, in the sunny eastern part of Washington.

Anyway, here are the trip pictures:
Jax to Whidbey album #1
Jax to Whidbey album #2
Jax to Whidbey album #3
Jax to Whidbey album #4

We arrived in Oak Harbor, Washington on July 30. We set up residence at the "lovely" Acorn Motor Inn which was to be our home for the next 3 weeks. Husband checked into his new squadron on July 31st. Soon after getting there, husband was told that he was going to Hawaii for a week. So it was me and the cats and rabbit for a week, alone in a hotel. I was definitely worried about reaching crazy cat lady status at that point.

However, Husband came home without his plane malfunctioning, and we became first time home owners! We closed on our very own home on August 18th and have since spent the time from then until now unpacking, setting up, organizing, etc.

I'll update more at another time with all of the excitement that a small town like Oak Harbor has to offer.