Autumn Warmth

Things I LOVE About Fall

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*I LOVE the weather getting cooler
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*I LOVE the absolutely BEAUTIFUL colors


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*I LOVE the smell of cooking apples to make applesauce, then drying it to make fruit leather. Also making frozen apple pie filling.
(Side note: this applesauce picture is from last year)
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*In high school I LOVED the start of a fresh year of school and I LOVED football season. Even though I never fully understood football, I loved going to the games.
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*I LOVE that I can start not feeling guilty about drinking hot cocoa.

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*As a kid I LOVED spud harvest because we got two whole weeks off school and I got to go help sort spuds up at the farm (which I really enjoyed doing)!
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*I LOVE going out hunting/camping with Kenny. Usually summer flies by so quickly that we don't get to go camping then, so we usually do it when hunting season comes around.
(Side note: these pictures are from last year)
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* I LOVE Halloween!
I love decorating for Halloween
I love going to haunted houses, haunted forests, haunted mills, etc.
I love going to Halloween parties
I love seeing all the different costumes
I love carving pumpkins

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*I LOVE getting the spicy, warm scents in candles and candle warmers

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*And I LOVE shuffling my feet through the fallen leaves (I don't know why, my mom does it too--genetic or learned?)
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*And someday I will LOVE to harvest a big garden and can/freeze everything in it!
(This will be me someday)
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*I'm sure I missed quite a few, but these are the main ones. As you all can tell, I LOVE fall!

Tomatoes!

Can anyone tell me what to do with all these tomatoes? We don't want them to go to waste, but there's no way we can just eat all these before they go bad! Salsa is the obvious choice, but whereas we don't have any jars, lids, or a pressure cooker (main key), we can't do that. Does anyone know what else we can do?

We're Pregnant!

For those of you who don't know yet, Kenny and I are going to have a baby! And for those of you who already knew, I am not as far along as we had thought originally. Next week I will be 11 weeks along. The ultrasound is our baby at 9 weeks (and I'm sure most of you know this already, but the little "peanut" cradled in the bottom is our baby, not the "tadpole" looking thing floating above it which is the yolk). Our due date is April 6, 2010 and my goal is to do it all natural--yep that's right! :) So here is my belly at (almost) 11 weeks. I'm showing a little bit and my pants are getting a little snug, but I don't have to wear maternity clothes yet.

I took a leaf out of my cousin, Morgan's, book and decided to "yearbook" Kenny and I. It was fun and I feel kind of goofy posting them, but what the heck! :) I think I would have fit in in the 70s.

Gotta love the 90s!

And these are classic!

More Clinicals

I just finished my rotation at Fort Hall Clinic. It was four weeks long and I had a great time. Of course, everything that could go wrong went wrong while I was there, but it was a good experience for me to see how to handle situations like that. A few things that happened are: we were out of reagents for our chemistry machine, so we had to send certain tests to a reference lab; the power went out twice while I was there, which for most people isn't a big deal, but for the lab it fried some of the machines so we had repairmen coming in trying to get them going again, and the power going out tripped our A/C over a weekend and caused the lab to go to 110 degrees F ruining most of our room temperature reagents and blood drawing tubes. I also had quite the experience drawing blood on the patients out there because there were quite a few who were hard draws. I even had the pleasure of drawing on an inmate in handcuffs which was no easy feat! I had to draw on his hands which I don't normally prefer.

Here I am in the Micro department doing what are called APIs--they help identify the type of organism causing infection. They are a lot of fun because they turn different colors and you have use those colors to decide if it's positive or negative for that test, and then there's a number system that you add up and get an ultimate code that you look up that's tied to a certain organism. These particular APIs were from urine cultures and they ended up being E. coli. That is normally what I found out there that caused urine infections.

Here I am dipping a urine dipstick into a urine sample, then I would place it on the machine behind me and it would read it and spit out results that I would have to look at and decide what to do next. When the power went out and fried our machines, this one was one of them that went out, so for a time we were manually reading the urine dipsticks.

Here I am drawing one of my "co-workers" so we could test her blood. She also drew mine so I could run all my lab work while I was there--luckily I'm pretty normal! :)

Here I am filling up a glass tube with my blood to check my erythrocyte sedimentation rate--this checks to see if you have inflammation going on somewhere in your body. Below is where I set my glass tube for an hour, then read how many millimeters there is of serum at the top of the tube (basically).

Above is an interesting sample from a patient we drew on my last day there. This is what the tube looks like once we've spun it in our centrifuge. The bottom layer is all your red and white blood cells, the middle layer is the gel that originally sits at the bottom of the tube but when centrifuged separates the cells from the plasma. The top layer is the plasma--it's not supposed to look like that. It is normally about the color of the middle layer and should be clear. This patient was severely lipemic, meaning they had an increase of fatty molecules (lipids) in his/her blood. There was more going on, but I'm not even sure I understand it, so I'm not going to try to explain it.

And now, my own blood! I was able to take these pictures through the oculars of the microscope and I think they turned out pretty good! Above, as you have probably guessed, the pinkish colored cells are my red blood cells. The other two cells are white blood cells. There are five different types of white blood cells: NEUTROPHILS (take care of bacterial infections), LYMPHOCYTES (are increased in viral infections and leukemias), MONOCYTES (respond to inflammation), EOSINOPHILS (increased with allergies or parasitic infections) and BASOPHILS (not common, increased with allergic reactions). The two white blood cells (WBCs) above are a neutrophil and a lymphocyte (both are the most common WBCs).

Above are both neutrophils, but I had to take a picture of this because this is the second "smiley-faced" neutrophil I've found in my blood (on two different occasions). :) Can you see it?

Above: Monocyte (top) and Eosinophil (bottom). Eosinophils are really pretty because they have big orange granules and large purple nuclei. I know you are all thinking I'm really weird right now, but I don't care. :)

Below are just some pictures of me with the Fort Hall Med Techs:

Me, Krisi, and Anita

Mikey (short for Miquelina), Kristi, and Me

Mikey and Me

A nurse, a rad tech, Mikey, a fellow classmate, and me

This is what our back corner looked like almost every day. Pop, donuts, cookies, cake, turnovers, etc. I think I gained a few pounds while I was there!

A Red Velvet Cake that the lab manager brought for me on my last day. I shared it of course, but it was delish!

The cookies that Mikey brought me on my last day. And Kristi gave me a Bath and Body Works air freshener to "remind me of how bad the Micro room stunk." :)

Lots going on...

Okay, I thought I would start out by explaining why I haven't posted for a while. We've been really busy trying to get our house ready to either rent or sell. There aren't any jobs around here for us, so we will most likely be moving somewhere, plus we would like to explore "greener pastures", but also keeping in mind that the pastures may not be greener where we end up.

First, does everyone remember these little buggers?....

....The termites that caused a lot of damage here...

...here...

...and here...?

Laundry room prior to complete remodel:

Below: the dogs could hear the termites in the walls and were trying to get to them, so they dug into the walls and floor. This was when we had to lock them up in the laundry room before we built them a doghouse.

So thanks to these little buggers, we started our gutting process:

It was a mess!

We re-vamped the plumbing a little bit. The washer was hooked straight into the faucets of the sink, so Kenny fixed it so it had it's own spigots and we could use the sink too. :)

We had to re-do some of the sub-flooring.

And the insulation (which is not fun to get on your skin!)

And you get....

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.....

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Our new laundry room!!!!

We have also been trying to whip our basement into shape. Our carpet and pad got ruined from flooding that has happened randomly in the last couple years. We couldn't figure out why we were getting wet spots here and there with no signs of water damage from broken/leaky pipes or water coming in from the foundation and down the walls until last month. Our house had been sprayed for termites previous to our buying the home and thye had drilled holes in the concrete floor to inject their chemical into and then plugged them with a type of silicone. Well, it didn't hold very well and ground water was coming up through those hole when it was especially rainy. So we pulled all the plugs and filled the holes with grout. This was before the last 4 weeks of rain, and it's been holding up really well! :-D Our carpet was ruined and the concrete just isn't appealing, so we bought some carpet to go down there and got a little extra for the stairs (which desperately needed it):

See that yucky yellow, peeling linoleum? Time to cover it up!

Kenny has a mask on because we were glueing it down with contact cement.

And, viola! So much better! I have not posted pictures of the downstairs because I am working on painting it and we've decided to finish the ceiling in the family room down there. So I will post more pictures when we are finished.

We've also tried to have a little fun while we are at it. A few weekends ago we went fishing. Kenny caught the only two fish in the stream I think!

Now, then next few pictures....well...let me explain. We were trying to get across the stream adn there weren't really any narrow spots for me to jump across (Kenny already tried, and didn't make it quite all the way across). So I see this tree...

Yep, I really did think I could monkey my way across...

My plan was working...okay not really...

And here I am--trying not to get my feet wet:

And I failed miserably!

But I still laughed about it...and so did Kenny as he was so kind to take these pictures and I'm dumb enough to post them.

And next are some scenery pics I've taken recently that I like:

Father's day weekend we went up north. We spent Friday night with Grandma Logan in St. Anthony and Saturday morning we took her up to Mesa Falls. We got some pretty good pics:

Here's a panoramic shot of Upper Mesa Falls

Grandma Logan (I really like this picture!)

A yellow-bellied marmot (aka rock chuck). It was so cute I just had to take a picture.

Me and Grandma looking down at Lower Mesa Falls

The rest of the weekend we spent at the farm with my dad's side of the family. We helped my cousin, Morgan, and her family move into their new house (which I used to live in long ago). We spent the night Saturday night at Gma and Gpa's house and then spent Father's Day with my dad for most of the day, and then went over to my Uncle Alan and Aunt Shelley's house for dinner as a big family gathering (thanks Alan and Shelley for hosting on spur of the moment--it was great)! Kenny and I had a great time while up there and it was what we needed for a "refresher" from Pocatello. :)