Joys of living in a new house

Part of our Kitchen looking in from living room
Living room
T.V. room/mountain of boxes/death trap
Another view of the death trap
Final view of the death trap


Well it has been about a week since we moved into our new home. Until last night there were still boxes covering every surface of the house. I have tripped over and bumped into more boxes this last week than I care to remember. Every morning I wake up and discover a new set of scratches and bruises on my body that were not there the day before.

I have gone on special ops missions to find certain articles of clothing or a pair of shoes I know I packed in the room which has become a mountain of at least 180 boxes, it will one day be known as the T.V. room/office when it become less of a mountain. It is quite the process to squeeze ones self in between the tiny crevices between boxes in an attempt to reach the back wall of this room to find the certain box containing your most prized possession, only to have your only exit become blocked by an avalanche of other boxes, a large table, a shelving unit and a huge hunk of carpet. Oh the fun I am having.

My aunt came over last night and her and my mom went crazy unloading boxes and attempting to put things in their places. It was mostly a success. There is now walking room between most rooms in our house, and we have a living room floor! I some how got roped into helping rearrange and remove furniture from the living room at midnight so that the new furniture my mom ordered could fit in. This involved me and my aunt carrying a very large and might I mention crazy heavy old antique couch and 2 HUGE antique chairs down a steep embankment beside our house and into our carport. I am a little sore! So as you can tell, things are slowly coming together at the new place and it will hopefully look more orderly in the next couple of weeks. By then, maybe my bruises will be gone and my scratches will have healed.

New Home

Well my mom, sister, and I have officially moved into our new townhouse. Yes, there are boxes EVERYWHERE and nothing seems to have a place to call its own yet, but we are getting there. Between packing up our old family home in less than 10 days and then jamming all our stuff into 5 large storage crates to be stored for 2 weeks and living with my aunt and uncle for the in-between time, then unpacking those 5 large storage crates into our much smaller new house, it has been about a month in the making. But it feels really good to be in our new home, actually having my own space again and being able to sleep in my own bed is so nice. The first day we got into our new house we ripped up the old carpet in the living room and hallway and put down very nice laminate flooring and my mom and I did some tile work around our gas fire place. It was a lot of work, but it was nice to see the drastic change when we were done! Our house doesn't feel very Christmasy yet because it is covered in boxes, but we did manage to buy a tree which we will be decorating very soon so I think that will make a difference. Thanks to everyone who came to help us pack, move, unpack etc. etc. It was greatly appreciated! I will post some pictures of our new home as soon as I can find my camera! :)

DONE!!

Ok, so I just had to post when I got home from the hospital today! I am done! I have completed year 2 and have just returned home after my last "shift" at the hospital! It was such a nice shift too! I spent it in the O.R. I think I have created a record for most surgeries watched by a student while wearing lead! 4!! I have been in 4 surgeries this last rotation and all 4 of them I had to stinking wear lead! Yeesh! None as long as the 3 hour escapade during the first one! Good work out though! But anyways, today all I had to do was simply observe a surgery and then I had my final evaluation with my instructor which went fantastically, and then I got to come home! Beautiful! And I will add that before the surgery started this morning the anesthetist actually let me intubate the patient once she was under anesthetic!! It was sooo cool! **Don't tell my instructor!**;) (intubating is inserting a tube into a patients airway to help them to breath when they are under general anesthetic) So the gist of this post is to say GOOD RIDDANCE to year two...HELLO year 3!! Whooohooo!

Year 2 comes to a close...yippeee!!!

It's true! The year that I have sometimes referred to as the year of hell will be coming to a close on Tuesday! I have two more 12 hours shifts at the hospital, Monday and Tuesday and then my 2nd year of nursing is officially OVER!! Wow! Half way done! It seems surreal to me still. When I started year two, we were warned by previous students of the level of difficulty and the amount of hatred one would feel during the next two semesters during 2nd year. I thought to myself, "self, they are just telling you lies! You can make it through no problem!" Hah! It was a hard up hill struggle. I actually questioned my sanity for going into nursing during this last year (Darla and Kim have had to endure my ranting phone calls...thanks girls!). But thanks to friends like Darla and Kim and Tanja and Erin and Laura and all my nursing gals I managed to stay sane and am 2 days away from completing what is deemed as the hardest year of your nursing school life! I am ecstatic! I can now tell people that I am a 3rd year student nurse! The worst of it is behind me and I am excited to move forward. Bring it on!

Moving Day...sort of

So I have spent the last few days packing and packing and packing and getting ready to move from my childhood home into a town house with my mom, with a 12 day interim stint living at my aunt and uncles until the town houses' current occupants vacate the premises. It's weird to pack all of your stuff away and then not actually move to the new place with your stuff! But we will get there soon enough. Anyways, the amount of junk that one can accumulate in 18 years in a house is absolutely nuts! We are down-sizing to half the size we currently have and my mother seems to think that we can still bring everything with us! We have currently filled 4...yes 4... 8x8x7 storage containers with all our worldly belongings and now a fifth container has been ordered! ACK! So needless to say my mother will have to part with some of her things when we get to the new place, and I think my sister and I will have to put our extra stuff into storage for the time being. So we spent the day yesterday with family and friends filling the containers to their brims, and then some! I am so physically exhausted from all of this as well. I have been working almost full time hours at the pharmacy and attending hospital rotation weekly and moving. I know I am crazy and I need to take it easy, and It has taken a toll on my body. But I will take it easy during Christmas break when I can leisurely unpack stuff without the rush! But the hard part is over for 12 days while we live at my relatives house until we can begin to unload the 5 storage containers on the 17th into our new place. Yippee! I can hardly wait! At least I have a stress free clinical instructor for my hospital rotation and she makes me laugh, so going to rotation is the least stressful part of my life right now which is good!