A Blog Friend!

Over the past couple of weeks, Kim, from The Simple Things and I have been chatting. She was planning to come to my fair little town to attend Women's Week at BYUI. Well, it's worked out so great that all the hotels in town were booked, SO I have had the awesome priviledge to meet Kim and have her stay with us in our humble cottage! She's as wonderful as I thought she was on her blog. Very kind, down to earth and funny! We haven't spent a ton of time together, she's been at Women's Week and I've been working, but it's so nice to have a friend. I'm convinced we are twin sistas from different mamas!
We haven't done photos yet, we'll have to get to that sometime today, but when we do I'll post some so you can all see how adorable she is.
We made her work last night. We had a temple assignment to clean the Rexburg Temple, so after driving all the way from where she lives she came with us at 9:30 last night and we cleaned the temple till a little after midnight. She's such a good sport. I was feeling kinda bad about it, but she said she was excited about it and truly seemed to love it.
I'm sure you're all jealous cause I've gotten to meet one awesome lady!

Wow, I won!

I won a little contest over at Shauna's blog. It was a long day at work and it was so nice to win a little treat.


Check out her blog, she's ALWAYS doing stuff fun like this. She's pretty famous.

Finally celebrated her Birthday

With dad being in Waco, TX for the last week and her work schedule and mine we didn't celebrate Angel Baby's birthday until today. I still can't believe that 18 years went so fast, but then my oldest is 30 and that seems dang-near impossible to believe!
I made this fun cake I found on this on a fun blog. (makeitfromscratch.blogspot.com) It was so easy and today I needed the Easy Button.


It was nice to spend a few moments with family and enjoy the day. Everyone thought the cake tasted awesome.

'lest you think I'm lazy...

I've been a little busy today. I know my kids don't think I ever do much, but I keep trying to convince myself that I'm a very hard working woman. Today I made strawberry jam. I'm feeling pretty domestic right now. I've been harvesting strawberries from my patch and I also bought some strawberry bits and pieces from Alison's Pantry. So together with all of my strawberries...
I went from here:

To here thawing out all my strawberries:

I used over 25 pounds of this:

and about 21 boxes of this:

Sur-jel is my favorite.
And 47 of these:

And my end result was this:

47 pints of strawberries waiting to go into the freezer after they've sat at room temperature for 24 hours.
I think that might be my year's supply of freezer jam.

Sob.....

My baby is 18 years old today. She is at work and then off with friends for the rest of the evening, and I'm just here drowning my sorrows with root beer.

Happy Birthday Angel Baby! I love you!

There aren't words...

There are no words for this day.

My son and his beautiful wife married 10 years. Sealed today....

I get SO irritated!

I hate laziness! I mean really really hate it! I work 12 hours shifts, usually running my rear-end off (well I wish it were gone) starting IV's, starting hearts, bandaging bloody digits or other parts...just a regular day. I get up at the butt-crack 'O dawn and work for 12 hours! I hate laziness! When I get home at night, that's when the real work begins! I'm tellin' ya those living in my house better be ready for work! If I'm workin' everybody is workin'.
Slothfulness will not be tolerated.

So what's with this?

(No, in case you're worried, he's not dead, he only looks like it!)
And then there's this loafer!

I mean come on!!!!!!!!! It's nearly 9:30 AM! The day's half over!

I've got three words for you people:
GET A JOB!

A Spontaneous Trip

In my previous post I went on and on about my friend Nita and her exciting life. Little did I know how mine was going to drastically change a few days later. I worked the weekend in the ER. Two days of injury, accidents, sickness, vomit and all sorts of other VERY exciting things. Twelve hours is a long day. I even had to stay an extra 2 hours Sunday night to assist with yet another ambulance. By the time I got home Sunday night I was beat.
My better half had a business trip and he left in the wee hours of Monday morning. Ahhhh, sleeping in........bliss.

The phone rings and my BFF from high school called. She was on her way to West Yellowstone and she wondered if I had free time and would I like to come up and stay with her. She had brought her darling talented daughter to a camp at the Playmill Theater for the week. My BFF had tickets to the shows and deluxe accomodations to one of the finest hotels in West Yellowstone. Let's see.....hubby gone....17 year old daughter in Texas with older sibling....laundry here at home.....grass that needs to be swathed....hmmmm....decisions, decisions.....uh, "Ya! I'll see you in few hours!" Woo hoo!

I arrived right on time, beautiful drive only 80 minutes from my house. Why don't I go there more often?

My friend and I were inseparable in junior high and high school having moved to the small farming community just days apart and entering 9th grade at the same time. We were pretty nerdy, OK, I was nerdy, but she liked me anyway.

The second I arrived we started talking mid-sentence where we left off 2 years earlier! Don't ya love friends like that?

We did a little shopping, bought twin jackets, enjoyed the Playmill show and went out to dinner at a highly recommended place.

The accomodations that she had chosen were truly deluxe.(I think in the off season they use this room to hang meat)

The bed only had one hair on the sheets, we won't discuss the condition of the bathroom.
Our second day there we ate "brinner" at this famous pizzaria. Our pizza was called a Buffalo Bill or something westerny like that. It was baked beans, red onions, pulled pork and barbeque sauce. Most delicious for a "brinner". I say brinner because we hadn't had breakfast because we slept in till noon because we had stayed up until 3:00 AM laughing and talking like the dorks we were in high school. We laughed about our biology class and dissecting frog guts and taking the frog gonads into Seminary. We didn't really take the gonads, we didn't know what they were, but it was a new word we had learned and thought we were funny. Seriously, I did not know that word when I was 15. I'm tellin' ya we were dorks.

It's been a long time since I've laughed that hard. My face still hurts and my belly is still full. We devoured that entire pizza! All 12 inches of it. We ate like teenagers instead of two woman staring menopause in the face.

We wandered all over Yellowstone acting like tourists, buying homemade fudge, taffy and carmel corn which was promptly spilled in the next store that we went in. We didn't go into the park and see Old Faithful even though we were minutes away. I'm just going to have to assume that Old Faithful still is.

We are different now, this BFF and I. We are married, we both have children. I'm a grandma...she isn't. She's a little bit vain however, she's had some augmentation surgery. Ya, she's kinda like that. She wasn't happy with her own kidneys, so she had one transplanted, I still have my originals. She got really sick in high school and over the last (*&^#*& cough) years she's slowly gone into kidney failure. She had a wonderful cousin that gave one of hers about 18 months ago. It's so awesome to see her so healthy now.

I had a blast! It was so fun to be spontaneous (this was huge for me...I have control issues) I love you Peggy! Thanks!

Can you Imagine?????

My friend Nita lives an exciting life. I would link you to her page, but she is a blogging flunkie. She doesn't blog. She says she doesn't have time. If I lived her life I wouldn't have time either.

A week ago she flew from our little town in Idaho to Alaska........on a helicopter. Can you imagine?


They left on Sunday morning and got to Alaska Monday afternoon. Just like that. Flew to Alaska on a helicopter! Are ya hearing me here??? They went with a person who flies helicopters all the time and is a guide in Alaska. Can you imagine? This guide person had to go and deliver a helicopter to someone in Alaska and asked Nita and her hubby if they would like to fly along. Can you imagine?

She took my camera at my insistence because I wanted her to take great pictures. She didn't know how to get the pictures off my camera. I was OK with that because I got to look at them. AND since I don't have an exciting life and I do have time to blog I am going to post some of them.

They flew over glaciers and water. Nita said that there were lakes EVERYWHERE! It was green and lush and beautiful. They even landed on a glacier! Keep in mind they were with a tour guide. Does it get any better than that? Can you imagine?



Nita's hubby called my hubby last Saturday night and said "hey you got a passport? Do ya wanna fly to Alaska and come back on a helicopter? The guide needs to bring it back and would love a few passengers" Can you imagine? Unfortunately my hubby was unable to go because he had a business trip to Texas he couldn't get out of, but he racked his brain trying to figure out how to call in sick for the business trip.

Someday I would like to go to Scotland just because that's where my peeps come from BUT my new dream is to go to Alaska on a helicopter. Can you imagine?

A week of camping!

We just got home and cleaned up the camp trailer from 5 days of cooking, cleaning, stinking like a camp fire and having a BLAST! I'm not sure if I'll recover or if my washer and dryer will ever stop running, but it was sure fun! I'm going to have to steal some pictures from my DIL cause I was cameraless.
I saw a bald eagle take a fish out of the river and fly off with it, that was so awesome! We floated down the river a billion times...OK I exaggerate a little. But we were wet. I was carried off by the Idaho state bug.....the mosquito....OK I wasn't carried off, just eaten alive!
I spent time with my two awesome sons and their beautiful wives and the most darling grandchildren in the world.....even with s'more smeared faces! Hope to go again SOON!

Me Me Award

Cherie at Bakow Babble gave me an award that she called the Me Me Award. I'm supposed to tell you 7 things about me that you don't know.Thanks Cherie, you are very nice and I love your blog. I think the pictures you took of your world tour were awesome!

Well, considering I don't know hardly anyone this shouldn't be too hard, except there's hardly anything interesting or worth telling.
So, let me think.......

#1 I'm a drug pusher..............(ya, ER nurse extraordinairre)

#2 I was a hairdresser once upon a time. I had to quit doing it because the smell of a dirty scalp makes me dry-heave, weird I know considering where I work now...those smells don't get to me.

#3 I HATE morning! I abhor early hours of the morning. I may get up and be at work by 0600, but I don't really become coherent until 10:00.

#4 My 5th child was 6 weeks old and decided to go to college for the first time to pursue my dream of being a nurse. Got my Associates in 1995. Then in 2007 finished my Bachelors........for no purpose other than to say I did it. I also went to school for 5 semesters on the Deans List with Academic Scholarships. Who knew?

#5 I LOVE a good heart attack! I love taking care of cardiac patients. Cardiac drugs are awesome, they make the heart stop or go.....it's really a rush.

#6 I've been known to be sitting next to perfect strangers and take their hand to look at their veins.

#7 I used to tell people I was adopted, everyone in my family had brown eyes and mine weren't.

OK, so those were some really lame things about me. My next assignment with this prize is to pass it on to 7 people. I'm not sure 7 people check out the blog. But here goes:
#1 'Nef Said... JoAnn is about the funniest person I know...outside of an institution.
#2 No Botox Allowed.....Wendy may think she's the oldest person in Bloggywood, but I have her beat. She's an awesome woman and her blog is hilarious.
#3 Kim at The Simple Things is probably the best friend I've never met. She's a fellow nurse and we like to share disgusting stories that would turn most people away from the dinner table. I love her blog and KIM honey, it's time to get blogging again!
#4 Mary at Life is Good is a world traveler. I'm not sure there is a continent she hasn't been to. A few years ago she went to India for about a month....I'm sure there's a ton I don't know about her.
#5 Funky Bag Freak is pretty much what her name says. She's funky and a bag freak.
#6 Sondra at Happy Clean Living always has the funnest posts. Her yard and garden are beautiful. She decorates her home on a budget and it's so fun to see what she does.
She always says such nice things about people. I love her.
#7 Abby from A Feathered Nest has such a cute blog and it's full of craft ideas to beautify your nest. She's says that she's so crafty she makes people! That's how she announced she's preggo. So cute.

So, there ya have it. You seven people need to pass this award onto seven people or Cherie will be all sad and everything. I don't want Cherie to be sad.