27, a time for reflection.

So, I just turned 27. No, I didn't eat my whole cake myself. Didn't even have a cake actually. I figured since I'm the one that makes the cakes, I wasn't going to bother. This didn't go over very well with Jimmy though, because a birthday with no party, no cake, and no pinata was just a regular day with presents-not a proper birthday at all. We did go out to dinner though, with our friend John, and Chris was very mean and subjected me to cruel tortures that were bad enough at the time, but then he took pictures and posted them on facebook. Jerk. Anyway...so that same day another picture was posted of me on facebook at Candie's wedding. Now, I had a great time at the party, and I know that while I was the ONLY one dancing for about an hour, eventually everyone was dancing and having a great time and I started that and that's awesome. BUT. this particular picture is of a really really fat chick dancing all by herself (chris was next to me but not really dancing). I learned several things from this picture:

1. A-Line haircuts are great for other people.
2. My awesome purple shoes truly are as awesome as I thought they were.
3. That particular top has a certain potential but...
4. I really should tan more
and
5. I really don't care how much weight I've lost since then, it's not NEARLY as much as I thought it was, and what were all you people thinking letting me look like that?

(did you like how I blame others for my own problems?) Feel free to look up this picture, I'm tagged so it's easy to find. Just remember when you see it that YOU PEOPLE saw this often, and NEVER brought it to my attention. Now that I know, steps will be taken! Oh yes, you heard me, STEPS! (not literally though, 'cause, you know, my back, and I'm so busy, yeah, excersize is just like really not an option right now).

So...come here often?

I was at work the other day, minding my own business, and one of my new regulars comes in and starts chatting about this and that, the weather (which is a completely different subject), his day, blah blah blah, and then all of a sudden he asks if he can buy me a fruit cup. I know! Like it's some kind of dimly lit night club. I seriously had no idea what to say so i quickly changed the subject to how I'm actually deathly allergic to the melons in the fruit cup. Awkward... even more so when he tried to announce a boycott of the fruit cups so i wouldn't have to subject myself to the dangers of making them anymore. I just couldn't win!

But good news--I'm getting a blackberry for my work! My boss is paying for it and he's going to set up an email address for me so that people can email orders and questions and things like that and i don't have to give out my phone number to (slightly) creepy people who try to hit on me. I really don't get it but it seems to be quite popular to make innuendos to the deli manager. Most of them are my friends so I know it's just joking, but some of them... Anyway, I'm really happy about the blackberry (even though I'll miss my purple phone ^_^).


Okay, so the other day I went into the office to print something out for work and I saw that a very important financial form (that was sitting on the desk waiting for some info before I mailed it out) had been signed Zoe Hill over and over in red ink. I asked who did it, and was told quite emphatically that no one did, and if someone did it must have been Jimmy. Yup.


I'm sorry--I think LOL cats are so cute. So here's another one for your viewing pleasure


And, in closing, a Jimmy story. He and Zoe were in the living room playing and i overheard the end of a conversation about who was going to play what part in the game.

Jimmy: I don't want to be a girl, I want to be a boy.
Zoe: It's so easy to be a girl, all you have to do is wear makeup and kiss all the cute boys.
(at this point I was about to have a talk with her about what it actually means to be a girl, but then Jimmy spoke)
Jimmy: Oh! I can do that!

Duck

I was going to blog about a Duck. But blogger is having trouble uploading my pictures, so I will blog about a duck another time. Rest assured that I WILL blog, I will blog SOON, and I will blog soon about a duck. Yup. Gonna blog about a duck. maybe two. two ducks. Later. duck blogging.

"I'm afraid you're a little off" said the Doctor

Okay. So on Monday I decided to cheat Murphy's Law and clean my house so I wouldn't have to have surgery. This actually makes sense because everytime I get injured or really sick or require someone to come into my house for any reason my house is a complete disaster and only gets worse with my being laid up. It NEVER happens when the house is clean. So I figured that if I clean the house and do all the laundry and make everything really nice-I even dusted my bedroom--then I wouldn't have to have surgery. It really makes sense if you think about it, plus on the off chance it didn't work then I'd have a nice clean house when people came to help me.

So I went to the actual surgeon today and here's the verdict. I do have a herniated disc between T5 and T6 which is causing me topical pain. I also have a thoracic strain, probably the same one I've had since November that hasn't healed yet. But the nerves from this disc are not being disturbed which is a very good thing because the doctor told me that this particular operation is one the most dangerous and difficult operations there is and no surgeon in his right mind wants to ever do it unless he absolutely has to. Whew, dodged that bullet. But because he is the nerve specialist who is not intimidated by MRIs, he noticed what no one else had noticed yet. My pain and nerve problems simply can NOT be caused by that area of the back. They have to be caused by the Lumbar--so basically because a lot of my pain is thoracic they did that MRI and found a relatively inconsequential disc problem and heaped the blame on that instead of finding out the real problem. So he went out in the hallway and came back with a physical therapist and they discussed many things in very technical terms. The surgeon wanted to order a Lumbar MRI to see what the problem is down there, but the physical therapist convinced him to wait a month and let him see what he could do because he thinks that won't even be necessary.

So then I went over to the physical therapist's office because he just happened to have a free several hours (I know?), and while we were talking about things he suddenly stopped and asked me why I was standing with my weight on my right leg. Apparently because I'm right handed I should be standing on my left leg. Long story short, my right leg is 2-3 mm shorter than my left. This is enough of a problem that my entire spine is curvy--it goes off to the right and then tries to straighten up by curving back left around the thoracic area, hence the thoracic disc bulging to the right. He said he would bet good money that I have at least one if not two discs bulging to the left in the lumbar. So now I have to wear a lift in my shoe. How retarded is that?!? Good news though is that with the lift and lots of physical therapy he thinks that he can fix not only the pain but also the underlying disc problems. Woohoo!

So I win twice! Because I don't need surgery AND my house is all sparkly clean for me to enjoy! My activities are much more restricted--I'm not allowed to do ANYTHING that hurts that I don't absolutely have to do, for instance he said I have to find a substitute and I'm not allowed to play the piano again until he says so. :( I can't mop the floor at all or drive more than I have to, but the promise of being done with this mess soon and non-surgically is awesome. And he says that I should be able to play golf this summer which I'm really excited about since we have such awesome courses here.

And the happiest thing of all is that my Mom is coming here in 16 days!!!

My new car!!!!!

This is just a picture I took off the net...my car doesn'thave those stupid wheels. But other than that this is the car we bought on saturday, a 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited. Some of you might remember that we used to own a 93 that was blue, well when we saw this one we knew we couldn't pass it up. It's in absolutely perfect condition, with new tires and very well maintained. And it's grey on the inside, so it's perfect for us Buckeye Fans! I'm really really happy with it and incredibly relieved that we have a second car. We were making it work, but it was horrible. The family time was really nice, but I was driving for 4-5 hours everyday and the kids were with me for most of that and it was just too much. I'm trying really hard to avoid surgery and driving is something I'm supposed to limit if not avoid completely. I have to drive a little but now thankfully I don't have to be running around everywhere all the time. Hooray!! (I'm a little excited, can you tell?)

However I did something really bad on Friday--I don't know what I did exactly but I was trying to stretch my back at work and found a new stretch that I thought was great until suddenly I couldn't move and my arm went numb. It eased up after about an hour but I've been in absolutely incredible pain ever since. I'm laying here on my heating pad with my pain pills and still want to cry! (But on the bright side when the ambulance came to church yesterday to get the sister with shortness of breath and chest pain it wasn't ME! That may sound mean to those who don't know me, but it's happened before and I was happy to be on the helping the ambulance find the building end this time.) My appointment with the neurosurgeon is on the 10th so hopefully he'll give me some physical therapy and pain management techniques and shelve the surgery for now. I have lots of other things I'm doing now and this back thing is getting in the way. I got a raise at work, so I'd like to work a lot, I'm trying to get a few springcleaning/organizing things done and there's two rooms I'd like to paint. Not to mention some excersizing!

On that note however, I have great news--I bought new jeans on saturday and they are 2 sizes smaller than the ones I wore when I moved to Ohio. So I'm pretty happy about that! The girl scouts are trying to derail me though--drat those cookies!

OOHH the big red letter stands for the neurosurgery, OH the big red letter stands for the neurosurgery...

It's bulging! Fun fun fun, into the nerves fun fun fun, and the SPIIIIINAL COLUMN two below T3!!!!

Okay the last bit was a stretch but clever no? (for anyone who didn't grow up in utah, that was the Jell-O song...I don't know why it morphed that way in my head but it did and there you go).

So I went to the doctor a bit ago because I felt another lump like the one I had removed last year. She thought she felt a few but that maybe they were cysts. So she sent me to the hospital for an ultrasound and figured as long as I was there they'd do an MRI on my back since it's not much better from when I hurt in in November. Well I got the results back yesterday, and the lumps, of which there are two, are seemingly benign fibro-whatsits and small so they're fine we just need to check them in 6 months. However the MRI showed that the disc between T5 and T6 is bulging on the right side and pressing in on my spinal column and regularly messing with the nerves on that side. Which explains the shocky snappy pains I've been having but in a very creepy way. So I have to go see a neurosurgeon who is probably (because he's a neuroSURGEON) going to say I need surgery, to which I am going to reply, "yeah right". I'm not afraid of surgery (how could I be at this point), but I can't afford to take that amount of time off work. First of all because they'd probably just replace me and secondly because we need my income. And also because I'm afraid of THIS surgery. Backs freak me out. I was looking around online to see what it involves and the thoracic surgery USED to be an open chest thing. They couldn't reach it from the back so they'd open your chest, crack your ribs, deflate a lung, and who knows what else. Supposedly now it's easy and they do it with lasers. But it's still creepy--if they screwed it up I could get meningitis or be paralyzed or something nasty. I haven't talked to him yet though, so we'll see what he says. Maybe I can make do with some physical therapy and stuff.

Also, my kids are cute. I don't know if you knew this, but they are. They're pills, but they're cute. I see quite a lot of them lately because Chris totalled the car in January so I'm driving everyone everywhere all the time, but you know something? As irritating as it can be to be in the car all the time, I do see my family a lot, and when we're all in the car together we talk and play games and have nice family time. Until they start screaming, but generally that comes in the afternoon/evening time. Mornings are nice.

Oh yeah, and I joined a book club and we just read the most horrendous book ever, "The Traveler's Gift" by Andy Andrews. But one of the points in it I did decide to try to remember and impliment in my life and that is to Choose to be Happy. Typical glass is half full stuff, but if you think about it especially nowadays, things are not nearly what they could be. Yeah, my back hurts and I'm afraid of what that means. But I don't have cancer. I don't have to have surgery right now with no arguments. I HAVE a job that I love and don't want to take time off of. I have a home, food, clothes, washer and dryer (that I love much more than I should), a car, two healthy intelligent children, a healthy intelligent loving husband, two Dr. Who seasons on DVD, a friend (who buys me chocolate sometimes), another wonderful friend who takes Zoe to school in the morning so I can work a few more hours, more friends from church, I could seriously go on and on. I've been thinking a lot about this since I read the book and that's a good thing, so I guess I can't say I'm sorry I read it, but really, don't read it. It's terrible!

Well after that terribly thought out and poorly put together post I'm going to say Good Night and go to bed with my kleenex and Nyquil because I'm actually pretty sick at the moment as well--but at least it's just a head cold.

How SWEET it is!!!!

Wow. Can I just say, WOW. That was an awesome game!!! It was the best possible outcome I think. Not just that we won, but that we won decisively. You can't look at that game and say it was luck or anything like that. Everyone played well, and we played BETTER. I am incredibly proud to be a Ute.

In other news, we had our first Christmas in Ohio and it was nice. Weird, but nice. My parents came out the week before and we did all sorts of awesome stuff that my mom already wrote about on her blog. Christmas morning the kids woke up at a semi-reasonable time and found that the hallway to the livingroom was blocked with wrapping paper. Santa does this to prevent any sneaking of presents before parents are awake. So we broke through it and found that Santa came! The kids had lots of cool presents and new watches, I got Twilight books, and Chris got the best present any red blooded american 31 year old married grad student could wish for:

A Carol Channing Ventriloquist Doll

Seriously! It's so awesome! and a little scary... No really, I was with my mom and we couldn't fiure out what I should give him because anything he really wanted or needed was over my budget and I didn't want to get him something dumb like handkerchiefs (again...) and we turned a corner and there it was, the only one left, and 30% off. How could I resist?

We spent the next 4 days in post-Christmas bliss, the kids were playing with their new toys, Chris was doing, um, something, I unfortunately have absolutely no idea what anyone was doing because in case you didn't catch it before, I got two Twilight books for Christmas and in those 4 days I read them both...twice. I finally resurfaced Monday morning and dragged myself off to work to get my paycheck so I could afford the last book and immediately lose myself again. Which I did.

Now I need to see the movie...