Some Assembly Required

Last weekend John and I decided that we needed somewhere to put all our books so we bought a book shelf. We still have a lot of books boxed up in our storage room but now our textbooks from school aren't piled up on the floor. We were surprised at how many books we have between the two of us. The top shelf is church books, the middle is for John's textbooks, and the bottom for mine. When we finally get into a real house we're going to need a library for all our books, not just a book shelf.
We decided to get a nice bookshelf from Target that we had to assemble. I took over the assembly since I like that kind of stuff. John had to help me with the two person stuff... and when I put one part on backwards and we had to take a bunch of it apart to fix it. Now we have a glorious book shelf and the standing picture frame that used to be in that spot is going to be mounted on the wall.

Back to School...

This week was my first week at nursing school at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah. I have 5 classes and two labs, each one is once a week for 3 hours. I'm taking Nursing Skills, Health Assessment, Intro to Pharmacology, Pathophysiology, and Professional Nursing Practice. I think it's going to be a good semester. I've already learned how to take a blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and respiratory rate. I've been nervous about school because I hate needles and I faint around blood (you may be wondering why I'm going into nursing...). I was reassured in my skills lab that if I do faint that I won't be the first and that I'll just get over the squeemish stuff eventually. I am confident that I can do it!
This week was a little bit of a crazy one since we've had a hurricane warning all week. We ended up only having a tropical storm, which was bad enough for me. It rained all week and for two days straight it was like someone was dumping a bottomless bucket-full of water on Savannah. Before we moved here I got rid of a lot of my warm and snow-proof clothing, forgetting that my snow-proof clothing was also my water-proof clothing. I didn't have any water-proof shoes or jackets so I just did a lot of running from one shelter to the next or I stayed inside.
On one of the watery afternoons when I didn't have class I went to visit my girl Katie. Risking being washed off the road, I drove out to the island to see how my little friend was doing with her new nanny. When I walked through the door she looked very confused and a little unsure of who I was. After a few minutes she warmed up to me and welcomed me back with a big kiss on the cheek. (She kind of grabs my face with her hands and pulls her open mouth onto my cheek, its cute.) I was happy although maybe a little sad to see that she's attached very well to her new nanny. She seemed so big since the last time I had seen her, which had been less than a week. She's started crawling and claps and waves a lot. She's still as cute as ever.


I don't have any exciting pictures from class yet but I do have this exciting picture of a car. It is kind of a fashion here to get an older car, paint it an obnoxious color, and jack it up on big wheels. I quite enjoy it and have been wanting to take a picture of one but I've been scared that the driver might shoot me if he saw me taking a picture of his car. When I saw this one in the Armstrong parking lot I couldn't resist.


Another thing that I just have to add because I think it is so hilarious is that in a neighboring county there is a law that is in the process of being passed that makes it illegal to wear your pants more than 3 inches lower than your hips. I'm not exaggerating when I say that some people here don't even wear any part of their bum inside their pants.

John's Sewing Class

This week John had a suture lab where he and his fellow PA students learned and practiced suturing techniques on pig's feet. John was a natural and had a great time. He even sewed his two pig's feet together on the last day. He's thinking that he may enjoy surgery when he's ready to go out into the real world. So next time you're thinking of going to the emergency room to get stitches, save yourself 100 bucks and come on over.

I am Clearly Canadian

This weekend I took a CPR certification course as preparation for nursing school. It was at the Red Cross in this random corner of town. John came and met me for lunch and brought some leftover snacks from his PA wheelchair cleaning. We went and got drinks at the gas station which is where I found the purpose of this post. The drink I got was called "Clearly Canadian". When I was younger we would all go out and buy a bottle of Clearly Canadian from Shopper's Drugmart before our long family road trips. You can imagine my surprise to find a little piece of my past and my mother country's beverage in the deep southern state of Georgia. It was even in this fancy glass bottle that had maple leaves imprinted in it. What a pleasant surprise to stumble across my roots when I'm so far from home!

PA Wheelchair Cleaning

This weekend John's PA class had a service activity where they cleaned people's wheelchairs and provided some health screenings. It was a big event and they even got a spot on the nightly news.