Sink and Destroy

You Twilight fans out there will remember the part in New Moon right after Edward leaves where for like five or six pages, all that is written is the name of the current month. That is kind of how I feel lately, not the comatose depression, but the feeling that each month is completely unremarkable from the next. Anyone who follows my sister Julie's blog will get a picture (literally) of what the fun part of my summer entailed.

The month of august I think has been designed to make me wish summer was over and I was back in school. BTW I took a class this summer and did GREAT! I got an A!! We'll see how next quarter goes, it is the quarter before extern where you do the phlebotomy and medication administration (read lots of needles) and I have been really excited to learn about how to do all of that. The concern is that you have to have proof of immunity documentations in before the quarter starts or they drop you. My conflict exists because I couldn't get my third Hep B shot till 8/23, and then you are supposed to wait a month and get the titer (a blood test that proves you are immune). School starts 9/20, I think you can all see the problem here. I have sent an email explaining the situation and am hoping for mercy.

Back to wishing summer over; our house was painted four years ago, but it has been apparent for at least the last year that it would have to be repainted this year, or we would suffer the consequences. So after much deliberation over colors, we began the work of proper preparation before painting. First we power washed (one day), then we scrapped loose paint (about 4 days), then we filled holes, cracks and imperfections with wood fill-three kinds (9 days), then we started sanding the wood fill and discovered that the fill we had used for 2/3 of the house was like cement to sand- I strained my wrist for a week hand sanding one day. To make matters worse, we discovered after test priming a patch, that we really didn't like the look of the patched areas and have ultimately decided that we should have sanded most of the areas we filled. By this point my poor mom, who has borne the brunt of the fill/sand labor decided that we would buy two cheap orbital sanders to ease the labor. With their help we only sanded for about 3 1/2 days-completely burning out the motors on both sanders and moving to dad's nice sander in the end. So with all of that done we finally started priming yesterday. After 9 hours of both mom and I priming, we had completed about 2/3 of the house. Of course it is supposed to rain all day tomorrow and part of Tuesday, but dad plans to take Wednesday and Thursday (before the temple) off so we might actually get most of the house painted before they have to leave for Utah Thursday in order to help clean out Grandma and Grandpa's house.

I forgot to mention that part of the prep work for painting has included nailing down any siding that is loose. Sounds easy, right? Well the reason so many boards are loose is that it seems whoever put them up originally did so without regard for stud placement. Now even I can figure out that the boards will stay on the house much better if they are actually nailed to something other than more siding. But apparently there wasn't anyone as construction savvy as myself present when this job was done. As a result, watching Dad try to nail the boards went something like this: Pick a spot that should have a stud, nail, nail, nail-nothing. Pull it out, move over 1/2", nail, nail, nail-nothing. Pull it out, move over another 1/2", nail, nail, nail-nothing. You can see why after a short time I commented that it looked like he was playing "Battle Ship"- A12-miss, A10-miss, B11-hit! Never knew that Hasbro knew so much about building houses.

First day of school, here I come.

The Advantages of Being Poor and in School

So I still really have nothing big going on, work, school, church, school, work, etc. But I did recently file my tax return and because I am a) Poor, b) in school, and c) old, I not only get all my taxes back, but the government was also kind enough to give me an additional $1800. Not too shabby. It might make up for the fact that I can't work next quarter due to class being scheduled in the middle of my work shift. But now no more complaining, I have been well taken care of.