When it rains...

What would make ACL surgery even more fun?  Poison ivy!  All over your legs!  Under your bandages and on your ankles where it conveniently rubs against the machine you have to use on your leg for eight hours a day!

Ouchers.

Turns out, we have poison ivy growing in our backyard.  In our flower beds, actually.  Because that makes total sense.  Mark mowed and edged the yard the day before surgery.  He also took the weed eater and skimmed over some weed/plant/overgrown piles along the back fence.  Skip forward three days.  Surgery is over, he's laid up in bed, and suddenly he has this red rash all over his legs.  His mom, who was still staying with us, thinks he's either allergic to the padding on the machine he uses for rehab, or he has developed a heat rash.  Sunday evening, my parents stop by with cookies for Mark.  My mom takes one look at his legs and says POISON IVY. [She lives in the country.  She's had poison ivy before.  Heck, she was stung by a scorpion last week!]  So I grab my phone and start taking pictures of random plants in the backyard (without touching anything) and a few Google Image searches later it is confirmed.

"Leaves of three, let it be" - Well we learned that a little too late!

So now he's on a steroid pack and I'm washing the sheets every day.  Oh my.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

This has been a loooooong week.  Out of control long.  Mark had his knee surgery on Wednesday (one week ago), I was up at work until 7:30 that night, and then the next two days were Grandparents' Day at school, which is just a generally stressful time for me, even when I'm not coordinating and running the entire event by myself (long story).  Friday night I packed up for a road trip to Shreveport with two of my best girls to see our friend Morgan.  Mark's mom stayed with him for the weekend, so I was able to still go on this girls trip that had been planned for months, while only feeling slightly guilty.  We had a great time in Louisiana, but I couldn't help but think of everything that was waiting for me to do at home.  Plus, I did feel guilty that Mark was holed up in bed while I was off seeing painting the town red in LA.

Work has been incredibly weird/drama filled/stressful for the past couple weeks.  I am just so tired.  All the time.  Rant, rant, rant.  Mark's not sleeping well since he's in pain, so thus I am not sleeping well either.  I just need to get through the next two weeks.  My grad school classes are wrapping up, I'm finishing up some papers, I'm almost done with my observation hours for the semester, and each day Mark is getting a little more mobile.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel.  I can juuuuuust see it.

Shelf Numero One

Our new house has four built-in shelves, which I L-O-V-E.  I have been avoiding decorating them, because I feel like it's a pretty daunting task to take on, so they have been sitting empty for the past six weeks.  Or not empty really.  More like a place for anything and everything that doesn't have a place yet to sit and gather.  So pretty much, 7 lamps, 26 candles, and lots and lots of knick knacks.

This weekend, I took on getting them in order.  I searched Pinterest for "shelf arrangements" and "shelf decor" and what not to find some good examples, and then tried to mimic the ones I liked with whatever I can find around the house.  I think a trip to Home Goods is in order, because I do not have nearly enough "things" to decorate with, but I did manage a nice little set-up on my first set of shelves.  This one is in the kitchen/dining/living space.. which is hard to describe.  Here's how it turned out:

 

Not too shabby, eh?  I pretty much used every pretty thing I have, so the other 3 shelves are hurting for anything other than books and picture frames.  Home Goods, here I come!

Hey, I CAN do yardwork!

This weekend, I volunteered to help Mark out in the yard, since he has the gimp knee and all that jazz.  We've always assumed without actually saying it that he gets to "decorate" the outside of the house, and I get to do the inside.  So he does all the yard work.  He had just started to lay mulch in the front flower beds the morning before that fateful soccer injury, so that project has been on hold for a couple weeks.  Since he has surgery this week, we decided to finish it up this weekend before he was really out of commission.  I don't have a picture of the garden work we did, but I'll take one later today and add it.  We got about 85% of the garden finished before we ran out of weed mat (I have no idea what this stuff is actually called? Fabric that you lay under the mulch to prevent weeds from growing in the garden.  Mark claims it will last 25 years!).  So we still have a hole of un-mulched garden, but perhaps we will finish that up today? 

Yesterday evening, Mark decided he would chop down this bush/tree thing in our front yard, since it wasn't all that attractive and was growing with pretty reckless abandon.  It took all of thirty minutes before the bush/tree was nothing but a pile of brush laying on the sidewalk!  I helped supervise and photograph this project ;)

There goes the soccer season...

 

Well, Mark tore his ACL.  He plays on a soccer team with some friends and suffered this season ending injury last Sunday.  Surgery is scheduled for a week from today.  The doctor told him he could wait up to five months to get it repaired, but we have some trips planned this summer and we figured he'd rather be on the mend when we take them, instead of still limping around.  He's in great spirits though, and looking forward to having the hard part behind him and on to getting better!

Girls in White Dresses

I just finished reading Girls in White Dresses, by Jennifer Close, which captured life of an almost-thirty-year-old (gasp) perfectly. Following a group of girlfriends from college into their late 20's, I found myself relating to their years of bridal showers, baby showers, break-ups, job changes, those friendships that stayed strong and those that fell apart.  I read it on my Kindle, so I highlighted several passages as I went along that made me think, ohmygosh, yes. this is so my life.  Last night, after I had finished the book, I went back and read everything I had highlighted.  This passage from when one of the characters was visiting BC, where she had gone to school, pretty much sums up exactly how I feel whenever I go back to Austin.  That feeling of homesickness I get from just being in that city, the nostalgia that pulls at my heart when the UT tower first comes into view as I drive into town.  It makes me wish I didn't have to "grow up" --

It made her sad to think they'd never be back there again, never bounce from bar to bar drinking and dancing just because they could, just because they should.  It wasn't that she wanted to be in college again, exactly.  No, she just missed it sometimes, the aftermath of those nights out, inexplicable bruises and lost wallets, phone numbers being requested, make-outs with near strangers in crowded bars.  

I don't want to be in college again, not exactly.  I love where I am now - with my husband, my friends, my house, my life.  But there is a part of me that wants to go back to being in school, where I lived with my best friends, slept late everyday, and never had to worry about actually cooking a meal.  If you are in your post-college life and still manage to live like you're in school... props to ya.

Weathered the Weather

Well, I spent two hours on the floor of the hallway at work yesterday, but we didn't get much more than some wind and rain.  Better to be safe though, especially when you work with 600 kids!  It was an eventful afternoon, that's for sure.  Hubs was afraid we'd have tree limbs falling at home, but we luckily only had two (very) wet dogs waiting for us.  If we had known there were going to be tornadoes blowing though, we would have left them inside!  Poor pups.