Story of my life right now

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As my friend Sara tells me, there is nothing that I can do - they are only hiring internally right now. Still, 70 applications to this hospital alone (at least 40-50 to other hospitals) and not one call is depressing, frustrating, and anxiety-producing.

Fungi in the forest

We saw so many mushrooms in the Porkies, more than I have ever seen, and in many varieties. We tried to take pictures of the more memorable ones, here are some of them.

Phew!

Wow, time has flown since our last post and a lot has happened!

First, I finished my program! August 1st was our "pinning ceremony". It was a jam packed weekend with Dan's mom and sister coming to Duluth, grad parties, the Brewhouse Tri on Sunday, and a baby shower thrown in there for fun.

Monday the 3rd I hit the road and went to Chicago for 4 days, which was a blast! I love that city. I got together with my girls Heather and Kerry. We did a lot of biking, drank some good beer, and enjoyed the hot weather. It was fun to talk, laugh, and be together again.

I got home on the 6th and on the 8th went to the Twin Cities until the 15th. I did a Kaplan board exam prep course with some other people from my program. I stayed with Maddie for a few days and with Nick and Louisa for the rest of the week. It was another really fun week. Class was pretty much every evening from 6 pm to 9:30 pm leaving lots of time for biking all over the metro area. There are spectacular bike trails and paths all over the twin cities and Nick and I explored a lot of them. Dan came down one night and he and my nursing school friends went to a Twins game.

Last week I took the dreaded board exam and passed! So now I am officially and unemployed RN... shouldn't I be getting a check or something? Ha, just kidding. I have been spending my days searching for and applying for jobs. I figure I have applied for over 70 jobs at this point and have not gotten one call. Its an ugly market right now.

Dan and I went to the Porcupine Mts in Michigan's UP last weekend to celebrate our 2nd anniversary, my finishing school/board exam, and Dan finishing at the Scenic!!! Thank god he is out of that place. He definitely stayed too long and should have quit being a manager there long ago. Its has been wonderful to spend time together, eat dinner together, and live a normal life! Our backpacking trip was wonderful, I wish we could have stayed longer. It was a nice way to enjoy a little bit of summer. He starts school at UWS tomorrow, so that should be something to stay tuned for.

Katie, Ellie, Sara, Audrey, Mo, Leanne

Chicago from the SAIC deck

new bridge going to SAIC modern wing (Heather's alma mater)

for Jolene, love Oprah

Heather and Kerry

the Hopleaf - lots of beers, good mussels and fries

Last time at the 'dome?

Jason, Ro, Jodie

Ellie, Kelsey

Two of my favorites from my childhood

Rainy start to the trip

packs up on the bear pole

Billie earns her keep

Lake of the Clouds - not as special as it was made out to be

Highest falls in the park

Stella checking out the edge of the cliff

Billie is so tired

Happy

Billie rolling around sans backpack

Mirror Lake

Me

Presque River

The Big Lake

keep the faith

Hi friends. Recently one of Dan's friends said that he was "losing faith" in our blog. I am sorry! I really have no good excuse except that our lives have been pretty boring for the last few months.

I went straight from Spring into Summer semester at school (literally, we started the summer semester the day after our last final exam from the Spring). Dan is working 2 jobs and continuing to heal from his surgery. I haven't been working as much this summer because of school.

Two weeks from today and I will be done! The month of July is spent in our capstone clinical - we do 130 hours with one or two preceptors. I am at SMDC on the pediatrics floor, or St. Mary's Children's Hospital, and I love it. I would absolutely love to find a job in peds, but at this point I will take anything I can get. I have applied for over 40 nursing jobs here and in North Carolina and not one hit yet. It's very frustrating. The reality of leaving Duluth is increasingly setting in. We don't want to leave yet, as we just refinanced our house. Hopefully we could rent it out, but that is sort of a hassle. So we have a lot of things to think about and decisions to make in the next few months.

As for fun, pretty much the only thing we have done was to go over to Bayfield and see the Indigo Girls and Brandi Carlile at Big Top for my birthday. We're hoping to go backpacking at the end of August for our anniversary and maybe squeeze in a Twin's game sometime, too. I am pretty jealous of those of you that have been doing all of the normal summer things - going camping, hanging out at the lake, going to the beach, and just taking vacations in general. I really hope that once I get a job (positive thinking) we can start enjoying these things as well.

So, as usual, here are some photos from the last couple of months.

Dan's walleye



Flowers in the front of and around the house

Stella loves her frisbee

Evening at Park Point, or, as my two favorite Alaskans call it, Cabo San Duluth

View of a part of the Sea Caves on the South Shore of Lake Superior

Indigo Girls

Brandi Carlile and the Indigo Girls

snl

signs of spring...

Dan's birthday party. Lots of grilled meat, homemade bread, beer, friends, and cake.

More signs of spring...

muddy legs from trail running

fiddlehead ferns

the yellow tulip that grows from this crack in the driveway every year

could it be? leaves on the trees???

the girls getting their vitamin D

Dan's garden beginning in the basement

Vaca

Soooo, this is only about a month overdue. We went on a much much much needed vacation March 6-13. We went to the Bay Islands in Honduras, specifically Utila and Roatan. It was wonderful. Roatan was a little more touristy than we usually prefer, but nothing like Cancun or other spring break hotspots.

Utila is more of a laid-back "backpackers" island. It was a fun vibe, very safe feeling, and relaxed. The only thing really lacking was a nice beach. I couldn't let go of wanting to go to a really nice beach so we ended up checking out Roatan, also, where we found beautiful beaches - more people and higher prices, too, but no bother. The worst part for me was finding out I get motion sick on choppy ferry rides - lets just say I took advantage of the barf bags they handed out. I have never been on a boat ride like these though, the sea was really rough for 3 of the 4 ferry rides we took, and I was not the only one getting sick. Anyway, small price to pay and I made up for loosing my breakfast by eating an extra ice cream cone when we got to Roatan.

Both islands are scuba diving havens, Utila especially was made up of dive shop after dive shop. Since most of the certification courses are about 4 days long and we didn't want to spend our vaca in class, we took the one day "discover scuba diving" class, which was a nice introduction. We had a really great instructor who put up with our beginners fear well. I thought I would be very comfortable scuba diving, since I spend a lot of time in the water as a swimmer. I found it to be really unnatural feeling, though, only mouth breathing and not coming up for air once in a while. Dan, too, took a while to get used to it, and he is not very comfortable at all in the water anyway, so he was really a champ. We finally got comfortable and were able to swim around a nice reef for awhile.

Since we got back life has been going absolutely non-stop bonkers. I honestly have not had time to spend posting on the blog, so I apologize but I can't say I will be much better in the next 4 months. On that note, I will be DONE with school in less than 4 months!!!! I think I will need another vacation soon after that. Enough typing, check out the photos...

View from the ferry dock in La Cieba

Feeling queasy

First meal on the island

Beach walk at dusk

Flowers along the main road in Utila

Hike across the island

At our hotel

Our awesome hotel in Utila


Goin' diving

Roatan...

our favorite eatery

one of many dogs, this one I gave some bread to and she followed us all morning. We named her fox-dog. She was really cute.

at the ferry dock on Roatan, there was another abandoned ship a little ways further out

Our last dinner in Honduras, sadly, at Pizza Hut

A little girl was having a bday party and there were little kids running around like crazy, then they brought out this Tinkerbell piñata and they whacked it for a good 15 minutes.

Total score - our flight from Honduras to Houston was only about half full and we nabbed a whole exit row for ourselves - check out that leg room! Poor Dan's knees are usually pressed against the seat in front of him.