free fallin'

i'm always amazed at how little changes in the weather can affect my outlook on life... i love fall, and i didn't realize that until a year or two ago. the beautiful weather and anticipation of holidays gets me more than a little nostalgic.

this fall will be a little different. matt's work schedule has changed due to a "turn around" that he has a role in. as of last week, he works 5pm-5am, 7 days a week until thanksgiving, with every 14th day off. its not anything we expected to dodge indefinitely but it pretty much sucks now that its here. don't get me wrong, i cherish me time, but its already getting old, boring, and lonely not having matt home at night and not seeing him long (if at all) before he leaves in the afternoon. i'm afraid as it begins to get dark earlier and the holidays approach, it will get even harder to keep the serotonin firing on all cylinders... they're finicky enough as it is.

one thing that has kept me quite busy is my job. i started teaching chemistry at lamar this semester to fill a few retiree vacancies in the faculty and will be there at least through may. i never saw myself as a teacher (still kinda don't) and didn't apply for the job, but was asked if i wanted to do it. the first few weeks i was so stressed out that i started having palpitations! i had to wear a heart monitor and they figured out it was something like superventricular tachycardia... niiice... anyway, it has stopped and i'm more comfortable at work now. its still weird, especially when 40somethings call me mrs. ruggles, and my former teacher (who intimidated me to tears one day in organic lab) asked me to call her by her first name.

however, doogie howser complex aside, i'm fairly certain i want this to be my career, as long as i get to do research too. so the ph.d. is definitely on the horizon. i'm planning on talking with a few professors in the coming weeks to try to get a better idea of what field to pursue... more on that later...

the gen. rs meeting was last weekend, general conference was this weekend and i'm going to time out for women next weekend. i've tried to take a few things from each session but i think i've already reached my saturation point! anyway, some things have stuck:

-- "Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication." -L. DaVinci

-- a very cool perspective on the mirrors in temple sealing rooms was explained by Elder G.W. Gong. probably my favorite talk.

-- Faith is a gift, a choice, and an action. and a concept that tends to evade me... especially the choice part.

hopefully time out will be good. i know there will be something there for me if i can fight off the cynicism, but a friend told me it was "like efy for old ladies." : ) wish me luck!

a week of firsts...

1. i defended my thesis on monday, finally! it was extra cool because matt, and my mom came to watch even though their only interest in the research was me. they suffered through it though! made me feel like a little kid in their school play waving to their family out in the crowd and then glowing when eye contact was made.

anyway, i was actually quite nervous about the whole thing the day before, which is a bit unusual for me. matt offered to give me a blessing that morning and let me just say, it made everything better. after the general questions from the audience, everyone is asked to leave and then i get drilled by my committee. its like some sort of initiation process since the first time you see what actually happens is when you're doing it. they weren't too hard on me... it could have been worse, i guess. so then i get asked to step out while they deliberate over whether i will pass and graduate or fail and have to repeat a portion of my degree....

i passed!!

it was a wonderful feeling. glad i got to share it with some of my fam.

2. the next day was fairly uneventful, consisting of shopping all over town for the exact paper specified by the graduate office to print my thesis on for binding. then having it printed... that was interesting. so that evening, i hadn't done my workout for the day and it was almost dark. matt said, "get up. go put your shoes on, you'll thank me later." ummm.... no!? i don't feel like it! go away you skinny workout nazi! well, he won. then he said, "you're doing the mile tonight, no stopping." what?! i don't even want to go and now you're going to make me do something i've never ever been able to do?? eh?! i know a mile doesn't sound like much to most normal humans, but even when i was the average active little kid, i NEVER ran the whole way in PE. i was in the walker crowd even at the age of 9. so the mile has always been this sort of glowing genie lamp of fitness, attainable only to those who wear funny pants.

since it was late, we ditched our usual 2-mile walk/jog route and mapped out another one before we left that was exactly 1 mile...

aaaannnndd we're off... i was MAD. but i knew he was right, which always makes it worse!

we made about 3 blocks, i turn right, he says go straight.... he comes with me, because i ignore him.

a block or two later he says he thinks we're going the wrong way. i snap back, "if you think i'm wrong then go your own way!"

silence... for most of the way home.

at one point i was thinking, surely the turn around should be coming up soon?! gahh!! but alas, i made it the entire way home... NO STOPPING!! yaaayy!!

once we got home, we mapped out our actual route only to find that it was 1 1/2 miles! and i still made it! so i've still never done a mile, per say, but i'll take it. i've always been told that running is a head game and now i totally believe it. i'm sure glad to have a hubby who makes me better than i can be by myself. we're planning for a 5k in the fall : )

3. wednesday, i was offered a job for next school year! can't share details yet but i am still a little shocked/excited about it. will tell more when i can, but yay for unexpected income!

4. so since i missed last week's update, here's the news: i'm down another 5.6 lbs in the last two weeks! the total since the beginning of april: 11.8. only 3.2 more and i get new running shoes. good thing my rewards system is more generous than my credit card's.

graduation is next saturday, but i'm not looking forward to losing my gym membership. i'm still too cheap to join one that doesn't include its fees in my tuition. so i plan to start the torture of p90x the following week as an alternative. yeah... i'll let you know how that goes.

april showers... may flowers??

lets see if i can organize a few thoughts... feeling pretty scatter-brained today.

1. my thesis defense was not today. a guy from the university of houston came and gave a lecture at my scheduled time, so i got bumped... all the way to may 3rd. AND thats a monday. yaaaaay. i'm telling myself that it will be great anyway.

2. i was not at the seminar today because i was at a funeral in buna for the bishop, henry westbrook. i'll admit, all i really knew of him was from when he was on the high council and would visit our ward. he was funny, and will be sorely missed. there was a huge outpouring of love from the ward, stake, and community. i've never seen so many flowers at an adult's funeral.

i was asked to sing, which is never fun at a funeral. except at this time yesterday, i could barely speak because my spring allergies are in full effect. after a frantic call-in and trip to my dr., she hooked me up with a steroid shot. this morning, i was channeling a little more norah jones raspy-ness than usual, but other that that, it was at least a 90% improvement. thank goodness for modern medicine! and insurance!!

3. speaking of funerals... i hate them. i feel like in my 25 years, i've reached the quota of a 50 year old. and what's worse, probably half of them have been for people younger than me. life sucks sometimes, but it sucks way less than death. at least for those of us left here to deal.

and did i mention how completely dreary the weather is today? nothing like a rainy funeral. the day katie left us, it started raining that evening and didn't stop for three whole weeks. seriously, not one dry day. heaven couldn't stop crying, neither could the rest of us. and theres a song tied to that whole time called "sometimes he lets it rain." maybe someday i'll tell you about that.

4. anyway, on a lighter note, its the end of week 3, and i lost another 2.2 lbs, making 6.2! yeah, it doesn't sound like much, i know. and i would definitely already be kicked off the biggest loser, but hey... this is reality, and i feel good about the changes that we've been making. since moving to beaumont a few months ago, i've lost a little over 15, by changing day-to-day things, kicking some bad habits. what's more, i haven't had anything to drink but h2o since the end of march. YAY! thats huge for me.

so here's to another week of staying ON the band wagon... whatever that means. : )

great expectations...

well i'm at the end of week two... and first of all, thank you for all your sweet comments on last week's post. you confirmed my fears that a) other eyes do in fact see what i'm writing, and b) now i really do have to be accountable... thanks a lot, guys.

a few things since last we spoke:

1. went camping with brother and his family. we only got to stay one night but it was wonderful. i didn't even turn on my phone for almost 2 days. bliss... and other than being pretty chilly at night, the weather was amazing. i'll take cold over suffocating heat and humidity any day. carrie and i went fishing for a few hours and i caught 3 perch. BUT, they were used as bait the next day and my bro caught a HUGE-mongous catfish... so i like to think i contributed to that, ya know. thanks paul and carrie for letting us crash your very first real camping trip! i still can't believe that, by the way.

2. we got our flower beds outlined with the stones i bought last week... all 1400 lbs of them. oh, and we have patio chairs now. nothing fancy (we're holding out on a real set), but comfy. and now i sit on my very own back porch in my very own chairs and enjoy my very own little patch of grass... and weeds. but we're working on that.

3. i'm so flippin close to busting through 2 of my workout goals... next week, they're toast. matt went "jogging" with me yesterday, if you can call it that. oh his patient soul... i won't say how far i made it but i will say it was the longest i've ever gone. as in, ev-er. and matt did more than twice that, all while saying how long it had been since he'd worked out, and that he was sooo out of shape, yadda, yadda... thanks, dear.

but really, that aside, he was the best coach yesterday. he makes me feel like a superstar. the extra little comments about how my face looks different or how those pants look loose (as if you can actually tell a difference after a few pounds) don't hurt either. and whether he's lying or not... doesn't bother me! just keep 'em coming babe! : )

4. so with that, this week's report is only 1.5 meager lbs. i was expecting more... but i'm pretty sure that aunt flo is getting the blame for that... after all, she gets the blame for everything else, right? right. well, and i may or may not have indulged in a strawberry s'more during our little camp out. : /

so the total is only 4 so far... but my chubby ankles are shrinking, so i'm calling it a win!

'bout time...

well hello again! so much to catch up on...

1. christmas break = 10 days in angelfire, nm... skiing, family, snow... absolute BLAST!

2. matt has settled in at work finally... i was hating that he wasn't liking it at first. its better now though, and he's even getting a new assignment in a few months. hoping for the best.

3. i'm graduating THIS semester! as in, 6 weeks from now! thesis is turned in to committee and graduate office, practice defense tomorrow, real thesis defense in 2 weeks. yeeeeeah...

4. ripped out/replanted flower beds in the back. chickened out and started there before delving into the front. looks great but the plant budget definitely doesn't go as far as i expected.

ok, well the real reason for today's update is because of a few other breakthroughs i thought i'd share with the class. referring to #3 above, (can you tell i've been writing a thesis for 2 months?) the impending completion of my schooling for now has come sooner than i expected, even though its a semester longer than i planned. not following? let me explain:

matt and i just celebrated our FIFTH anniversary... time absolutely flies. we've always planned to wait to start our family until i was finished with school, partly because i've been in a lab all the time with weird chemicals that aren't good for growing a human inside of you... and partly because the thought pretty much scares the patooie out of me....

anyway, graduation is here, almost, meaning i better start getting over that quick, right? well anyone who's seen me knows i've packed on more pounds than i care to admit. did you think i didn't notice? i've done the yoyo thing since i was in high school, but since becoming a mrs., my yoyo has been stuck! on the wrong yo! to top off the whole "i'm not old/wise/mature/good enough to be a parent" freakout, i can barely fathom getting pregnant, and being even bigger.. whoa... i don't think i could handle that.

i guess my point is, i've realized that if i don't start fixing some things now, i'll never be ready, physically or mentally. and that would be a shame because man, my little people will have an amazing dad, just sayin...

so i know other people deal with this crap too. a friend of mine has been on some crazy diet (not sure about details) and has been posting her progress each week on facebook. shes doing fabulously well by the way. but since fb is way too public for my taste, and their use of "friend" is meaningless, i'm going to do the same on here. maybe it will help hold me accountable!

this is what i'm doing:

in my opinion, its like the word of wisdom, only in scientific terms (so of course i liked it). it does seem a little extreme, especially if you're used to southern, cajun, and mexican food like our families love. but once you get past what you can't have and focus on what you can, its easier. and the bottom line for me is: i feel sooooo much better when i follow this.

oh, and i'm quite literally working my butt off. i've never been a fan of hard workouts. you're surprised, i know, but it is what it is. i'm trying to get into shape, something other than globular. also, i will be a "ma" for the handcart trek coming up in june, and i'd really rather not actually die on the trail. i hear helicopter rides to the hospital are expensive!

so for my sixweeksuntilgraduationgottadosomethingfast goal... i'm down 2.5 lbs. see you next week!

but seriously... get the book, read it.

Isn't it Fe-ic...

CAUTION: extreme nerdiness ahead

ok, you were warned...

last night i learned something that was actually interesting in my adv. inorganic class. i doubt anyone else will find it as cool as me, but-- oh well. we had the assignment to read a journal article and be prepared to discuss it in class. i had skimmed through it but didn't actually read the whole thing, so i missed some of the details. it had to do with developing photosensitizers being used to treat certain types of tumors. being an inorganic class, we mainly dwelled on the symmetries of 3 different metalloporhyrin molecules. porphyrin is a basic structure that is present in all kinds of enzymes and biomolecules. it looks like this:

the point is, all those double bonds happen to be conjugated (meaning every other one, double, single...). so it has the capacity to absorb tons of light energy, especially visible light. thats why its in molecules like chlorophyll, b vitamins, hemoglobin, etc. the hole in the middle is occupied with various metals depending on what it is. so when all that energy is absorbed, it has to go somewhere... it just so happens that it is just enough energy to turn triplet oxygen (safe) into singlet oxygen (not so safe... it can cause cell damage, like sunburns).

from a medical standpoint, this is huge. tumors are being treated by essentially raising the levels of porphyrins in the persons body then using fiber optics to target the tumor and give it a really nasty sunburn from the inside, causing it damage, and hopefully death. pretty amazing if you ask me...

but what caught my attention last night is this: there are medical conditions that cause people to have excess porhyrins in their bodies, usually the type without the metal ion in the middle. sometimes they tend to concentrate in the skin and can cause a person to sunburn very quickly. Their bodies are always trying to find more metal ions (like iron in hemoglobin) to insert into the porhyrin ring to reduce these effects. another compensatory effect is growing excess hair in an attempt to sheild the skin from light. these people would likely become nocturnal.

wait-- lemme get this straight.

they only come out at night....

looking for bloody iron....

or they're reeallly hairy...

sounds like vampires and werewolves to me!!

i dont know if my professor meant to share this with us the week of halloween or not, but the irony was not lost on me! i love learning about the roots of our holiday traditions and how they get slanted over centuries. and since halloween is one of my very favorites, this was too cool. hope you all have a great holiday weekend!! watch out for those little blood-suc-- um, i mean... precious children!!

This Old House: The Doors

well... as i mentioned earlier, most of what's new about living here, we love. there are a few things, however, that we don't.

one of the reasons we chose this place is because of its move-in-readiness. we loved what the previous owners had done with the place. we want to change a few things, but they're minor, right? during recent remodeling the doors in the master bedroom were changed to six-panel ones from the old flat ones probably original to the 1975 house. thats great, but they didnt change the rest of the ones in the hall so now they don't match. it also seems that their little angel was a budding graffiti artist and was in the middle of a new piece on her bedroom door, what we affectionately refer to as "the pink room." --a topic for a future post, indeed. so, for those reasons, we decided to finish updating all the doors in the hall and two others to match the new six-panel ones.

easy as pie...

first of all, matt and i were in complete disagreement as to what we should even buy. i figured all we needed was the actual door, since thats all that needed replacing. matt thought we needed to buy the doors already pre-hung in new jambs because "everyone" said it was easier that way. so much so that the 3x price increase over my idea would be worth it. guess which ones we got...

once we borrowed his dad's truck and several big tools we went to one place and bought them out on the sizes we needed. we were still missing 2 so we decided that since we had the truck, we'd just go to lowe's and get the other two. 2 doors there turned into doors, plus a ladder, 5 gallons of kilz, and allllll the little neccessities we could think to buy with our coupon... all but one.

we got home and matt started busting out trim and a (perfectly good) door jamb. after SEVERAL attempts at hanging the thing, we did what all good gen-x'ers would do... youtubed it. bob vila makes everything look sooo easy! have you ever noticed hes not the one actually doing the work?!? anyway, we tried a new way which required several shims. ya know the little wooden wedges-- the one thing we didn't get on our earlier trip to lowes? good thing we live so close now!

after all that and 3 hours of work, we finished!! one door, that is. only 5 more to go! after a few tips from a friend of ours that can hang one in 10 minutes, the rest hopefully won't be so arduous. we'll see... i'm just glad we didn't go for the "fixer-upper" that was next on the list of purchase prospects!

This Old House: H2O

since we don't have a kid to gush about all day on our blog (i'm not knocking you, i'm just sayin'), i figure i can write about what makes news around here, not to mention that it takes up a lot of our time and nearly all of our spare cash these days. sounds close enough to a child, right? that said, welcome to the first installment of a series about our new home.

every day it seems there is something new or different that makes us grateful/excited to be here. its usually good but occasionally its, well, sobering. after all, i'll be the ripe old age of 54 when we pay this thing off, assuming we stick to the payment plan and never move... not likely.

this morning while showering, i realized yet another thing i love about our house: water pressure!! we have a shower head in the hall bathroom that matt has confessed to using as "a water-pik for his grill." its truly awesome. you see, our apartment was upstairs so we were fighting gravity anytime we wanted a shower, or anything else. not only that, it was on the same meter as P&R's house so that probably didn't help. don't kid yourself though... that shower was magnificent after a few weeks with no power/water after hurricanes.

so if you want a "moral of the story" it is to appreciate even the smallest luxuries in life. meanwhile, i'll be taking extra long showers and enjoying the feeling of my hair getting *almost* blasted off my head. :~)

comatose...

they say history repeats itself. i don't know who "they" are but it seems accurate enough.

i noticed on a friend's blog (who has mine listed on her sidebar) that it said 7 months since my last post. i knew it had been a while, but still, 7 months?! anyway, here's my pitiful defense:

when matt was on his mission i kind of stopped writing him. i know-- and i'll be paying for that for the rest of ever. point is, i wanted to write. i really wanted to talk to him but it just wasn't going to happen, so one week turned into two, then two months and before i knew it, it had turned quite awkward. i felt like i would have to somehow acknowledge my lack of correspondence, which made the task even harder to approach. so it was... a vicious cycle that left my best friend thinking that i had abandoned him. i still feel guilty about inflicting those feelings of doubt on him, especially at that time.

so blogging world, i still love you. i've actually had so much to write about that i haven't written anything. i obviously still have not learned my lesson... at this point though, i may or may not do a post containing the events of the past 7 crazy months, to catch up. but i am going to start from here and try to do better. i love reading other people's blogs and will probably steal a few ideas from you. so thanks in advance for being so copy-worthy! :~)

topics to address soon:
- new house!
- status of my degree
- who knows what else...

the bear-necessities...

every year, lamar students are freed from classes for MLK day and matt and i usually wind up doing nothing. this year however, we got to keep our neice for the day since she was out of school but her parents weren't off work. matt did some hunting and found that the houston zoo has a few days a year -including MLK- that admission is free. so we decided to surprise gracie with a cool trip with her cool aunt and uncle.

unfortunately, miss grace was also planning a surprise... a urinary tract infection. the poor kid was squirming and dancing all evening the night before we were to go. i asked her mom why she had not gone to the doctor and carrie said she was worried about her missing anymore school since she had been sick 2 days the prior week with something totally unrelated. so the next morning, gracie was in the bathroom about three of every five minutes while trying to get ready. i couldnt stand it anymore because i knew she was miserable. i thought if we could get her in, that she could be seen and not have to miss school. a two'fer, i thought. so by 9 we had an appointment, and by 10 we were in beaumont, trying to get a 7 year old to pee in a cup. the dr gave us some antibiotic samples (yeah, no trip to the pharmacy!) but he failed to have them reconstituted... we then had to go to another location where they were to do another test, and have her fill yet another cup. by this time gracie was getting hungry again and our hope for a fun day at the zoo was fading. she didnt feel sick, she just had to pee every 5 seconds. i still had to go to a pharmacy, get a syringe that measured mLs, mix up her meds and get her fed.

when asked, grace didnt care what was for lunch. we had been wanting to try out a vietnamese place in bmt to see if it was as good as the place we like in houston and she agreed! she ordered something akin to chicken noodle soup and loved it! who knew?! grace got several awesome-kid-points for that.

so then we decided that since her medicine was kicking in that she might still be able to make it to the zoo. she really wanted to go. after sleeping the whole way (read "no pit-stops"), we arrived. it was the most beautiful january day to spend outside. the weather was perfect, and little-bit woke up happy, so double yeah! on the top of the list to see were the bears, then monkeys, then turtles. we managed to see all of them plus many more. gracie rode around on matts shoulders.

we talked about the dancing elephant (no kidding, he was literally grinning and swaying), how bats are really mammals, how venomous snakes have a triangular head, the difference between apes and monkeys, and how humans are primates too.

shes such a smart kid! i found out the next day that she recounted to her mom on the ride home the story about the borneo orangutan named doc who was born one day after i was. she even remembered the date to tell her mom.

we stopped for dinner at tortugas. by the end of the meal she was saying "i have a pet turtle at home" in spanish. uncle matt is the linguist of the family. i know to you moms out there, all this probably seems like just another day. but i truly enjoyed spending the day with matt and gracie. i enjoyed them. it just wasnt the typical babysitting duty ive become accustomed to. ive often felt like i dont really deal with 6ish-11ish year olds very well and ive wondered if i would lose the relationships i have with my neices and nephews once they got to that age. instead, i love seeing their personalities and interests develop and change. sure, they can still be bratty with the best of 'em at times. but they're becoming very cool, though still very small, people. after all, they better be good... they've already agreed to babysit mine one day. mwah ha ha...