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Sunday, July 29, 2012

The End is Near... And the Beginning is in Sight!

I am so happy to be back home with Shrimp and all these furry creatures.  Two weeks without my girl and my pups was about enough to make me go crazy.  I even missed the cat, despite our tenuous relationship.  Although it was fun getting to play with babies and teach all sorts of different groups about nutrition (and have someone take out my garbage, make my bed, replace my towel every day), I am content to be back under the roof of this little cramped townhouse for the time being.

With this little trip to North Carolina I have officially completed my internship rotations.  Yes, I can see the finish line!  The "first final draft" of my research manuscript is due bright and early tomorrow morning (need to get cracking on that one!), then I have 5 weeks of repolishing, defending, presenting, etc.  After that I head out into the forest and figure out how to set up a kitchen for a disaster, try to formulate tube-feedings from everyday foods, and play Girl Scouts (not Boy Scouts, we know their stance on people like us) for a week and a half with all my classmates from grad school, and then we GRADUATE!  After we graduate we move on and leave grad school and internships behind us.  This cannot happen soon enough!

Throughout all this craziness is we are to close on our house (I don't know who is more excited, Shrimp, me, or the dogs... we haven't yet told the cat), and move.  We're hoping to have the movers come in and pick everything up ASAP so we don't have as much to clean and maintain over the next couple months/  We'll have them hold on to everything until I'm gone playing in the forest.  We're hoping this gives us a week or two in the empty house to get in and make sure everything is clean to our standards, put a little paint on some of the walls, and do some projects before the house gets full of all our stuff.  That's the plan... assuming we close on time :)

~Tater

P.S.
For your visual pleasure...

So excited to add over 1000 square feet of living space to our lives...
and a functional kitchen, nice, big fenced yard, and a neighborhood we love!


This is the point at which it is ok for Shrimp to start hating me. 
While she was at home working hard I was playing with babies, talking to people about food and zip lining.


Thursday, July 19, 2012

Busy Lives & Still Rolling Right Along

So now it's my turn to talk about how much it sucks when Tater is away!

I will honestly say that I love "me" time.  I enjoy mornings by myself, I appreciate silence & time to think, I love a good run with just me and the pavement, etc.  Then this girl came along, and I still very much enjoy all my alone time, but I absolutely adore spending as much time as possible with her. It's great...I mean how many people can you say that never bother you or that you can't seem to get enough of?!

Last Monday Tater drove down to NC with another intern/friend to stay for 2 weeks.  It's part of their internship and we both have been dreading it for different reasons.  She's been working/shadowing different areas of a hospital down there and I've been working & cleaning (boring!).  It's only been a few days and I'm so ready for her to come back now!


On to more exciting news....


We are in the process of closing on a house....YAY! It's pretty much perfect....fenced in yard, open kitchen, plenty of room to grow in and the location is great!  It's right near Old Town Alexandria and the National Harbor.  I love this because parts of those areas remind me of Charleston, SC (my hometown).  We've made an offer, had an inspection and now waiting on banks, seller and whatever else.  We're both so excited about the house...we know that once we get moved in then we finally get to live "normal" lives.  Tater will be done with her internship in September and will begin actually working as a dietitian and will be able to have more time to relax.

Anyways...time to start my work day!

~Shrimp
ps- Sorry for the lack of pictures lately.  We'll make up for it soon :)









Saturday, July 7, 2012

Updating and Improving

We will be updating and designing a new blog layout and all.  So bear with us through a few different looks while we figure out which one we want to stick with for awhile! 


Happy Saturday!

~Shrimp & Tater

Monday, July 2, 2012

3 Digit Temps & No Power...Thanks, Derecho Storm!

Last Friday night, Tater and I made last minute plans for a little date together down in Adams Morgan at Rumba Cafe (this tiny place has fantastic tapas and strong mojitos!).  We don't get to do DC dates very often so it was great to have some time together!  We kept it simple, had a few drinks and headed back home to get some sleep for our early morning 8k race in Leesburg, VA the next day.

5:00am came around...I climbed out of bed and soon realized we had no power...ugh!  I get downstairs to let the dogs out to eat and something doesn't seem right in our backyard.  By the way, I am so blind without my contacts so I yell at Tater to take a look our the window to see what's up.  Sure enough, part of our fence was down, our big grill was knocked over and our fig tree was all messed up (yea, all that and still I couldn't see it with out my contacts!).  When did this happen?  Why didn't we wake up?  I didn't even know it was supposed to rain and here it looks like a hurricane came through our neighborhood!  We were both baffled and laughing that we had no idea this went on in the middle of the night.


We quickly checked the news (what would we do without iphones?!) and saw that over 400,000 homes are without power in the DC/MD/VA area because of this so called Derecho Storm! AND...the power company states it will be 3-7 days before power will be restored! What!? Time to drag out the big cooler...

Gas stations were either out of gas, out of power or had a line of cars waiting 20-30 minutes to fill up.  We loaded up our huge cooler and drove around awhile and grabbed the last 4 small bags of ice in our area!  This poor guy ran in looking for ice right after we bought ours and Tater gladly gave him a bag (yea, she's good people)!

Once we got home and stocked the cooler with beer, sandwich meat, bread, cheese, water, etc then we were good to go!  Thankfully, we are laid back, don't watch much tv and are completely comfortable without power....except for the 3 digit temperature outside.  We managed to stay cool by sleeping downstairs with the windows open at night, hanging out in Barnes & Nobles during the day along with everyone else and of course sitting in the shade outside with a cold beer! Don't get me wrong, it was pretty miserable and uncomfortable with this crazy heat....but we survived and as of 4:00pm this monday evening...we finally have our power back!
 Slumber party downstairs with the pups!

This storm was horrible and we are very fortunate to not have any major damage.  Sadly, there were a few deaths, cars crushed and roofs damaged from this freak storm.  So keep the few states that were effected in your thoughts!  I hope everyone had a safe weekend....stay cool and extra safe during this holiday week!
Huge tree limb down right by our townhouse!

Some guy's poor truck...at least he has a sense of humor "For Sale, Recently lowered"


Wow and we slept through all this?!





~Shrimp