Virtual Tour of Our House

Here is the Virtual Tour of our house.  Click on the first image to see the slide-show with detailed descriptions.  🙂

Read Full Post »

Lip Piercing Story ~June 5th, 2009~

I got my lip pierced on Friday, June 5th.  This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a really long time.  The biggest reason I hadn’t gone through with it until now is a combination of fear and not really being sure how it would affect my flute playing.  The fear part was mainly things I’d read on the internet about how they can cause gum recession and wear your enamel off your teeth.  Of course, I’d also read that a Properly Placed lip piercing should cause very few problems.  Now that I have mine I realize that’s true, my piercing is nowhere near my gumline and it only rarely touches my teeth.  As far as my flute goes, I played it very briefly yesterday and it will take only minor adjustment before I have my old tone quality back.  My piccolo will probably take a tiny bit longer. But as I expected, this is no worse than all the crap I had in my mouth as a teenager with braces trying to play the flute.  🙂

The actual piercing was seriously easy and relatively pain-free.  First, I got to swish with mouthwash.  Then, after my piercer and I agreed on a location she did some more marking and lining up, then clamped my lip and had me take a couple big, deep breaths and the needle went through, I felt my lip go warm and swell slightly and it was over.   She put the hoop in and secured it, she went over some instructions,  I thanked her and was on my way.  It never bled, never turned very red, and only swelled slightly.  I slept with my head elevated for the first couple nights to make sure overnight swelling would be minimal.  The very first day eating was painful and challenging and I felt a constant nagging pain in my lip all day.  By Sunday the pain and swelling was only slight and I was even up for a 4-mile hike.  🙂   It’s been 5 days now and I only have slight swelling in the mornings and slight pain if I bump it.  Eating has gotten easier, though I’m still sticking to easy to chew foods.   I’m hoping to go to band tomorrow and I’m going to try eating pizza Friday.  🙂

I would highly recommend these piercings to anyone considering it, well, to anyone considering it who is really mature enough to take proper care of it.   The stories I’ve read from those who didn’t follow directions read like absolute horror stories.    *Remember, piercings are wounds, and they need to be treated as such*

Read Full Post »

My First Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Well, the Rhubarb that grows in our yard is ripe for the picking so I decided it’s time to try my hand at making one of my husbands favorite pies;  Strawberry Rhubarb.

Here are pictures from the adventure:

Read Full Post »

Road Trip to Oklahoma ~April 2009~

Well,  no hiking for the past couple of weeks.  We’ve been busy getting ready to go to Oklahoma, then going to Oklahoma, then recovering from the trip, lol.  While there we attended the wedding of one of my cousins, and we got to meet my long lost sister!  It was a great trip, here are some of the highlights! (For some reason I cannot get these to fall into order, so they’re not in order but whatever).

Read Full Post »

A New, Unplanned, Start.

Welcome to my new blog.   Sadly my old blog is gone, entirely.   So, here I begin anew.  I will be working, slowly, to make this blog my new home.  It’s hard to start over, especially when I was very attached to my old blog, and when the choice for it to be gone was not my own.

My old blog was a WordPress but it was hosted on our own domain.   That domain was disabled, without warning, by our webhost early this morning.  Someone hacked into our account and started using it to send spam about a month ago.  We were to told that they were aware of the problem and were led to believe that they were actively trying to fix it.  Instead, we found out this morning that that was not the case, they chose to lay the blame on us for something we had no control over.  We’re being treated as if we are the spammers, the culprits, in all of this.

I am sad, I lost a lot of stuff, all my entries, everything in my email account, all gone.  I guess, in a way, I am still mourning the loss of everything. This comes at a very trying time in my life.  The past 4 months I have seen massive upheaval in my world, my entire life has been turned upside down.  What I once thought was up is now down, right is left and so on and so forth.  I wake up each morning wondering what today will bring.  More upheaval? More stress? More pain?  I hope each day that it will bring something good, and that has come about too, it’s truly not all been bad.

Whatever each day does decide to bring I realize that I have no choice but to move forward.  Just like with hiking, always forward, no matter how tired you get you must keep putting one foot ahead of the other, it’s the only way to succeed, to finish the walk.  So, here I am moving forward.  Welcome to my new wordpress blog.  🙂

Read Full Post »