Happy Tuesday & A Quick Trip to Nashville

Hello friends and happy Tuesday. I didn’t post anything yesterday my husband and I had an overnight In Nashville. I may have mentioned a few times that since having the kidney transplant several years ago, my husband has to return to Vanderbillt Medical Center three times a year. This is so that he can visit with his nephrologist and get blood work and make sure everything is still going well with the kidney. It is about a four hour drive each way for us. However traffic in the mornings going into downtown Nashville has become unbearable. Last time we had the visit it took over five hours to get there. We almost missed the appointment. We have spent the night in Nashville a few times but with all the kitty and dog babies it was hard getting them farmed out and taken care of. Sadly we no longer have our doggos and you know cats require little care for just the twenty four hours we are gone.

After the last fiasco we said never again. We were in the road for over nine hours that day and we were exhausted. We decided to do the overnight again. My husband was so set on not doing the entire drive in one day that he made all the arrangements himself!!! What? We have stayed at this hotel before. It is only about five minutes from the hospital. It is also the hotel we stayed in many years ago with some of our family after the transplant. So lots of good memories. It was a little pricey for an overnight but totally worth it.

We drove over yesterday after I had worked half a day. We arrived around 5:00 PM central time which is 6:00 PM for us. Traffic was not bad at all. We checked in, had some dinner at a nearby restaurant that also featured live music every night. It was so nice not having to worry about getting up at 3:00 AM and driving over. We always prefer early morning appointments even when we drive over. That way we get back home at a decent hour. Also we have found that the later in the day we schedule the appointment the longer it seems to take getting seen by the doctor and getting blood work.

Vanderbilt Stadium, if you look closely you can see Vanderbilt hospital just beyond the stadium. We were probably within walking distance.
A great view from the balcony. We were on the 14th floor.

Dinner was amazing.
The band was good. Local song writers are featured every night. I love to hear the lyrics this is quite a talent all it’s own.
And on the way home we always stop at DQ and get an ice cream. After a great check up we feel the need to have a little treat. Or a big treat.

Last week we received a large dish garden at my brother in law’s funeral. I took it home and proceeded to take all the different plants out of it. This one had about seven different species of plants. You can’t keep them all together because they all require different things to grow and thrive. So I took this apart and repotted all the individual plants. Then before I placed them in the house I checked to see if they were kitty friendly. They were not. Well one of them was ok to have around the kitties. I have been given some additional office space at work and one of the rooms has two large windows. I hauled all of those plants to work with me and they look great!! Now I can have my plants around me at work. I will have to stick to the orchids at home. They are safe for the babies. I think that may also mean I am ready for another orchid. Yes I definitely think that sounds like a great idea.

I had so much fun repotting all of those plants. And the large pot they were in I will keep for something else. It is absolutely beautiful. I think it will look great for something “fallish”

So that is what has been going on with me. How was your weekend?

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!!

My Summer Bucket List

Yes summer is quickly passing us by. Here it is nearing the end of July and school will be starting soon. It’s crazy how fast that happens. We’re starting to see all the back to school items in our local Walmart. I can still smell pencils from first grade every time I walk down the school supply isle. In tourism we are in the heart of summer but we know it is slowly winding down. Labor Day is on the horizon and that usually ends the especially larger crowds for us. I am always ready for the slow down.

I wanted to share with you some things I still have on my summer bucket list, as well as some summer fun that I have had so far. I think the summer flies by so fast we have to make it count. First off are some things I have done this summer. It’s not a lot because I don’t get a lot of time off in the summer so I have to make every weekend count.

1. I went to the Lavender Festival in Oak Ridge. I would love to find more festivals like this. They are so much fun. Here is a recap of the Lavender Festival of you missed my post.

2. Go to the beach. We did get to go to the beach last month and we had a great time. The weather was good all week and the crowds were not bad at all. We love to go to Wrightsville Beach in Wilmington NC. Here is a recap of that.

3.Plant and grow beautiful flowers or ummmm pretty flowers. I love flowers and I love to have them inside and outside. Marigolds are my favorite but sadly my marigolds didn’t do very well this year. It could be because of all the rain we have had. It has been the rainiest summer I can remember in a very long time.

4. Growing fresh tomatoes. I myself do not eat tomatoes but I love to grow them and give them away. We had several tomatoes from our one little container pot. They didn’t get really big but Mark said they were delicious. We also had plenty to give away. Something has been eating our tomatoes and I’m not sure if it is a deer or some other critter. We have a lot of them hanging around.

5. Eat Ice Cream. What can I say. It screams summer time. I try not to buy too much or I will eat it every day. Sweetwater Creamery in local downtown Sweetwater makes ice cream daily and it is delicious. I will work my way through every flavor this summer and give you an update. If you are local head on down there and get you some ice cream.

6. I also love cooking and eating lots of fresh vegetables. We have a Mennonite community close to us and they grow the best vegetables. The vegetables are so fresh and very reasonably priced. That’s where I got my tomato plant.

7. Cherries!!!! I love them so much!!! This is the best time of the year for them. I’m not fond of cherry pie, I just eat them one by one.

Here are a few things I haven’t done this summer that I would love to do. Most of them are quite simple but that’s how I role. I will give you an update on some of those things hopefully before summer is over.

8. Go on a picnic. Picnics are the best The food always tastes so much yummier when you are eating it outside. When I was a little girl we would take picnics to a local lake or the mountains. And it was sooooo good. We always had special treats when we were on a picnic and I guess that’s what made it even more special

9. Visit a sunflower field. We have one close by and I want to do that maybe this weekend. The flowers are beautiful right now and sunflowers are some of my favorite flowers. You can actually pick the flowers, and there is also zinnias which is another favorite of mine.


10. Lay on a blanket in the backyard and watch the clouds. Maybe take some pictures of them. Just another thing we did when I was a kid.

I guess I’m seeing a pattern of wanting to go back and do simpler things, fun things that don’t require a lot of thought, time or money. You just do them. When the world gets a little crazy I think simple is the best. Take a break.

What are some things you are doing this summer? or maybe have on your summer bucket list?

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!!!

A Downed Tree And An ER Visit

Hello friends and happy Tuesday. I’m sorry for the misleading tittle, which is a big no no in blog world. Thankfully the tree had nothing to do with the ER visit but I will get to that in a minute.

We have a tree in the side of the yard. It’s not a huge tree, well it looks bigger when you are standing next to it with a chain saw, but it’s big enough. My husband and I had discussed cutting the tree ourselves. The tree started rubbing against the side of the house. Some of it even touched the gutters and that is three stories above the ground level. So it was starting to cause a problem. We have had flying squirrel issues before and those little critters just love finding a way to get into the attic. A tree that close to the house is just an invitation for them. And lying in my bed at night and hearing those little things scurrying around in the attic is not what you want to hear just before going to sleep. We were also worried that if we didn’t cut the tree just right that a part of it would land on our deck. We kept thinking it was a job that we shouldn’t handle or maybe we could. We couldn’t decide.

Several weeks ago we called a man who had cut some trees for us in the past. He came to check out the job and said it was a rather small job for him. And he could cut it and not have it fall on the deck. He quoted us a very reasonable price. He told us he would get to it in two weeks. I told my husband we were probably never going to see him again. What he quoted us was not a lot of money and probably not really worth his time. Sure enough that has been about five or six weeks ago. Last week we finally decided we could do it we could cut the tree. We are not always smart when it comes to things like this.

So on Saturday morning Mark got his chain saw and I got mine, remember that little one I got for Christmas?, and we decided to tackle this tree ourselves.

You can get an idea of the size of the tree when you see my husband beside it.
And it’s down.
You can see that some of top of the tree landed across the railing on the deck but we cut it off easily.

We started before 8:00 AM hoping to beat the heat. No luck on the humidity because it was already high. Mark did several notches in the tree and then the big cutting with his saw and the tree fell. TIMBER!!!! The top of the tree was rather skinny and spindly and luckily that is what fell across part of the deck. We had moved all the deck furniture out of the way. The rest of the tree fell across the backyard. Whew!!! That was a bit scary. It then took us another two hours to cut and clean up the tree. I used my smaller saw for cutting branches and making the limbs easier to haul away. We dragged limb after limb into the woods, and cut up what we could. By 10:30 we were finished with only a couple of casualties. I had a big scrape across my arm from one of the branches. Nothing too bad. And I lost my glasses. I had taken my glasses off and hung them on the front of my shirt, why did I do that?, and I must have snagged them with one of the branches when it went into the woods. I looked around a little bit to try and find them but there were just too many branches to deal with. Luckily I have several pairs. Someday I may see a squirrel or rabbit or a deer wearing my glasses. HA!!!!

I will say we were rather proud of ourselves and strutted around most of Saturday patting each other on the back. Now for the ER visit.

Early Sunday morning at 1:00 AM I got a call from the assisted living village where my mother in law lives. She had fallen and split the back of her head open. It was bad. They had called an ambulance. Luckily a woman that I know was spending the night in the room next to my mother in law. Her dad is in heart failure and having really rough nights and she has been staying at the village with him. She heard my little mother in law yelling for help and when she got to her room she was covered in blood. Head wounds always look worse than they are but my mother in law is also on blood thinners so that makes it doubly scary. She lost a lot of blood.

Hubs and I raced to the hospital, it’s about a 30 minute drive for us, and she had already been taken back to a room. Once we were able to see her she had a huge bandage wrapped around her head and chin and she had twelve staples around the back of her head. She was very confused and didn’t remember a thing about what had happened. They did a CT scan and luckily there were no broken bones or anything. After a few hours the ER doctor decided to keep her in the hospital a day or two so they could watch her. We let her sleep and went home to get sleep as well. She was able to return to the village yesterday. I told her to tell everyone at breakfast that she was bandaged because she had been in a bar fight. She thought this was quite funny. She is almost 90 years old and pretty darned tough.

That was my weekend how was yours?

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!

A Sad Week

The sun was shining. There was a soft breeze blowing and the leaves were rustling lightly in the trees. I could smell freshly mown grass and I felt it tickle my sandaled feet as we walked through the cemetery to the grave site. You could hear the loud screech of the cicadas as they serenaded us with a cheery tune that was a bit uncharacteristic for the day. My brother in law, Mitch, my husband’s only sibling passed away on Monday.

My brother in law Mitch was only 56 years old. He has had a lot of medical issues through the years, as well as addiction problems. We got the call from his wife at 3:00 AM Monday morning. We knew it was probably coming but wasn’t expecting it so soon. He was such a fun loving person who never met a stranger and truly believed in living life to the fullest. You couldn’t be around him without having a good time. Respectful, loving, caring, smiling, these were some of the words used to describe him at his funeral. What a great way to be remembered.

My husband was 3 years old his brother Mitch was just a few months old and their mom.

We spent the week making arrangements and reliving some old memories. We had to break the news to my mother in law who is in an assisted living center. Her short term memory is so bad that some days when we visit her she remembers that he has passed and some days she doesn’t. It’s almost like having to relive it each time we visit. On the days she doesn’t remember we keep quiet and don’t say anything about him.

It is so hard losing a loved one. Losing a sibling is different than losing a parent which I am sure is different than losing a spouse or God forbid, a child. I have heard that each loss is different. I only know of a couple of different ones, siblings, parents, thank God that is all

I have been a little quiet this week. Just being here for my husband and mother in law and sister in law is all I can do. Just being, that’s really all any of us can do at a time like this.

Always remember

Love your day your way!!!!