Grateful

Well, I'm here in Montana for a friends wedding.  It is beautiful up here!  Today a lot of her friends and family were at her house helping and just hanging out.  As we ate lunch, I was talking to some of her family and soon to be in-laws.  They were talking about how there is so many more natural disasters and wars in the world today.  They wished they knew why it was happening.  I kept thinking, duh!, it's a sign of the times.  The scriptures tell us all about it!  Well, none of them are LDS, though some are very religious.   I just don't think they think about things happening in the world along those lines.  I sure am glad that I have many friends and family who share the same beliefs as I do.  Though I love my friends who are not LDS, there is something about being able to talk about all things!

Side Note

Ok, so my lack of sleep last night really kind of surprised me because at 9:00 pm, I took a muscle relaxer AND a lortab (my shoulder really hurts at night when I try to sleep).  Needless to say, I didn't anticipate still being awake 3 hours later when I could take my next lortab.  Around 1:30 or 2:00 am I was nearly in tears knowing I was soon approaching the next dose.  Somehow my body processes these drugs very well.  I took 2 valium before my surgery when I had to have an MRI (I'm clausterphobic).  It did NOTHING!  I was hyperventilating in the MRI machine.  The tech kept asking me if I was ok.  :)  I did survive!

Tonight the drugs seem to be working a little better.  Let's see..............

Anyone Know Where We're Going?

Ok, so my friends and I headed out on Wednesday to go to Montana for another friends wedding.  I reserved the hotel rooms so I thought it was only right that I figure out how to get to them.  We decided to split our trip into two pieces (my friends have two small kids), which left us staying the night in Idaho Falls.  The Pinecrest Inn was ok and we had a decent night (at least if you call falling asleep at 2:00 am and waking up everything 30 minutes a decent night -- but I have sleeping issues anyway).

Well, today we headed out towards Bozeman, Montana, our destination.  We have all been to Bozeman before, but it has been a while.  So, after we have been in the car for about 30 minutes or more, I asked if they knew how to get to Bozeman.  Hmmmmmmmm..................  I erroneously assumed (yes, I know what happens when you assume) that the driver would have a map and would have figured out where we were going.  Nope.  They asked if I had a map.  Nope.  So, I called our friend that we were coming to see and in the midst of laughing, I asked her how we were supposed to get to Bozeman.  She asked if we spent the night in Idaho Falls. Yes.  Have you already started on your way.  Yes.  Well, I think Idaho Falls is where you need to go to get to West Yellowstone.  Oops.  We had been going long enough to make it silly to turn around and go back.  Our friends fiance called us back and told us that it really would be best to go through Idaho Falls, but that if we went up to Butte and then cut over, we could still get to Bozeman, though it would take longer.  Well, not enough longer to make it worth turning around!  We kept pushing along and actually made it to Bozeman in about the time it would have taken the other way.  It just wasn't as pretty.  We are here safe and sound.  Yea!

Amazingly, the kids did quite well in the car.  We did have a few crying spells, but they were pretty minor compared to the length of the car rides.  Going home on Sunday will be interesting since we are going the whole way that day.  We may have to stop a few times....

Anyway, tonight we went to a bridal shower for our friend, Kelly, who is getting married.  We are so excited for her!  The wedding is on Saturday.  I feel bad because I'm not very helpful in getting her ready for the wedding (she's doing pretty much everything herself).  It's really inconvenient to have only one functional arm (due to shoulder surgery -- a story for later).  

Oops!

There were a lot of dreams last night, but the one I remember best was this: I had been at a gathering of friends and family and a bunch of other people. This gathering was at some sort of zoo or something like that. As I was getting ready to leave, someone was showing us a big bridge of some sort that they were working on. We stood there admiring it with them. I stood there with another friend and we were analyzing some of the buttons and gears that went with the bridge. It looked like there were tracks where the panels of the bridge would slide down and moved into place. Well, being the curious person that I am, I decided to push the button to see it all work. These big concrete slabs started sliding down the track (the slabs were kind of like the sound walls the line the freeways). The problem was, the tracks that hold them in place at the bottom were not there. Oops! All of these concrete slabs went piling into the ocean. Agh! I was quite traumatized by my blunder. These huge concrete slabs were rolling and tumbling over each other along the coast. Now, I really couldn’t figure out why they kept going. It seemed to me that they should be stopped by the sand on the coast line, but I was wrong. These slabs were somehow directed down some canals that went through the “zoo” (wherever we had met). I started walking through the “zoo” and saw them tumbling and rolling along. It just didn’t see possible to me that this was all happening. I was now expecting them to get caught up on each other in these little canals. I was so horrified that I had caused this mess! I wasn’t about to admit it to anyone though. The other interesting thing is that no one seemed particularly worried about this turn of events. When I arrived near the entrance of the “zoo” there was a special meeting where they were telling people about this wonderful material that the slabs are made of. They were not made of concrete, they were made of boron (yea, right). They had a bunch of samples to show us. They come in all sorts of colors and they are so soft and light. I wanted to see if I could get a sample to take home…….. Then I woke up…….

Doctor's Orders

Ok, so my body has moved on to another very strange problem. I've been very dizzy since Saturday. I've had vertigo problems in the past. My guess it is from calcium crystals in my inner ear coming loose and impinging on the nerves. This called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. Now, I haven't had an official diagnosis, but my symptoms PERFECTLY match everything I have read about it. Also, my sister has the same problem and she has been diagnosed. I, personally, believe this gives me the right to diagnose myself! Ha ha! How's that for scientific thinking?!

Ok, so I've been having problems at night for a few weeks now (I've had this happen at least 5 or 6 other times in the past, so I wasn't really worrying about it). Come Saturday, I was feeling dizzy all day long as well as at night. Not very fun. Teaching classes has been a bit of a challenge this week as well. I've had people asking me if I'm OK every day. Today, while I was washing my hands in the bathroom at school, a girl I don't even know asked me if I was OK. Hmmmmm, I apparently look as great as I feel. I decided to call the doctor's office. When I talked to the doctor's assistant, I told her I would be terribly depressed if I came in only to be told it was a virus and to deal with it. She laughed, but said it would probably be best to come in and be seen, though she wouldn't promise that I wouldn't be told it was a virus and to deal with it. :)

So, the doctor asked me about my symptoms and all the usual stuff. He did some neurological tests to make sure I was ok in that area as well. I actually "failed" one, in my opinion. He asked me to put my left hand in my right hand and flip in over (alternating palm down and palm up). Well, first off, I couldn't figure out which hand was my left to put it in my right hand. Then when I went to turn it over, I put it under my right hand instead. I wasn't any good at that test! My doctor just chuckled at me (though I can't blame him). I felt pretty dumb.

Another test he did was to have me follow his fingers with my eyes, witout moving my head. Well, this process makes me dizzy (yes, a pain in the bum!). He was moving his finger around and when he got over to my right side he just held it there in the same place for quite a while. He watched as my eyes tracked back and forth, wiggling back and forth from the dizziness. He told me the name for it, but I don't remember what it is. He did the same test after having me lay down really fast. Laying down and turning my head to right made the eye movements much more pronounced.

Anyway, it's obviously an inner ear problem, though there really is no way to know if it is an infection (viral) or if the calcium crystals, or if there is just swelling within the utricle. He gave me a prescription for Meclizine (basically the type of meds a person takes for sea sickness). He then told me he was going to give me one more thing to do, which may (or may not) help. He said that he would NEVER "prescribe" this under normal circumstances and that this is the only situation when would suggest it...... He told me I need to go get potatoe chips and french fries and anything else that is nice and salty and EAT! He wants me to start retaining water. I guess sometimes the increased pressure due to water retention sometimes helps the problem. Now who can argue about trying something like that?! Ha! I don't know if it will work or not. We'll see.

As of now I still feel pretty dizzy. If I hold my head in a constant position and don't look around, then I'm fine! No problem, right?! I don't know why I am so good at getting such weird "illnesses" that have no solution to them. I have decided I should donate my body to science while I am still alive. I'm much more interesting now than I would be dead! :)

A New Brother? Sister?

I have forgotten to write down my dreams lately, but last nights dream was just a little too interesting to me. Here it is......

A new baby in the family! It first started out as a friend that was pregnant. She was due any minute and we were trying to find any thing we could do to speed the process along. It then changed that my mom was pregnant. We had a get together at someone else’s house so I headed on over. Apparently my dad helped deliver the baby on the way to the get together. When they arrived, they needed to clean up in the bathroom (apparently no need to go to a hospital!). I picked up the baby and he had my dad’s face – EXACTLY! It was kind of cool, but a bit weird at the same time. I was kind of excited about having a new baby brother! We were calling him John. A little later, after my parents cleaned the baby up, they had a bow in the baby’s hair. What?! Apparently they had somehow missed the fact that the baby was a girl. Well, so I was excited to have a new baby sister! She looked completely different now.

At this whole gathering, I realized that I was supposed to have a primary presidency meeting at my house that morning. I wasn’t there. I was stressed out about calling the rest of the presidency and telling them what had happened.

New Pets

I dreamt that I had a pet giraffe. He was so cute! He was still a baby at about 7 or 8 feet tall. We kept him in the house, which was very messy because he wasn’t house trained. Later in my dream, we had some smaller animals move in (I think they were minks or something like that). They were “housed” in the kitchen cabinets. There’s nothing like animals running around on your pots and pans!

Another dream I remember was that a friend (Jodi) asked me if I wanted to go to Kaui’i with her. Of course! We were out floating in the water. It was wonderful. She was very nervous about being in the water. I told her she would wear a life vest if she wanted, but I tried to assure her she would float just fine with it being salt water. She had her baby with her and asked me to hold the baby as we went out in the water. As time went on, the baby “grew” and gradually because my nephew, David. I asked him why I had to hold him since he was tall enough to stand up in the water himself AND he can swim just fine.