All this sunshine and blue sky has got me in a “go get ‘em” kinda mood lately. I feel so productive and excited about life when it’s nice out. I’m sure most people feel this way, obviously, but it is just so weird how the weather can affect your mood.

Today I had to go to the doctor and I was driving with the window down just taking it all in. I wish I had a job where I was outside doing stuff all day, I think that would be the funnest. Especially if I got to do something with furry animals.

I know this post is a bit random, but so is my brain. We are off to Bart and Summer’s tomorrow to stay a couple nights and then one night of camping in Florence so we can ride the 4-wheelers. Fun, fun. When I think about camping I just get excited about roasting hot dogs in the fire then slapping them in buns with tons of mustard. Yum!

Last night we went for a little jog around the neighborhood with Angie (Michael’s sister) and we wanted to show her some houses we discovered up in the hills. So we run up Donkey Trail (it’s our secret passage) into the hills and showed her this cool house. Right as we get up to it an old man is pulling into the driveway.

When he gets out he says hi and waves then I tell him that we love his house. He’s like “Have you seen the backyard?” I say no and he invites us to come see it.

He sets down his Subway that he just picked up and he takes us around back, the view is crazy and the yard is so unique. His back yard is the downslope of the hill and it has three levels and is so neat looking. It had so much character and was so peaceful.

He was really nice and pretty excited to show us around the property and tell us a few bits of the history. He tells us about the masonry on the lower walls, about how a tree weighed down with ice pushed this arch thing down into the ground two feet, that the house was built in 1930 and he bought it in 1964 from a guy he worked with. His wife just had her 80th birthday party there last year and they had someone come out and landscape it for them, but other than that he does all the yard work himself, as his workout routine. He was a kick in the pants.

As we left we told him thanks and introduced ourselves and shook his hand (which maybe we should have done first off) I was last and as he took my hand to shake it he brought it up toward his face, put his other hand on top of it and kissed it. “I just like to do that so I can kiss my own hand.” I gotta love those old-timers.

Most everyone who knows me knows that I don’t like eggs, with the exception of hard boiled ones. Well as of today I think I am officially over my aversion to the yellow squishy things.

This whole problem with the eggs began with my mom. She used to make us scrambled eggs for breakfast and then make me sit at the table and eat them. She did the same with white fish but that is a whole different story. Anyway, I disliked the taste of the eggs so much that I would drown them in ketchup just so I could swallow them. No chewing of the eggs occured, just swallowing.

So for years and years and years I haven’t eaten eggs in any form besides hard boiled. There was just something deep in my mind telling me I couldn’t do it. Whenever I see plain scambled eggs I just think about ketchup, they need ketchup!

When I saw other people eating them I wished I could do the same, without being afraid of my gag reflex going into overdrive as I brought the eggs to my mouth. I truely wanted to get over my fear of eggs.

Well a few months ago I went to a breakfast with Michael and we were served a neat looking spanish omelette thingy. That was the only thing there was to eat. So I sucked up my gut reaction to avoid them and I put some in my mouth. I even chewed. They weren’t bad! I had seconds.

I still wasn’t about to give in that easy though. Those eggs were very special, there was some weird reason I was able to eat them, besides the fact I would have looked like an anorexic if I didn’t eat any breakfast.

I had eggs again as a guest at someone’s house and I was able to eat them again. Then I wondered if my dislike of the eggs was purely just for the reason that my mom had made me eat them and I just really do not like anyone making me do anything. Maybe if my mom had told me to never touch her eggs I would have loved them from the start. (ooh I have more stories of my mom making me hate things too, um reses peanut butter cups, yeah who the hell knows.)

Geez how long can I go on talking about eggs here? Like you even care. Okay back to me, I ran with Rhianna the other day and we decided to go to Busick Court afterward. I was starving, I wanted real food, power food, I ordered the busick omelette. I ate it, every bit of it. I’m an egg eater now, I just made myself some for breakfast. I am proof that people can change. LIVING PROOF PEOPLE!

I’ve had stitches two times. When I was four my uncle’s skanky girlfriend tripped me and I hit the air conditioner with my face, awesome! So I remember someone driving my mom and I to the hospital in my grandparents blue Oldsmobile. My mom tried to comfort me in the backseat, I kept telling her “I’m fine! I’m fine!”

Apparently I wasn’t fine because I came home with several stitches in my face. A few weeks later my mom sat on me as I layed on the couch and she removed the stitches herself, double awesome! We are a family of do-it-yourselfers.

The second time someone sewed stitches into my skin was when I was fourteen. It was a beautiful september afternoon and I was out riding bikes with my friends about 3 miles from my house. We were haulin’ balls down the street, of course, and we turned into a gravel driveway. I didn’t make the turn so good, the tires slid out and I did a nice slide on the gravel getting stabbed by a sharp rock along the way.

My elbow hurt like a motha and I was pressing it against my body yelling the F word (because when your in a lot of pain you just have to say the worst thing you can think of). My friends, knowing what a freak I was about getting my clothes dirty, started telling me I was getting blood on myself and so I started screaming at them too. Real nice Laycie.

I didn’t even want to look at my elbow because I thought it would hurt worse if I knew what it looked like. We walked to my house and when I got there I had a thick line of dried blood from my elbow to my wrist. “Mommy, I fell down, waaaaaahhhhh”. So to the ER we went and stitches I got.

I did get to show everyone at school though and it’s weird because people are kinda freaked out by little black threads in your skin. And since my mom taught me so well, a few weeks later I cut them out myself. awesome!

Which reminds me, Spunky had stitches when we got her fixed. Of course I removed those myself too. Sweet! I definitely learn from example.

A few weekends ago we went to Bend to hang out with our best friends Bart and Summer. As most of you know we have two cats so we have to:

A. Ask someone to come check on them
or
B. Leave them with enough survival gear to last three days.

This time around we chose option B because the last two times we’ve had people check in on them they were so completely disgusted, as if Michael and I were the ones flinging shit everywhere. When we had Rhianna check on them once she said something like “I didn’t know cats could shit so much”. When Angie watched them a couple of times she said “Yeah everything is going great, I’m scraping shit off the wall as we speak. . .” and another favorite quote from Angie “Um I think Spunky is evil and she wants to kill me”

They aren’t so cute when we leave them alone. Anyway to make sure they have enough supplies (food, water, litter, newspaper covered trouble spots, etc.) we just over compensate. We left them two HUGE bowls of water and three bowls of food. Way more than enough to last.

We also left the toilet open in case they spilled their water. I made an extra litter box by the laundry room door (their other litter boxes are in the laundry room) and put it infront of the door so there would be no chance of a door getting shut. We layed newspaper on known “trouble spots” (places they would prefer to defecate rather than the little box) and we we set to jet.

We were gone for three days, three days of not cleaning up hairballs, not scooping litter, not wiping up poopies, and sadly not petting my pretty kitties. When we get home they are over joyed at our return (we are their heroes) and we clean up all their messes. First they pooped in the new little box about 500 times and the other two boxes only had puddles of pee.

There were no suprises poopies anywhere else, we were stunned. Aside from the fact that when we are gone the cats (maybe just Spunky) eat and poop like there is nothing else to do, we were pretty surprised at the lack of destruction that occured. One of them normally poops in some obscure place just to tell us she was mad we left.

Then it gets good. The other day we were sitting on our living room floor and Michael looks over at the wall by the kitchen cabinet and says pointing “What is that right there?” I look over my shoulder and it looks like a freakin’ dried up turd that hit the wall then slid down leaving a little trail. In my head I think no way, that can’t be shit. It’s like 6 feet from where the laundry room door is. I get closer and use my forensics skills (yes, I have completed all the credits for my Forensics minor at Western) and come to a conclusion. Yes Laycie, it is a turd!

What the hell are they doing can fling a turd that far? I swear, if we had a camera on them when we were gone there would be some crazy stuff happening. You’d see Princess take a dump then you’d see Spunky get in the box and start kicking knowing exactly what she was aiming for until one round turd flew accross the room and hit the wall. Then after it happened Spunky would go lay down, satisfied that she had made her point. Don’t leave us home, you jerks!

I’m going to walk or run (I haven’t decided which yet) over to my sister’s today to go walking with her. (I find myself talking about what I’m going to do on here when maybe I should just talk about things I’ve done, anyway . . .) She just lives 4 miles away so it’s not too bad. We haven’t walked together since the day before the attack of the short bus. It sucked really bad because we had been walking for 30 minutes 6 days a week for 2 weeks and she had lost 8 pounds already. She’s 6′1″ (dang!) so 8 lbs sounds like a lot but she said she can’t really tell yet.

Weight comes off really quick when you drastically change your routine. Katie isn’t very active so this was big stuff for her to be getting out there with me. I am really proud of her. Anyway we start again today. We have a goal to do the 2007 Portland Marathon together. That would make me so happy I can’t even tell ya.

When we decided to do the walking thing I told her to write down ever single thing she ate everyday. So she made up a little chart and she was doing it and I asked her to see it after a week and it was so cute because whenever she ate something that she knew she shouldn’t have she would draw a little sad face by it. But she said that it helped her a lot to do that because she didn’t want to write down that she ate 3 corn dogs.

Anyway I’m just excited for her. It’s hard to do something all alone and I want to be there by her side and give her motivation to keep going. Plus I get to see her and talk to her more so that is obviously a benefit for us too.

I’ll keep you updated on the weight loss and as soon as I can see a difference I’ll get some before and after photos up too.

I tried out a pilates class today with Rhianna at 5:30a.m. I pretty much suck though. I haven’t been to the gym in about a month so I am week as a geek. There was a lot of burning involved but it was pretty cool. You just have an instructor telling you what to do so you don’t have to think too much and it’s pretty relaxing. We are going to go every Monday and Wednesday. Just mixing things up a bit.

We are training for the Portland Marathon again, this time we hope to finish much faster. The training hasn’t gone quite as planned but it’ll get better. Running is so addictive once you are into it.

At first trying to run kind sucks; it’s hard, you can’t breathe, you feel like you should be able to do better . . . But if you stick with it, you’ll get to the point where it is so easy and makes you so happy. Even at the sucky stage you feel good about yourself when it’s done, but later you feel good while you’re out there and then you feel even better when you’re done.

Everyone says they would like world peace, well I know how to get it. If everyone started running the world would be so much better because everyone would be happy. When people are unhappy they do crazy shit, when people are happy they do awesome shit. (excuse my poopy language but I needed the right word there)

End of Story!

Getting yourself a primary care doctor is like getting into a secret society. You have no idea who to call or what to ask. Well actually you just have to call some doctors and ask if they are accepting new patients, but still it’s a rough road!

My back and shoulder still hurt from my accident so I was thinking I need some physical therapy or something. So I call up a place and they tell me I need a referral from a primary care doctor. Okay, well I haven’t been to the doctor in 10 years … let’s see … who do I call?

I had the bright idea to call a doctor’s office that was accepting new patients. I actually picked him because he had a web site he built himself and seemed like a pretty cool dude.

Anyway I call up and the lady tells me they don’t take patients who have been in car accidents. I was like “What do you mean you dont take patients who’ve been in accidents? If i’ve been in an accident I can never be a patient there, that makes no sense” She tells me they don’t take new patients who’ve been in accidents because of all the paperwork. I tell her she can bill me and I’ll send the paperwork myself. She says “um, we just don’t take new patients who’ve been in accidents for their first appointment”

Okay whatever. I ask “Can I see the doctor for a physical first and then get a referral after that?” she says “Um, we just don’t take new patients who’ve been in accidents”. By now I am mind boggled at her lack of ability to make me understand why we are talking in circles, or squares. I hang up.

Why do they make it so difficult. I guess you’re supposed to have a doctor and just sit on him until you need him for something. If you actually need something and call up they are freaking out at you. I can’t help it that I’m not sick every other week and I don’t have any reason to go to the doctor.

Well I ended up remembering the name of the doctor I saw in highschool and I assumed that he was my primary care doctor then so I gave the office a call to see what was up. They still had my file and I got an appointment, for freakin’ April 20th. By then i’ll probably be better. awesome!

Moral of the story: Whatever!