So Long Dump of Farm House!

We have moved into a new duplex which is much nicer and more convenient than the dumpy farm house. We are still getting everything settled and in the end it's been nice to move closer to everything and to avoid a lot of the issues of living in an old home. Also, no more dead animals to deal with. We are really excited to live in luxury for a few months before we move for rotations.

So we are excited to say goodbye to the shack we were living in and as a eulogy, a story from this past Spring showcasing how we won't miss living there at all...except for the fact Rhett can't play his drums at home anymore.



Rhett and I were chatting right before we fell asleep and heard some banging. Rhett leaped out of bed, pulled the shotgun from underneath the bed and cocked it, thinking there was an intruder. “I think some animal got under the house.” I said, pointing out a scratching noise that had joined the banging. We located the noise under our feet and stomped around until we couldn’t here it anymore. Rhett ran outside with the gun hoping to kill the culprit, but didn’t find anything. We assumed it was the groundhog that has been living under the back porch since we moved in and we were ticked. The next day Rhett found the break in route, the animal had busted through a vent under the house. Rhett repaired it and we thought nothing of it.
Two weeks later, I came home from work at 6am and our bedroom REEKED. I turned on the fan and asked Rhett what it was, no idea. He went to school and I thought possibly a wet towel or something was stinking. I did all the laundry and it progressively got worse throughout the day and the stench was more identifiable as decay. When Rhett got home from school I told him I thought something had died under the house and after taking a large whiff of the vent in our room and almost retching right there, he agreed. We called Animal Control and they were setting up an appointment and when given our address told Rhett—you live outside city limits, we can’t come. Rhett was so frustrated. “We pay all our bills to the city of Kirksville and you won’t come an extra mile?” So no help from the government and the county doesn’t have any services so we were on our own…or Rhett was on his own.
He had just studied in microbiology zooontic diseases (he explained these are diseases contracted from animals) and was too worried about contracting something to venture down in the crawlspace that night. I went to work and brought home an isolation outfit for him from the hospital. The next morning he geared up and prepared for the disgusting job.
I laced the mask with peppermint oil to help with the stench because that is what we always did in surgery when the patient was extra stinky but I underestimated the power of the oil and Rhett’s eyes were watering from breathing in the peppermint. He took it off and said: “Jess, I appreciate the thought but I think I’d rather deal with the stink.” Oops! He was more worried about disease and just ended up doing the job with peppermint tears.
Luckily we had put a bug bomb under the house weeks earlier, so the spiders were at a minimum, even though he came out covered in webs none the less. At first he popped up and said he thought it was the septic tank because there was stagnant water everywhere, but as he crawled around he concluded it was merely rain water that hadn’t absorbed yet. I had been up all night and fell asleep on the back porch and woke up to Rhett crawling out of the house with the what looked like 2 pink dirty diapers in a trash sack: “Jess, the next time we move to Missouri, lets not live in an old, crappy farm house OK?” he said removing the face mask. “I don’t think we’ll ever be moving back to Missouri Rhett.”
He explained he found that the groundhog had broken its way into the ventilation of our house…and given birth right below our bedroom!! The groundhog had a litter of 2 pups, after which Rhett had blocked the mother rodent’s entrance earlier; the babies had obviously died and began rotting. Rhett had to use a mirror to see into the vents and saw the first hairless lump and couldn’t see any more, but just reached in, feeling for more…SO GROSS! Anyway, he got the dead rodent carcasses out of the ventilation system and spent a few hours having to go to Home Depot to buy supplies to clean/ repair the vents under the house. I felt bad because it was the Saturday before finals week and he had been counting on being able to study but ended up having to spend all morning on the rodent control, but I was grateful he was willing to do it and the stench cleared up within an hour.

Sun Damage

I received this image in an email. The email focused on the gross, tan, damaged skin. But what caught my eye was the side view of the position of the bikini top. Follow the back string to the woman's anterior. I think it should be a rule if your chest is lost in your waist when you bend forward, time to hang up the string bikini...but that's just me.

Egg the Landlord

Thursday we just found out our flaky landlord allowed the house we are currently renting to go into foreclosure. Just as we were sitting down to dinner, a rep from the mortgage company came to our door to claim the house. He was shocked to find us--living here. He was kind of flabbergasted by the situation, "In all the foreclosure's I've dealt with, there's never been tenants, so I don't know what to tell you." With this he left, and I had to go to work.

Today, late Friday afternoon, we found out we have to move out by January 24th. We have to move in 13 days. We are frantically looking for housing that is 1. available to be moved into next week, and 2. will allow us to sign a lease only through July because we will be moving back to Utah July 20th.

Stressful, but what can you do and I'm just hoping this will be a blessing in diguise...although I know God has a sense of humor and I've complained a lot about our current house and this would make a great joke of my ungrateful attitude I guess sometimes the hardest lessons to learn hit you right in the middle of a hard semester of med-school , when your 6 months pregnant, and when it's freezing outside. :) Well I know Heavenly Father will help us relocate and I should stop blogging and go begin packing...only 12 more days to go now that it is Saturday.

Os Coxa

Tonight Rhett's band composed of other med-students performed at a Breast Cancer Research Fundraiser. They've jammed almost every Saturday since August in our upstairs bedroom. They played mainly just for fun, so this was their first performance and they did a great job. The name of the band is Os Coxa, the anatomical term for the hip bone. The audience was really excited, I don't know if they really loved the music or if the fact most had been drinking for 3 hours before they started playing made them a great crowd.

It has almost been 2 years since Rhett's performed, and he had a lot of fun. He'd been with his former band, Stitch Riley, since 8th grade so it's been great to have the opportunity again to play his drums and perform.

I've been going to gigs since we were friends, and at one time I knew how to set up his entire drum set except for the double bass pedal and the high-hat cymbals. But since it's been a while, my roadie skills were definitely lacking this show...but my groupie skills are just as great as they ever have been.

To read more about our rock band romance past, catch the post of when we first met.

Ghost Writer!

I was at work and found an awesome pen in a random pencil cup. It was really "inky" kind of like a gel pen. I was writing along, and thought: "This pen is sweet! Just like the pens the kids had on Ghostwriter."

I have not thought of the PBS TV Series Ghostwriter for at least 10 years. From 1992 to 1995 I loved this lame show. It's about a ghost that helps kids in New York solve mysteries. They can only communicate with letters provided by the kids, I remember he was fond of the alphabet magnets on the fridge. In later seasons Ghostwriter even learned to communicate on DOS based Internet...there was obviously a reason I forgot all about this show until last night.

Anyway, as a kid, I was a little obsessed with office supplies--especially pens. One year my Grandma gave us $20 cash for Christmas and I spent the entirety of my small fortune on coveted office supplies. Office Max was one of my favorite stores...with this crazy love for pens I had a deep appreciation for the pens used by "the team" on Ghostwriter:

They used pens that were basically black fine tip markers, but attached to the lid was a lanyard type necklace. That way they could just pull down mid mystery to get more clues from Ghostwriter.

So I lusted after these amazing pens for some time, when to my joy, they had a promotion to get your own Ghostwriter pen. I can't remember the exact details of the promo but I remember having to wait until the end of many episodes to write down different things--maybe it was as simple as getting an address to mail in $2, but I remember it taking weeks to be able to send it off, followed by an eternity before getting the bulky envelope in the mail.

After my dedicated weeks waiting for each episode to end, and all the days checking the mailbox daily, it finally came time to use my amazing Ghostwriter pen. I opened it up and found: a crappy ballpoint that didn't even produce ink, but just scratched along the paper. The neck strap was worse than a shoelace and the first time I tried to pop off my pen mid-run, the whole pen came off.

GHOSTWRITER JIPPED ME!!!

It was probably the biggest disappointment of the entire 9th year of my life.

I could definitely sympathize with Ralphie from Christmas Story. We were both swindled by big, non-existent celebrities just trying to sell a buck. At least Orphan Annie gave Ralphie something he could use more than once.

10 Items or less is back!

Last Spring TBS aired an original comedy called 10 Items or Less. The first season was only 6 episodes, but it is picking back up Jan. 15 at 11/10 c on TBS. This show cracks us up and thought you might be interested in it also..

The show is about Leslie Pool, who struggles managing a grocery store, the Greens & Grains, after his father's death. Todd is the butcher and a lady killer, and Richard is the full time cashier who dreams of a spot in the Ice Capades. Check out tbs.com if you want to learn more.

Christmas Break

We were in Missouri for the holidays, and it was better than we expected. I was kind of sad because it would be my first Christmas without family, and has been a very nice holiday break. Rhett and I made a big meal for Christmas Eve, and he was in charge of preparing the turkey.

Christmas morning we ate Creme Brule French Toast and opened our gifts. Our friend, Molly got Rhett a gingerbread kit...here is his handy work. Unfortunately, I had to work Christmas Day. Since then we've mainly nested in our house fearing the freezing weather except for one day when we drove south to Jefferson City, the capitol of Missouri. Some highlights were museums on Missouri, the capitol, Target, and the fact we left Kirksville for a day.

The State Capitol

The Missouri State Penitentiary being torn down