Atlantic Coast Highway

I called Christie this morning. Noel answered. Christie is not home. She is in Raleigh visiting her friend, Mel. That girl gets around! She and her friends always meet in a different city!

Anyway, Noel remarked that I haven't updated my blog since I was in Georgia. Right! I have been wanting to. So here goes...
A strange site for us Pacific coasters. Even Christie says she is still not used to seeing the Atlantic Coast Highway!

This is the part where I tell you about my visit starting with a relaxing morning on the Burgdorf's front porch. Unfortunately, the other photos I uploaded have disappeared!




Well, I am frustrated at trying to blog. About a gadzillion photos that I uploaded to blog about disappear as I try to write! And I certainly can't arrange them on the page once they are uploaded! Even when I try to move a tiny photo into a huge white space it won't move. Then when I look for the rest of the photos I uploaded, they are gone!!

So I am certainly not finding this a user friendly site! This makes it hard to convince Christie and Noel to assist Cayleigh and Aiden to blog. Even if it does help their creativity and story telling skills!

Any tips to help me would certainly be motivating. As it is, I am not sure how much future blogging I will do. Unless I upload the photos one at a time I guess.

So I will post another blog with the family shot of Christie, Noel and the kids.

This is my friend, Karen. I am sure you all remember her. We met when Christie was about 4 and her daughter, Jessica, was in Little Church with Christie. Then, when the girls were in St Christopher's School, we were much younger than the other mothers in the class so we ended up hanging out together. Karen also has a daughter one year younger than Christie and Jessica, April. Then she has a gap like I do.

Her son, Jeffrey, went to school with Joseph. Jeffrey is the one that was born with a major heart defect and ended up in Janet's unit at Children's Hospital with major heart surgeries. He also had to have a pacemaker placed while he was a teenager. Fortunately, Janet's team did a great job! Jeff is doing great! Living a normal life! In fact, he has a young man's dream job: playing video games for a living. He is a beta tester for one of the game developers!

Anyway, when Jeff was born with all his medical problems, Karen needed a nurse to translate when she went to visit the doctors. Enter me. Well, Karen ended up going to nursing school and becoming a nurse herself. She and I started the BSN journey together in the 90's. Karen finished in the 90's. I finished in 2006.

I continued on to the Master's program. Karen did too. We both finished our Master's in August of last year. However, when I finished, I was finished. Karen took a much more difficult route. She is now a Nurse Practitioner! She called me last Thursday to tell me she passed her state boards! Above is a picture of Karen standing by the door of the office she shares with the physician she now practices with. The empty space on the door is where her name will be very shortly!

And here we are celebrating!

This is what I have been busy with lately. I had to renew my BLS and ACLS as they expired at midnight last night. So Thursday night after work for 3 hours I was in class renewing Basic Life Support and yesterday, Saturday, I spent the entire day renewing Advanced Cardiac Life Support. We do not get paid for doing this. It is a "condition of employment." Unfortunately, we renew in the month they expire, we can't work without them, and the renewals weren't offered until the end of the month. Nothing like waiting until the last minute!

Hey, I'm lucky to have a job in today's economy. And fortunately, I love my job!