Birthday Surprises

Yesterday was my 28th birthday - whew time flies. Damon woke me up at 4:30 am telling me to get ready because we had to leave in an hour to "go somewhere for my birthday." Needless to say I didn't argue because one, a surprise was in store and two, it must have taken an act of Congress to get Damon up and going at that hour. We were in the car by 5:30 and leaving Grundy for a day full of fun and adventure.

Stop 1 - Starbucks!!! What a great start to any day, but especially for my birthday.

Stop 2 - Biltmore House/Estates in Asheville, NC. After driving for 3 1/2 hours, I still had no definite idea of where Damon was taking me. We arrived at the Biltmore house in time for our 9:45 am tour. I've had patient's tell me that we need to visit here because you just can't put into words what the house is like. AMAZING and ORNATE are the words I would use to describe it. The moment our bus rounded the corner up the long driveway and we could see the huge mansion, it took my breath away. The house was built by George Vanderbilt in 1895 and is 175,000 square feet with 250 rooms (35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, inside bowling alley and swimming pool, and 3 kitchens)! We took the audio tour through the 5 level house admiring all of the design work and Christmas decorations. I wish I had some pictures of the inside, but photographs were not allowed. If you'd like to see a slide show of the house, use this link which will take you to the Biltmore website then click on the picture off to the right.

http://www.biltmore.com/visit/house/default.asp

Stop 3 - Lunch in the Biltmore courtyard and gift shops - yummy gourmet pizza

Stop 4 - Biltmore Gardens - These were truly amazing even in the winter so I can only imagine what they must look like during summer when everything is is full bloom. Damon and I had a great time just wandering around looking at all of the different trees and plants. We discovered these crazy trees that looked like field goals posts and candelabras. Again, here is a link to a slide show if you are interested.

http://www.biltmore.com/visit/gardens/default.asp

Stop 5 - Biltmore Winery - We took a tour of the winery followed by some wine tasting. This wine tasting was unlike any I've every done before. Typically you pay for the tasting and you have a limit of how many you get to try. This was not the case yesterday. I bet we could have tried all 40 wines if we would have liked, but after about 6 or 7, we were having a hard time differentiating them from one another. We wanted to sit out on the varanda and have a glass of wine with a cheese tray, but we both knew that if we did this we'd be too sleepy to make the 3 1/2 hour drive home, so onto the next stop we went.

Stop 6 - Marion, NC high school basketball game. We were in route to Damon's friends Matt's house to pick up a Christmas tree from his family farm, when we found out that Matt was coaching a basketball game in the town we were driving through. Damon's other best friend Jeremy was also there watching, so we were able to see both guys. Half a basketball game later, we left to continue our journey.

Stop 7 - The Wiseman's house. We stopped at Matt's childhood home to visit with his father, Paul who owns a Christmas tree farm. After a great glass of sweet tea and tying the Christmas tree to the top of the car, we were off again.

Hardees

Stop 8 - Birthday dinner at Hardee's!!! I know this isn't a typical birthday dinner, but at this point we had been gone from the house for 15 hours and we needed to get home to let poor Igor out. So we ate in the car and passed the time by taking birthday phone calls.

Stop 9 - HOME!!! Whew. 18 hours later, we returned home exhausted and excited to see our little Igor. I had such a wonderful birthday and it was great to do so many things in one day. We took over 200 photos yesterday, so I'll post them to our online photo album. Just click on the box to the right of this page and it will direct you there.

Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes. I truly had one of the best birthdays I've had in a long time. What a special day to go exploring new places, see new sights, and spend the entire day with the man I love.

Manual Therapy

Well most of you probably know that I am in the process of getting my manual therapy certification. Many of you have asked what that exactly is, and I didn't feel I had a very good explanation for you. I started my coursework 2 years ago, attending 3 day weekend courses about every 4 months. Throughout the coursework, we are expected to take online tests. This all leads up to the mac daddy of tests - the Level III oral practical!!! It makes me sweat and bite my nails just thinking about it. Once I pass my 2 hour oral practical and written exam, I will be an official CMT (certified manual therapist).

I found this exert online and though it described manual therapy really well. Manual therapy is a broad group of skilled hand techniques performed by a physical therapist, which include mobilizations or manipulations of soft tissue and skeletal joints. Manual therapy techniques aim to decrease pain, swelling, and inflammation and aim to increase muscle, joint, fascia and neural functional mobility. Manual therapy in short refers to hands on treatment of muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints. Patients that receive manual therapy report a greater decrease in pain, improved functional improvement and increased perceived improvement as compared to those patients who did not receive manual therapy.

Hope this clears some things and gives you a better idea of what I'm working towards. This next year will be one of a lot of studying as I prepare for my level III oral practical. Wish me luck!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today I braved my first ever Turkey Dinner. This year Damon and I stayed in Grundy and had a nice dinner with just the two of us. Before today, I had never made a turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy... actually nothing except for the cranberries. Here are the 5 most important things I have learned about making a holiday meal:

1) Always have backup - and by that I mean mothers, aunts, and friends close by their phones to give quick advice. My mom was a saving grace today.

2) Cook using all tin foil pans from the store. No mom, I wouldn't actually serve guests with these plates, but we had the entire meal cleaned up in under 15 minutes!!!

3) Never underestimate the size of a potato! I though we'd need a lot of mashed potatoes so I cooked up 6 large ones. Well, we'll be eating mashed potatoes for at least a week.

4) We didn't have to worry about being classy today seeing we live in Grundy, but next time I think I may need to invest in a gravy bowl instead of using my plastic measuring cup.

5) Last, I admire all of the ladies out there who know how to get every single component of the dinner out of the oven at the same time so everything stays warm. That's considered an art in my book.

We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving Day!! We are so blessed and thankful to have such wonderful family and friends. Happy Holidays!

Online photo album

I put a link over on the right which connects you to our online photo album. I've finally figured out how to upload photos quickly from our new Mac, so hopefully I'll have a lot more albums soon.

Grundy in its finest...

I decided that this afternoon should be spent exploring Grundy and all of it's fine surroundings. I wanted to work on using different settings on my camera, so I ventured out with my mediocre creative mind and camera in hand. Here are a few of my favorite photos from today. The RV trailer with the roof built on top is just classic, and the abandoned coal mine is located just a 1/2 mile from our house. Kutsu is the vine/weed that grows everywhere here and on everything as you can see.

Halloween

So this Halloween this year was pretty uneventful because I had to be in Knoxville for continuing education and Damon was home working on homework. So since we didn't get to properly celebrate, we figured at least Igor could dress up. Doesn't he make a cute Yoda! I spent 2 1/2 hours altering his costume because it was too big, to have him only wear it for about 15 seconds. Oh well, at least we got a few good pictures before he tore it off.

Damon thinks Igor actually looks like Yoda is jumping to attack Miss Lippy (a Sith)

Our Story

Well here goes...I'm going to officially start/restart a blog. I tried doing this after returning from my trip to Montana this past summer but somehow only 1 picture with a very short description made it to the blog.

So let's bring all of you back up to speed on what Damon and I have been up to lately. We have officially now been in Southwestern Virginia for 1 1/2 years. Damon is half way finished with law school and counting the days until he is done. I'm staying busy working as a physical therapist at a hospital about 30 minutes from our home. I've also recently volunteered to be the trainer for the girl's volleyball and basketball teams. And if that wasn't enough, I've also started teaching my very first college class to the first year Physical Therapy Assistant students. We have two lovely "creatures" that bring smiles and sometimes stress lines to our face. We have the ever so handsome Igor, who graced us with his presence last December. He has brought us a lot of laughs and is such a great cuddle bug. So our family was three until a small black kitten showed up on our doorstep 2 weeks ago. We thought she was just one of the kittens from next door who became more independent and ventured over to our house, however we soon found out that it was just a stray. So needless to say, now we are a family of 4! Welcome Miss Lippy. It's a bit like the movie, Milo and Otis here at our house. Igor and Miss Lippy surprisingly play really well together, or at least until Igor trounces all over Miss Lippy. The photo below is of Igor first meeting Miss Lippy and trying to play "nice".

So that's our lives up to date in a nut shell. I'm going to try and keep up with this and include picture posts to our online photo album that way I can bypass having to email one photo at a time to everyone.