Snap

I... got a job! Woo hoo!

Ok. ok it isn't that impressive, but ya know... a job is better then no job right? I'll be mixing up pizza dough and cooking in the kitchen of a pizza place. :-) Not glamorous at all... but I think I may like it. And... this will work as a "bridge" job. Until I have enough training in the medical field to get a job in a hospital or on an ambulance like I would love to do. Specifically I would love to work in the ER of Elkhart General. Oh my gosh. :-D Or Goshen I guess but... mostly Elkhart.

Spent the day with my mother running all over Elkhart County it seems like. Tracking down leads to future schooling and what is necessary for me to transfer my old credits from the first school into this one so I don't have to take the pre-reqs for their nursing program if I choose to go this direction. But right now, I'm going to get into the CNA (cert. nursing assist) program and since they have it set up as the CNA being the nursing pre-reqs... I should be set to go if I decide to go for nursing.

For clarification I want to work EMS. I love EMS. But I could also be happy working in the ER as an ER nurse. I have to have the high speed, emergency setting type work though. I can't be a basic nurse and be happy on the long term.

Meh anyway... I am getting pretty bad about updates and I haven't even covered some of the stuff, but... thats whats going on right now with me.

Oh yeah -- and brian is cheating on me with two other women. And I'm fine with it because he was/is completely honest about it. He didn't lie or try to hide it... was completely up front with the details so I'm ok with him sleeping with them. *shrug* Whatever. i guess that makes me a slut huh?

Anyway -- I'm out :-) laters everybody     

As most of you know, I have been out of work off and on for about the last 4 yrs or so. I still am technically out of work, but I had a spur of the moment thought that I should go talk to "New Rinkle" to see if they would hire me for odd jobs or whatever. They can't right now, but said that after the two guys who are going off to college, leave, that they will have a better idea of where they can fit me in. So... if nothing really changes I hope to have a steadier incoming within the next month or so.

A week from today, there will be a historical festival to try to bring more people in and so forth raising the income of the mill until the next festival. Every year, they do this and have an all you can eat pancake breakfast with a suggested donation, using the flour that the mill produces to make the pancakes. Then after the people get their bellies filled up, they can come up to the mill and go tour it and see how the mill works. And if they don't want to do that, or have already gone through the mill and the store, they can go down into the field and go through the vender's that set up their booths in a small version of the farmers and/or flea market.

My mom, brother, sister and grandma will be playing music for this thing, down in the field, so it will be an adventure for all of us who are helping with this.

Wish us luck!

Happy Birthday WolfWyndd!!!

Note: I have pictures on my laptop computer and those will be added via links to this post after I log in on a high speed connection.

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As many of you have probably noticed, I have been absent without any real explanation for the last few days or so. The reason being that my parents, siblings and I went up north to Mackinac Island in northern MI and then up to Sault Saint Marie in the Upper Peninsula to watch some of the great lakes freighters go through the locks, then down to a logging camp. And finally home.

This vacation would be the first for my parents in a little over 8 yrs. So as you can imagine, this was a very much needed rest from the every day living for them.

We camped out sleeping in tents, on the ground, so all of us are tired and sore. Today will probably be an extremely low key day for everyone after they return home from driving truck / working the route / hauling milk.

I for one slept like a rock in my own bed, and I think everyone else slept good too, but my brothers and parents had to get up and go to work this morning driving truck/hauling milk, so even though they may have slept good after they hit their beds, I know that they didn't sleep as long as they would have liked.

I have been asked by several people if I am glad I went on this trip. The answer is yes, however I was ready to come home 2 days prior to our actual arrival home. Mainly because I simply can not go for very long without good sleep. I know that the days toward the end of the vacation are much more hazy and I don't remember them as well as the days that were toward the beginning of the week.

While on the island, we biked completely around the outer edge of it (10 miles) then around the inside, looking at the specialty shops, and then going up to the Grand Hotel to look at the outside, and the stables. Being a horse woman like I am the stables held more of a fascination for me then the hotel itself.
However, for the record, to even go inside and look around at the hotel it is a $15/head charge to walk in the door. It is free to walk around the stables and look at and pet the horses. I knew I liked horses better then people for a reason...

Then while we were up in "the Soo" we watched two ocean going vessels go through the locks, one was 700 and some odd feet long and the second was 1,000 ft. Both of them were cargo ships built to transport coal, wheat, iron ore, or whatever needs transporting over the great lakes and/or the ocean.

For those who are not familiar, Lake Superior is 100ft higher then Lake Huron and back in the 1800's, there was a portion of the river that connects to the two lakes that was rapids making it impossible for ships to go back and forth between the lakes. So when transporting things by boat became more prominent it became necessary to devise a way for the ships to pass between the two lakes. So they came up with what are known as "the locks". These are a series of gates meant to hold back the water from Lake Superior  while a boat pulls in from Lake Huron (or vise versa) and then the gates close and the lock fills up with water  (or drains of water) until the water is level with that of Lake Superior (or Huron) so that the ship can continue on it's journey. It is really a very interesting thing when you realize the technology that it takes to devise this and when you consider that these were thought up back in the 1800's... before they had any "technology" to speak of.

When they were originally built there was only one lock. Now there are four of them. However two of the four are to small to be used on the large ships that come through now, so the people who maintain the locks are considering turning the two smaller ones into one gigantic super lock.

Anyway... those are the highlights of our trip. There are other things I could mention but this post is getting quite long. I may have to make a follow up post of sorts to detail all the things that didn't go as planned. Such as getting rained on and the tent leaking... and so forth.

:-)

Later -

Heidi

Happy Birthday </b></a>