Probably Not!

Well, one more week of free bus transportation and I will be back to driving myself to and from work once again. I pretty much have decided that I will NOT be signing up for permanent bus transportation. On Friday the bus was a few minutes late and it got me thinking. What if it gets in a traffic jam on the way in and doesn't come until 6:00? I would be going crazy! And in the winter, if the driving is dicey, how late might that bus be? If I have my car I could leave work a little early and yes, I would be cleaning my car off and driving myself, but at least I will be making my way HOME and not sitting waiting for a bus for a extra half-hour. So my decision is made. But I will be taking the bus this week because it gives my car a nice little break, not to mention gas money I saved.

My only other option would be talking my supervisor into letting me work from 7:00-3:30 (a bus picks up at 3:47) but that is not too likely to happen!

My friend and went shopping on Saturday. I spent $127 on two pairs of shoes. Never in my life have I spent that much on shoes, but they are for work and do a lot of walking so I needed good shoes. I expect them to last me for a few years!

In the afternoon on Saturday Rich and I went to Proud Lake State Park to do some of this:



It was nice out, breezy and sunny off and on. We enjoyed it even if we did only find 2 pennies!

We drove to a couple different picnic areas



and through the campground. It looked nice. We used to camp all of the time when I was a kid and when my kids were little. We stopped going when the they got too old to want to go. But I miss it sometimes. I keep thinking we should buy ourselves a little pop up camper and go again!

Today is laundry and cleaning, the usual stuff.

Tomorrow morning I have an appointment at the urologist for my 3-4 month check up. Ugh..I hate those appointments!

What To Do

I have two weeks to make a decision.

The place where I work has arranged to run a express bus from Canton where I live, to Ann Arbor where I work. It is in the trial stage right now and is free for two weeks. The bus stop is 5 miles from my house, versus 16 miles one way to drive to work. Drops me off right at the main hospital entrance, versus having to wait for a parking spot, park and then walk up a hill to the entrance. The bus is very comfortable and not at all crowded. I can read my book or sleep or just stare out of the window, and I don't have the stress of driving to and from work every day. It will cost me $62.50 per month, which if I figure I use $25 worth of gas a week is a lot cheaper than driving myself.

I have a couple of concerns: One being that I won't have a car there if I need to leave early. Along with the bus permit I get two free cab rides to my car in case of emergency but still it makes me a little uneasy.

The other one is my schedule. The bus drops off at 7:47, which is perfect because I start at 8:00. But the pick up in the evening is at 5:20, and I usually get off between 4:30 and 4:45. Sometimes I even have the chance to get off earlier than that. So that means I have to hang around until 5:20 to get the bus. I know it doesn't sound all that bad, but I have to work on changing my mindset because when the afternoon hits, all I want is to just get home!

So the pros definitely outweigh the cons and I have to do some serious attitude adjusting in the next week or so!

In other news; my co-worker has a target return date of October 7th. Six more weeks of winter! I will be taking some much-needed time off when she comes back.

We sort of solved the dilemma with our old-lady kittie! We let her go outside once for a short time, bring her back in the house. And when she starts crying at the door again, we pick her up, give her lots of love and petting, and then put her in her bed in the living room. She'll stay there and usually fall asleep! I think once she hits that bed she forgets she wants to go outside! Gives us a little peace!




"What? I just want quality of life!"

Back At It

Well, it took approximately one and a half days at work to make me feel like I never took a vacation!

Our poor old lady kitty is driving us crazy every night to go outside into the backyard. Then we have to constantly check on her because a few times she has wandered out of the gate and headed toward the street. She's blind and I really don't want to let her outside at all, but she cries so insistently at the door wall she drives us crazy so we relent. Anyway, a few nights ago I thought I would pen her in to a certain area of the yard with chairs and stuff. She wandered and wandered in circles. I felt so bad that we just let her out. So we spend every night letting her outside, checking on her every 30 seconds, carrying her back in when we get sick of checking on her, and then letting her outside again when her insistent meowing drives us crazy!!

The weather is cooling off a little now and the humidity is going away. I hate when it's so humid; it's so uncomfortable, but I also hate to see summer ending. I would rather have hot and humid than cold and snowing any day!

Rich and I want to go see the movie District 9 this weekend. I usually don't care for that kind of movie, but it looks really good and it's getting good reviews.

Well that all the excitement in my life right now.

Look how many flowers my hibiscus has!

The Brenda Photo Challenge "A View From Above"

Looking down at a pretty fountain.



Down at my sleeping (not dead!) cat.



Looking down Niagra Falls.




Thanks to Charmine of Travel It's Fun for hosting this photo challenge! It was fun and a great idea!

And please go HERE to see more great photos!

Road Trip Part 2

After leaving Pennsylvania we headed toward New Jersey and our destination of Atlantic City.

The mountains through Pennsylvania sure are beautiful. The pictures do not do them justice.



We arrived at our destination at about 3:00



checked into our hotel and headed for the boardwalk.



and the ocean!



I love the ocean...I don't like to go in farther than my knees, too salty, but I love to look at it and watch the waves!

Atlantic City was fun and a neat place to be. There was actually a feral cat colony living under the boardwalk. One day a lady was there feeding them and giving them fresh water. They had all sorts of beds and houses under there.



On Wednesday we took a drive to Cape May, which is a resort town on the southern tip of New Jersey. Must be the place to go if you live in NJ because it was PACKED with people! We walked around a little bit, but could not get onto the huge beach without paying, so we stayed long enough to eat lunch and then left.

We enjoyed out stay in Atlantic City and on Thursday we headed to New York. I have to say that New York is a beautiful state..the drive was stunning!



Our last destination was Niagra Falls, New York. I had never been on the American side and it was very pretty. Something about that rushing water is so powerful and mesmerizing!





We only stayed one night there and headed for home early on Friday morning. After a one hour delay on the Blue Water Bridge trying to get back into the USA, we got home around 3:00.

It was a great trip but it is good to be home. Now I am just chilling for the last two days of my vacation.

Tomorrow is a photo challenge.

Back Home Again

Boy vacations sure do go by fast!

We left last Sunday for a little road trip. I love road trips, especially if it's to somewhere I've never been before. Anyway, we took off fairly early and drove for 6 hours. We decided to stop for the night in Somerset, Pennsylvania. What we didn't realize when we decided to stop at that particular place was how close we would be to the field where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11. Normally I don't read the little information folder in the hotel room but in this case it was fairly early and we had the whole night ahead of us. We didn't want to just sit around, we had been sitting all day, so I looked in the book to see if there was anything local to see. When we saw that the crash site and memorial was less than 10 miles away, we hopped back in the car.





The memorial is up on a hill overlooking the crash site. There is a ton of different monuments and also a bunch of stuff that people leave like crosses, rosaries, pins, patches, hats, shirts, plastic hearts and anything else that they are moved to leave. Click on any of these pictures for a closer view.









There is an angel for every person on the flight and benches with the names engraved on them.





And then there is the actual crash site:



This is as close as we were allowed to get. Only family members of the victims are allowed on the site. It is surrounded by a fence and there is a flag in the middle. It was a very humbling and sad thing to see and I am so glad that we were able to go there.

More road trip tomorrow.

Officially My Vacation!

Thanks for all your comments on my last post. I spent the day thinking of things I could have or should have said to him, but to tell the truth..I'm kind of scared to say too much. I really think this guy has a screw loose...and I don't want to be the first one he comes after if he decided he's had enough of every ones incompetence and shows up with a gun some day, you know? Maybe I'm being paranoid, but it's a crazy world out there!

Well, today is the first day of my vacation. I have my friend, Marie's daughter's wedding shower to go to today. Plus I need to clean my house and finish the laundry because tomorrow we are heading out on a little road trip to Atlantic City for a few days and then to Niagara Falls, New York for a day or too. I love road trips! We have never been to Atlantic City and I am looking forward to the boardwalk and spending some quality time at the ocean! Then on the way home instead of going the same way back through Pennsylvania, we are going north to Niagara Falls, and coming home through Canada and the thumb area of Michigan. In a circle like this:



Well, more like a half-circle!

Last Sunday we took a ride to an area in Michigan called the Irish Hills. My father's aunt used to have a cottage on a nearby lake and we went there a lot when I was a kid. One of the places I remember going to was the Prehistoric Forest Amusement park.



You could ride through the forest and there would be cement dinosaurs with the sounds of roaring coming from hidden speakers in the trees and bushes. I remember loving it but being a little scared too, especially by this guy!



He doesn't look quite so intimidating anymore! Anyway, the place is closed and fenced off and there are No Trespassing signs all over. In fact, that whole area looks like a ghost town now. I think it is just a victim of the bad economy and the dying popularity of tacky roadside attractions! I personally still love that kind of stuff!

Maybe well find some other good tacky roadside attraction on our trip! I hope so.

See you from the road!

Crazy People Day

Today is one of those days where you meet crazy everywhere you go! It's the kind of day where everyone is asking if there is a full moon because full moons are notorious for bringing out crazy people!

During my jaunts through the hallways of my department, I sometimes come across a man who works in one of the other labs. I don't know which one, and I don't know his name; I only know that if you are walking on the wrong side of the hall, or cut a corner too close, or carry a cup of coffee with no lid on it, he feels it's his duty to tell you what you are doing wrong! And not nicely, either! Like he's disciplining his kids or something. Everyone here has run into him a time or two.
This morning I was in the lounge getting a cup of coffee. He was in there obsessively cleaning his breakfast dishes..and by obsessively, I mean scrubbing the color off of the bowl, hot steamy water, drying with multiple paper towels! I poured myself a cup of coffee. Now I admit, I left less than a cup in the pot and you are supposed to make another pot when you do that but a) I was in a hurry because my desk was busy and unmanned, and b) there was no one else in the lounge and it was late morning anyway. So I start to walk out of the door and of course, Mr. OCD starts to yell at me for leaving without making another pot of coffee! The way he carried on you would think that the whole department was going to crumble because I did not make a new pot of coffee! All I did was tell him that I knew he would say something about that, and continued on my way back to my desk! I swear someone needs to file a complaint about him or something! I feel really sorry for anyone that may live with him!

Then when I get back to my desk, I get a phone call from a patient asking for test results. When I told her that I was not allowed to give results to patients and that she needed to call her doctor, she got hysterical, claiming that there was something wrong with her and I just did not want to tell her myself! It took me a while to convince her that I had no idea what her results were, and that I was not trying to avoid giving her bad news!

I really need a vacation!

Brenda Photo Challenge--Keeping Cool

This challenge is hosted by Judy of The Road To Here .
Thanks Judy for hosting this "cool" photo challenge!

Well, let's see...how can we keep cool.

How about a nice drive through a tunnel of trees?

Or a walk down a sun-dappled lane.

Or maybe splashing around in a fun pool!

or enjoyng a light snow fall...nah, that's a little TOO cool!