"Stand Back Up"

Go ahead and take your best shot,

Let 'er rip, give it all you've got,

I'm laid out on the floor, but I've been here before,

I may stumble, yeah I might fall,

I'm only human, but aren't we all?

I might lose my way, but hear me when I say,

I will stand back up,

You'll know just the moment when I've have enough,

Sometimes I'm afraid, and I don't feel that tough,

But I'll stand back up,

I've been beaten up and bruised,

And I've been kicked right off my shoes,

Been down on my knees more times than you'd believe,

When the darkness tries to get me,

There's a light that just won't let me,

It might take my pride, and tears may fill my eyes,

But I'll stand back up,

I've weathered all these storms,

But I just turn them into wind, so I can fly,

If what don't kill you makes you stronger,

When I take my last breath,

Thats when I'll just give up,

So, go ahead to take your best shot,

Let 'er rip, give it all you've got,

You might win this round but you can't keep me down,

'Cause I'll stand back up,

And you'll know just the moment when I've had enough,

Sometimes I'm afraid and I don't feel that tough,

But I'll stand back up,

You'll know just the moment when I've had enough,

Sometimes I'm afraid and I don't feel that tough,

But I'll stand back up.

~Sugarland

Wow, what an awesome song. MISS 103 has been playing it with bits and pieces of people talking about Hurricane Katrina, and it is very moving. Although, I'd really rather hear it without the extra stuff, because hearing it all again just brings it all back to me and makes me really sad. But regardless, it's still a great song. I just thought I'd share it.

The wrong Bulldogs won...

Well, the Bulldogs won last night, but it was University of Georgia Bulldogs, not Mississippi State. But my bulldogs still put up a good fight and played good defense. We lost to UGA 23-10, and that is not a let down... it could've been a lot worse. UGA is #7 in the country, and a pretty darn good team. They're just a bigger and better team, so I feel like we did a pretty good job playing them.
Now as for Ole Miss, they lost to Wyoming 24-14. Who is Wyoming?? That's all I have to say about that.

Ode to Nano

Oh Nano, you are pencil-thin,
Yet somehow a thousand songs you store.
Hours of music, and pictures, too!
And still, there's even more!

So tiny and so lightweight,
You are with me all the time.
Just slip into my pocket, and
Oh what adventures we will find!

Walking or jogging,
At home or in my car,
You are always right beside me.
My iTunes are never far.

If never I had seen your face
Whatever would I do?
My ears would never be so happy.
Oh Nano, I'm so glad I found you!

My New Friend

Let me introduce you to my new friend that I made today...

I finally was able to get one today at Best Buy, and let me tell you... it is so cool! Now I just can't wait to get some cool accessories to go with it! Yay iPod!

I'm Bored...

Well, I'm bored... just sitting here waiting on time to go home, and I thought I'd blog since I hadn't done it all week, but I can't think of anything to talk about. Amazing that I don't have anything to say, huh? So maybe I will just come back later on and try this again.

Just an update...

Just to note, my Dawgs won tonight!.... 21-14 against Tulane! Go Dawgs! Yay!

Ole Miss, on the other hand, LOST. Ha.

Saturday

Well, last night's date was wonderful, but today I have a different date... college football. Right now I'm watching Vanderbilt and Ole Miss, and it's been pretty amusing since Vanderbilt has been in the lead for most of the game. But with 19 second left in the game now, it is 31-23 Vandy. Can they pull it off? I think so, although it is still quite close here at the end. Ole Miss could possibly score again. Go Commodores! Yay! With one second left, Ole Miss fumbled, so Vandy won! Haha Rebels... Go to hell Ole Miss!! :) Now, as for my Bulldogs tonight against Tulane (the game has been relocated to Shreveport)... last year we beat them, and it was our first win in quite some time. It should be a good game. GO DAWGS!!

As for tonight, I wish I could go out somewhere, but none of my friends are able to do anything tonight. So I guess maybe I miss having a guy around just a little bit. If only my date with college football could take me out.....

My Friday Night Date

Tonight I've had a date all night long.... just me and Cinemax on my big-screen TV. It's been the best date I've had in a while. :) I picked up some take-out from Abner's, we watched Gothika, and now we're watching Titanic. But anyway, I feel like I'm neglecting my date now, so I'd better get back. I think we'll snuggle up under my fleecy blanket on the futon. Titanic just started, and I think we all know how long that movie is, so we've got quite a while left to go before our date ends. Who knows, we may even fall asleep together tonight. ;)

Almost there... (the weekend, that is)

Ok, I'm tired of talking about boys and how much they suck. Plus, I don't want to sound too much like a man-hater, because I do really, really like them... that just seems to be what my problem is.

So.. I have to take a moment to brag just a little bit. I had my first test tonight in Biostatistics I, and I made 108! Yay! Ok, enough.

I'm also excited today because I got my mother's wedding rings back from being sized... they survived Hurricane Katrina! This was her original wedding set (she has since gotten new rings to wear). They're not big or anything, but just very special, and we actually found them in the house after Katrina. It is really absolutely amazing that we found them. Mama had wanted me to have them, and now I do, so I had them sized to fit my finger and I'm going to wear them all the time! (I will wear them on my right hand, but in order to take a halfway decent pic, I had to put them on the left had to hold the camera with my right.)

Other news... I am going to soon be an egg (oocyte) donor. This means I'm going to basically go through a cycle of IVF (in vitro fertilization), but after my egg retrieval, I'm done. My eggs will be put with another woman's husband's sperm and then she will get the embryos back in her own uterus to hopefully get pregnant. It is completely anonymous.. I know nothing about the recipient couple, and all they know about me is physical traits, etc. This will be a couple who has been trying to get pregnant for a long time and has been unsuccessful using every other option. She may have no ovaries, have ovaries that don't produce eggs, have eggs that are genetically abnormal, or have some other reason that she has been unable to get pregnant with her own eggs. But regardless of their reason to need to use donor eggs, they desparately want a child, and I want to help them. I will start what is called "down regulation" on October 7, which requires giving myself a shot of Lupron once a day to suppress my ovaries. Then on October 21, I'll start taking shots of Follistim and Repronex (follicle-stimulating drugs), and over the next week and a half they (the Dr.) will monitor my blood levels of estradiol and do ultrasounds to follow the stimulation of my ovaries. Then, when they say my follicles are ready (to produce mature eggs), I will have the egg retrieval. It's just a basic outpatient procedure, where the doctor uses a needle guided by an ultrasound probe to aspirate the fluid out of all of my follicles. The lab takes the fluid and finds the eggs, and later puts them with the sperm. 3-5 days later, the recipient gets her embryos transferred into her uterus, and hopefully will get pregnant! That's basically IVF in a nutshell (which is what I do at work everyday, by the way). Sorry for the education!... hope y'all didn't mind. If you want to know more though, or have questions, ask me! :)

And guess what... TOMORROW IS FRIDAY!!! Hallelujah woohoo! A weekend off! :D

And.. let's not forget to buckle up! ;)

an' another thing

I thought of one more...

11. I have much more time to post to my blog, do homework, laundry, housecleaning, etc.!

For my single friends...

I was just sitting here thinking of the advantages of being single, so I thought I'd share some:

1. I can eat what I want, where I want, when I want.

2. I can sleep in the middle of the bed if I want to, and with as many pillows as I want, and I don't get hot during the night.

3. I can go for more than 2 days without shaving my legs if I so choose.

4. I have complete control of my 51" TV, with no worry of it somehow ending up on ESPN.

5. I have access to my own computer at any given time.

6. I don't have to share my washer/dryer with anyone.

7. I don't have to clean anybody else's hair off the bathtub drain.

8. I can have "couch appreciation night" any night I choose.

9. I can go to Headliner's and dance if I feel the urge! (AL - next time we can go out, we're gonna close out Headliner's and then go to Pop's, and we're not coming home till the sun comes up!)

10. No more of "what do you want to do tonight?", "I don't know, it doesn't matter", "I don't care, it's up to you", and on and on and on....


These are just a few of the pluses of being on your own! Can anybody think of others? When you're single, you've got to think about all these things that you enjoy about being single so you don't get so down in the dumps about not having anyone else around. Besides, we won't be single forever, so enjoy it now! Someone else will come along when the time is right.

An interesting article...
Do You Fall in Love Too Fast?

Day 4

It's been 4 days now and still nothing. Apparently he doesn't think about me enough to call. So I'm starting to wonder... should I bother wasting my time wishing I would hear from him? Should I just assume it is really over for good? It would just kinda be nice I guess to hear from him even if it is to say "it's really over, I don't have feelings for you." I'm just kind of like hanging in this limbo of "to move on, or not to move on?" Such confusion!! And I'm getting sick of it, so I don't think I will put up with it for much longer.

So, to change the subject, I donated blood today, and I ran into this guy friend of mine (Jay) from State who, as it turns out, just started med school at UMC. It was pretty cool to see him and nice to see a familiar face from my days in StarkVegas. :) I'm looking forward to seeing him around campus.

Other news... I'm looking at buying one of these. Having one is supposed to be my motivation to start walking by having some good tunes to listen to. :) I'm ready to get in shape!

Eye of the Storm

This is a great blog that I came across last night. Check it out!

Must be the half moon...

I don't know what the big deal is about having a real relationship with somebody. Why are guys so freakin' scared of it?? I mean, it has only been a couple of months since I've even known the guy, so it's not like I'm ready to marry him or to even say the "L" word to him. Yet he has suddenly freaked out. What is the deal?!

Okay, so I did offer for him to keep a key to my house (and I did not pressure him whatsoever), and that may not have been the reason for the freak-out, but apparently that means a whole lot more to him than it does to me. To me, all that means is that I trust him enough to have access to me and my house and my stuff... not that I want him to move in with me or that I expect a proposal or anything. But then again, I guess I can be way too trusting of people...

And if I want to introduce him to my parents, then all that means to me is that I think he is nice enough of a guy to feel comfortable about my parents getting to know him a little... their opinions are important to me. Meeting the folks doesn't mean that I'm expecting to get married next.

Apparently it has just been a bad weekend for love and not just for me. Must be the half moon...

Would somebody please get me another Fantastic Jason? Or another chocolate martini would be great too!

P.S. Don't forget to buckle up tonight!

Y?

Men suck. They are weird and stupid and impossible to figure out. I would swear them off all together if only I weren't so attracted to them, and I'm really trying to figure out why it is that I'm so attracted to them. Nature, I guess. Something about that Y chromosome that I can't resist. But why can't I just meet somebody who I don't send running after only a couple of months??

Continued...

As promised, here are more pictures...

First, we have the den. The den was on the back side of the house, and now it is more like a nice covered patio. On the left side of the first picture is what used to be a wall of basically a big window, and now the whole wall is gone. The second picture is the view of the back yard from the newly-made patio. The backyard is huge, and there was a wood fence all the way around it, but no more. By the way, all that stuff that you see sitting around is stuff that has been found and brought back into the house. The storm surge pretty much cleaned everything out of the house for the most part.


The pic on the left is our still functioning bathroom. Part of the wall behind the toilet was till there (from the waist down), and we slid pieces of wall paneling in on each side (also from the waist down) to give some privacy. The only drawback was that you had to get someone to guard you while you went because it was wide open facing the back of the house. The pic on the right is of my parents' bathroom. The stuff that the surge decided to leave in the house ended up like this... nasty. And the water in the bathtub is water left from after the floodwater receded, so that is the same water that flooded the house.... so you can just imagine how nasty everything is from that water. YUCK.


This is the view of the front porch. All of those bricks that are laying on the ground used to be the wall of the house. The pic on the right is the dining room, looking into the kitchen. Like I said earlier, there was nothing left... no furniture, no cabinets, no refigerators, no oven or dishwater, etc.


Here on the left is the guest bedroom that was on the front of the house. The king-size mattress was still there with some sheetrock and other debris. On the right is a picture of basically the far right side of the house (if you were facing the house). From front to back, there was my mom's study, Ben's bedroom, and then my parent's bedroom. I'm standing in my mom's study taking the picture, and the whole wall, including studs, is gone between that room and Ben's bedroom. All of that debris got hung up in Ben's room (wall paneling, doors, studs, and the daybed that was in Mama's study).


This is my parents' bedroom. The first pic on the left is looking back into Ben's bedroom. There was still a mattress from their bed left in their room, but no other furniture. A lot of clothes and magazines and etc. got washed into the corner of the part of the wall that was still left as you see in the next picture. Those are Ben's drums and I'm not sure if we found them in that bedroom or where they were. The other picture is looking down one hallway. The A/C unit at the end of the hall had come out of its closet, and all kinds of other junk, clothes, etc. ended up in the hallway all bunched up with the carpet. It was pretty gross.


Here is our pop-up camper that got caught up in a fence with other debris a block back from the house. And then there is my mother's piano that we found a couple of blocks back in somebody's back yard. It was her high school graduation gift from her parents. It survived the Flood of '79 in Jackson, and then I grew up playing this piano. So it was very special to her and to me. After I got there, though, we went to say good-bye to it. Even though it is all in one piece still, there is probably no saving it. However, on Monday, a church group from Daphne, Alabama had come over to help work at the church and to help do what they could, and they were able to get it for us and bring it back to the house. That was very special. But we're still not sure it will be able to be saved because the inside was just filled with muck and debris, and saltwater does horrible things to stuff.



So anyway, that's all I have to show. Even though it has been hard, my parents are doing okay (okay as they can be, I guess). We just try think about how it could be worse. But next time I post, I'll try to talk about something a little more cheerful. :)

2103 Washington Avenue ...Not Exactly Home Sweet Home

Okay, so last weekend, I ended up not being able to go to Dallas because of the major gas shortage thanks to Hurricane Katrina. (By the way, to those of you not in Mississippi.... there REALLY was a shortage, not just an unnecessary panic. You couldn't get it anywhere, and if a gas station actually had electricity, when they would get gas, there would be a line to wait in for 2-3 hours.) My heart was broken because I was so looking forward to seeing Dave Matthews. But on the other hand, I was so thankful to have to opportunity to go be with my parents. Adam stayed at my house with the dogs so I could make the trip. (Thank you so much, Adam!) So anyway, here are some pics of what things were like....

It doesn't really look that bad from here, but you can't really tell what the house looks like in this picture because of the huge tree that is laying in front of the house. From the ceiling down, the house was basically completely gutted. Here is a pic of the back of the house...


This is the house next door, so we really do feel lucky.

This is what you encounter as you drive down Washington Avenue.

Just down the street a little ways...

The church did not have quite the damage like we did at the house, but it was flooded really bad (apparently the water came up to the floor of the second story). But we did have a church service Sunday morning in the parking lot of the church. We arrived in style via a four-wheeler pulling a trailer...


Blogger won't let me put all the pics I want on this one post, so this will be continued....

Thank You

Thank you so much to everyone who has offered to help my parents in any way they can. It really means so much to me that people have been so supportive through all this.

My mother called me this morning to let me know that they did make it there, and that they are okay. She told me that they do have a roof and an attic, but everything below that was gone. Apparently it is just an attic standing on the studs of the house with no walls or anything. So things in the attic should be okay, but they haven't been able to get up there yet and find out for sure. So there are things in the attic like a box of children's books (that we were saving for their someday grandchildren), a few Christmas things, maybe a Christmas tree, my mother's angels that she collects for Christmastime, and maybe a few other things. She did find mine and my brother's senior portraits... mine was in really good condition, but my brother's picture was a little water-damaged but the frame was still in good shape. She had taken them off the wall and wrapped them in a blanket and laid them on a bed. The bed is gone, but somehow miraculously the pictures were there. A painting of their church in Madison that was done by a church member and framed and given to them when they left was also found and in good shape. They found a couple of quilts (they are filthy though, with no way to wash). There was an end-table in the front yard, a pillow sham from their bed was found on Beach Blvd, and a sofa cushion was found in someone else's yard. So stuff is basically scattered around, and things are just being found here and there. They still can't figure out how all the furniture is gone, though... except for a daybed that managed to hang on. My dad is still hoping to come across one of their kayaks somewhere, since we can't really see how a kayak could be easily destroyed, but who knows where they may be.

But they do have a bedroom to stay in now. No water or electricity or gas anywhere, but where they are staying they have a generator and some fans. My mother said they have plenty of food because the daughter of the people they are staying with has been going back and forth to Pensacola. They were able to wash off some in the swimming pool that is there, too. She said they may see if they can possibly find an apartment or extended stay hotel or something in Mobile, AL (Mama works at a hospital there) to stay at short term, but I have a feeling that may be a bit difficult to find. Mobile is gradually getting power back, and things are looking better there day by day.

So right now I don't know really what to tell people that they can do, but if I find out things that can be done, I will definitely let y'all know. I know that they have no clothes... they took very little with them when they left, and they have had no electricity or means of washing anything since they left. I did find out an address where they are staying right now, but they have no post office, so I don't know what will be done in terms of mail service to the coast right now. Anything could be sent to me, and I could take it to them. I'm planning on going as soon as I possibly can... hopefully next weekend or the next at the latest. I just want to go be with them and do whatever is needed and take as much stuff to them as I can.