Graduation Weekend!

This weekend was a special one! Two of our sisters, Jenn and Alisha, graduated from college!!

Alisha's graduation was on Friday night in Tuscaloosa, so we headed there first after leaving home. It was exciting to see how happy she was because I was feeling that same way about 2 1/2 years ago...no more nursing school!! :) Go Alisha!! She is still looking for a job, but I'm sure one will come up soon.

Alisha's graduation!

Walking across the stage

I wish this was closer up...I love her excited face :)

Siblings!

Tyler's fam

Love you!

After graduation (and a few pictures), we all headed to Midtown Village for supper/frozen yogurt. It was great to be back in Tuscaloosa again, especially for such an exciting occasion!

After leaving t-town, Travis and I headed to Trussville for Saturday/Sunday until it was time to go to Jenn's graduation in Auburn on Monday. We had to leave the house at 6:30 AM to get down there in time! Jenn graduated with her degree in chemical engineering and is planning to work at UAB for a year before going to med school. She definitely got the brains of the two of us! :)

Jenn's graduation!

Summa cum laude

Mom and Dad with Jenn

Sisters!

The whole fam :)

After eating lunch back at Jenn's dorm, she took us on a tour around campus before we went to a reception for all of the graduating Chem Es. We made sure to get some lemonade at Toomer's, of course! After the reception, we walked over to the stadium to see their new Heisman winner statues before heading back home. It was a great day!

Congratulations Jenn and Alisha!! :)

A lot has changed in the past month!

Sorry it's been so long since I last posted! It's been pretty busy around here lately. In my last update, we were still in Tuscaloosa ready for Travis's graduation, and now a month has gone by, and we are both working and are (mostly) settled in our "new" place. Graduation was definitely an exciting time! Travis was so glad to finally be finished with classes, projects, homework, and tests. The graduation cookout was a success! We had more than enough food and everyone seemed to have a good time. Even the weather was pretty much perfect (except for the wind!).



It's weird to think that we don't have a "home" in Tuscaloosa anymore. That's where we met and spent the last five years of our lives, and from now on, whenever we visit, we'll have to crash at somebody's house or apartment I guess! I already miss all our t-town friends, but I'm hoping we'll see them this fall at a football game or two.

It's taken a while, but we've got almost all our stuff where it's needs to go in Baugay's apartment. The only thing left to do is hang a few more pictures on the wall. Once we get that done, I'll post a few pictures so you can see what it looks like! It looks and feels totally different here with all of our stuff!

Last week, we went on our annual beach trip to Fripp Island with my family. We had a blast! This year, our group was smaller than ever, but we still had a lot of fun kayaking, going to the beach, swimming in the pool, feeding the deer, playing Balderdash, and going to the Hunting Island lighthouse. The week always goes by too fast! Next year, hopefully no one will get sick, and Jenn and Claire will get to come too :)






Today is Travis's first day of work! His boss, Doug, called him yesterday and told him that he could start work even though he still hasn't gotten his paperwork from HR in the mail yet. He'll just get paid his co-op salary in the meantime, which is better than nothing! He's excited about actually getting to work as an engineer now, so hopefully his first day is going well! I work a 12 hour shift tomorrow, and then tomorrow night is Travis's graduation party with the Dvoraks at Uncle Allen and Aunt Debbie's house.

I'll try to update this blog more often from now on! :)

This is THE week...

...that we've been looking forward to all semester! Travis is graduating on Saturday, and I am so thrilled for him! He has really worked hard this semester, so I know he's glad to be finishing up for good this time. He has finals tomorrow, Wednesday, and Friday, and his senior design project demo on Thursday, so by Friday night, it'll be time to start the celebration!

I'm really looking forward to the graduation cookout on Saturday. I hope everyone has a good time, and the weather turns out nice. Right now, they are saying there's a 10% chance of rain Saturday with a high of 77, so that's sounds pretty good to me.

Although I'm really looking forward to Travis graduating (because that means we'll be reunited in the same city again), I'm not looking forward to leaving t-town. We've made some really great friends there, and it's going to be sad to leave everyone and not come back in the fall. I guess you have to grow up eventually though. I hope we'll be able to get football tickets for at least a game or two this fall, so that'll be a good chance to see everyone again. If we can recruit a willing photographer, I think Travis and I are going to take some pictures on campus next week before we move. I'd like to get pictures on the Quad, in front of the stadium, and just different spots around campus that were meaningful to us. It'll be a good way to remember what everything looked like while we were students there because I'm sure things will look a lot different in 25 or 50 years.

Next week is going to be filled with packing and moving. At least we'll finally have all our stuff in one place for the first time in our almost 2.5 years of marriage!

I'm working tomorrow and Wednesday before heading back to Tuscaloosa Wednesday afternoon. Yay for a short work week! :)

Long week...short weekend

This week seemed like it was busier than normal for some reason! I worked Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for 9-10 hours each day. Yesterday was especially crazy at the hospital. Usually we get to take a 15 min break in the morning to eat breakfast, but yesterday that did not happen. There was no time for breaks! I didn't get to hardly even sit down until about noon when I ate lunch, and I'd gotten there at 5:30 AM! Needless to say, I was exhausted yesterday afternoon. Travis had a busy week too, and the next few weeks are going to be even busier for him. I can't even keep up with all the papers, lab reports, tests, and homework he has to do anymore! Only 11 more weeks until graduation though!

Travis got into town about 5:45 PM last night, and we went out to eat at Logan's for dinner. It was nice to just relax and be able to talk without doing other things at the same time. We got the hot fudge brownie for dessert, and it was amazing! We had to take home half of it because it was so big!

I'm not sure what all we'll do today yet. Travis will probably work on schoolwork for most of the day. I'm in the beginning stages of organizing a graduation party for Travis, Tyler, Jeremy, and possibly Alan. They all graduate in the morning ceremony (at 9 AM) on May 8th, so we are probably going to have one big party around lunch time to celebrate. I'm so excited!

Travis will go back to Tuscaloosa probably sometime tomorrow, and I have to work Monday through Thursday this week. Then, I think I have a 4 day weekend...yay!!! I also have the whole week of spring break off, May 6-14 off (for graduation and moving all our stuff out of our t-town apt), and the last week of May/first week of June off for the Fripp trip!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope you all have a great weekend :)

Home Sweet Home :)

I'm finished with school FOREVER! Completely done...no more clinicals or projects...and only one more test--the NCLEX. I will probably be taking that sometime in January though. I have to wait for the school to send my transcript to the board of nursing in Montgomery, and then they have to send me an "Authorization to Test" number before I'm allowed to schedule a test date. If I get a job (fingers crossed) before I take the NCLEX, I can go ahead and start working with a temporary license as long as I take and pass the NCLEX within 90 days, I think. I took an NCLEX review course last week, and it was a good review of a lot of the material I learned in nursing school, so if I can just motivate myself to go over that before I take the test, I think I'll be ok.

On the job front, I actually had an interview yesterday for a PRN position at Huntsville Hospital Women and Children's on the 3rd floor med-surg unit. I think it went really well, and I liked the nurse manager a lot. She said that she will be interviewing a few other people for the position, and she wants to decide something by the end of next week. If that doesn't work out, I guess I'll end up working in pre-op where I worked the past 2 summers, which would be fine with me. I already know everybody there and am familiar with the way things work, so that part would be easier at least. We'll see! At least things are looking more positive than they were about a month ago. For a while there, I never thought I'd get an interview!

Right now, we're spending time with my family in Trussville. It's great to be home for more than just a day or two at a time. I've pretty much been a bum the past few days, and it's been really nice. I guess once I start working I'll wish I could be a bum again! Travis has been working really hard to help me set up my new laptop. It's got Windows 7 on it, so we're having to learn that together since my old laptop and his laptop have XP. I'm really really hoping that we can get my pictures, emails, and documents off my old hard drive, but it's not looking good. Travis tried to use an external hard drive to get everything off, and it wouldn't work, so now we're going to have to take it somewhere and pay someone to try. It'll be worth it though if I can get those pictures back....it's pretty much all of the pictures I took since I've been in college...or at least, since the last time my hard drive crashed!

We've also got a big trip to California planned for January 5th - January 8th to see the football team play in the national championship game. We're going to stay in Long Beach which is on the other side of Los Angeles from Pasadena and take the metro everywhere we need to go (hopefully). I've been having a lot of fun researching cool things to do while we're there, and I think it would be really fun to try to get in the audience of The Price is Right one afternoon. It's free, and we could end up being contestants! Even if we don't get to do that, there's plenty of other stuff to do in LA and Long Beach....so much that I'm sure we won't have time to do everything! It's going to be so much fun though....we can't wait! :)

Here's some pictures from the past few weeks:

Travis and me excited about the big win in Atlanta!

The group we went to the game with...

My closest friends in nursing school...Lauren W, Stephanie, Laura, Lauren A, and Amy

Us in the front of Bryant Denny

Graduation pictures in our apartment after lunch

:)

My new purple dress!