Christmas Bells are Ringing!

Cashier looking at my purchases of gift wrap, tape, and sushi:  "So does this mean you are all done after this purchase?"
Me: "bahahahaha! no."


All the gifts I have bought online, except for one package, are "undeliverable". Which means that a) I have to call USPS and yell b) my stuff is definitely not getting home by Christmas Eve c) the shopping that I did have left has now grown considerably d) I'm going to have to fight to return the stuff that didn't make it home e) these are not things you can buy at your every day mall!

UGH! Have I mentioned that I strongly dislike shopping? I love Christmas. I love wrapping presents and listening to Christmas music and watching Christmas movies on TV (ok certain movies, not of the lifetime variety...more of the Love Actually and The Holiday and Miracle on 24th Street variety).  However I absolutely hate the holiday madness and mall crowds.

Also there is a considerable lack of snow here in Colorado. It's the week of Christmas and no snow on the ground? How is this possible? Even crazier, it is so warm outside that yesterday I went with Katie to go kick a soccer ball around at a park, in shorts and a t-shirt, and I was completely comfortable. Yep, it's 60 degrees today here in Colorado. Which I have to say was awesome for soccer! I haven't touched a soccer ball in forever so it was kind of sad, but Katie and I had a blast goofing off and trying to remember all the silly soccer games you play as a kid.

Despite the present delivery conundrum and the lack of wintery weather, I am still celebrating and revving up for the holiday! This weekend I had people over for the first time! Carolyn and Janna came over Saturday during the day to bake cookies. We made 101 sugar cookies.... which turns out is a TON of cookies (entirely too much for 5 people to consume on a Saturday night). On top of that, Rae (office manager at work) requested more Monster Cookies this week. So I have a ton of those as well. Despite having people over on Saturday night, where massive amounts of cookies were consumed considering there were only 5 of us, I still have cookies all over my kitchen!! Hopefully I can get rid of most of them at work tomorrow!

Sugar Cookies before:

Sugar Cookies After:

Adorable GingerPeople!

What is Christmas without  Holiday Dino's?!

So to sum up: the holiday season is in full blast here. This weekend consisted of christmas cookies, friends, soccer (ok maybe not so holiday-ish), lots of curling up on the couch watching christmas movies: Love Actually, Prancer, Miracle on 24th Street, and then finally gift shopping this afternoon! Tis the season... falalalala.

I'm really excited to be going home to the Pines on Friday! Xmas with the family, playing with the new puppy, catching up with friends, and then SBG brunch!! Maybe I will even have some cookies to bring home to them!

Also I just saw this today and thought it was adorable, not as good as the bears, but still..... Merry Christmas!

"I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat" - H.D. Thoreau on Snowflakes

This weekend my parents were here! We went skiing at Breckenridge. I have been to Breck three times so far this year, and every time I have gone it has been packed!! This weekend wasn't bad because we had so much snow the roads were closed!

I had the fortunate opportunity to take friday off of work (which yes, my friends, that meant a glorious four day weekend)! My parents got here Thursday night, and we left at the crack of dawn on Friday (in true Menendi fashion). It started snowing halfway to the mountain, and didn't stop until Monday morning. We had 24'' of snow, and there was no-one on the mountain until late Saturday. Needless to say it was glorious! Here are the winter wonderland pictures!

View from our room

The lift line for first tracks in the fresh 14'' of powder!

Mom and Dad ready to go

First tracks!

"it's up to your knees out there"

you could easily get lost in powder this deep (the vertically challenged people such as myself)

There is literally no-one here! (besides my parents you see in the distance)

Rockin the helmet.  My face looks tiny.

Then today my dear friend Theresa, who is currently studying glassblowing in Sweden (read her blog here )  sent me my very first Christmas ornament! Sadly I do not have a tree to hang it on, so I bent 3 nails trying to get it above the fireplace, until I gave in and just put it on the wall. It is beautiful and I love it!

Pretty glass ornament made by T!

My wonderful xmas card from T! I have no idea what "God Jul" means in Swedish, but I like to think it means "good yule" what is yule anyway? There are yule-logs and yule-tide.... maybe it is swedish? Thank heavens for internet!

I must now leave you for the night, as there are many holiday cards to write!

God Jul everyone! :)

Your local everyday casino

At the grocery store today...

"Daddy Daddy!!! We won money!!! We won moneyyyyyyy!!!!" - high pitched little girl screaming

....


as the self-check out spits out Daddy's change.


It's the little things in life!

Overheard in PT

"you know yawning is contagious" - hungover patient
"I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm so tired today, I even went to bed early last night!" - me
"You need to party more. It will rejuvenate you" - hungover patient


"My back hurts more today! And I don't think I did anything different."
1 minute later.... "Oh, wait yes I did! I was sitting on a desk attached to a wall... and it broke!"


"if my patient shows up 20 minutes late again, i'm going to scream!" - me to a student
"you know what you need? Tequila!" - student


"Have you been doing your exercises every day?" - me
"oh yes, I'm all about consistency. That's why I have to have my appointment scheduled at the exact same time" - patient (who showed up 20 minutes late... AGAIN)
"how about working on consistency with coming to therapy? You have cancelled or missed half of your scheduled appointments. If you come more often, you will progress more quickly" - me
"Oh, have I really missed that many? wow. Well I'll see what I can do" - chronically late and absent patient

Ten minutes later:

"Well you won't be seeing him again for two weeks." - A (front desk)
"WHAT?! Why not?!!"- me
"we didn't have any openings in for the same time slot. We had some half an hour later though, but he wouldn't come unless it was the same time" - A
Seriously?!?!

Patient quotes

Patient quote of the day:

"I'm tired today. We had our Christmas Party this weekend" - Patient
"Oh, did you have fun?" - me
"Yeah, I danced a lot!" - Patient
"How did your knee feel with that?" - me
"Great! The right combination and I'm fine!" - Pt
"What combination is that?"
"Crown and ice!" - Pt


20 minutes later....

"Do you need some water?" - me
"No, but I'll take a beer!" - Pt


Somehow all my patients think we run a bar... maybe we should open one next door?

"there are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them" - vicki baum

OK, so the quote doesn't really have much to do with anything in this post. Other than the fact I've been dancing around today for exercise, mostly because I'm going crazy with studying... but until we get to that...

Determination, my friends, determination!

About what you may ask? Well let me tell you, about this blog! As you can tell I am a very busy bee and have hardly any time to write! (not entirely true, just sometimes I would rather drink wine and read a good book snuggled under the blankets while watching the snow fall!)  But my friends, I've decided since we are all such busy bees, I will try to stick with this a little bit longer and maybe just have shorter, more frequent blog events!

Today was very very busy (ha). I returned my redbox movie: Letters to Juliet - definitely a cheesy romantic movie, yet wonderful if you like that kind of thing. I may or may not have leaked a few tears, although the ending was absurd! I took my skis to the shop to get tuned. I realized this weekend while I was skiing with my sister that my skis can't handle the late afternoon/early season ice patches, they slide right over and I almost bite the dust! Plus my parents will be here in two weeks and we are going for a 3 day ski vacation, so my skiis need to be in shape! Then I got some groceries, some wine, and spent the rest of the day studying and planning my week.

Studying you ask? Aren't you a doctor already? Well yes I am (still surreal) but I am taking yet another certification test on Saturday. The CSCS - Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist exam. I'm nervous!! I feel like I've hardly studied at all. Hopefully my PT background will help me!

Next Monday, I am in charge of the clinic as my bosses are off to a Titleist certification course (yep that's a PT course specializing in golf training and rehab). I'm really nervous, but also excited. I'm just concerned one of the techs (who is basically my age) wont listen. I'm definitely still transitioning from student to PT, and need to take more initiative/control with the techs. I'm also praying that nobody gets sick, or has exacerbations, or sudden adverse events during the day I am alone! Not that I haven't handled two of those already since working here, but it's awful calling 911 - and worse when you don't have your wonderful mentors telling you how well you handled it and helping calm you down! No, the incidents were not my fault. They both have conditions where these adverse events could happen anywhere, and they just happened to be in my treatment session. Although sadly I think it did scare one of my less mentally sound patients away.

Tonight I had dinner again with Carolyn and Paul. They are so wonderful! They had me over for Thanksgiving last week and I had a blast with Carolyn's family, who I haven't seen in at least ten years. Hoorah for old friends!

Thank you so much my dear readers for sticking with me! You are all very wonderful! I have had readers recently from the UK and New Zealand even! Welcome new friends :)

"No Soup For You!!!" - Seinfeld

Thank you my dearest faithful readers for keeping up with me despite me not keeping up with you! (yes that makes sense, I swear it does!)

I will try not to drone on and on about how much I love this new state of mine, but have I mentioned that I LOVE IT!  Last weekend Katie and I went to Breckenridge for the opening ski weekend.

It was a ton of fun, despite the crowds! Katie borrowed a snowboard from a friend and decided to take lessons. After I left her at her snowboard class I hit the slopes (and by slopes I mean lift line)!  Basically imagine hundreds of people sliding into each other in lines at the bottom of a hill. I immediately jumped into the single line (it always moves faster), however I had to hike up half the bunny hill to even get in the singles line! Then I had to work really hard not to slide down into the person in front of me as the line moved back down the hill. Thankfully it was only 15 minutes (GAH!) in the line. So I get on the lift with these three obnoxious teenagers... you know the type. They were on snowboards and giggling and being absurd, talking about how they switched to snowboarding and how they could be so much better at skiing by now, like their little sister, but no they switched. However they were convinced they would never go back, until their body actually couldn't snowboard anymore. I really wanted to tell them how when they are old and their knee cartilage is gone and they can hear their bones rubbing together, that snowboarding is actually nicer on the knees than skiing... but I kept my mouth shut. Let them find out the hard way! So I am very thankful as we near the top of the lift, and then the girl next to me says "I hope I don't fall this time!" well crap!

Of course she does fall, and takes me with her. I lost both skiis, poles, and had to duck under the chairlift! Very exciting for not doing any skiing yet.

Thankfully the rest of the day went much better. Not much improvement in the lift line, but it started snowing and snowed all day so the conditions were great! I met Katie for lunch and we went to the bar, which was packed with people. So we joined this guy sitting at a table by himself. After we started talking to him a bit, his friends show up, and had to find more chairs since this guy gave us his chairs. They turned out to be nice, and Katie told me later that she had actually met them before (but they hadn't remembered at all)!

Then we split again and I spent the afternoon mastering Moguls! It felt great, and the last hour and a half was wonderful because it only took 2 minutes to get through the line and it was still snowing! You just can't beat the feel of the crisp air in your face, the smell of the snow, the spray of the powder. I love it!

After a wonderful day on the mountain

After skiing we walked to the Breckenridge Brewery for dinner, and through the snowy christmas lights on the way back. It was beautiful!

This weekend I spent a lot of time studying for the CSCS exam with some friends from work. Then Sunday night I saw the new Harry Potter movie! It was wonderful you should see it! I won't give anything away, but I was cracking up because Hermione had a tiny little bag packed with anything and everything (think Mary Poppins), including a small stack of books. Which only reminded me of my friend Jenny, who once took a red purse to a bar. The bag fell off the bar (chair? i dont remember, but she dropped it) and the purse hit the floor with a loud thump! Turns out it was FULL of books! "the library hit the floor!" My friend probably thought i was completely absurd giggling away at those few scenes in the movie, but all I could think of was JD at the bar! There were also a lot of dark scenes, and things jumping out at you. I personally thought that there were far too many small children there (especially one who kept crying and crying), I guess half the parents haven't read the books and don't realize how dark the last book is! Which, by the way, I am now re-reading.

Then today I ran through Garden of the Gods again. It was gorgeous! I had a flashback to right after my interview, which was the last time I ran there. It was kind of surreal to realize how much has happened in the last few months! My next stop was Poor Richard's - a delicious little cafe/bookstore/restaurant/toy store. I had delicious hot cider, and then ordered some soup. I waited 20 minutes and then finally asked the barista how long it should really take soup to come from the restaurant (which was basically two rooms over), and they brought me my soup and said I could get a gift card before I left. I had basically paid $4 for my soup, and they gave me a $10 gift card! I win!! Thank goodness for good business practices and free things.

I'm excited about this week! I only work 3 days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday). I'm having Thanksgiving with Carolyn and her family, including her sister, one of my closest friends from middle school, who I haven't seen in at least 10 years! Then my sister gets here on Friday and I think we're going to go skiing! It's going to be a great week. :)