On The Mend! 5 months! (OK, now it's been 6)

I can't believe it's been 5 months! Almost to the day. It was August 11th. (OK, so I started this a while ago -now it's been 6 months and I'm GOING to finish it tonight!) Sometimes it seems like it really hasn't been that long and others it seems like it's been a life time since I've been able to do what I want and not have to think about every move. It's been a good 5 months though. and I feel like I'm almost back to being myself. Let's see, what's happened .....

My hair is growing back! A lot more than I thought, and when I find the right venue, I'm going to rock it with the old part and gel up the couple inch grow back.

My plate and screws are looking good.

And my incision is looking better than this. This was probably at about two months after surgery. Still pretty cankle-y, but that's getting better also. 

I MOVED! I really love my parents and I'm so glad I was able to stay at their place while I was recovering. There is nothing better than being at home when you're sick.  My parents had had a trip planned for a while, so they were gone when I had my surgery but luckily I've got great friends and brothers that were there to have sleep-overs with me and wake me up to make me toast so I could take my pain meds. However, I am really stoked to be living on my own. Going to look at houses on crutches was not ideal, but it got me moving around. It took about three Saturdays of looking to find the perfect house, but we did it. I do love to say I live in East Milcreek, and it's a great location and Kristina moved in and we've been wanting to live together forever and it was great when she moved in. Then a month later our other friend from the river Haley moved in. Our place is great!
 
It's a big one floor place and we all have big rooms and big closets (my room has two smaller ones which is great for me, one for clothes, one for jackets and back packs.... yes I need a whole closet for those!) and a great gear room where we can have all our skis.

When I moved in I was still on crutches and I got these very attractive callouses on my knees from scooting around on my knees pushing boxes and organizing everything. But it's so great to have this place that I actually have all my stuff and that I will be here for a while.


I'm so sick of moving everything every 6 months. And this place is so awesome! I'm really loving it! I am going to rent it over the summer and have a place to stay.


I drove across the country with my friend Steve. He was waiting to leave to be a mountaineering guide in Mexico and got hooked up with a random job to drive this amazing 15 passenger Clear communications van, (affectionately named Marge) from SLC to New Jersey.

I wasn't doing anything and I had a credit from when my passport got stolen in Canada last year and he wanted a navigator so I decided to join him.

We got to Michigan in 4 days and I flew out of Detroit because I had to get home for a Cry Baby party with my girlfriends from high school. What? You've never heard of Cry Baby!? Well, let me tell you, it was one of the most amazing movies I've ever seen probably 67 times. Kristine and I discovered it and have been in love with Johnny Depp ever since. Here is just a little taste of how amazing he is:

But before I left, one of the more exciting things was going to see the biggest reservoir in Nebraska.  
It's it amazing! Middle America isn't that awesome, I gotta be honest. So to pass the time I pulled some tricks out of the 7 grade sleep over bag of tricks and told some fortunes and it was pretty fun.

I got my nose pierced!

 I've wanted to do it for a long time now, and I finally figured I can't give blood for 6 months after having surgery anyway, so might as well do it now so I only have to wait another 6 months. Yup, that's my reasoning. I've put a smaller one in since I took this pic and I really like it.
Halloween was good. It was funny going places on my kneelie.
The week before Halloween my friends Rachael, Kim and Jos and I got dressed up as Zombie Prom Queens. A girl from that I used to work with at the hospital had a party that was kinda lame and so we went out down town and they almost wouldn't let me in with my kneelie. Trust me, if you ever want to get some attention, it is the way to go for sure. Just don't take it anywhere with stairs!

 

 Since then I don't really have tons of pictures because I haven't really done anything cool. I've been working on walking and not limping, not going on any great slot canyon trips or skiing or anything cool like that. I have been able to start skiing a little and it's been so great! I've gone up with Jos or Kate and I finally got to ski at Solitude with Chris and Trine and Jos and it was some amazing powder and my body was so tired! I swear there's nothing you can do to get in shape for skiing except skiing. I love being up there! It feels so great to be somewhat getting back to myself.






I have still been working at backcountry.com which I should actually say trading my great phone skills for gear bc let's be honest, I have a bit of a gear problem and looking at it and talking about it everyday makes me want so much of it! I'm getting a whole AT set up and I'm sooo stoked!
They have been a little slow and they've been cutting back some of our seasonal worker's shifts and for a few weeks I had a bunch of days off in a row and it was a bummer that I couldn't really take advantage and ski all day, so I decided to do a project. We are just renting this house, but most of it hasn't been remodeled for over 20 years. I do love the kitchen counters! (Although the boarder is my next project and probably some yellow walls)

 But the wallpaper in the bathroom just wasn't that same 'retro-cool' look as the kitchen so I thought I'd do a little project and strip the walls and paint it. It turned out to be like a 30 hour project! I've learned some really valuable lessons: NUMBER 1: Take the time you think you'll take to do the project and times it by no less than 3
Here's how it looked at the beginning: 

Camille came over to drop something off and ended up helping me for a bit

LESSON NUMBER 2: I learned how to disassemble a toilet, even though I had no intention of doing that or take the huge mirror off the wall and ended up doing both.

It literally took 10 hours to get the wallpaper off then to get all the glue off that you can see in this picture:

I chose this really cool green color that I loved, however, after all the prep work, I learned how to putty (not too hard after watching my dad do it a bunch) and sand and prime and tape everything, I did the first coat and it looked TERRIBLE with the pukey pink counter tops and the gray and white marbled shower. I was so bummed!
Thus: LESSON NUMBER 3: It doesn't matter how cool the color looks in the store, you MUST make the trip back home to try it with the rest of the stuff in the room. 

So, after like a week of no zit popping because the light in my room is terrible and we didn't have a mirror or lights, I finally got the bathroom put back together.

LESSON NUMBER 4: It's not that hard to take a light fixture down. I was pretty nervous to do that, but putting that back up ended up being the least eventful part of the project.

LESSON NUMBER 5: It's OK to drill like 4 holes at each spot where the mirror holders will go because the mirror will eventually cover it up, but it sure would have been a lot easier to notice where they were when I took them off then puttied them over.

So, here's the finished product. We decided that a kinda dark gray would be a lot more benign, and it looks pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. There's a few things I need to fix (the mirror is just a little bit crooked and it just may drive me crazy) but I need to take a breather from house remodeling for a bit. 

Anyway, thanks for sticking with the epic novel of a blog! Now I'm caught up so it won't be such a daunting task to update. Happy winter!