Jessie learns to Kayak!

One of the best parts of summer here is the variety of activities that can be done at a moments notice...this morning Jessie learned how to Kayak.

Summer Time Hits NY!

Hopefully these little tidbits of life in NY, now that Spring has officially arrived will temp Paige to come back and visit us soon. When Paige left here to move to LA, it was still cold and I'm pretty sure snow was still on the ground. Now, things are coming back to life and the berry garden is getting ready to be picked. Between the mowing, clipping, planting, picking and pruning, we're pretty busy here in the garden right now. We could use Paige and maybe a friend or two to come back for a weekend and help us out - hint hint.

Love Julie

Escondido Falls

This is Sierra. Sierra is Jeff's golden retriever, she loves swimming, eating toilet paper and now she loves hiking. Sierra has always been a fan of walks and jogs but she doesn't have much off-roading under her belt. When I went on the Trail Canyon Trail hike with Mark, the trip leader brought along his dog, Fargo, who had a great time running from the front to the back of our little group, in and out of the shade and splashing around in the water. I mentioned this to Jeff and he thought it was a great idea so yesterday we set off for Escondido Falls. That link gives a far better description of the actual hike than I will and here is a map of the trail so you can get your head around it a bit better. Take note that you get to this hike along the Pacific Coast Highway which means that everything off the bottom edge of the map is the Pacific Ocean, so as you get higher and higher up into the Malibu hills, the view just keeps getting better and better... I am really liking this whole three day work week thing, can you tell?

Trail Canyon Trail

The Angeles National Forest is so clever with their trail names aren't they?! Last Sunday Mark May (one of dad's friends) invited me to go hiking with him and a group of his friends, I had to work the night shift Saturday so I was a bit hesitant but I decided that my need for sun outweighed my need for sleep and so I found myself headed out for my first foray into the Angeles National Forest in the middle of a heat wave (we topped out at 102 that day) after working all night. I'll be honest, the circumstances could have been far worse (it really was a beautiful day) and I still would have been out there all because of one little line at the end of Mark's invitational email to me: "Would you mind driving? We may need a high clearance vehicle to reach the trailhead." I was hooked. It was the Pathfinder's time to shine, how could I resist?! The hike couldn't have been more than three miles but when you are overheated, near delirious from lack of sleep and dodging rattlesnakes you feel like you are in an episode of Survivor Man. It was nice to get some fresh air and this hike was quickly followed by the best sleep I have had since Dance Marathon when I was a freshman at UF. You will notice that the first couple pictures in the album require some explanation. Our destination was a 75 foot waterfall however, California (just like everywhere else) is experiencing a lack of rainfall so instead of a thundering tower of water, we arrived to find a small creek trickling over the edge of a steep cliff. To make matters more anticlimactic, we arrived at the top of said waterfall and so could only peer over the edge at the shaded pool below, accessing it would have required adding another hour of hiking (in direct sunlight) to our afternoon so we opted instead for backtracking along the stream to a shady spot where we could dangle our toes and enjoy lunch. You will also notice that I did not manage to pull out my camera before we arrived at the waterfall so my only hiking pictures are of the return journey and thus are all downhill (which, I can assure you, the hike was not) and end at the trailhead with a map of Trail Canyon.

The Little Manatee

On Monday we took a post-Mother's Day trip down the Little Manatee River Canoe Trail in Wimauma, FL with Dada and Katie Glaser. We rented canoes and spent the day paddling and picnicking... it was very fun :) Florida is in the throes of quite a drought, so there were a couple spots where we ended up having to get out and drag the canoes (like in the picture above, I am standing without dumping us because the boat is actually resting on the bottom). During one such episode, Dada somehow managed to fall over and get completely soaked even though we couldn't have been in more than five inches of water... it was very impressive.

Jess and Seth's Wedding

One of the perks of nursing is that you only work three days a week. This is, of course, because we work 12 hour shifts but I am pretty sure that most people wouldn't mind tacking an extra couple hours onto their day if it means having two more days off each week! Now I don't usually work three consecutive days in a row because that is a good way to get tired and burned out when you are a newbie, however last week I needed to fly to Florida for a wedding of a friend from school and since I hadn't been home since Christmas I wanted to make the most of the trip. To do this, I worked Sunday, Monday, Tuesday of week #1 then I requested to be scheduled off from Wednesday to Wednesday and now I will be working Thursday, Friday, Saturday of week #2, a week off and no vacation time used... who can complain? So this past week I have been in Tampa and on Saturday morning I drove down to Fort Myers for the wedding. I met up with Kacy (who had driven down from Gainesville where she is in grad school) and her fiancee Brett at our hotel, we went out to eat and then changed and drove over to the wedding. The girl getting married was our sorority sister Jess. Jess is a year younger than me, she just graduated this past week from nursing school at the University of Florida and she and her new husband, Seth, are moving up to Charleston, SC - scary but exciting!

Duncan

Ashley is a social butterfly. I know that a big part of why it was so easy for me to uproot and move to the opposite side of the country is because she was already out here... not only living less than a mile away but working in the same hospital on the same unit! Ashley and I went to nursing school together at UF, we were in the same sorority, and we are both planning on going back to school to become nurse anesthetists. Weird huh? Our life-plans finally diverged once we graduated, I decided to go play in a cabin in the woods for a couple months and Ashley started working. One of the pre-requisites for admission to a nursing anesthesia masters program is two years of work experience in an adult ICU. Since Ashley knew she wanted to start working as soon as she graduated she was far more on top of her job search than I was, as a result of this she really did all the legwork when it came to researching good hospitals with good cardiac ICUs that take new-grad nurses. When it finally came time for me to start looking for places to interview, the path of least resistance seemed to be to check out Ashley's unit... and the next thing I knew I was staying at her apartment while I waited for my car and my belongings to get shipped to LA! She and her roommates whisked me off to a Hollywood club my first official night as a California resident and the social invites haven't stopped since. One of the best parts of meeting Ashley's friends is that the majority of them are nurses on our unit (that started when she started - the new grad class before mine). It is like I got to skip the entire awkward "getting to know you" stage with my coworkers because I have already met most of them at a bar or party with Ashley! Ashley has another friend, Duncan who just graduated from architecture school at UF and moved out to LA about a month after I did. This past Saturday Duncan invited a bunch of us out to his aunt and uncle's house for a day by the pool watching the Kentucky Derby and eating fresh crawfish (shipped out to us live by his dad). It turned out that Ashley had to work Saturday :( so we enjoyed a mint julep toast in her honor as a thanks for bringing us all together.
L to R: Paige, Jeff, AK (impersonating a crawfish), Duncan, AP