Little Kitty update

Well, we've had little kitty for just over 24 hours now and she's become so much more active. Adam had salmon for dinner the night we got her so she's been eating that (just finished it off), some kitten milk replacement, kitten food and a few soft kitten treats and tons of water. We were concerned yesterday because even though she was eaing and drinking so much, she just wouldn't go to the bathroom. I guess she was just absorbing everything because this morning, everything seems to be in good working order. Pam, the farmhouse woman, told us she probably had worms that were stealing all her nutrients, which is why she's so thin. She had a good appetitie and ate what the woman gave her. We're pretty sure that she doesn't have worms because with regular meals and a warm place to sleep she's gotten stronger and she no longer has diarreah. I think all she needed was some TLC. Adam will take her to the vet on Tuesday just to make sure there are no other problems than neglect. She's such a happy little kitty right now, always purring, and on the mend.

She spent the day yesterday laying outside in the grass while Adam worked on the car. The garbage truck came and scared her so I grabbed her right as she bolted. When I set her down, she spied a grasshopper right next to her. She scared him and he jumped, she pounced and caught it then ate the whole thing, bite by bite, except for one back leg. She'll definitely be a good mouser!

American West Heritage Center

I had such a good time yesterday! We finally made it to the American West Heritage Center. It's up in Logan. I found it on the internet while still living in Atlanta. They use volunteers for all the demonstrations and the tour guides. They all have volunteer researchers. I contacted them because we thought we'd be living in Logan. They told me that volunteers got a big book of all kinds of information about how people back then lived nd how to do things. I want to get ahold of that book so bad!! Saturday is the last day they have everything open for the season so I am SO glad that we made it when we did. Now I just need to make it to Antelope Island and This Is the Plack Heritage Village before they close most things down for the season. I hate it when I procrastinate!! There were only a few volunteers there and only two other visitors. In my opinion, that's the best way to go. You get to take your time looking at everything and ask as many questions as you want. Also, it had a very peaceful feeling that probably wouldn't have been there had there been a lot of people there.



We started out with the mountain men. They shoed us a bunch of furs and told us what some of them were used for. They showed us some tools they carried with them, including some black powder guns. He showed us how they mesaured the black powder grains to get the right accuracy and filled up his gun, minus the ball and shot off the black powder. I think Adam wants one now. He really liked it.



Then we moved on to Patch's workshop. They make everything out of wood there. They had carvings, butter molds, spoons, rolling pins, various cooking utensils, jewelry boxes and chairs. Patch was not in to give us a demonstration though so we didn't stay too long.


Then, we made our way to the pioneer settlement. There was a large windmill in the center. The Opera House and the General Store were closed but there were a few ladies at the bowery. There were a couple of ladies setting up a small loom. Another lady showed us around the bowery and then the dugout. It was so short that you can't stand straight up...well, I think Adam could. It was just a tad too short for me. They got the description of it from a sick boy. He was stuck in bed for a while so he wrote in his journal about the size of the dugout and described everything inside and daily life inside one. There wasn't much room in it at all and a family of 8 lived in it!!


Next, me moved to the cabin. It fit the minimum requirements (12' x 12' with one window, glass is optional, and one door) for the homestead act. Again, I'm not sure how a family could all fit in it to sleep. This was even smaller than the dugout.

Outside the cabin door was a barrel with some metal hoops and wooden sticks. We found out these were for a game called graces. Each person gets two sticks. One person puts a hoop on their sticks, crosses them and pulls the sticks apart to lauch the hoop toward the other person. If you catch it on two sticks, you get two points. A one stick catch gets you 1 point. And if you drop it, you don't get any points. This was a game that was supposed to teach the girls to be as graceful as swans but as Adam and I found out, it's just really fun!!

From there, we stopped at the Shoshone encampment. A woman was there and she told us just a little about some of the things there. Then we went inside the teepee. It is surprisingly big inside one of those, especially compared to the dugout and cabin. They had seats made out of red willow that sat on the ground. It was actually not too bad for comfort...of course not the most comfy I've ever been on.


Now, the most awaited part of the trip. The 1917 farm house. First, we came across two small outbuildings. One was a smokehouse. I opened it up and the smell of smoke came right out. There were meat hooks across the top of it. The other building was a root cellar. I think it wsa only about 6-7 stairs down but the temperature was so cool inside, I was amazed at the difference! It was pitch black inside so I was surprised to see, when the flash went off, that the shelves had some home canned goods on them...and they looked really good! The outhouse was across the path. I opened it up. They nailed boards over the two holes so no one would use it. (They have another outhouse by the barn that is actually a portapotty with a wooden exterior instead of the bright blue plastic normally on them.)


There were a number of other outbuildings...a blacksmith shop, a storage shed for the horse drawn equipment, a large barn for th milk cows and horses and a chicken coop.


While we were sitting near the chicken coop, there were al kinds of birds wandering around, peacocks, chickens, turkeys, a little duck and then came along a couple of kittens. One was so boney! I handed her to Adam and she instantly laid down in his lap and fell asleep. He held her while I went inside the summer kitchen and looked around. This had been their home until they built the larger cabin. Once they moved into the larger cabin, this becane the place where all the laundry was done, baths were taken, cooking an canning were also done in here. They only used it when it was hot outside and the extra heat from the stove inside the main house would have been unbearble.


Adam put the small kitten down and we explored the main house. The guide, Pam, showed us around and then answered all my questions. It only has electricity to the kitchen and no running water at all. She cooks on the stove there everyday for whoever it is she cooks for. She was washing the dishes in some enamel pots out on the back porch when we showed up.


Back outside, Adam picked up the little kitten while Pam told us that someone had just dropped her off there a couple of days ago and she was going to take her home to see if she could bring her back to life. We explored the garden. I will have something like it someday! While we were exploring the garden, a turkey came out of the plants chomping on an egg shell that was dripping with egg yolk.


The little cat tugged at Adam's heart strings and decided he wanted to take her home and nurse her back to health. He'll take her back to Boise with him and she'll keep him company in the evenings and on weekends. Then, when she's healthy enough, he'll find her another home, a farm he hopes. We talked to Pam again and offered to take her home. She was greatful and agreed. So we left with her.


We went and saw the temple...very pretty!! Then headed back toward home. We finally made it home, after a couple of longer than shold have been stops, at 11:30. We put her in her new kennel with the heating pad turned on under her blanket. She's got absolutely no fat on her so she needs the extra warmth. She slept above Jack...her kennel on top of his. The dogs smelled something in the air but they never figured it out. So, just so everybody knows, as cute and sweet as she is, we will not be keeping her because of our dogs.

The pictures above are:
1. Me showing how low the dugour ceiling is.
2. Tom, the turkey, getting ready for Thanksgiving.
3. Logan Temple.
4. New little kitty.
5 & 6. Inside the dugout.
7. Adam with graces sticks and hoop.
8. Inside the root cellar.
9. The coolest picture I took.

New digital camera

When Adam was in Atlanta visiting his family, he got a digital camera from his dad that he no longer used. It is SLR like...meaning it looks like an SLR but the lens is attatched. It did come with a screw on wide angle lens though. Movement is very blurry and I haven't found an action setting yet. I took it out and played around with it.

Should you blindly trust your doctor?

When I went to my doctor 2 weeks ago, I told him what I was doing. I scrub every night with a sodium chloride solution, letit dry for a little while, put on some neosporion and bandage it back up until the next night when I do it again. Despite the infection that had set in in the surrounding tissue, he said it looked great and that I was doing everything just right. "Keep doing what you're doing, take the antibioticsa and come back in two weeks so I can make sure everything is healing properly." So I have an appointment for Monday. I got the information on how to take care of the wounds from the nurse at the doctor's office, the pharmacist (on what to use to clean it) and my knowledge of basic treatment so I can't blame it all on the doctor but I have been doing exactly as I had been since it was "perfect".

Adam told all his coworkers about my accident and a woman from Boise called him on Friday and talked to him. 6 months ago, she fell off of a ladder and cracked her leg open to the bone. They told her to do pretty much what I've been doing and she was doing it. It got infected so they put her on antibiotics but told her to keep doing what she was doing. And she did, for a while. But the infection got so bad, the doctor started talking about the need for amputation. So she found a wound specialist (I have never heard of sucha thing) and told him what she had been doing to take care of it. He said that basically, it was he wrong thing to be doing. He told her what she needed to do. She's still wounded but it's no longer infected. So Adam came home and talked to me about it and told me I should do some online research about how to treat road rash.

I looked a number of sites and they all agreed that letting it scab over is outdated...that's one of the worst things to do because it results in scarring and it takes longer to heal and it's what causes all the itching during healing. Also, they all agreed that scrubbing is also outdated as it aggrivates the wound and does more damage and it takes longer to heal.

So what AM I suposed to do?

Treat it more like burn than a scratch. Initially, you have to do as much scrubbing as it takes to get the road grit and everything else out of it but that should be the only hard scrubbing you ever do on it.

So here is what should have been doing all along and I would be healed by now:
1. Clean wound with a Sodium Chloride solution (yeah me) lightly removing, with a guaze pad, the tissue trying to form a scab (exudites I think they're called).
2. Blot dry with surgical guaze sponges.
3. Apply Carrasyn V gel or Silver Sulfadiazine (both are burn creams).
4. Cover with burn treatment pads (2nd Skin, Tegaderm and Bioclusive are the ones named and 2nd Skin was rated the best)
5. Hold in place with some conforming guaze roll.
6. Use surgilast to hold it all in place.

The wounds need to be cleaned daily. Followig this from the beginning, most road rash heals in 10 days, more severe rash can take 2-3 weeks to heal...with minimum scarring.

I trust doctors pretty well. But I really need to take a more active part in my own medical care...get myself informed and make sure I'm doing the best thing for my body.


Oh,oh, oh...one more thing. I learned a handy tip from the best site I found. Leave your bandagig on and wrap the site with saran wrap and take a quick shower. Dry off, then remove the sarn wrap. I can take a shower again!!!! :o)

Thrift store withdrawls

I've really bee wanting to go thrifting lately. Probably because I really want to get out of the house, or maybe it's because there's almost nothing in the house so I feel a need to buy a few things, or maybe it's because I haven't been to one in close to two months. I think that's it! Anyway, yesterday, I was dreaming of making the rounds to all the salt lake Savers and DI's. Pretty soon I'll be living within 5 miles of 5 DI's, 1 savers and who knows how many others...I saw two smaller ones (one I know for sure is good) while I was there. Maybe I'll even live close to a used book store! Living near stores will definitely have its advantages. I do love living in the country but I also go through periods where I miss getting to go shopping close to home. I can even ride my bike to stores in Boise. Riding my bike to buy books...what could be better? :o)

Oh, and while we're on the subjecy of books, Adam gave me a wonderful birthday present. He wasn't going to tell me but I made him. He shipped all my books that we left in Georgia to the house in Boise. :o) All my books (except for the box that got destoryed in shipping) will be with me again. I'm so happy. :o) He went through the garage in our Atlanta house and got rid of everything we still had in there. We had to leave some furniture behind, my books and a large box of sports/outdoors stuff when we left because of weight and size issues. He shipped all the boxes, and gave away all the furniture. So other than our house, we no longer have anything in GA.

Photoshop Art

I am really bored so I was going through my pictures on the computer. I found these pictures I "drew" in photoshop a few years ago. The one of space is finished, the elephants are almost done but the other two are not. The lake and the lighthouse pictures were pictures on a brochure for Georgia state parks that I no longer have but that's ok because I doubt I'd ever work on them again. The lighthouse picture has a main billowing cloud...I probably spent 5 hours on that cloud alone and the water took me a while too. I was so proud of it but I didn't put that much time into anything else so everything else just looks so flat. Of course these are no where near the quality of Mike and Mia's work on the computer but I haven't dedicated my life to it either.

Discouraged...and bored

I'm getting really discouraged about my leg. It's been just over three weeks since my accident and I still have a large knot on my right hip. Both my hip and calf are infected and I'm not sure, despite being on my second round of antibiotics for over a week now, that it's going away. I am so sick of laying on my left side that I gingerly tried laying on my right side but the big bruised knot wouldn't allow it. I still have to scrub them every night and though my hip is getting much better, the calf stings more than ever when I do it. I've gone through over $200 in medical supplies and I'm not finished yet. The most annoying part is that I have all this forced free time and I can't even go visit anyone or go window shopping. I wish I could just hop on my bike and take a nice, leisurely ride. But I can't...I have to stay home.

When Adam came back, he brought along an afghan I started working on a year ago and haven't really touched in almost as long. I started working on it again and it's helping to aleviate some of my boredom. It's really just in the beginning stages. It's going to be large enough to be on a king sized bed if I ever finish it so I have a very long way to go....it'll will surely still be a work in progress when I am up and about again.

Adam is having some medical problems too. When he was in GA, he went to his oncologist for his yearly check up and it was discovered that his thyroid is hyperactive so he needs an ultrasound of his thyroid to figure out what's going on. He's going to try to schedule an appointment for that while he's still in UT with me.

Other than that, Adam cooked dinner and bought ice cream for dessert last night so I guess life isn't all bad.

Blackberry Pie

Last summer,I went to a city South of Payson and picked Blackberries at a farm. I was planning on making jelly with them. I did make 2 pints of jelly and froze the rest. The jelly turned out well but I didn't process it correctly (it was my first time and I didn't finish reading the instructions before I began) so they stayed in the fridge instead of the cupboard.

SInce we're moving, I'm trying to use up some of our frozen food...the blackberries are one of them. Adam likes fruit pies and he's always been the one to make them before. He told me he was coming home for a couple of weeks to keep me company so I decided to throw a pie together for him. I pulled the pie shells out of the freezer only to find them broken and thoroughly freezer burnt. So I ended up making the pie filling and crust from scratch. The recipe I used didn't say to bake the crust before I filled it so I was really concerned about the bottom crust being completely soaked and soggy.

All in all, I think it turned out well. Adam said it was the best thing he's had in a long time. :o) And Mike and Mia, who spent the night that night, also thought it was great and it only lasted 24 hours.

Crash and burn at Soldier Hollow

The ride started off well enough. I parked behind the visitor's center in Heber and rode out toward Midway. I really had no idea where I was headed. I found Old Town Heber which had some art galleries, an antique shop and a restaurant made from old looking buildings...my kind of place. I had nice views of the mountains. I was going to try to make it to Cascade Sprnigs but the road was steep and turned into gravel. I had no traction at all so I gave up on that idea and headed to Wasatch Mountain State Park. I ended up in Soldier Hollow (where they held the 2002 winter Olympics). I made my way onto the paved cross country ski trails. There was a very cute one-room cabin in the center (if I could buy it and live there, I think I would). I finished one loop and decided to do one more loop to see if I could get a good picture of the cabin. No such luck. :o( I was almost back to the gate when I took a sharp turn going too fast and ended up sliding down the asphalt getting a good case of road rash and a huge bruise on my hip. 2 weeks later, I can now walk around, sit (in a chair crowded with towels and blankets to let my right leg float) and I even drove a short distance last night just to see. It was very uncomfortable but I could do it. A bad ending to am otherwise beautiful ride which may end my riding in Utah...we'll see.