25 more days...

Only 25 more days until I start massage therapy school at Capri College of Massage Therapy. My class will be the first one in the new building about 2 miles down the road from the old one. Capri bought an 18,500 sq. foot warehouse and did a complete build out in it and I hear it looks amazing inside. They should be done and will open their doors about 5 days before I start classes. I guess the freak spontaneous rainstorms we've been having here every other day have been holding them back from finishing the parking lot.

I'm so excited to start classes so that I can learn more about the human body, and so I can learn how to be an instrument in helping others feel better whether it be emotionally or physically. Massage addresses such a wide range of aches and pains. In fact, I just got a massage a couple of hours ago and it wasn't for anything specific, it was just a "hurt so good" kind of massage. I feel great. I feel so blessed to be able to go back to school, and I feel even more blessed that I was guided to this profession. There were obvious signs that this is what I am supposed to do, and I am just glad that I had my eyes open wide enough to see them. Dean and I feel so fortunate to be able to pursue our interests.

Now, as for Palmer.... it is going GREAT! Dean is loving his classes and he is doing very well in them. He especially loves his technique classes. He cracks me up when he will just spontaneously set up to do a toggle adjustment and then deliver it into thin air on an imaginary patient. It at least shows that he's practicing. He wants to win the "toggle off" at the end of the trimester. It's a competition between all of the students in his trimester to see who has the best form and setup on a fake patient. I'll keep you posted in how that turns out in October.

He loves chiropractic and he loves Palmer. He's going to be a phenomenal doctor, and I can't wait to see how he changes his patients lives for the better.

Our Basement

The deep, dark, scary parts of our house....our basement. Okay, I'm exaggerating. It's not scary. And it's not dark. And it's just a below ground basement. It's unfinished and pretty blase, as you can see from the pictures.We keep all of our storage stuff under the stairs (right side of the picture). Keep our bikes in the back right corner.

It's actually pretty open. We only have the treadmill off to one side of the room and the rest of the stuff lines the wall. Like our makeshift bookcase? We got it from our friends Chad and Ash when they were moving.

Here's our food storage in our basement. We slowly but surely are adding to it to try to get up to the recommended year supply. We guesstimate that we have about 4 months worth of food right there, and a good 6-8 months worth of toilet paper on the top shelf. You can never have too much toilet paper.

We always try to keep 2 weeks worth of water (it's recommended 1 gallon per person per day) in our basement just in case of an emergency. Dean and I have been feeling very inspired lately to get on the ball with our storage and emergency preparedness supplies. We still have a bunch more we need to stock up on but we can't buy it all at once.

• So now you have a little bit of a better look at the Sheldon basement. Just what you needed to brighten your day.
  
  
  
  

The Mississippi

Dean and I drove over to the Mississippi River a couple of weekends ago, it's only a couple of miles from our house, and we decided that we at least had to touch it once while we live here.

It was greenish-brownish and SMELLED disgusting. Seriously, it smelled like one of the sulfer pools at Yellowstone National Park. We probably contracted some sort of foot disease from it, but at least we can say we've touched the Mississippi River.

Blessed

Dean and I have been feeling very grateful for a lot of things lately so we thought we'd share a couple of the things that we love in no particular order....

• Eachother. We are so thankful that we are married for eternity, and have the opportunity to learn and grow with one another for forever .


• Our home. We love how it feels like 'ours.' We don't own it but yet it feels like we have made it into somewhere that we feel comfortable and love our surroundings. Dean especially loves that it's the place that he gets to come home to at the end of the day and relax with me and tell me about his day at school.


• The incredible lightening storms that Iowa has. We have never seen anything like them in the PNW. There will literally be 15-20 strikes within a minute sometimes. And the thunder claps, wow, they are enough to give you a heart attack.


• The snow and frigid winters. Nothing makes you appreciate the zero degree weather and getting to cuddle at night more than 95 degree summer weather at 90% humidity.


• Palmer. Althought it's ridiculously expensive, we know that Dean is getting the best chiropractic education available worldwide. He is so passionate about his profession, and now that he's starting to get into the technique classes and starting to learn to adjust, all the rigorous science and anatomy classes that he has been bombarded with these past couple of years have been worth it. We are starting to see a light at the end of the loooooooong education tunnel. Just over 2 years to go and then he'll be my little D.C. (Doctor of Chiropractic).


• Our families. We love each and every person in our families and pray for them often. They are good people, and we have learned a lot from them throughout our lives.


• Our faith. We absolutely love being LDS, and see how abundantly Heavenly Father has blessed our lives for us living righteously. We wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

We realize how fortunate we are in so many aspects of our lives, and we would be ungrateful if we didn't express our gratitude every once in a while.