We made friends...and we DIDN'T have to pay them!

Jenn returned from Ohio in a perfect time to be put on the same work schedule. Our manager didn't trust that we are super nurses and work well together, but we must have proven ourselves because we now have the EXACT same schedule! Let the fun begin!

Basically we took everyday off with a goodnight sleep or not and made lotsa new friends. First, we took our new friend Sarah out on a much needed night on the town. She has four kids under seven and has been married for way too long already! The biggest shocker is she is our age, time to do some corrupting! So we headed out for some drinks, dancing and salty pizza.....Whaaaaat Sara thought it was the Parmesan cheese! Apparently, after the night was coming to a much needed end we ran into our neighbors and their boat owning friend and suggested they take us out for a Sunday fun day on the boat. Who could honestly say no to our drunk cute faces that were slowly turning into the sad puppy plea.

We also found out later that not only did we request a boat ride we also promised to bring basically a 5-star meal, but is all we showed up with was cantaloupe. Noon rolled around too quickly so it was all we could scrounge up in a pinch! Not to fear our Siesta stand in mom brought us carrots, hummus, chips, crackers, and Gatorade! What we would do without Lori is beyond us!! After a quick boat fill up and a purchase of 2 large Chaladas (Clamado juice and Bud light something we learned from Aunt Del in Texas) to ease our shaking hands we headed out on the water.










The boat was running smoothly and their was no sign of an malfunction thus far. Minor anchoring problems arose when no one was on the boat but rather holding on to a rope on the back. We looked up and it appeared as if the beach was moving, but as it turns out the anchor came loose and we were floating away into the great big ocean! EEEKK! Again we jumped ship and let the boys handle that situation. In the meantime on shore Jenn got herself a boyfriend and a date to his favorite place, a BUFFET! Sounds like a match made in heaven! After while we were itching to try out  the water skis. Sara was first and failed miserable lasting just about a hot second and possibly getting the worst wedgie ever... Our neighbor Steve was so nervous to try this out he nearly pissed himself before he got in the water. Surprisingly he dominated this sport and even began to ask questions such as "What angle should I hit the wake at?".

 Clearly he takes new things to a whole new level. Mama Lori had to yell at Steve to give the other girls a try. Jenn was up next and also proved to be some what of an all star, but the next day she felt it like an old person! We also took our friend Shan out and she was in the water geared up to give it a whirl when the boat wouldn't start up and the current was quickly taking us straight to the jagged rocked edge. It was about to be a mini Titanic

if someone didn't act fast. Let us break it down to what everyone is doing at this point:

Lori: slowly heading into a mental breakdown and will probably suffer from PTSD
Steve: throwing anchors out the back of the boat like their is no tomorrow (similar face on like he had when he was going to begin water skiing)
Jenn and Sara: not taking this seriously at all (big surprise) decided to crack their last luke warm Chulata when they heard a little voice. When they peered over the edge they saw their friend Shan holding on for dear life asking for a little help back on the boat...no worries she had a life jacket so it wasn't like she would drown, but we pulled her on board!
Finally...
Jason (boat owner) and possibly the only person with any senses on the boat: Jumps overboard using every muscle in his body to push the boat away from the rocks, literally with 2.2 seconds to spare.

PHEEEEWWW! That was a close call! After recapping the event their a couple things that could have been done differently like not anchoring the boat to a pebble that moves, especially when their are boulders all
around! Luckily they got the boat running just as we were taking our last sips of now warm clam juice...delicious! 2 for 2 on the boat and breakdowns..maybe we will give this whole boating thing a rest for awhile.




After a couple quick days at work we decided to pull an all nighter into and all dayer and headed to our coworkers house for a relaxing day of fun in the sun.

We thought it was just going to be us, but were pleasantly surprised to find that family was flying in from all over and this was basically a glorified reunion. We were 100% invited to stay and ended up fitting in, not sure if that is such a great thing but it was sure a whole lot of fun! We taste tested a whole spread of home cooked food and Big Papa made a special trip home just so we could try his famous moonshine soaked cherries from NC. No comment on how those tasted :). After completely outstaying our welcome we decided to head home for a much needed nights rest before our road trip in the morning!

                       

We decided it was about time to put a face to the voice behind the phone. Our nursing recruiter Vicki lives in Boca Raton, so we packed the candy and snacks and PorkChop and Applesauce hit the road for the longest drive to a dinner date EVER! We had big plans to hit Miami and Key West, but after much deliberation we decided we don't need or really want to be away from our island for that long. Soooo instead an 8 hour round trip dinner date occurred. WE made a quick pit stop at Target to grab a gift for Vicksters and we were in complete amazement when we walked through the doors. It was a TWO story target with a set of escalators and even a special convayer belt for your carts!!! Coolest thing we have ever seen...today!

All in all meeting Vicki was awesome, the food was delectable, and possibly the best part about it was it was on the company! Apparently, Vicki told her manager she was "going to meet up with those two girls who were peanut butter and jelly and that picture i showed you with the big red lips", her manager said instantly "O them, put dinner on the company card". See acting foolish really does pay off!!

The fun didn't end there, we decided to become one with nature and make friends with our fish friends under the sea. We woke up with the sun, made a bloody mary (what it was a holiday weekend!), and headed to the Point of Rocks to do some snorkeling. We truly looked like mermaids flopping around the ocean as we spotted various different fish and fed them our frozen peas.

We spent the rest of the day on the beach until we grew hungry and decided to keep up with the ocean theme. Siesta Key Oyster Bar (SKOB) is our favorite bar so we headed their for some delectable oysters that were more than we bargained for, but no regrets!

We weren't sure Sarah would be up for hanging out with us again, but this time was more low key as the whole family came over for a day on the beach and cook out at the house. Who said we couldn't civilized human beings? The beach wore us out as we jumped in the waves, which were HUGE and STRONG, soo fun! We took a looooooong swim out to the sandbar with crumbsnatchers clinging for dear life the whole

 way. It is a complete body work out to drag a crumbsnatcher through the water as they kick and scream in the opposite direction. We would have had more pictures of the sandbar, but unfortunately the underwater camera took a turn for the worst and seems to be dead. Let us take this time for a moment of silence as this camera has been through all of our travels thus far, may it rest in piece (KISS. KISS. BLOW).

We actually worked up an appetite so we headed home to start the BBQ. Words cannot describe how delicious dinner was..mmmhmmmhmmmmh. For dessert Mama Mike made a cake with all the guest present on it. Sara, Jenn, Ariana were the black bears because we are tan and everyone else was the pasty white bears. Very very creative mama mike! O and did we mention it was chocolate mouse sent from heaven!!!! We played a couple games well into the night and unfortunately the crumbsnatchers had to get home for school. They packed up all their crap, shoved it in the car, and were out the door within an hour. We made sure they didn't leave anything or anyone behind! They are well behaved kids, but lets just say we got us an extra strength dose of birth control today!

This all just geared us up for extremely busy next couple weeks as the out-of-towners start flooding in...

To be continued....

Island Bums

We just wanted to start by apologizing for not updating in awhile. We would like you all to think we have been working really really EXTREMELY hard, but unfortunately it is the exact opposite. We have turned into COMPLETE island bums. It is hard to put island life into words and some days it is even hard to form words. We will do our best to inform you what we have been up to. Here it goes…

The weather has ranged anywhere from 85 to 95, sunshine everyday, mild humidity, light breeze, and no clouds. Now your minds should be in our paradise. Basically, everyday when we wake up we must decide which of our numerous bathing suits to wear for the day, make sure the legs are shaved, and the oil is packed and ready to go. Then we jump onto the “La Jolla”, which are our matching beach bikes, and head to our practically private beach entrance. From there on out God only knows what might happen for the day. Some days, we have been a little sleepy so a four hour nap is taken, don’t worry we try to remind the other to flip over. It is never good when you aren’t even! Then there are days when we are feeling ambitious and full of energy so we start far away and swim out to the sand bar. Here we find shells and sand dollars galore. We keep collecting sand dollars in hopes the bar will start accepting them as a form of payment…not looking good right now! Some days you find yourself in a situation with barely legal beach boys who want to teach you to skim board. Although this is fun, it can be extremely dangerous and they were sure to inform Sara she was too old for them..haha. 

There are also more organized activities on the beach like the sand castle competition, our skills were not present but if there is another event we could surely win! Finally, and possibly our favorite days on the beach are those spent with an iced margarita, ice cold beer, or a 7-Eleven slush mixture. These days you may never know what might happen, who you might meet, or how the rest of your day may look!! All in all our favorite activities usually happen on the beach, so spending 85% of our time here is not an exaggeration.

]When you live on the #1 beach in the US there is really no reason to leave, but we do try to scope out the surrounding areas.  Our first stop was St. Armands cirlcle. We attempted a little shopping but it was out of our league so instead we found some good grub and did a little people watching..these things we are good at. Then we gave another beach ( Manatee Beach)  a try, but again nothing beats Siesta and we found ourselves a little homesick. We were also missing the 99cents store in Cali and the closest thing to this is Aldi’s, which is about an hour away from where we live. Manatee beach happens to be real close to this ALdi’s so we made a quick pit stop and stockpiled for the future knowing we would not be venturing off our island again for awhile. Normal people are in and out of this store, but not us we act like we have never seen food before and acted like kids in a candy store!! Supermarket sweep style shopping is basically how we ran through this store. The cart was parked in a central location and we just ran down the isles and back to the cart until eventually our feet were blistered and our cart was full. Now as we unloaded the cart we realized how out of hand we had gotten and also remembered they only take cash…this could be a problem. We decided it was best to tell the worker up front we may not have enough money, so she told us when we were getting close and we had to prioritize our needs/wants. 

Things that didn’t make the cut were face cream (wrinkles here we come), French dressing, BBQ sauce, green peppers, and various other things that since we can’t remember are clearly not a necessity to our life at this point. The things we didn’t get have since been bought so don’t worry we are not starving and you don’t need to send us BBQ sauce in the mail. All in all the trip off the island was a success, feels good to get off every now and then. It really makes us realize how out of touch with reality we are.

With having a couple days here and there off together we decided to take full advantage and head to the village, most people in the village only see us alone, when the other is working,  but now they are in for a treat with double trouble.  Our favorite place to hang out is SKOB and we are becoming more known there (whether this is a good thing or a bad thing we will leave that up to you), but every time we say we are travel nurses we always hear about someone named Rachel, Raquel, Richelle whoever the hell she is we are not sure but apparently she too was a travel nurse. Turns out her name is Richelle and she is the original island travel nurse, who has a paved a very good name for herself. Richelle even has a shot named after her! We have a lot to live up to!! Hearing more and more about her we feel like she is someone we can look up to and we just wanted to meet her! On this particular night someone said she was at the back bar so we took off running and demanded to know which one is Richelle! After our eyes focused a little bit we saw the pink stethoscope dangling around the only girls neck at the bar. She had a scared face on but raised her hand, the rest is history. The next night out on the town turned a little ugly, imagine that. Jenn got into a staring war with an older women, who appeared to follow us to ladies night. Luckily the band picked us to be a part of the gig before any words were exchanged. We sang our hearts out to our hometown favorite “Hang on SLoopy” as we beat tambourines and bells. Put on a pretty good show for all those present if I do say so myself! The main singer even said we had pretty good rhythm for a couple white girls…how this was possible at this point in time is beyond me. We decided we needed a break from the village, or the village needed  a break from us, we headed to the south end of the island to Captain Curts, which is an Ohio owned bar. They have the best clam chowder and their signature beer: Crabby Red, very fitting and also delicious! After our food was consumed we headed out back to where they have Karaoke 3 nights a week. This is not to be taken lightly there is some serious competition and a lot of talent. 

Needless to say, we made fools of ourselves and even had the local regular cowboy dancing with us! Our neighbors met us out and they too fit the mold of really talented karaoke stars. Fun night all in all. As you can see we are not going thirsty out here either, but bottles in the mail are always welcome!

The next couple weeks were a lot of work on separate days with little fun mixed in. We realized in those weeks we hated work and have no idea how people work more than 3 days a week.  Work is starting stabilize as we get more used to the craziness. The people we work with are really cool and have taken a liking to us so we actually have friends at work…that we can understand.  Welp! That’s all there is to say about work. We go our 3 days a week and that is that.

Anyways,  Jenn had to tweak her schedule so she could go home in time for the new baby so Sara had to find other ways to amuse herself. One nurse we work with and his wife Sara have 4 kids and can’t venture out to often, so they were heading to Venice beach for  the day inviting us along. Jenn had to sleep so sara ventured down with another girl from work Shan who basically stated “why would leave your paradise to go to a craphole”. But in this beaches defense they did have shark teeth, so that was cool! I enjoyed my time here with the 4 little crumbsnatchers, not sure I will ever be  welcomed back after I accidently shot the baby in the face with a water gun, but I can only hope! Ooops!

Work again got in the way when the neighbors asked if we wanted to go boating with their friend.  Jenn had to work, but Sara went to pave the way for our future in hopes Sara could behave and we would be invited back. Boating turned out to be fun and the sunset from the boat is a completely different experience. However, when Jenn texted Sara to make sure she made it off the boat alive Sara informed her of what happened. We were heading in and the boat appeared to have run out of gas. Stranded in the middle of the ocean is a very bad, and hilarious event. Basically we had to be pulled into land and then Jerry free ride picked Sara up with a shake of a head, “what are you doing here”. Jerry always seems to catch me in a bad situation, I can’t help it! I kept the sarcastic comments to a minimum so hopefully the boat gets fixed and we  will be invited on again.

The week finally ended and it was time to take Jenn to the airport! The baby boy  was born 5/7/12 named Evan Patrick. Jenn was extremely fatigued from waaaay too much work but being tired was well worth it for a trip home to see the nugget! What a cutie pututie!! Don’t forget to read the bib..all true!

Until next time....