This is where we live (in photos)

A few pictures to help illustrate where it is we live.  The good, bad, strange, and different.

I've never lived anywhere that had deciduous trees at the tops of mountains.  Either I lived near mountains that went above timberline (so no trees grew above a certain elevation and the tops were therefore rocky and rugged) or else they had pine trees.  It gives the mountains an entirely different shape to see them without leaves!

We see these trucks occasionally.  This was taken on the drive up to NYC for Thanksiving, and we really liked the mudflaps, too.

One night it "snowed" and they cancelled school for the county's public schools.  This is what the snowstorm consisted of.  (To be fair, people said it was icy elsewhere.)

 You know you've in Kentucky when you use the bathroom at the movie theater and three of the four stalls look like this.

This is where James lives during school.  It's one of the two buildings his classes are in.

This is where we actually live.  I took the picture before we went inside the first time.  It's our little duplex with no fences between the different yards.  (Turns out that's how it is here.  I don't know if it's a southern thing or a small town thing or just a Tennessee thing, but it's a thing.)

At a local taco joint* (Taco Casa, to be exact) they have a house special: The Beany Twins!  You can get a hot dog in a taco or a hot dog in a burrito at little to no cost!

*Mexican food, it should be noted, is in extremely short supply here, both in number of restaurants and types of food available at grocery stores.  I have seen exactly one Hispanic person since we moved here, and here I thought we were moving to a place with more diversity than Utah.  It's a little strange to not have delicious aromas from various Mexican places tempting us.  This is pretty much the highest quality option we have.

I guess someone has to be growing the tobacco people are smoking.  Apparently it's where we live!

We live near Tri-State Peak, where you can sit in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky all at the same time!  With a strange family behind you!  It's not the four corners (and no, it's not the three triangles either) but it's pretty cool.

We have nice pop choices here.  (Fun fact: Dr. Pepper is a Coke product in TN, but in KY it's considered a Pepsi product.  Who knew?!)

We got a new car and it lives here, too!

This is the view from our back door.  There were horses in the field in summer, so hopefully they'll be back.

Look carefully at these two tree stumps just outside our front door (I'm standing on our front porch taking a picture that shows, in the background, the back porch of the owners of the four culrpits of this )  If this is where we live, than THIS (these two stumps) is where all the dog poop in our neighborhood lives.

Kentucky: where our closest movie theater only has four screens, so you have to catch something opening week to see it, but where the most expensive ticket you can buy (adult, weekend) is only $4.75.

The South: where even the canned mustard greens have a soulful heritage!

What's in a Doctor's Bag?

It's been a while since I've posted on this blog. I guess you could say that taking 27.5 credits of classes is a little time consuming. That being said, I think that I'm finally getting a handle on this thing known as medical school. I've even figured out how to get a little bit of spare time to do things. Crazy, I know.

Anyway, when I'm at school I get a ton of emails. Most of them are essentially spam sent from the school's clubs trying to get me to buy a sweatshirt or a clipboard or some other unnecessary and expensive item. Sometimes there are a few worthwhile emails with volunteer opportunities. I got such an email probably a month and a half ago for a chance to go show some elementary kids what is in a doctor's bag. I thought that it would be cool to do, and since I felt like I could manage to volunteer for a few hours one day, I signed up.

The day came to visit the elementary school. It was an hour away from school and Google Maps took my friend and me to the wrong location at first, but we found it eventually. We got there and this school had some intense security measures. The first one was pretty normal I guess you could say; you had to call in from the outside and they would unlock the front door. We walked in and some of the school was at lunch. The kids were so excited to see us fancy med students in our spiffy white coats. The next thing that I noticed was that there was an armed police officer walking the perimeter of the lunch room. They must have some serious food fights reminiscent of "Hook". I personally thought it was a little excessive, I mean, kids will be kids. Food fights are a natural part of school.

We signed in at the front desk and got our visitor stickers. There were two activities going on that day: one was a mini-med school activity and the other was the doctor's bag thing, which was what I signed up to do. It was a pretty sweet activity. They took us around to about 4 different classes ranging from preschool to second grade. It seemed to me that some of the kids were very shy either around doctors or they were terrified of my height as is usually the case. The first two groups of kids that I had really weren't that interested in what I was doing. However, they all seemed to enjoy playing with my tools. They especially liked my blood pressure cuff. They thought it was the coolest thing being able to pump that thing up. I would have thought that the otoscope or opthalmoscope would have interested them more. Who hasn't ever wanted to see what's lurking behind your pupil or what kind of crusties your friend has hidden in his ear? Shows you how out of touch I am with the youth of these days.

I had a lot of fun doing that. And now, if any of you want to know what doctors carry with them, I am trained in the art of showing you.

Southern snow...sort of.

People like to talk to their cashier about the weather.  Especially when it's changing.  It's a safe topic - nobody's going disagree or argue about whether it's sunny or cold.  This last week has been getting gradually colder (but nothing like what poor Colorado experienced!), and people  are starting to freak out.  You'd think they'd never seen winter before!  People here treat snow like it's the end of the world, and they really don't get all that much snow.

One night at work, it was that cold weather where the air is frozen and you can feel little specks of frozenness touching your face, but there's nothing coming down.  Just frozen humidity.  A fellow cashier came inside saying, "It's sleeting!"  Another announced, "It's sure coming down!"  Nope.  Maybe a total of ten drops on a windshield.  Sleet?  No.

I want to rant for a minute and say that I love snow.  I agree, driving in snow isn't awesome, and being colder than you want is also not wonderful.   I don't like driving in snow any more than summer-lovers like dealing with sunburns.  But be prepared and you'll get through it; there's no need for the annual Facebook onslaught of snow hating.  Many people dislike hot weather, but you don't see everyone post "I hate all sunshine forever until I die!"  "Gross!  It's sunshine!"  "I can't believe the sun is out! I hate this time of year."  Wear sunscreen if you don't want a sunburn from the sun.  Wear a coat to be less cold from the snow.   Let's stop the hating on snow!  It's not a surprise - I mean, good grief, it's winter.  If you live in a snowy state and hate snow, then move to Arizona.  Four months of complaining and unhappiness because of fluffy white stuff you can't control?  What a sad way to lose a third of the year.  You're allowed to dislike it, but please don't be mean to people who do like it! And learn that this is a third of your life if you live in a place that experiences winter.  Sheesh.  It's just snow.  Rant over.

Anyway, in our city here, people treat snow like it's the Apocalypse.  On Thursday afternoon there were actual flurries in the air - flurries! - and they didn't even stick.  The prettiness of snow without any mess!  Brilliant!  It was not supposed to accumulate, and there's no snow in the forecast, but the sight of a dozen flakes sent people into a frenzy.  Our store was suddenly swarmed with doomsdayers buying milk, bread, eggs, and almost every gallon of water we had.  People buying lighters, propane, and coffee - oh, if I had a dime for all the coffee we sold!  It didn't even full-on snow.  It lasted for 30 minutes and was lovely.  Not a single person through my line that day liked snow, and they all mocked me for liking it.  I've seen snow-hate and snow-fear, but this was exciting: imminent snow death for all as the world comes to an end!  They're all scurrying about, preparing for the Apocalypse, and I'm just smiling, watching the snow fall down.  Some people just like to watch the world burn.

So we went to Louisville the other day...

We went to Louisville a couple of weeks ago in order to get a great deal on a carseat from a lady there.  (She'd found it accidentally  marked at $30 instead of the $190 it usually is and bought it, so we got it from her.  What a wonderful, wonderful thing!)

We decided we'd only spend the night there if we could find a hotel for $50 or under.  Otherwise we'd do the trip in one day (it's a 4 hour drive to Louisville).  Hooray!  We found the hotel!  So excited were we for our little vacation that we didn't think to read the hotel reviews first.

We arrived at our hotel, a more-than-vaguely sketchy little thing in Indiana, just across the river from Louisville.  The front desk first gave us the key to the wrong room.  We walked into our room and find the bed unmade, suitcases out, clothes on the floor...and as we were walking back down to the front desk to fix this mistake, we passed an old couple walking to the room.  Unfortunately, authorizing our key to their room inactivated their keys.  Fortunately, the front desk lady met us all on the stairs and straightened things out.  Then we arrived at our real room.  I wish we'd taken pictures!  Here's what our room consisted of:

• The bedding, towels, and furniture were all stained, torn, dirty, or shredded.  Every last one.  I don't know what blue thing happened on those towels, and I don't want to know.
• About half of the lights worked.  Some of them had no chance, like the one mounted to the wall by the bed with its cord dangling down into nothing - there was no outlet for it.
• The sink made a loud whining sound that may or may not have made me shriek when I washed my hands.
• The bathroom....ah, the bathroom.  There was someone else's pubic hair in our toilet.  The walls had smudges and dirt on them.  The tub itself and the inside of the shower curtain looked like Jackson Pollock had decorated them with mildew and mold.  It was textured with them.  We opted to not shower

After seeing this, we pulled up reviews for the place.  Apparently this is normal and reviews all said that asking for a new room often cost extra and usually ended up with a worse room.  Apparently it's a common short-to-long term "home" for vagrants, since it's cheap.  Apparently some of these vagrants are known for selling drugs and sex here.  Apparently drug busts have happened while visitors stayed here.  And apparently sometimes you can find drug paraphernalia in your rooms.  (We looked but didn't find any.)  At least there were no bed bugs or cockroaches (that we saw) and since it was late, we just slept carefully and brushed our teeth at a McDonald's the next day.  Upon checkout, we found another couple with the same sort of room situation as ours.  Our car wasn't even stolen!

We really enjoyed downtown Louisville.  I'd forgotten about public art!  And museums!  And being near stuff! This is on the same street as the Slugger Museum, and we wandered the area for a couple of hours.

We found a neat science exploration center.  We spent an hour in it and didn't even see a full third of their fun activities and learning stations.  It was free! It's like Salt Lake's planetarium, but better.  We found it because it had this sweet satellite dish mirror outside.












 One of our favorite things in the museum was the chance to be in a bubble.


 James found this sweet looking limo covered in rhinestones? Glass beads? Dried wine droplets?

And we drove past this exciting place (it turns out is is more of an events center than it is a taste testing site).

We also liked this cool gutted building downtown.  All in all, it was a fun trip!  Even with the hotel.

School Zones

We live very close to both the local high school and TNT Primary School.  The school zone lights here aren't very useful, and this causes some confusion in the area.  Nobody takes them seriously or slows down for the flashing lights, which is not what I'm used to, but that's probably because they're almost never applicable when they're on.  The schools are also over a mile apart and there's no real break between school zones.  Just...1.5 miles of school zone speeds with no children in sight.  What's in between the two schools?  The county jail and police department. Because the schools are on the same street and end at different times, the county decided that they'd just turn the school zone lights on 30 minutes before one school ended...and keep them on until 30 minutes after the other one ended.  Same for school starting.  And so...when are the lights on?

The lights are on from between 2-3 hours every morning and every afternoon.  The lights are on every weekday.  The lights are on on weekends.  The lights are on during the summer.  The lights are lit on Christmas day.  One can only guess what they do with daylight savings.  Maybe they'll just extend them!

I'm used to slowing down for lights.  You know, that being the law and everything.  Plus you have to pass the police department between the schools and don't want to get in trouble... But nobody else here obeys, and I can see why.  It doesn't appear to matter much.  Oh, and my favorite part of this scenario is a little off-shoot road that apparently doesn't see enough traffic to merit its own light but does connect to the light-riddled road.  It has pretty generic rules: "School zone from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm."  School zones...FOREVER!!

TNT

We live in Tazewell.  We barely, barely miss the line for living in New Tazewell.  They're kind of the same city, and we share most of our services.  To specify that they're for both Tazewell and New Tazewell, some things will have a little prefix: TNT.  Tazewell-New Tazewell.  This can be sort of funny at times.  For instance, we have:

-TNT Primary School (an explosive elementary school)
-TNT New Baptist Church (they have fiery sermons!)
-Police cars with "TNT Police" on the side (don't mess with them)
and my personal favorite:
-TNT Fire Department (specializing in dynamite)

The Cashier Chronicles 2

A few anecdotes from my job:

Yesterday I had two unrelated customers in line, a man and woman.  They were talking about food, and they were both overweight.  The first lady says, "I love food!  You don't get fat from starving!"  The second man said, "Yeah, but I don't have much appetite for food these days."  After the first lady left, I asked the man why he didn't have an appetite for food anymore.  He said, "Eighteen years ago my wife died.  Ever since then I've mostly only had an appetite for drinking.  That's why I'm so big."

There is a customer who comes in every other day or so.  His accent is thick and he mumbles, so I have a hard time understanding him.  He usually quotes Elvis and tries to get the cashiers to say "Thank you, thank you very much" to him.  The other day I understood him more than usual when he came in the store and we had a nice chat.  Later, I went to go bring in shopping carts and he came out while I was headed in.  He had me stop pushing the carts and then took my hand and kissed it, saying, "You are a gorgeous soul!"  I said, "Thank you, thank you very much!"

Less of an anecdote and more of an observation: all the cashiers at all the stores here call people "sweetie" or "sweetheart."  Occasionally they'll do "sugar," but mostly not.  I can't quite bring myself to do it because I think I'd sound insincere.  Many customers are not very sweet.  They call that being hateful or being aggravating here, e.g. "I was getting aggravated at all the hateful people today."

I have only had ONE day at work so far in which something like this has not happened: someone will say something like, "You're not from here, are you?"  When I ask them how they know, their answers vary.  "Your accent."  "You don't look like it."  "I can just tell."  Usually they laugh.

One customer jokingly asked me if his cashier was any good (I was not his cashier at the time).  I said, "Yep!  She's the fastest cashier in the West!"  They both stared at me.  "In the East?  South?  In the state?" Nothing.  Apparently that's not an expression here.

There's a nice man of American Indian descent who comes in regularly.  (I have a hard time understanding his accent and low voice, but he's really nice.)  One day he came through my line and said, "You're nice.  Do you like jewelry?"  Why yes, yes I do.  "What kind of pendants do you like on necklaces?" Um...turquoise?  "Okay." Then he left.  He returned two minutes later and opened a box for me, showing me a turquoise necklace.  However, the necklace was in a child's length and was therefore something of a choking-hazard for me.  He said, "Drive around out back with me here," meaning for me to follow him to his car.  One of the other cashiers motioned that this was okay (and presumably safe), so I did.  I stood outside his car while he tried to find the right length chain, but I had to go back in and do my job before he found one.  The next day he came through my line again and gave me a lovely necklace!  He insisted I put it on then and there, and he lady behind him in line jokingly asked, "Are we witnessing an engagement?"  Another cashier says he gives jewelry to the the workers he likes.  "That's why I try not to do that with customers," she said.  "Sometimes this stuff happens."  That's why she tries not to...what, be friendly?  Say hi?  Incidentally, she does not have a necklace from the nice man.

Yesterday a lady came in as we were closing to get groceries.  She was a very large woman and was very clearly not wearing a bra under her spaghetti-strap shirt.  When the time came to pay, she reached into her shirt and pulled out a $10 bill.  From between her breasts.  The bill was damp and warm.  And then she put her $1 change back in there.  After she left, the manager came over and said, "No, she did not just take that money from her boobs!  How did she keep it in there?!  Those are not pockets!"