Pardee Hospital - Total Hip Replacement

Today was another first. Not too long ago I was dressed up "head-to-toe" in Tyvek so I could go down inside of an active mine. Today, I dawned the scrubs. I was inside of the operating room while they performed a total hip replacement. It was incredibly interesting. The doctor was very passionate about his work and took time to explain almost everything that he did (and was doing) to me. I can only put up this one photo right now. Maybe at some point down the road I can put up more. 

edit: I had to take the photos down and destroy them all. The patient changed her mind about the photography and we have to destroy all the photos.

Heavy Ice on Trees Causes Havoc

A couple of posts back I talked about the differences in weather and some of the new crazy weather that I am being exposed to in North Carolina. Something new again: heavy ice on trees.

A couple of days ago it was about 31 degrees and raining quite heavily. This caused all the trees to collect a lot of ice. So much ice that tons and tons of trees snapped off branches and tons snapped in half.

We went for a drive to check out the damage and were turned back because there were so many trees and telephone poles blocking the roads. Here are a couple of photos where you can see the weight of the ice and another where you can see the tops of the trees missing. They looked like they had all had a haircut.

If you look at the trees on the right you can see they are all missing their tops.

This really shows the weight of the ice.

An up-close to show the thickness of the ice.

Pardee Hospital - Chimney Rock shoot

Not very often do I get to see the final product of what gets made with my photos, but the Creative Director for Pardee Hospital gave me a copy of one of the flyers that he had made out of one of the photos that I took in October up at Chimney Rock. This is a scan of the front of the flyer.

He has also made 3 wall-size murals that are on the walls around the hospital. I plan on going over soon and taking photos of those.

High Water!

Everywhere that I have lived has had some kind of crazy weather that was unique to its area. Michigan is just crazy weather. Nowhere that I have lived does it change as quickly as in Michigan. I have seen, many times, the weather go from 60 degrees one day, to 15 the next. The weatherman in Michigan does not have it easy.

Germany was something else. The clouds that would hang around for weeks and weeks at a time were unbelievable. I used to forget what the sun and blue sky looked like. It was not uncommon to go 4 - 6 weeks without seeing the sun because of the constant cloud cover. Dresden was a hard place to live because of the weather. I won't live in a valley again!

Alaska. Hmm... what to say about Alaska? -60 degrees, earthquakes, ice fog, 3 feet of snow in a day, etc. Alaska wasn't so much "crazy" as it was EXTREME. There is nothing mediocre about Alaska. Everything that goes on there is to the extreme. When it decides to be cold... it gets really cold. When the sun decides to come out and be beautiful... you have never seen such amazing sun and beauty.

On to North Carolina. Rain. When it rains it really rains. I thought the house was going to float away and Noah was going to be coming by to collect our cats. Yesterday when it stopped raining Maddy and I went to take a ride because it was so nice out. Check out what happens in North Carolina when it rains for a day.

That is a normal height bridge in the distance that is under water. Impressive to say the least. Thank goodness Hendersonville isn't in a valley, but rather way up in the mountains.

Dale's Garage

This is the coolest personal garage you've ever seen!


Last night Rick and I went over to a friend's house to change Rick's brakes. This was the first time that I had been there since they finished their house and I was blown away. I will let the pictures tell the story.

There is a garage just for working on the trucks. Amazing!

Notice that he's STANDING under his truck! How cool is that??!!

Dutch Oven cooking and Land Rover Monthly magazine

Last night two really cool things happened
1. we used our new Dutch Oven for the first time and it was awesome.
2. the new Land Rover Monthly came in the mail FINALLY from England with my article in it.

The Dutch Oven was pretty cool because ... well you get to sit by the campfire and cook and then eat. It doesn't get much better than that! Yesterday was the day to do it. It was 64 degrees when I left the office so we decided to do a fire and cook.

The article is not new news, but it has been a while since it came out in England and we have been dying to have it get here. It was an exciting moment when it finally arrived. For those of you that don't know, this was the first time that I actually WROTE the article as well as took the pictures.

Finally, I have had a couple people asking me for pictures of my new office. So... here are a few pics of the new digs. In them you can see Maddy busily working away. ;)

St Patrick's Day in Hendersonville

If you haven't heard yet, or been to the festival in last couple of years... there is a big celebration for St Patty's Day in March in Downtown Hendersonville. This year, for the first time, we are going to be having a TENT to protect us from the rain!!! Last year was a bit wet.

Mark it on your calendars! It's going to be a great day!

Here is a link to the blog with photos and info from the last two years http://marchoftheleprechauns.blogspot.com/