Southern Utah

Goblin valley in a cave

Goblin valley

Arches National Park

Can you find us?

Double O arch

Happy Birthday to me!

Some mandolin playing in Moab, I love it here!

mmmmm, breakfast!

Goblin valley

Delicate arch...this is the most famous one I think

We were pretty excited

Good group pic at arches

Aren't we cute :)

So this weekend we decided to head down to Moab for a little camping fun! We all took Friday off and headed down in the afternoon. Saturday we hiked ALL DAY at Arches National Park. It was amazing...I have never seen anything quite like it! All of the different rock formations were incredible and we had a great time just hiking and enjoying the great outdoors. It was also my birthday which made it even better and my wonderful roomate got a chocolate truffle cake so we could celebrate saturday night. Camping with good friends and chocolate is all a girl needs for her birthday right!?! So we woke up Sunday morning to another beautiful day, had the best eggs benedict ever at a restaurant in Moab, listened to a little mandolin playing and headed over to Goblin Valley. This place was crazy cool. It apparenly used to be underwater and wasn't "discovered" until the 1920's. All of these mushroom shaped rock formations are in this valley and you can hike all around them, crawl on top of them and even find a few neat caves. We eventually got back to SLC Sunday night and were worn out! But a great weekend none the less. Oh ya, I've been working too. Finally getting to work on my own with patients and am doing my own evals....but you don't really care about that :) Next weekend is Vegas so I'll let you know how that turns out!

Weekend fun

This is the view out my bedroom window.

A view from the top of Brighton at snake creek.

Shawna and I at the top at snake creek.

The rest of the week went well at the clinic and then we had the weekend to play in Utah! Friday night we went to this dualing piano bar, which was way fun and met up with two other students that work at Shawna's clinic. It was nice to get out and hang out with some new people for a little while. Then on Saturday all of us, Shawna, Matt, Chris and I went up to Brighton for a little ski/snowboard action. It was a beautiful day with blue skies and sunshine and the snow was still great! Saturday night Shawna and I went over to Park City to meet up with her friend that was in town from Texas. Even though we were drained from a day of skiing we still had a good time. We met this guy who had broken his collar bone earlier in the day and was doped up on pain killers and let us feel it...which was gross and cool all at the same time (being the nerdy PT students that we are). Easter sunday was good...the family that we are staying with had their kids and grandkids over for lunch so we hung out with them and had a good meal. All in all a pretty fantastic weekend here in salt lake! Here are some pics from the weekend.

whew!

okay, so I finally have the first couple days done with which is always the hardest. You feel awkward and are following around the PT like a little puppy dog and trying to figure out your place in this new crowd of really smart people. BUT, everyone is really nice and working to make me feel welcome and kind of show me the ropes. Hopefully it appears that I know a little bit and will start actually doing some hands on stuff in the next few days. My clinical instructor has been out of town the past two days and will be in tomorrow so that will help define my role as a "student PT." I'm nervous about actually evaluating and treating a patient, but at this point I'm a little bored just watching so I figure the only way to really start learning stuff is to actually do it! I have just come to accept the fact that it is probably going to take me at least 30 minutes to do an eval and I'll probably forget some stuff and mess up, but I'm just ready to get started! I'm starting to think I can actually do this PT stuff....I'll let you know how it works out :) Oh and I now know what adhesions sound like as they are being ripped apart in the shoulder...just like velcro!

Here goes nothing

Okay so it's finally setting in that I'm starting my clinical tomorrow and I feel like I know NOTHING! Now, I realize that this is crazy and I do know a lot but in the grand scheme of things my knowledge seems quite limited. Would it be bad if I took my MEM binder into the exam room with me, because I'm pretty sure that is going to happen! It's never as bad as I think it's going to be, I just have a little bit of the first day jitters. I'll let you know how my first day of playing physical therapist goes tomorrow. Hopefully I can sleep good tonight!!

Colorado and Utah!

The first two pics are from the back deck and the third one is the front of the house. Notice the huge snowflakes!




We finally got to Utah on thursday after leaving Amarillo tuesday and skiing in wolf creek on wednesday. The drive wasn't too bad because I was so excited to get here. I've got settled in the house we are staying in and will add some pictures later. The views are gorgeous and it has been snowing the past few days...which means that snowboarding today was FABULOUS! Nice fresh powder and no lift lines=a great day on the mountain! We are starting to figure out our way around. We found the important things like the grocery store, wild oats and REI of course. I decided to do this whole blog thing so that my parentals and anyone else who cared could keep up with the happenings in my life for the next couple months. I'll try to remember to write down good stories and post pictures, but I've never done this before so we'll see how it goes!