Lots of news as usual. Starting with the biggest:

1) My parents bought a house here! It’s a 5 bedroom colonial 0.3 miles from our house. They’re coming out around Thanksgiving to stay for a week or two and gets some things settled. Right now my dad is still working for Kaiser and it may be that they’ll stay in Oregon until he retires in a few years. If that happens the house will be rented in the mean time. Send positive thoughts he’ll be offered a job in the DC area!

2) My cousin Tiffany had her stem cell transplant last month. Here’s to a healthy new cancer free life. Thank god us Potter’s are all tough and hard to kill :).

3) Passed my RNC exam. The RNC is a national certification in Neonatal Nursing. You’re eligible to sit for the exam after 24 months of practice as  NICU nurse. Since most of us military people rotate before then a lot of Navy Nurses never get the chance. So there is an upside to being medically stationed a command forever! On that same note, the other day in a code on a 23 weeker I realized halfway through the reason I didn’t see the fellow was that the fellow WAS there all along…I just didn’t realize it was her because I still remembered her as the intern from four years ago! Yikes…I’ve now seen a whole intern class go through residency and graduate.

4) Todd and I are going to the UK and France next summer. I am SO excited and waste a good hour or two every week researching where I want to stay and what I want to do. I’ve already been to London once and seen a lot of the top touristy stuff, so this time I want it to be a little bit different. Definitely on the list: Dr Who tour of Cardiff (Wales)and eat at a really old pub.

5) And on the list of the disgusting: Oliver has giardia! Blech. The only good thing is we didn’t discover it because he was symptomatic- it just showed up on a routing puppy stool screen. Apparently it can takes weeks to treat. Greeeaaat.

6) I suppose I couldn’t end the list without mentioning thyroid cancer somehow or another. The last few days I’ve had this awful salty taste in my mouth between meals. Imagine tasting seawater every so often with no warning. Yet another potential side effect of the RAI. Somewhat comfortingly another woman on the thyroid cancer Yahoo listerv told me she had the same thing happen months after radiation and that it eventually went away. I hope it does for me too! Other than that I’m feeling well enough, and I won’t have any more scans/tests until this fall.

Hope everyone is enjoying their August,

Kate