Changes

Posting has been sporadic at best over here.  Yikes.  Sorry.

Lots of things are happening (or have happened).  I finally adopted a new horse, Skeeter Bang, from the BLM.  You can read all about the horse thing if you want over at Tales from the Trail.

Jay just turned the big four-oh, and we celebrated our fifth anniversary.

Monster turns 19 on Friday.  My baby is turning 19.  Wow.  It's hard to wrap my head around that one.

In June, I start working toward my M.B.A.  Like I need one more thing on my plate, but if I want to advance at work, I must have a Master's degree, so off I go.  I chose the perfect time to start it, too, as we're in the middle of a corporate-wide massive changeover of student databases and learning management systems.  Well, there's no time like the present, I suppose.  I'll never get finished if I don't get started, right?

Also, today, Jay and I decided we're going to move.  Our lease on the apartment is up at the end of July and we love our apartment, but we have the opportunity to move into a house on the same property Skeeter is on.  Imagine, being able to look out a window and see my horse, not have to drive to see her.  It's not far, only about five minutes from our apartment, but still ... I'm pretty excited to be just steps from where she is.  Aaaannnnddd, it means that Allie-bird can move back in with us.  Our apartment is pet-free, so she had to go live with Jay's parents, but with the little house, she can come home with us.

I've got lots of ideas floating around in my little brain about my next book, but Lord knows when I'll have time to actually sit down and write.  Jay and I do have a book sale and signing coming up in June, so maybe Momma will earn some hay money :)

There are lots of things going on, but all of the changes are for the better and I'm very excited about what the future holds!

Five Already?!

I can't believe that Jay and I have been married five years.  Where has the time gone?

On one hand, I can't believe it's only been five years, and on the other, I can't believe it's already five years.

From day one, we knew we were meant to be together, so when I look back, the only five years is surprising to me.  Our lives have melded so well it seems like we've spend our whole lives together.  We even have shared, but separate, experiences that adds to the Twilight Zone feeling that we've been together forever.

How can we have shared, but separate, experiences?  It's almost eerie.  One such experience was our trip to Italy.  Same week, same year, opposite direction.  We started in Rome and ended up in Venice.  His family started in Venice and ended up in Rome.  There were times that we were within a day or so of each other. 

We've been to the same concerts - at the same time - and didn't know each other.  I worked a motorcycle rally that he was a participant in - didn't even see each other - at least not enough to make an impact.  It's crazy, isn't it, how things in our lives are timed to work out at just the right moment?

It's almost enough to give you goosebumps if you spent too much time thinking about all of our "near misses".

I don't claim to know the "why" of the timing of us finally meeting, other than it was the right time, and for that, I'm eternally grateful.  My life has changed drastically for the better since we met.

Happy Anniversary, Sexy Man.  Love you to the moon and back.

Happy Mother's Day

You may or may not know that my mother is a terrible influence on me.

Terrible, I tell you.

She's influenced me to state my beliefs; to be independent; and not to compromise with what's right.

Basically, she raised me to be a big ole pain in the ass.  You know, just like her. :)

But the area she has been the worst influence in?

Horses.

Gotta love that she can rationalize just about anything when it comes to why I need horses in my life.  When Estes came available, she reminded me that paying for a horse was cheaper than paying for a therapist.  Well, considering that period of my life, she was absolutely right.

She's been 100% behind me adopting Skeeter and then started pushing immediately for a second horse.  Because, we don't want Skeeter to be lonely, do we?

See?  She's a master rationalizer when it comes to horses.  :)

I might have learned that from her, too.

Anyway, Happy Mother's Day to the best worst influence in my life.

Love you Mom.

Newt

Jay started a new project with Newt last night and I love it!

With Ripley, he took some of the interior trim pieces and painted them the same color as her body color.  He got the idea from Kia's special editions of the Soul.  It really tied the car together and was one of my favorite customizations.

Newt's interior is much darker than Ripley's, so when Jay suggested doing the same thing to "brighten it up", I readily agreed.

I knew it would be beautiful, but I didn't quite expect it to be such an amazing change.  The Alien II color really pops against the black.

It's Just Torture, I Tell You

Jay and I are house-sitting for a friend of mine.  She's kind enough to let us use her property for shooting and is mean enough to make me come workout with her.  (I haven't made it to her house for a six a.m. workout yet and I'm not seeing that happen any time soon.)

When she asked if we could house-sit, it took me about half a second to say yes.  How could you say no to this bit of paradise?

I don't do mornings.  I hate them and don't really believe they should exist, but this morning I crawled out of bed to let her eighty zillion fowl out of the coops, feed the bucket calves, and check the four mommas who haven't managed to get their babies on the ground yet.

Holy cow, these turkeys and roosters are ginormous

They were wide awake and ready to leave the coop when I opened the door.

The not-yet-mommas

Turns out, mornings aren't so bad out here (but don't tell anyone I said that!).

After a trip to check out our first 9HealthFair of the season, I took a quick nap before starting the noon-time chores.  Here's the thing.  Actual farmers make it look easy.  Faux farmers like me huff and puff through the feeding of the animals.  I did get one hell of a shoulder workout, since the tops of the rolls of cornstalks are taller than I am.

I'm not exactly sure how many laying hens they have, but for someone who *hates* chickens, it was a feat to go gather the eggs.  I had long sleeves and leather gloves on, so I figured even if I ran into a stubborn hen who didn't want to give up her eggs, I'd be okay.

As I was reaching up into a box, I felt a hen peck at my leg, so I flicked my foot at it to shoo it away.  Only, it didn't shoo away.  It attacked me.  Full-on, wings flapping, spurs.  Wait...spurs?  I don't know if hens have spurs, but I damn sure know that roosters have spurs.  Sure enough, I looked down and there was a little rooster looking up at me like, "bring it, bitch."  In fact, not only did he look at me like that, but he opened his damn beak and cock-a-doodle-doo'd me as he puffed up for another attack.

Are you kidding me?

Little bastard wasn't so cocky once I had Jay hand me the shovel.  In fact, he might have been afraid I'd whack his head off with it and hustled out of the coop.

We managed to fill up our down time before evening chores with a little plinking.  Have I mentioned that this house-sitting gig is pure torture?

Deejo, and Jay's dad and brother came out to crack off a few rounds with us.  While we were waiting for them to arrive, we enjoyed just sitting at the picnic table in the sun.  (I might have gotten a bit too much sun, shhh.)  I looked down and saw this rattlesnake.

Dead.  Just like I like them.

We didn't manage to waste enough time plinking, so Jay and I tried our hand at pin-striping.  Newt has been pretty hard to distinguish from other Souls because she didn't have any tattoos.  We fixed that today.  Nothing as in-your-face as Ripley's tattoos, but still cute.

Not bad for a DIY job.

The requisite gun sticker.  Now Mom and Bill can identify my car.

Since she got her new tattoos, of course she needed a photo shoot.  What's the point of getting new body bling if you can't show it off, right?

Finally, time for evening chores rolled around and I made Jay come out to take pictures while I fed the babies.

This little cutie has a mommy, unlike the two I had to bottle feed.  But it's only 24 hours old and super, super cute, so we had to get pictures of he/she/it.

Now, it's bedtime and I'm plum tuckered out.  I suspect tomorrow will include a much longer nap than this morning did :)

Adventures in Baking #87930

I was almost afraid to try a new recipe after the disaster that was the Royal Blue Velvet Cupcakes.

By and large, I'm not a fan of "flour-less" anything, but this recipe for Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies from Cooking Classy caught my eye.  Even if the recipe wasn't any good, how bad could peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies be?  And with only six ingredients, not even I could screw it up.

So far, so good.

They look pretty good right out of the oven.

I got cocky with the second batch in the oven.  The directions say to let the cookies sit for five minutes before moving them to the cooling rack.  With the first batch, I only let them sit for about a minute and a half and them moved them and didn't have any problems.  When the second batch came out of the oven, I just tried to slip them onto the cooling rack.

It was a very bad idea.  They're not pretty, but they are tasty and only took a few minutes to make.  The longest part of the whole process was the ten minutes in the oven. 

Breaking in Newt (Caution: media heavy)

Newt is finally starting to feel like "my" car.

Last week, we got the parts that Jay ordered for her: a warm air intake, a strut tower brace, and a set of cold air inlets.  We invited ourselves over to Deejo's to use his garage to put all of her new stuff on. 

The inlets are the only visible change

Since we had a new car and new performance-enhancing toys on the car, we decided to take a road trip.  You know 9HealthFair season begins for me in February and runs through May, so getting away is tough.  Last Saturday was my sixth Saturday in a row teaching phlebotomy to the RN students, so the thought of running away was enticing.

Our plans were to go to Mom/Autobot's birthday party and then head out to South Dakota immediately after.  Plans never work out that way, do they?

Ashinator's car broke down and left her stranded, so we had to deal with that before we could leave.  We did get it back on the road for much less money than we anticipated it would take (Bonus!), but also left a couple of hours later than we had hoped (bummer).  I don't know why the drive through Wyoming always takes days but, man, that's a long, tough drive.

We landed in Hot Springs, SD for the night and when we got up the next morning, headed into the Black Hills.  One of the parts we put on Newt was a strut tower brace to stabilize the suspension and take some of the body roll out while driving on the mountain roads.  There was one road in particular that we wanted to try, the Iron Mountain Road.  We weren't sure it was going to be open since it was still technically winter.

We took our time getting there.  We went through Wind Cave National Park, where we saw bison.

We took Newt's picture with a fake bison and drove past some young mountain goats.

We were pretty happy that the road we wanted was open.  There was a warning sign that the road received no winter maintenance, but it was in good shape.  As we left the one of the tunnels, we saw this view:

The view as you clear one of the tunnels on Iron Mountain Road

It was pretty cool, perfectly framed by the trees.  Makes you wonder if they cut away the trees on purpose, doesn't it?

I wish we had out GoPro for the road, but we forgot it, so we had to make do with my camera for video.




It was a lot of fun.  There are a total of three corkscrews in the road and each one is just a ton of fun.

Once we met up with the highway again, we got a much clearer view of Mount Rushmore.

We've both been to Mount Rushmore and had no desire to go to the visitors' center, so we kept driving on toward Crazy Horse.  The amount of work that it takes is astounding, and they accomplish more every day, but I'm afraid it won't be finished in our lifetime, which makes me sad.  I'm also very happy that it's absolutely, 100% privately funded, without government assistance whatsoever.

Statue in front of the visitors' center

From Crazy Horse, we drove up to Deadwood and stopped in a little town along the way to (attempt) to grab something to eat.  There are definite pros and cons to traveling in the off-season.  Pro: no tourists.  Con: nothing is open.  By this time, the places we were driving through were just a blur, so I don't remember where I took these pictures, but I love the artwork.

We did manage to find the one open restaurant in Hill City.  Despite the waitress's best efforts to forget us, we were able to eat and head back out on the road to Prairie Berry Winery for "free" wine tasting.  Free, my ass.  We walked out of there with almost $100 worth of wine.  To be fair, the wine was amazing and I'm sure we'll enjoy it.

Deadwood and Sturgis didn't warrant much other than a quick pass through town to say we've been there.  We still had some time to burn before we called it a day and the Devil's Tower was calling our name.  Back to Wyoming we went.  What astounds me is how close everything is once you're in the Black Hills.  I mean, it was maybe a half an hour from Sturgis to the Devil's Tower.  I had no idea they were so close.

On our way back to South Dakota, around Beulah, we hit 1000 miles on Newt.  They were darn fun miles, too.  A lot more fun than if we would have racked them up driving back and forth to work.

I did not take this picture while I was driving.  Jay did :)

Despite all of the road time and everything we packed into one day, we still managed to find a hotel in Spearfish, grab dinner, and watch The Walking Dead (OMG!  Best. episode. ever.).

Unfortunately, Monday morning, we had to head back home so I could go to work that evening.  Why is it heading out for a road trip is so fun that even driving through Wyoming is tolerable, but driving through Wyoming on the way home seems to take days and days?

It was certainly a whirlwind weekend, but it felt good to get away, even if it was only for one (very) full day.