breathing again....

Flatiron Lake in the Bighorns

Good morning and a happy Thursday to everyone! We’ve almost made it to the end of the week again! Time to get a spring in our step and start looking toward the fun we all have planned for the weekend, right?

Remember I told you yesterday that I was getting over my telephone reluctance by accepting an assignment to cold call a bunch of Wyoming businesses for the Chamber?  Well, I lied. Instead, I pretty much had a meltdown yesterday over the whole thing, darn it. I thought I had it under control but everything I did to try to make it go smoothly just turned into more and more anxiety for me. I had even typed up my little speech of what to say to these people.  But the closer I got to making that first phone call, the worse I got.  I spent two and a half days getting ready and I wigged out.  I ended up going down to the Chamber office and telling Rachel that I just couldn’t do it.  I have agreed to go personally visit all the local businesses in town that have Made in Wyoming stuff and talk to them face to face but I told her I just can’t do the phone calls. I  know that she probably thinks I’m a total freak and I’m beginning to agree with her.  I guess we all have things we just can’t get over.  Poor Rob has had to deal with this aspect of my personality for many years and I don’t think even he really gets it. Hell, I don’t even get it!

People think I’m really extroverted but I’m not.  I’m one of those people that’s really shy around new people although you’d never know it.  I’m always trying to make up for it by being overly friendly but inside I’m shaking like a leaf.  I guess we all have our little personality faults and we just drove into the cavern of mine.  I don’t think I’ll be trying any more experiments in trying to  overcome this one in this lifetime.  I have actually quit my membership on boards because I can’t make the stupid phone calls and I should have known better.

I must say, I feel a lot better today, though.  The tension I’ve been carrying since I got this assignment last Friday is finally gone. From now on, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut when people are looking for volunteers! 

Speaking of volunteers, we have our Small Business Expo here at the fairgrounds tomorrow.  We have a booth for our business, Wild Wyoming Images, once again this year.  This is one of my favorite shows that we do during the year.  The Expo goes on Friday and Saturday and there’s going to be a lot of local small business people there.  They incorporate a Business After Hours cocktail party on Friday night into it, too.  I believe we’ll have live music and the Invasion Bar down in Kaycee usually caters the food.  Amanda, who owns the Invasion, is an incredible cook and always had really yummy appetizers!  I’m not sure who is providing the beer and wine.

It’s going to be a long two days, though.  We have to set up in the morning tomorrow and there’s a vendor meeting/luncheon and then the doors finally open to the public from 3-7 tomorrow and then again on Saturday from 9-3.  The reason it’s one of my favorites is that it is the first time all season we see a lot of people that have been holed up all winter.  It’s a big social gathering for everyone in town.  The Chamber always has great prizes for this, too. I think this year they are giving away a flat screen TV and several nice trips. Our booth is going to be right next to St Francis Animal Shelter, and I know Olin is bringing a bunch of kittens from the shelter to entice people to come adopt!  So, I’ll have lots of fun with them for the duration of the show!

Cloud Peak in the Bighorns

So, today, I’ll be getting everything ready for the show, making sure we have everything ready to go.  We just had that show in Sheridan so it shouldn’t be too much trouble, everything is pretty much ready.  I think all I really have to do besides pull everything out and check it off the list is to go get our cash bank together.  I did notice that there’s a lot of fingerprints on the 18 x 24 photos (people really like to go through those) so I may have to change out some of the plastic coverings we use to protect the photos from all those grubby hands.

Other than that, I think Thistle and I are going to try to hit Mtn Plains Park for a walk at some point today after my morning tan.  It’s supposed to be gorgeous again today.  Everything in the flower garden’s coming up like gang busters right now.  I was out at my friend Sherry’s house yesterday and all her tulips are up and almost ready to bloom, which is usually unheard of this time of year.  Sherry has had an ear infection that she just can’t get rid of! She got antibiotics for it and it turned out she’s allergic to them, causing her some severe reactions and not helping to get rid of the infection.  As I left her yesterday, she was headed to a specialist in Sheridan.  She’s been battling this for about two weeks now, the poor dear.

Well, I hope you have a fantastic day.  I know I will now that I don’t have to call anyone I don’t know!

Scientists have found the gene for shyness. They would have found it years ago, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes. ~ Jonathan Katz

yay...halfway through the week!

Full moon pic of windmill

Hey, we’ve made it half way through the week already! How did that happen? I swear the days are just flying by!  Good thing, because I am getting really ansty about going on vacation and I really need them to go quickly right now.  I’m impressed because usually it’s the other way around and time just drags when I have something fun planned.

Rob has our itinerary all planned out for the trip and has managed to fix it so that we get to spend more time with some friends in Sedona than we first thought we’d be able to. I just love being married to a “planner”.  He is the one who does all the lists in the family and although I’m always teasing him about his list making, it really comes in handy! He has made a great list of the things we need to take along in addition to having already scoped out all the good restaurants along the way.  Bless his heart, he’s even included a few sushi restaurants for me!

We are such an odd couple, I swear.  He’s a meat eater, I’m a vegetarian.  He’s a little on the anal retentive side (okay I’m being nice, he’s really anal, okay) and I’m what I call anal explosive.  I couldn’t write a list of things to do if my life depended on it.  He plans life out very concisely while I plod through it, hoping I get things done.  Rob is very detail oriented while I am a big picture type.  They say opposites attract and in this case, they are right.  We balance each other out very nicely.  We also have more fun on trips than most people do.  Rob has even burned a bunch of music cd’s just for this trip with music he thinks will be perfect for it.  That’s another thing I love about him, his taste in music.  If you were to meet him for the first time, you’d no doubt “label” him as to what you think those tastes might be.  I bet you’d be way off the mark.  Rob has one of the encyclopedic minds when it comes to music.  He knows just as much about Beethoven’s sonatas as he does about hard rock.  He likes a little more country than I care for but that’s okay.  At least he has an open mind when it comes to the new music that’s always coming out.  He’s one of those people, though, who can hear a song and tell you who is singing, what year it came out and whether or not it was a “one hit wonder”.  That just fascinates the heck outta me!  I tend to like music because I like the melody or the words, I can never remember who the heck is singing but I know I like something when I hear it.  If it weren’t for him, I’d probably not have any music on cd’s as I wouldn’t know what to get.

I guess I just don’t have that kind of mind. I’m the same way with reading books.  I don’t just read them, I consume books!  But, two days after I’ve read it, don’t ask me what it was about.  I might be able to give you the gist of the story but I never remember any details.  I have a lot of favorite authors but I couldn’t tell you who they were unless you remind me of their names. Funny how some people can keep all that little information in their brains while others, like me, just can’t.

Of course, I try to tell him it’s because I have all this medical jargon and scientific stuff cluttering up my brain.  That’s where my memory comes into play, I guess. I think we all have things our brains consider important and that’s the stuff we tend to focus on remembering. Of course, in true wife fashion, I also know where everything is in the house he’s misplaced. I often wonder how Rob would even fix himself dinner if I weren’t here.  I swear that man doesn’t even know where the pots and pans are kept.  He’s a great cook, though.  Back when I still worked as an RN, I worked 12 hours shifts and Rob always had dinner ready when I got home.

Anyway, so I’m getting really excited about our trip.  We leave two weeks from tomorrow! Because the entire US has been having this great early spring, we are ensured we are going to have lots and lots of nice wildflowers to take pictures of when we get down to Arizona and Utah. I am also really looking forward to visiting with some people we haven’t seen in a long time.  Don Weir, who used to run one of the local motels here in town for his brother, lives down in Wickenburg now.  We’re going to be spending the night with him and his new girlfriend, Judy, while we’re there.  Don is a very interesting cowboy who has worked in a lot of really neat places over his lifetime and has more stories than most people.  He’s even run the guest ranch down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  That place is only accessible by mule or hiking.  I can sit for hours and listen to Don talk stories about some of the places he’s lived! His late wife, Odie, was one of my best friends here before she died suddenly of a brain aneurysm back in 2006. His new girlfriend, Judy, reminds me a lot of her, same spunky attitude.

Playing in the backyard with Thistle!

Yesterday was a very laid back day here around the Yingling household.  The wind finally died down, at least.  Thistle and I didn’t get a whole lot done except to go get some lawn fertilizer for the yard, which Rob applied last night.  The rest of the time, I was busy trying to get my little spiel written up for talking to all these Wyoming vendors I have to start calling today to get their products for those gift baskets I was talking about yesterday. 

This calling is going to be a pretty big deal for me.  I have what I like to call “telephone reluctance”.  I don’t know why, I’m a chatterbox and I love talking to people but I just hate calling people I don’t know on the phone.  I actually agreed to do this for the Chamber because I really need to get over this phobia. It’s just silly and I don’t know what my problem is. There’s just something otherworldy about talking on the phone I don’t like, I guess.  I can’t see people’s faces and I guess that’s part of it. But, today, I’m going to be spending most of it cold calling these folks and we’ll see how it goes. I sure hope a lot of them want to send stuff!

Well, folks, it’s hump day and it’s all gonna be smooth sailing into Friday from here, right?  I hope you really enjoy your day and find something special to make you smile.

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”~ Elizabeth Gilbert

blowing into Tuesday....

starting to clear out the snow!

Yesterday was an enormously blustery day here in Buffalo! The wind just seemed to be never ending! The actual temperature was really nice, I think it got up to almost 74, but it was hard to get out and enjoy it with everything flying past you at breakneck speeds.  Once the birds finished half the seed I put out in the feeder yesterday, the platform insert went flying into my neighbors yard.  Even Thistle, who usually really enjoys the wind, was a little spooked yesterday.  I know we had to have had gusts in the 50-60 mph range, at least.

After going to my tanning, I stopped by and visited with a friend for a little bit and then I headed home to get out of the freaking sandstorm that was being whipped up by all this darn wind.  Instead of salt, they use dirt here in the winter for keeping the streets safe and because we had a weird winter, the clean-up has been slow.  Well, yesterday, all that dirt they had distributed made it look like a sandstorm out on the main drags, there were times you couldn’t see the mountain for the swirling dust!

So, I spent most of the day trying to find things to do indoors.  I did manage to finally read a book that I’ve been meaning to finish for some time now.  Thistle hates it when I read, she thinks I should be doing something with her, instead.  She spent the whole time coming back and forth to my chair and nudging the back of my book, the little devil.  Luckily, I only had a couple of chapters left and was able to spend time playing with her after I finished.

I'm still so sore from all that raking I did over the weekend, so I also spent a little time in my portable sauna, hoping to ease some of that muscle soreness.  It helped a bit but it's still going to be awhile before I pick up that rake again!

For dinner last night, we hit the Moose Lodge for some of Jason's fine ribeye french dip sandwiches.  Twice a month, Jason cooks on Mondays for us.  One week, it's hand cut ribeyes and then on the other Monday, he does the french dips.  They were absolutely yummy, although I really don't eat red meat anymore so Rob ate most of mine.  There was a nice crowd there, too, especially for a Monday.  

I think the wind is finally dying down this morning.  I certainly hope so as I would like to be able to take Thistle for a walk.  It’s only supposed to be in the 50’s but I think the sun will be out so it will still be a nice day.

This afternoon, I will be calling a bunch of vendors for the Chamber of Commerce. I think I told you we have this huge convention coming here at the end of April called the RMI (Rocky Mountain International).  The goal of RMI is to promote the region to the European travel trade.  My assignment is to get Made in Wyoming vendors to send us products that we’re going to put in gift baskets to be given out during the three day conference.  So, I have a list of about 250 vendors to call in the next week or so.  We are going to be putting a few of our photos from Wild Wyoming Images in there, as well.  This is a great opportunity for Buffalo to showcase itself as a destination vacation spot and our Chamber has really been putting everything into it to make it successful.

A Robin trying to stay out of the blustery wind!

Other than that, nothing much is going on around here at the moment.  I’m still waiting to get all my medical records from Billings Clinic before I can proceed any further with my quest for a clinical trial.  I swear, these people move slower than mud.  The folks at NIH want to know if I’ve already had a blood test for the marker they are looking for, to see if I qualify for their trial.  So, I have to wait for all the test results from Billings before I can proceed any further.  As I said before, if I don’t have that marker, I’m going to be going for the stem cell transplant trial in Seattle.  That one, I’m sure I’ll qualify for with no problem but it is the more dangerous trial. So, I guess I’ll just twiddle my thumbs until Billings gets around to sending me my records.

I’m going to make this short and sweet today.  Hope you are having a fantastic week and everything is going your way! I’m off to do my Nia workout and see what kind of trouble I can get into!

limping into Monday...

Buffalo's municipal pool - it's huge and free! Notice the olympic lanes go sideways.

Holy Cow, today I feel like my arms got stretched twice the length they should be!  I think I may have said that yesterday was going to be a nice, relaxing day, didn’t I?  Well, I lied!  It was such a gorgeous day that Rob and I spent quite a bit of it outside working in the garden and on the lawn again.

We had a lot of ice that accumulated in several spots in the front yard this past winter.  That doesn’t usually happen, but this year the darn stuff just sat in one spot, right on either side of the front walk.  It took months, I swear, for those two little ice islands to melt.  We tried real hard not to use any chemicals on the sidewalk as we found out in prior years that can really do a number on the grass.  Oh sure, they say on the container of ice melt that it’s safe for plants and animals, but they lie, they always lie.  I think they get a kickback from the grass seed people, if you ask me.

Anyway, what resulted from all that ice sitting so long, was a ton of dead grass.  In order for the healthy grass to start coming back out, we have to thrash out the dead stuff.  So, silly me, I decided yesterday that I was up for the task of using the thrashing rake to start pulling out some of that darn dead grass.  I don’t know if you have ever seen those particular rakes, they look like a medieval weapon!  They have a series of blades on both sides and you have to hold them at a certain angle or they’ll pull up everything, including the dirt. I only worked on a pretty small spot yesterday and now I can barely move my arms! I’m thinking that for the rest of the job, we may need to go rent one of those thrashing mowers because otherwise, it may take me til next winter to finish this project. 

When my arms started feeling like jelly, I switched to the regular rake and finished getting all the dead leaves out of our hedgerow that we are trying to grow in front of the house.  Our lilac hedgerow circles almost our entire property and for the last few years we have been trying to get it to grow on the last little bit of the front so we can block our view of the neighbors across the street.  Because it’s still sparse, the leaves from everyone’s trees seem to accumulate there all winter.  It was all packed down and starting to turn to mulch.  I had to get it out, though, as we have that all graveled with scoria rock and the leaves were just making it look messy. It amazed me that I got almost two full bags of leaves out of that little area!  While I was doing that, Rob was filling the flower gardens with fresh topsoil.

We have a great system here with the landfill.  Everyone takes their yard waste to them and they compost it and screen out all the yucky stuff and then you can go and pick up as much of it as you want after it’s turned into good soil again.  It’s free if you load it yourself and only $10 if they use the backhoe to fill your truck bed for you. Rob had gotten a whole truck bed full on Saturday and did a nice job yesterday of topping off the gardens. I can’t believe how much stuff we’ve gotten done so far this spring, we are way ahead of schedule!

I also spent several hours trimming my clematis vines.  That’s one of my favorite features of the garden out front and we now have four vines spaced along the front.  You have to let them sit with their squiggly vines all winter because they put out new shoots all over the dead vines.  You wait until spring to see where the new growth is coming out before you start trimming all the branches.  Ours have gotten so big, I have them tied up to the trellises so they don’t sag in the summer.  It’s a lot of work to trim them back in the spring but the payoff is incredible.  I have several different kinds of clematis, one makes purple flowers the size of your outstretched hand that blooms all summer and then I have several that are variegated and a little smaller in bloom.

The big clematis in bloom

So, this morning, I’m stiffer than heck, let me tell you! I took some ibuprofen last night before bed to stave off the worst of the muscle soreness, so I have no idea what I would have felt like otherwise! I’m not really complaining, though, it felt so good to be out in the sunshine working.  Rob has asked me to delay fixing dinner at the regular time for the rest of the week so he can go out after work every evening to work on stuff some more as the weather forecast is still saying we’re going to have lovely weather all week.

Today really is going to be an easy day, I think.  I have my tanning to do, first thing, of course. I should be able to stop that real soon if the weather continues like it’s been going. I would much rather get my sunshine naturally, if I can.  I think I told you that I have a skin condition that requires me to get a certain amount of sunshine, or I break out in a nasty rash.  It’s one of the lovely side effects of having AIDS. It’s called eosinophilic foliculitis and they believe it’s caused by my low t-cell count, causing eosinophils to attack the sebum (oils produced in the skin) of my sebaceous gland cells.  The only treatment is steroids or sunlight.  Since steroids deplete your immune system even further, I have to go with the sunlight. I’m probably one of the few people you’ll ever run across that actually has a dermatologist’s prescription to go torture myself in a tanning bed. As I said before, I’ve found I only need to go twice a week to keep the rash at bay, thank goodness.  I get really tired of slathering myself with lotion all the time to combat the dry skin that results from the tanning.  I also have to go twice a year to get checked for skin cancer because of it. Bizarre, eh?

Thistle munching her big bone

The rest of the day is pretty open at the moment.  I may have to go track down some girlfriends and see if anyone wants to go for a nice hike later.  I know Thistle is ready for a nice long walk, that’s for sure.  She was not happy that we spent most of the weekend in the front yard, away from her.  She let us know by digging more of her extra special holes in the middle of the backyard.  I guess I’ll be filling those back in today, the little cuss!

I hope you have a wonderful week and that your Monday starts it off right!

soaring into Sunday....

Last summer's Great Blue Heron at Kumor Rd lake

Man, the weekend sure does fly by, doesn’t it?  How come the rest of the week doesn’t do that? Rob and I had a really nice one yesterday but I swear there just aren’t enough hours in the day! Of course, it would seem longer if I didn’t sleep half of it away, I’m sure. 

We went for a nice drive in the morning yesterday around our favorite scenic tour of Kumor Road and the lake on our way to Sheridan.  The birds are really coming out now out there.  The little lake on Kumor is almost completely unfrozen now. We really thought it was at first glance, but on further inspection, we saw that a bunch of the geese were sitting on a very thin layer of ice on the far side.  I bet their little feet get cold standing on that!  Maybe that’s why they were so loud?  Gosh, I tell you, those geese can really get to honking when they want to. We saw some nice rough legged hawks nearby, too, but still no migrating blue herons yet.  I guess we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves with the nice weather.  I keep having to remind myself that it’s still only March!

While in Sheridan, we stopped and got our usual Saturday Dragon Wall Chinese Buffet fix, that always wipes away any lingering nastiness from the prior night’s drinking.  Luckily, I’d been so busy talking Friday night, I really only had one drink.  I’ve started drinking something new I really like.  It’s called Birddog Blackberry Whiskey and it’s really yummy. I know it sounds sweet, but it’s really not.  It has a hint of blackberry in it, not overpowering like a cordial. Rob, on the other hand, had his usual amount of scotch and beer and really needed the buffet yesterday!

We also had to stop by the Verizon store and see my favorite guy about my dumb Blackberry phone.  It’s had this annoying habit of rebooting itself every hour or so. That’s not very conducive to being able to use it, now is it?  It takes the darn phone about 5 minutes to get itself back to normal mode every time it does that.  I had stopped in to see Jerry about it last week and he’d said I might be overextending my RAM on it and he had done some upgrading on it and told me to see if that fixed the problem.  Well, it didn’t, so we stopped back in to see what we needed to do next.  Turns out, there was just a little wiggle room between the battery and the connectors and every time I set it down or put it in my pocket, it would lose the connection and reboot! We stumbled on this fact because as I tossed it on his desk, it went into rebooting itself!  I was giggling as he used a “high tech” fix of placing a folded business card to complete the connection to tighten it!  Oh well, I’m due for a new phone in January and I guess we’ll just deal with the business card fix til then.  No way am I paying $600 for a new phone in the meantime when I can get a free one then.

With the phone finally fixed, we headed over to the local camera store so Rob could buy a new chip for the camera I bought him for Christmas.  Since we’re going on a long vacation in a couple of weeks, we need lots of chips to hold all the photos we’re going to be taking.  He also needs a new camera backpack to hold his three cameras now.  The old one is starting to fall apart from so much trail use.  He found a couple that he likes but none that would allow him to have telephotos on two of the cameras, already connected, in the bag, so we’re still looking. I tell you, photography is an expensive job/hobby!  I can’t wait until we finally get rid of most of his web business and only have to deal with the expenses from the photography business! I won’t complain too much, though, as Rob is an incredible photographer and we usually recoup his expenses quickly from the sales.

A bunch of pelicans from last year, too!

Upon our return from Sheridan, I decided I needed a little nap, which turned into an all afternoon slumber. I must have really needed it as I slept from about 1 p.m. til 5 p.m.  While I was sleeping, Rob created two new flower beds out in the front yard.  He did one out in front of our pretty bear carving, surrounding it with some scoria rock.  The other one he did around our new Canada Cherry tree.  We’re going to plant some blanket flowers in the beds that will come up every year and give it some nice bright colors in the summer.  Rob did a beautiful job and I can’t wait to get the flowers in!

Since I was so out of it from my long nap, Rob graciously fixed his own dinner last night.  I just love it when he does that!  I just had some tomatoes and blackberries for dinner, as I was still full from the buffet and had not been out gardening like he had.  Hmm, I’m sensing a theme of blackberries for the day as I read back through what I’ve written here! I drank blackberries Friday night, fixed my Blackberry, and ate blackberries, weird! I guess I really like those things, huh?

Anyway, today is another easy day.  I don’t have too much to do except for the usual laundry and house cleaning.  It’s supposed to be another beautiful day so I imagine we’ll take another drive.  We haven’t been up on the mountain in a while, maybe I can talk Rob into going for a drive up there! With all the wind we’ve been having, I imagine the roads should be pretty dried up by now so there should be too much mud on the trail roads.  That’s the only problem with Spring around here, they close a lot of the forest roads when they get too muddy from all the runoff from the snow on the mountain. 

Well, I hope you all have a magnificent Sunday and you find something fun to do, as well!

slothful Saturday....

Mtn Plains Park windmill at sunrise

Good morning, all my festive friends! I hope everyone had a fabulous Friday!  It’s so nice to finally get to the weekend!  It’s going to be an incredible one here and I can hardly wait for Rob to get up so we can get out and start enjoying it.  Yesterday it got up to almost 80 here and I think it’s supposed to stay that way all weekend!

People around here are getting really antsy with the weather to start doing things in the garden but it’s really too early. I’m afraid Mother Nature still has a few surprises up her sleeve for us, she’s just lulling us into a false sense of security.  I have yet to see a spring around here where it didn’t snow at some point in May and early June! You sure couldn’t tell by my front yard, though.  My lilac hedges are sprouting leaves like crazy, I think this is the earliest I’ve ever seen that happen.  I sure hope the poor little tender buds don’t get frosted by some bizarre weather!  My lilac hedge is the crowning glory of our yard every spring and it usually bursts into bloom around the end of May.  It is so intoxicating to walk outside when it’s in bloom! The hedge wraps around three of the four sides of our property and when it’s blooming, you smell lilacs all through the house for weeks!

Yesterday, I was so busy, I hardly had time to think!  We had a really nice Chamber Coffee meeting early in the morning which Rob and I had to escape early from as we had a workshop at the Hampton on water wise planting of perennials and weed control that started before the coffee was over.  It was a great workshop and we learned a lot of great stuff about planting.  Because of our extremes in temperature here and our “microclimate”, it can be tough to get things to grow, even things that are supposed to come back every year.  This workshop focused on planting things that are native to this kind of weather.  I came away armed with all kinds of great information, including a nice list of plants that will survive our harsh environment here. Now, I really have the “bug” to start planting!  They did solve one of my biggest mysteries and made just that one tidbit of information worth the whole morning.  Our state flower is the Indian Paintbrush and it’s a beautiful flower.  I’ve been trying to grow it for years now and it always dies.  I found out yesterday that it’s a “sucker” plant, which means it likes to have another plant to latch onto to grow!  So, you are supposed to buy one that is growing alongside something else!  I’ve been trying all these years to grow it from seed, which I found out is almost impossible! So, maybe this year, I’ll finally have some success.

After the workshop, we had a nice lunch with Zack and Carol Ann at the local Chinese restaurant.  It seems everyone else in town had the same idea yesterday!  It was packed when we got there.  I’m so glad to see the restaurant doing well.  The new owners are really nice and their food is so much better than the last owner’s.  Tommy, the owner now, is a sweet chatterbox, although at times, he talks so fast with his Asian accent, I only catch half of what he’s saying.

Rob dropped me back at the house after lunch so I could spend some quality time with Miss Thistle. The poor dear was stuck in her kennel all morning because we were gone and she was not real happy about that. I made sure we got in a nice little walk around the neighborhood before I set to making my appetizers for happy hour. Of course, Thistle was more than happy to stay right with me while I was doing that!  She’s my chief pre-washer before things go in the dishwasher, you know. I’ve always wanted to name a dog Prewash but Rob won’t let me.

Thistle directing my cooking from the greatroom

I managed to finally get through to my GYN’s office and get scheduled for a biopsy, too. I had a bad pap result a couple of weeks ago and now we have to see what it means.  I’m a little worried as I had cervical cancer back in 1990.  Back then, they did a conization, where they try to remove the cancerous area, but at the time there were no clear borders so they ended up giving me a partial hysterectomy.  I haven’t had any further problems in 22 years until just now.  One of the big things they are finding with AIDS patients recently is that we are way more susceptible to all forms of cancer. You can probably see why I’m a little concerned.  Unfortunately, they are unable to do the procedure until after I get back from vacation. I was really hoping to be able to go off with this already resolved, but what are you going to do? I’m not panicking or anything, it’s just an uneasy feeling, if you know what I mean. I told Rob, I’ve fought off bigger, meaner cancer in the past, this little thing isn’t going to rattle me too much.

Happy hour last night was a whole lot of fun!  We had quite a nice crowd, including a few people that rarely get to join us.  Ray and Becca managed to find a babysitter so they came out for a bit and Jim and Breean’s mom was in town so they got their first “date night” since they’ve moved here and joined us for a bit before heading out for dinner.  If we didn’t solve all the world’s problem’s last night, I think we came pretty darn close.  Dawn showed us this magnificent body art she did on one of her pregnant friends that was just awesome.  Gosh, that woman is talented! One of these days, I’m going to hire her to do something on me, I think, if I can talk Rob into letting me do it.  I’d love to be a canvas, I think that’d be wild!  Dawn travels all over the country to do her work.

Well, not much else is happening at the moment.  Today is going to be an easy day of just puttering around and going on a little drive to see what we can photograph, I think. The meadowlarks are finally back so I imagine we’ll take a drive over to that little pond near the lake to see if any other birds have come back for the spring. I can’t wait for the pelicans and all the big birds to hit the pond.  The geese are sure back in full force, honking everywhere!

Have a wonderful weekend, folks!!

Friday frenzy!

View from the park, see that road on the right going to mtn? That's our roof you can see where the road seems to end!

Hallelujah and pass the peas, we made it to Friday! Gosh, yesterday was the most glorious day yet in the little burg of Buffalo, too!  My car thermometer actually registered 77 degrees at one point in the afternoon.  I spent as much time as absolutely possible outdoors, yesterday. I have to tell you this is the warmest March I’ve ever seen in the 14 years we’ve lived here.  There’s already a lot of talk in town, though, about the upcoming fire season, and what kind of impact this warm spring is going to have on our beautiful national forest. I keep reminding people that the water content up on the mountain is still good, and we aren’t out of the woods for snow for the spring yet, either.  It’s funny how we are so attuned to the weather here.  Of course, there’s bizarre warm weather all over the country this season.

Yesterday, I took Thistle along when I went to tan.  She’s become quite the little lady when I take her for drives now.  She sat patiently for the 15 minutes I was in Kris’, waiting in the driver’s seat, looking like she was going to be my chauffeur.  I can now completely trust her in the car.  It doesn’t hurt that all the ladies coming in and out, coo and stop to talk with her through the cracked window while she’s sitting there, of course.

After tanning, we headed over to Mtn Plains Heritage Park, which is only a couple of blocks from the house but can seem a world away because of the magnificent view.  There were already a bunch of people with their dogs there at 9:15 when we arrived.  It looked like I wasn’t the only one who was intent on taking full advantage of the beautiful day. I couldn’t believe how warm it was out there, and there wasn’t the usual wind whipping around the park.  It was just a beautiful, calm day!  As soon as we got out of the car, Thistle had to do her usual barking at the big bronze statue of the bison, which I find hilarious!  Every single time we go to the park, she’s convinced that bison is real.  Once again, we had to spend the first 5 minutes checking out the statue to make sure it wasn’t real.  Thistle, of course, starts off with her hackles all raised, circling closer and closer, until she finally realizes that dumb statue isn’t going to attack her. 

When we finally got moving on the trails, we ran into several people who had their dogs and of course, had to stop and talk, allowing all the dogs to meet.  Thistle just loves other dogs and that’s so awesome.  My last golden, Tumbleweed, really didn’t like other dogs and it was a constant problem when we would encounter others, as she really hated having her butt sniffed.  Thistle, on the other hand, thinks absolutely every dog should be her friend, and especially the little dogs.  So, for the first round of walking, we did more socializing than anything else.  Pretty soon, the other walkers all drifted back to their cars and we were alone on the park’s paths and that’s when we really started having fun.  I got Thistle running as much as I could so I could wear her out a little.  I was amazed how well my knee held up, too!  This morning it feels just fine.  Anyway, we ended up spending about 2 hours out at the park, enjoying the scenery, running our fool heads off and taking short breaks on the park’s covered benches. 

We got back home just in time to make lunch and I figured Thistle would be totally pooped out from all the exercise.  So, I made myself a nice cold sandwich, which I put on the dining room table and went back into the kitchen to make Rob’s lunch, which yesterday, was hot roast beef and sugar snap peas.  I was only gone from the dining room about 2-3 minutes.  As I come back into the dining room, I see that Thistle has grabbed my sandwich off the dining room table, eaten the whole thing, and all that’s left is a couple of pieces of lettuce on the floor! I was so mad but I was also laughing so hard, just from the thought of how fast she had to scarf that down.  So, we learned a new lesson yesterday…Thistle is now big enough to grab stuff off the table! At least it was something healthy and not something that would cause her harm.  She spent the next couple of hours sleeping off the sandwich, totally knocked out in a turkey stupor.

While she was sleeping off her feast in the kennel, I took off to visit Breean and her son, Wyatt. If you remember, Breean is the new co-planner’s wife, who just moved here from Basin.  She said they are getting more and more acclimated to Buffalo and really enjoying it.  She’s gotten a part-time job that will be starting in a month so we’ve still got some time to hang out together before that starts.  It was still such a beautiful day, we sat out on her back deck, almost sweating in the sunshine.

Football in the backyard!

When I got back to the house, Thistle was rousing from her comatose state and I took her out in the backyard for some play time with her football until Rob got home. All in all, it was just a perfect day! I even managed to get some medical appointments scheduled that I’ve been putting off. 

Today is going to be a really busy day.  We have our monthly Chamber of Commerce Coffee this morning at 7:30.  It’s early this month because we have a Chamber Small Business Expo next Friday and Saturday (we have a booth for that).  After the Chamber Coffee, Rob and I are signed up for a Small Acreage workshop that’s being sponsored by the Lake Desmet Conservation District.  That’s going on from 9-12 at the Hampton Inn.  We went last year to their workshop on trees, shrubs and bugs and really got a lot out of it.  This one is concentrating on water wise landscaping with perennials and weed identification and management.  It’s a constant battle here with the wildest assortment of weeds!

At 12:30, we’re meeting Zack, the City Planner and his wife, Carol Ann, for lunch at the local Chinese restaurant.  That’s always a hoot.  Because they have teenagers, we don’t get to socialize with them a whole lot, even though they are two of our favorite people, so we try to have lunch or dinner with them at least once a month.  They keep joking that it will only be a couple of more years before they get their own childhoods back when these last two kids go off into the world.  Carol Ann has 6 kids, so I know she’s looking forward to that day!

The afternoon, I pretty much have to myself but I need to spend that getting appetizers ready for happy hour this evening.  I think I told you that Rob is pre-diabetic so I have to make sure he has something to eat when we go out for cocktails.  Our table of friends has been getting larger and larger lately at the Moose, we’ve recruited quite a few friends for membership lately, so I have a lot of food to make.  Today I’m going to be making some little appetizers with fresh mozzarella balls, basil, and cherry tomatoes that were a hit a few weeks ago.  I also have some leftover sourdough bread I’m going to chunk up and make rosemary garlic toast with. Of course, for Rob’s meat addiction, there has to be a bunch of cut up sausages to go along with the whole shebang.  I found some great coppicollo , ham and  salami while I was shopping the other day.

Sometime in the afternoon, I have to find the time to take Thistle for a walk, because it’s supposed to be even nicer than yesterday!  Whew!  I think I’m really going to be ready for my weekly Captain Morgan by the end of the day, wouldn’t you say?

Another pretty view from the park

I hope you have a wonderful Friday and an even more special weekend.  If it’s nice, don’t spend it inside, get out there and enjoy nature!  Everything here is sprouting out buds like crazy!