Cactus | Snerkology

Tag: cactus

Coming Up Roses

High 60′s and breezy. The cats are locked in the bathroom, the back door and garage door are open to cross-breezes, drag races on the TV, Bailey is wandering around squeaking her stuffed dragon, Gadget is begging for treats, and Bill is making the Jeep look stylin’. Today is a good day.

I’m pretty darned proud of myself at this moment in time. I’m ahead on my homework (as an aside, I’ve started having those darned dreams again, where I completely forget I’m supposed to be attending a class, and lo and behold, Finals are looming and I haven’t attended a single lecture). I’m three weeks away from finishing this semester. I have two classes to take this summer (Stats and Nutrition), two this fall (Leadership and Experiential Writing) and two to take during the winter semester (Global Business and Sustainable Solutions) and I will be DONE. D. O. N. E. DONE. DUH-UN.

And about friggin’ time.

We’re taking a vacation this summer, back to Wyoming, to re-enact parts of our epic road trip and also spend some much-needed quality time with our awesome Wyoming family. The kids will be with us this time, which is wonderful considering we haven’t taken a vacation together, as a complete family, since before Robert went into the Marines. So the five of us (that’s me, Bill, Robert, Amanda, and Amanda’s boyfriend Brandon) will be flying into Denver, driving to Laramie to spend a few days (Cheyenne Frontier Days!), then up to Jackson Hole for a handful of days (Teton National Park and Yellowstone!), over to Cody for a couple of days (Nite Rodeo and the Buffalo Bill Museum and a cheesy chuckwagon dinner!), back down to Laramie for a couple more days, then home again. I CAN’T WAIT.

I talked about it on Facebook but I don’t think I mentioned it here – about a month ago we thought Gadget was on death’s doorstep. He couldn’t breathe – he was struggling so hard we really thought he wouldn’t survive the night. He just wanted to snuggle, didn’t wag his little stump tail when we talked to him, refused all treats. I bawled my eyes out, repeatedly. But he was still soldiering on the next morning, when we had an appointment with the vet. Poor Gadge, he just lay on the floor in the exam room, instead of sniffing around and being sociable like he usually is. I really thought it was the end of the road for him. The vet gave him a diuretic and a shot for pain, and we took him home again so Amanda could visit after work and say goodbye. Within an hour, he was breathing better. Two hours later, he ate his dinner (he’d left it the night before – I don’t think I could eat if I couldn’t breathe, either). Amanda got to the house and was all, “Why, what’s the matter with him?” The next day, he was pretty much back to his usual dimwitted self. We’ve been giving him diuretic pills – it seemed he had a bunch of fluid buildup around his lungs, which these pills helped to resolve. He is utterly back to normal now and behaving in a manner that is incongruous with his actual age.

Fourteen years old and he’s going to end up outliving us all, I bet.

Something I also haven’t mentioned on this blog (“Poor neglected Snerkology” indeed, Jean!), is that Robert enlisted in the Air National Guard and has been in Texas since January. He actually left while we were in Wyoming, so we haven’t seen him since around Christmas (weird to think of it that way – we text and call each other so often it seems like much less time has passed). His schooling is up in mid-May, at which time he’ll be headed back home. His being gone just further aids the excitement about being able to take a family vacation.

Also! I’m going to Costa Rica for a business trip in the second week of May. I’m just waiting for my “expedited” passport to come back, then my boss and another co-worker and I will be headed there for a week. We may take an extra day to do the tourist thing, and I’ll take an epic ton of pictures. This will be the first time I’ve ever traveled outside the country (Canada doesn’t count). I’m excited! I’m also glad I’m going with folks who have been there before – if I were going by myself I’d probably be a nervous wreck.

I got a really good review at work.

I got a new lens.

Bill thinks if I actually say “life is good” out loud I’ll jinx it. So I won’t say it. But consider it implied.

Tiffany
April 14, 2012
Family, photography, vacation, weekend
bearded dragons, cactus, Family, macro, roses, school, work, Wyoming
2 comments

Kvetching, then pretty pretty pictures!

bugssteamtail Okay. I’m mostly set up at the desk in the bedroom. I gotta tell ya, life is much better on an HP w2207 monitor.

As previously reported, I was going to clean up Marie’s room and use it as a home office. I went upstairs to her room to assess the situation, and immediately came back down and started clearing up the desk in my bedroom. The whole carpet is going to have to replaced up there, is all I’m sayin’. Eight years of adolescent occupancy did a number on it. And I CAN’T work where my eye sees things that need to be (desperately) cleaned. Eventually, yes, I’ll tackle the two-days-worth of work to be done up there.

But it ain’t gonna be today, my gentle snowflakes.

Preparing the desk in the bedroom for work was a much smaller, easier task. It just required removing some clutter, dusting, fishing out the monitor cable, digging up the keyboard, and getting a power stick to plug my laptop into. I can’t use the keyboard yet because I need an adaptor so it can plug into my laptop’s USB port, so I’ve got my laptop cracked open and my hands wedged in there, while looking over my laptop at the monitor. It’s cumbersome, but temporary and easily remedied.

I have to plug into a power stick run across the far side of the bedroom to the desk, because there’s already two power sticks plugged into the outlet behind the desk, and all of the plugs are occupied. You should SEE the mess of cables back there (and dust, which has got me sneezing my fool head off). We have two CPU’s, random external computer speakers that never did work quite right, a scanner, a printer, the cable modem and the wireless router. Plus the aforementioned monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. OH, and a video camera. I positively ITCH to get back there, dig in, and not emerge until the unnecessary things are removed, the necessary things are neatly organized, and everything is wire-managed. But I have to wait for Calvin to get home. In talking to him on the phone this morning, the mere mention of the possibility of even thinking that I might start unplugging things sent him into a swivet. I mean, it’s not like I’m incapable of figuring out what goes where. But Sir must have Control of the Situation.

Which is fine. I get it. He’s got things going on with this whole workstation area that I’m not privy to. And he IS vastly superior at All Things Electronic. So I’ll let him do it. But it’ll bug me until it IS done. I’ll let the kitchen go to hell in a handbasket, I’ll let the laundry pile up until it rivals K2 (it’s on the bed behind me as we speak), but Heaven save me from a cluttered work area!

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Calvin and I went to the Desert Botanical Garden yesterday. We thoroughly enjoyed the Chihuly glass exhibit, and the Butterfly Pavilion. I wrote a post about it on Uptake, but I thought I’d share a few of my favorite pictures of the day with you all, here. Hover over the image for comments. Also, click on the photos for larger versions. Finally, the whole set can be seen here.