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.
Last weekend, while despairing at the state of my back yard, I noticed that the rose bush was freaking out with all the blooms. There were (are!) entire bouquets of roses on this poor little neglected thing that we’ve never done anything for except stick it in the ground and kind of coax one of the drip heads over toward its general direction. Apparently our neglect just served to motivate this little rose bush to Show Us that it could thrive.
