Archive for July, 2002

My doctor says I hurt my neck from stress. I think it may have been the way I slept or pilates. I don’t know. It still hurts a bit but I’m on good muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatories and have some fun exercises to do. :-)

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I spent the weekend housesitting at my parents’ mini-ranch. I call it a mini-ranch because it’s only 2 1/2 acres. While that is bigger than most city people will ever have, it’s rather small for rural areas.

I also call it a mini-ranch because they have miniature animals. :-)

They have horses…well, shetland ponies. Cookie and her daughter, Princes Moki (who has one beautiful blue eye) are the sweetest animals. They talked to me all weekend. Moki is barely a year old and is sassy as heck. She lets you know what she thinks of you right away. She can be sweet to one person and the next, she tries to kick. She’s funny though. She has a really cute personality. Cookie is the vocal one. She will talk and talk. She called out to me often while I was working in the yard this weekend.

My parents also have pigs. They have two potbellies. One is Trixie who was a rescue. The previous owners never cut her hooves, filed her teeth, or really took care of her. Consequently, the quick in her hooves has grown out and now her hooves can only be cut back so far. It is rather sad because the hooves are incredibly long and it’s hard for her to walk. The vet has come out and tried to do what he can but he says there is very little more we can do. She also loses her hair at the end of every summer and so she becomes bald and looks a bit scary. She’s a doll, though, and is very shy. Hohokam, on the other hand, is a little terror. He’s not even a year old, has blue eyes, and terrorizes everyone. My mom got him when he was 4 weeks old. He was very sickly and the breeder wanted someone who would take care of him. Let me tell you, this little portly thing is not sickly anymore. He delights in making Trixie squeal, loves to chase the dogs, and even likes to chase people. He doesn’t bite but it can be intimidating for a little black pig to come tearing towards you at high speeds.

Also on the mini-ranch, my parents have 3 rescue greyhounds, Kia, Leeza, and AppropriatLee (Lee for short). These dogs are astounding. There is nothing more beautiful than watching them run at full speed.

We used to breed beagles and bassetts but found that we had a hard time selling them because we fell in love. Consequently, there are 5 beagles (Dakota – who is mine, Coalie, Arizona Charlie, Sandra, and Bridget Bardot) and 3 bassetts (Rusty Lowrider, Harley, and Pancho) baying at everything and being complete joys. These dogs are the most loveable perpetual 2-year-olds that I’ve ever seen.

I felt a bit like the pied-piper this weekend. I had a pig, a dog, and a horse following me all of the time.

It was kind of fun. :-)

I can’t stay online long.  I’ve hurt my neck somehow and I am on doctor’s orders to stay still.  I’m supposed to use hot packs, cold packs, and special exercises for this thing.  So, I’ll visit you all when I can.  My apologies.

I wanted to come here to thank you all for your thoughts.  My cousin’s daughter has normalized.  She’s not having the seizures right now.  She’s still in intensive care so thoughts are definitely welcomed but she seems to be stabilizing.  Thank you all so much for your kind words.  We’ve all been worried about her.  {v}

I got to hear the heartbeat yesterday. My sister and I went to her midwife appointment and I heard the strong heartbeat of my new niece/nephew. It was pretty exciting to hear it. I’m sure I was *beaming*.

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If you are the type of person to send out thoughts or prayers, please keep my cousin’s daughter in your thoughts. She’s 8 years old and was recently flown from her home in Idaho to the children’s hospital in Salt Lake City. She started having seizures and now has blood clots in her brain. The seizures are sending new clots every hour. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

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dryadsage commented yesterday about 25 cent ice cream cones. I was thinking about that. A favorite treat of ours, when we were kids, were the 15 cent cones from Thrifty’s. Man, those were the BEST!

She reminded me, too, of the green lockbox that my mom kept all of her financial information in, much like her mom’s green notebook. Everything was totaled to the penny and my mom knew what could be spent on groceries and bills. I remember one Christmas when we got a gift certificate to Albertson’s just so we could eat. That was our Christmas present. And I’ll tell you, it was well received.

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I don’t mind my roots. I think they’ve made me appreciate the things I have in life. I also think they’ve made me the person that I am…and that’s not so bad.

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Which flock do you follow?

this quiz was made by alanna

My brother and I were talking the other night about our childhoods. He told me that he couldn’t really remember any good times. That made me really sad. I reminded him of some of the things we did as kids in Montana.

There was one summer that the UofM was offering a program called NYSP (I can’t remember what it stands for) and we got to go on scholarships. We rode a bus for an hour to get to this program that lasted all day for a few weeks in the summer. We got to learn new sports that summer. I learned how to play rugby. I loved it. I also got to swim a lot which was a complete joy for me. My brother played racquetball with a partner and they won the tournament.

I reminded him about riding our bikes all over the town during the summers. “Remember going up to the river and swimming?” I asked him. We mused, reminisced…the streakers (it was the 70s) jumping off the bridge, afraid to ride our bikes down the huge hill at the base of the mountain because it was so high but willing to sit on a skateboard to ride down that hill. laughing

We reminded ourselves of the rope swing all of us kids in the neighborhood had fashioned over the ditch so we could swing over the water and, maybe, if we were lucky, fall in it on a hot summer’s day. We would catch crawdads in that same ditch water and play with them (kids are weird, aren’t they???) :-)

I reminded him of the horse rides, the little Honda 70 trail bike, the basketball playing in the ash that had fallen from Mount St. Helens. We had to wear facemasks to go outside but there we were, playing in the ash. We collected that ash because we were entrepreneurs and wanted to sell it. We made solar ovens to cook cookies, solar viewers to watch the eclipses that seemed to occur all of the time there, and performed ice-skating and theatrical shows for anyone who would watch. We drove tractors and jeeps when we were 9 and 10.

We hated one another back then. We fought like cats and dogs. We did whatever we could to get under one another’s skin or to make life miserable for one another. We both have physical scars from the abuse we piled on one another.

Something happened along the way and we became great friends. That’s why it’s easy for me to remind him there were good times among the hardships. We were the poorest kids in our classes. We worked hard for everything we got. We built bikes out of scraps that other kids threw away. We took hand-me-downs from other families around the neighborhoods. We lived out of cars, in businesses, and took baths in cleaned out garbage cans. But these are the stuff that stories are made of and we came out ok in the end. We knew we were loved.

I reminded him of the days that I had to make dinner because mom & dad were trying to make their business work and they had to be down at the shop. “Remember the pancakes that were, in all actuality, frisbees?” He laughed.

I love that laugh.