Labor Day Weekend

(I'm about a week late with this, but if I don't do it now, I'll never get it done.)

This was a busy weekend for us.  First, the snake training refresher, which many of you saw on Facebook--an awful and stressful, but totally useful and needed, event. Then, a wonderful, magical rest of the weekend!  Roadtrips, great food, rediscovering us, enjoying our dogs--it was incredible.  I didn't take any pics of the towns, restaurants or other people places we visited, but here are some of the natural highlights.

A view of the Texas hill country.

An angry cow, found on one of the numerous back roads we traveled which had loose livestock roaming around them.

A place that has become one of our favorite places in all of Texas.  

The ubiquitous cactus in bloom.

Obviously near a water source, as you won't find green like this anywhere else in this state at this scorching time of year.

Naturally terraced cactus.

The aforementioned water.  Surface water is a rare sight here in this drought.

More terraces.

DH, Don, intent on something.  :)

This might be my favorite shot of over 100 pictures.  Don, again, this time watching his step.

 Limestone cliffs near the bats.

 

Aaaargh!!!!

I've had trouble with electronics ever since I started on my current Wiccan path.  Even a little before, actually. 

For instance, I used to LOVE wristwatches.  I own close to twenty of them, I love them so much.  But I no longer wear them.  They won't last more than a handful of days after I put a new battery into them before they just quit working.  They don't slow down, they don't do anything but just stop. Also, I can no longer install software.  I can't even be near when my DH installs it or it won't work for him, either.  I've had so much trouble with my iPhone (and, subsequently, with Apple customer service) that I've changed my password to a version of "I hate Apple."  My new car is having so many electrical troubles (and Chrysler's customer service has been nothing but a big joke so far) that DH and I are seriously considering pressing a Lemon lawsuit. 

There are lots and lots of instances like that, small and large, but I won't go on.  Suffice it to say that the modern world and I no longer get along too well.  I've learned to get around it, most of the time.  But today.  Oh, man, today.

A friend of mine posted on her blog for the first time in a long time, as I'm doing now.  It's on LiveJournal, and I haven't been there since she last posted.  I thought, cool!  I'll just go over there and see what she's got to say.  Wrong.  I tried to sign into LJ and it said my password was wrong.  No problem.  Maybe I just didn't remember it after so long.  I told it I forgot my password.  It got lost in the weeds.  Sigh.  I tried a number of other times, but same problem.  I finally got it to go to the reset screen, and went through the process of resetting my password.  Then it said accounts like mine didn't have passwords.  But if I tried to enter without any password it said I needed one.  Sigh again.  So I signed in through FaceBook (and don't even get me started about FB.)  It let me in, but wouldn't let me see my friend's post.  My friend checked, and yes, I did indeed have permission to see it.  Still couldn't.  Tried more password stuff. No avail.  I then spent an hour or so trying to log out.  Hah!  Still, I finally did it.  Then I went back in with my Google password.  Finally, SUCCESS!  Although, sorry, Jenn.  By that time it was just a teensy bit anti-climatic.  :)   

But, enough of my rant.  I'm very happy that she posted an entry today, and I hope it inspires me to start posting regularly again myself.  And I'd rather have magick than technology anyway.

But do any of my witchy friends have problems like this?

The Rest of Day 8

After the tide chased us away from Hopewell Rocks, we continued our journey back.  Next stop was in the hometown of a friend of ours.  In the foreground you can see the town's famous covered bridge.

She gave us clear directions to where she grew up, but we got a little lost, so we're still not sure we got the right house!  Is this it, Angie?

 

If so, it now comes with a dog.  :)

We're fairly sure we got the correct high school, at least according to the locals, it's boarded up now, and it got to late for us to look for the new one.

 We drove into Maine late in the evening.  It was too dark to get a picture, but the Maine woods really ARE creepy at dusk.

We were so exhausted by then that we basically stopped at the first hotel we found.

Other Worlds, Adventure, An Oddball Group. . .

Since I'm not doing anything noteworthy in my own life at the moment, I thought I'd mention a webcomic by a friend of mine: 

Brymstone

By Marie Tary

It's a sci-fi/fantasy story about a group of adventurers in a future time when several worlds/universes have collided with our own.  The writing is terrific and the art is AMAZING.  (And she's only on the fourth chapter, so at this point it won't take you very long to catch up!)  If you have any interest in comics, science fiction, fantasy, roleplaying, manga, art, fiction, ongoing stories, or if you just want something new to read, check it out! (I swear I'm not making any money on this endorsement, btw, I just like the story!)

Put a little fantasy into your life!

Birthday Party

I just realized I completely forgot to post about Lance's 1st birthday party!  He turned a year old on August 22, and we celebrated on August 21st.

It was a good party, or at least we had fun.  I think everybody else did, too.  There were only 10 or so guests due to the fact that we inadvertently planned the party for the weekend of the Canadian Shiloh Shepherd Nationals, but quite a few of them commented afterward that it was a really interesting mix of people, so we were pleased.

The guests included neighbors and people that are in Lance's life--his trainers, his groomer, a few of the friends who'd help socialize way back in the beginning, and so on. And Lance had a canine guest, too--a chocolate lab puppy by the name of Hardy.  And Kai, of course.

The party and the prep went fairly smoothly, although we had a bit of a panic when, after working all day to prepare the new patio and the back yard for company, it started raining about 1/2 an hour before guests arrived.  But we got everything moved into the garage and under a dining tent, so it all turned out well in the end.  And the rain cooled everything off, so we didn't have to worry about humans or dogs overheating.

And Lance had a lot of fun.  He had so much fun in a game of chase that he broke a hurricane lamp on the aforementioned patio 'cause he couldn't make the corner!  LOL!  And so much fun that he wore both Kai and Hardy (who is a few weeks older than Kai) out by the end of the evening.  They both had to go to bed early, so Lance wound up having the human guests all to himself.  :)

The only thing I regret is that I was having so much fun I totally forgot to get any pictures.  :(  We took some of the aftermath, but it's just not the same!  I'm thinking next year we put out a few disposable cameras to make sure we get some DURING.


All in all, a very good memory!


p.s.  We did make it to Nationals the next day, and Lance took second in his age class.

An Ode to Merly

A friend of mine lost a dog a few days ago, and it reminded me that I never really posted about Merly on this blog, other than to briefly mention her passing.  I decided it was high time I did.

We got Merlyn Anne Durham in Texas, the first year that we were together.  We were driving through our neighborhood when we saw a handwritten sign announcing, "Free Puppies".  We debated back and forth for a week, before walking two blocks to inquire about the puppies.

It turns out they were what is now known as crossbreeds, meaning they were the product of two different purebred breeds.  Mom was a champion Dalmatian, and Dad was the purebred Lab that jumped a six-foot fence to get to her.  The puppies, who by this time were close to 16 weeks old, looked more like Holstein cows than they did like Dalmatians--instead of spots, they had large black splotches on their VERY white fur. 

We named her after a character on a tv show we were watching at the time, a show called "American Gothic."  The name of the young girl on the show, Merlyn Anne, went hand in hand with the name of our other dog at the time, Arthur.

Because we got her near the end of her prime socialization period, and because at the time neither we nor her dam's owners knew anything about properly socializing an animal, Merly was never really good in public.  She would bark and jump at people she saw in the distance, and she would go ballistic if she saw a dog while on leash.  It wasn't much better in the car--if she saw a dog, she would throw herself at the windows as if she wanted to go through them and murder the other animal.

Nonetheless, she was the smartest dog either one of us had ever seen, and the sweetest, and we loved her.  She moved from Texas to British Columbia to California to Ontario with us.  She loved the heat in Texas and California, absolutely HATED the rain in BC, and was cold ALL the time in Ontario.  She didn't like to be outside unless it was roasting, and spent most of her time here in Ontario either huddled in front of a fireplace or curled up on a warm dog bed.

She learned to walk at "heel" the first time we ever put her on a leash, she defended our house from intruders one day when the back door blew open while we were out, and she delighted in laying out in the sun in the hottest weather.  She ate a couch and never learned not to get things off the kitchen counter.  She was learning clicker training just by watching us teach Lance.

We got Lance to be a companion to her, to liven her up and get her moving again at the age of twelve.  And while that strategy worked, deep down she hated him.  But she never blamed us.  And four months after we got him, we discovered she had cancer.  Six weeks later, this past March, we made the incredibly hard decision to let her go.

I still miss her terribly, and occasionally still cry when I think about her, as I'm doing now.

One of her favorite pastimes:  'scroonching' in the warm sunlight.

19 Posts to a New Habit

Yay! I have another follower! (Thanks, Terri!) Maybe I'll be motivated enough to post more often! I mean, this is the second post in two days--certainly a good foundation for a 21-day-to-build-a-habit exercise. Especially good since after yesterday I have to start my 21 days for controlling my spending over!

In the meantime, I'd better get my Correspondences of Spellcraft assignment done before I get kicked out of class!

Meeting REAL people

Finally, a blog post on the actual day it happened!

Joining Covenspace paid off. I'm actually in touch with a real, live, human being near us! Yeah!