4th House in a Year

I've been super busy with  birthdays and work and moving and friends in town and family in town and oh yea, a blizzard this week that I'm behind in telling you about all of this.


This post is about moving into house number 4 in one year.

Owls

When we sold our first house, several days before we moved, there was an owl in the front tree. It was the first time I had seen (at least as an adult) an owl in the wild, and I remember thinking "why couldn't this have shown up when we lived here?"

Two weeks before we moved out of the House in the Woods, I heard owls outside our window, several nights in a row. Again, I thought, "why haven't they been around before? Why do owls show up when I'm leaving somewhere?"

This Guy = 40!

Southern California

 My best friend turns 40 years old today.

This guy.

40?

Maybe in age, but youthful as ever in spirit, in love, in adventure.

Plus, 40 just isn't that old.

Happy birthday Eric, I love you!

Smelly Kelly

I eat stinky stuff.

I come by it honestly - this is a family trait, and may be genetic. One of our family recipes, passed down from generation to generation, is literally a mixture of crushed, raw garlic and white vinegar. Growing up, there were more jars of pickled vegetables in the refrigerator than anything else. Sardines were eaten directly from the can and last week I caught my mother drinking the pickled herring juice directly from the jar.

We smell.

Santa Buddha

Down the street from our house is a Buddhist Temple. It's really a great set-up, especially for those houses directly next to the temple. I mean, what could be better than neighbors whose primary activities are meditating and seeking peace? The monks have taken over a corner lot and house, which appears to have been a private home at one point (including an attached RV garage, but I'm guessing the monks aren't tooling around in a Westphalia.)

HailNo Does Thanksgiving

250 million year old wood

We decided to do something a little different this year for Thanksgiving. Since we had just seen family in Texas for the cutest, smartest baby's first birthday, and since we're heading back to Hand Land for Christmas, we decided to do our own thing for Thanksgiving.

Our own thing generally involves remote corners of the world.

We considered camping, but two things happened. 1) It blizzarded, and there wasn't really a good path for getting the pop-up out of the garage where we are storing it (read: really big drift in the way.) 2) where we were thinking about going had a change in the weather and got really cold. So, we packed up our camp stove, grill, picnic basket, food, hiking gear and boots, and headed to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, sleeping in a motel instead of the pop-up.

The Petrified Forest is awesome.

When Rabbits Attack

WARNING: This post contains graphic fictional and non-fictional representations of animal violence. No, not violence against animals, animals committing atrocities.

Eric and I took a walk around the back lot this weekend, and realized...

We may be dealing with rabbits like this:

I'm not kidding.