Is that a chickadee in your pocket?

One of my new favorite past times is bird watching. I'm trying my hand at photography, too, with some success. Unfortunately the birds flee if I'm outdoors, so everything is through a window. My camera doesn't have the greatest zoom, either, so bear with me. Still, here is a small sample of some of the birds I enjoy observing. Click on the pictures for full sized versions.

This fellow on the left is a Ringneck Dove. I think he might be a juvenile because his feathering doesn't seem as sharp or developed as some of the other birds... or maybe he's just slow? He's pretty friendly though and fun to watch.

This is a familiar scene - those small doves with the "scale" like feathers are called Inca Doves. They're not really supposed to be this far north, but there you go. They're about as big as a Robin and quite cheeky little fellows.

Here are some close ups of the Inca doves. Aren't they just charming?


Last but not least is my favorite bird, the Junco. These little folks have a black back and a bright white belly. They're cheerful and make lovely sounds. All of the aforementioned birds, including the Junco, eat mostly the corn scattered around the bird bath. Tomorrow we shall take a look at a few of the feeder frequenters.

New Years Recap

I haven't posted in a few days; been busy around here. Where's here? Still in Oklahoma chilling with my aunt and uncle (pictured on the left). We have a low key Christmas with tons of great food and a very merry New Years. My uncle bought us all little tiaras just to celebrate, and a few bottles of champagne that we had no trouble working through.

Dogs, bird and fish are all swell. We had two fish casualties on the road down, but that's not too bad. All of the loaches are still around though. The bird started out being a shriek monster but now has settled in quite well. He's very pleased to ding his bell and talk to my aunt, who whistles to him.

Sirius and Niko have, for the first time, a fenced in yard in which to romp all by themselves. They are having a dandy of a time rolling in cat poop and barking at birds. Sirius isn't quite as happy as Niko - he'll go out and wander for a time, but inevitably goes to the window and starts crying and pawing to come in. He's not allowed to leave the mud room during his stay here and he's having to adjust to not being with us all the time. Niko seems rather pleased to lay out in the sun all day.

They are having a little bit of trouble with the weather. If you look closely in the picture of Sirius (the brown one), you'll note that the temperature is close to 80 degrees. It's a far cry from the blizzard we left back in MN! I think we'll manage. ;)

Now, my aunt and uncle have a BEAUTIFUL house. They completely gutted the inside and have created an absolutely lovely living space, with a gorgeous kitchen and cathedral ceilings. Not everyone in this small OK town has done such a nice job. We usually take a daily walk through the neighborhood around dusk, and I have observed all manner of unusual hillbilliness. I have captured some of these images (that haunt my dreams) to share with you today. There are others I would have liked to photograph, but I was afraid the inhabitants might lynch me.

This house has a never ending roof. It's about one city block long and is composed of such interesting materials as duct tape and tin foil. Apparently the lady who lived there wanted no one else to occupy the house after she was gone, so she added this roof to ensure that goal. Mission accomplished.

Oddly, next to is a lovely brick house with a barn and horse pasture. I wondered why anyone would ever want to live there, until I realized that it's a perfect theft deterrent. After all, who's going to look twice at the brick house with the never ending roof next door?

Well kids, that's it for this time. Tomorrow I'll show you some of the interesting birds I've observed at the feeder outside. Now doesn't THAT sound exciting? I think so.

The never ending storage

Originally we had planned to head south just a couple days after the house closed, on Nov 27th. We actually left at 12am Christmas Eve morning, after working all of the 23rd. Why this long delay? I shall explain.

When most people move out of their house, they pack everything in boxes, rent a truck, load everything up, and unload at the new spot. Since we were planning on taking a trip, we decided instead to put all of our things into storage. Have you ever seen the sheer amount of crap one acquires after living in the same spot for 13 years? It's a lot. And most people don't have to store all of it.

That the unit we rented is 12x24, and about 20' high. Now you may wonder what we would do with all of that head room. No fear, we set up industrial strength steel pallet shelving (which is pretty impressive since we had to pick it up and dismantle it, haul it, and reassemble the whole thing all by ourselves), so that we actually have two additional "floors" on which to set stuff. A person can take a ladder up and walk on the top level. At least they could have, before we loaded it down. Now someone can squeeze up there to get at boxes, and that's about it. The whole thing was more like a storage mansion than anything else, and by the time we left, it was full. And that was AFTER we tossed and/or gave away most of our furniture, a third of our stuff, had a garage sale, and filled up the junk man's truck.

We had been planning our trip and the sale of our house for a long time, and the house was on the market for about 9 months, so we thought we were pretty well prepared for the actual move. We had already gotten the shelving in and filled the storage up at least 3/4 of the way with things we didn't want on our trip. When the house actually sold, my brother helped us take a u-haul full of our furniture out, so all that was left was anything left in the house the little that had been kept there while we were showing it. And the garage. (Or as I now refer to it, the dungeon of despair).

The day of closing we worked from sun up until 2am packing and loading our u-haul. I thought we were about 3/4 of the way done. I was wrong. Unfortunately, we had to be out by 11am the following morning. Let me just say that we didn't finish until 4am the NEXT morning. The hell that transpired in this period still gives me nightmares. I'm not even exaggerating - I still have hideous dreams that there's one room left to clean out.

Because of this, we decided to rent an additional storage unit to take just the stuff from the house to, because we had multiple trips to make, and our other storage was over 30 miles away. This unit was climate controlled and well let, and close to our hotel, so it would be easy to go through and pack for our trip. Actually everything about the unit was decent, except that the facility closed at 9pm, a fact I forgot in the horror of that day. It was fun arriving in the wee hours of the morning only to realize we couldn't get in, and having to unload that one the next day.

That 9pm time hindered us on several further occasions. You see, I thought it might take a good weekend to go through the unit. It didn't. We worked about 2 good weekends, plus four hours or so after work every day for two weeks straight. The good news is that we were both able to keep earning money during this time, the bad news is that a lot of it went towards the hotel bill. We only got enough out of the house to cover the costs of moving, and so there was no extra. For a whole week until we were paid, our food budget was a $10 bill my mom found in her purse. It's surprising how many meals we were able to get out of that from Cub.

Payday made things a bit easier, but there was one absolutely terrible night the day before my check arrived that my card was declined at the hotel, and they were fixing to kick us out. I have never been so scared in my life. Actually that's not true; the move was still worse. My mom had no money either and so we were definitely in a bind. Finally I pleaded with the hotel cashier and they gave me until the next morning to pay. My check was deposited first thing and we had no additional troubles staying at the hotel for the duration.

Nonetheless, we were eager to get out. Mom's job ended on Tuesday the 18th, and I made that my last day at work as well. We figured that we'd maybe have to do one more trip to our 30 mile away storage that evening as well as one the following day, and leave around noon on Wednesday. We checked out of the hotel for the last time. Kind of. It was a good dream and we made a heroic effort, but we also had a ton of errands to complete prior to our departure, like getting our driver's licenses changed, so we decided not to leave until Thursday. We checked back into the hotel that night, a little embarrassed, and out again the next morning. Curiously, though our errands were complete, we did not leave that day, either. The whole time was spent at storage, rifling through boxes, packing for our trip, throwing things out, adding to the "donate" pile, and freezing our hind ends off in the cold weather. We checked into the hotel that evening and out the next morning. Friday was basically a repeat of Thursday, except with much more despair and fear that we would never leave. Thankfully on Friday, we thought there was just one more load to take to our big unit, and then we could go.

Saturday was my 23rd birthday so we celebrated by having a lovely breakfast out on the way to our big storage. We still had another load to do but were otherwise ready to go.... or not. We ended up doing 3 trips that day with both cars, and oddly, there was still more to do. It was really a lovely way to spend my birthday, and it only got better. Around 5pm mom threw up and starting having a terrible fever. She had food poisoning from my birthday breakfast. We checked into the hotel that evening.

We of course couldn't continue that day, so we went back to the hotel and she slept and vomited a lot. I indulged in a little self pity but mostly tried to stay positive.

Sunday morning she was feeling better and we figured there was really only about one more load to take to our big storage. We checked out of the hotel and headed off. By the way - we always seemed to end up at this large unit after dark, and way out west like that, the wind just whisked through the prairie and under our clothes. It's a kind of cold you can't describe but to those who have experienced it. Anyway, we loaded up and off we went, in the day time for a change. I was already packed for the trip and had been for some time, and was mostly waiting on mom to get her stuff ready. And she did, bless her heart. We loaded up the LAST load to storage, which was only one car full, and she headed off alone while I continued to work and make a trip to goodwill.

By 7pm I hadn't heard from her for 3 hours and she wasn't answering her phone. I was really worrying and got ready to head out and see if she was all right, when I got a call from a number I didn't know. It was my dear mom, calling from a policeman's cell phone. She had gotten locked out of her running car at storage. The wind had blown the door shut. To make a long story short, she got back to our small storage at around 9pm. My car was packed and ready to go on the trip. We started packing hers.

Around 11pm I hit a new level of fear when we had about 6 more boxes of stuff to take than would fit in the car. Some boxes we unloaded the contents of and smashed into tiny corners of the car. Others we decided to dump completely, but of course there wasn't even a spot in the car to take it to the dumpster. So we strapped it on to the top in a sad pile and headed off to the nearest trash. One box fell off on the way.

By now it was midnight and we were finally ready to go. Determined not to spend another night in the hotel, we drove for about two hours until we were almost ready to fall asleep at the wheel. We stayed in the parking lot of a truck stop and I got positively the worst night of rest I've ever had. But at least we were gone.

Prelude

There are times in life that we have periods of great change, times we will look back upon and remember all our lives. Times of starting over, times of rebirth. At 23 years old, I find myself at the first of these times. Here is my story.



This tale starts at the end of high school for me, but that is not the focus. It's just a background for you to see where I'm coming from. The summer after graduation was spent in upstate New York with my boyfriend, Keely. We stayed with his father and step-family while working at the axe-throwing game at the Renaissance festival. I was having a hard time emotionally but Fest was great fun, and I learned how to throw a battle axe into a target 20' away. Upon reflection, the targets seemed to be at crotch-height rather than head-, but I think it would stop a man in his tracks just the same.

The six months after returning home are some what of a blur for me, probably because I was miserable. I was taking courses at a local technical college and hating every bit of it. Part of this was because I was unable to ride horses, which is my greatest passion in life and also an incredibly expensive past time. I got a job at a large, commercial pet store to pay for my car, and did enjoy parts of that job. The less savory elements included cannibalistic hampsters and the lady who killed seven guinea pigs in 3 weeks. You've seen the face of the devil when you've found a hampster who has eaten out the inards of another and is using the remaining skin-and-bone carcass as a food dish for seeds it has collected. Don't let their little beady eyes fool you; hampsters are vicious tribal fiends. Even the babies. Imagine selling a fluffy little pipsqueak to an innocent child, knowing that the creature devoured its own littermate ALIVE that very morning. Anyway.

I made the decision to go on to Sweet Briar College, a rather exclusive women's school in Virginia, that fall. I had deferred enrollment for a year because I was so burned out from high school, but dinner with a good friend during the depressing technical school saga had made me reconsider and given me a new view on my education. SBC had the added bonus of a very good equestrian program. Partially because of this, I opted to have surgery before heading to school. It was a very good decision and I don't regret it one iota, but it did set me up for some troubles at school.

In the end, it was the Virginia heat that did me in. My stitches dissolved early because I was sweating so much, and I was banned from any physical activity for a month, which meant no riding for the semester. I was devastated. It didn't help that my two best friends both rode, as well as most everyone in my dorm, so it wasn't something I could easily ignore. Nonetheless, I was doing very well in my studies, even earning the only "A" on the first paper of the term for my British history class. I adored my professors and the only problem was deciding whether to major in Latin, the classics, or history, or maybe all three.

Yet it was not to be. Around mid-term, I fell ill with mono (probably because of my weakened immune system from the surgery) and had to drop out. (Someday I'll share the story of how I shipped my aquarium of fish all the way back to MN, but that is for another day). I was sick for almost 2 years, unable to do anything except rest in bed or watch television. A single outing to the grocery store could flatten me for a week. It was especially hard because few people understood how deeply ill I was, since I could go out occasionally for a bite to eat with them and only look tired. They wouldn't see the next few days when I would sleep for 22 hours straight and not even be able to shower because of the exhaustion. It was an unhappy time and I was in a place of extreme depression. I also lost my scholarships and ended up with a good chunk of debt because I had dropped out. Hooray.

To make a long story short, I was a little too broke and feeling too old at 21 to try and start the dorm life again, so I took a different approach and thought to incorporate my love of horses with my desire to own my own business. I enrolled in farrier school to learn how to shoe horses. One can make a very decent living from doing that, and I had a good business plan to market specifically to the more elite equestrian di$cipline$.

But it, too, was not to pass. The day before class started, I had a seizure. First ever in my life and hopefully the last. They think it was a combination of stress, fatigue (mono has left me with a need for more rest than most people), and a medication I was taking. I considered myself "well" at this point in time, and over mono, but this seizure really set me back, physically. I was unable to cope with the rigors of shoeing horses for 4 hours a day in the afternoon summer heat, nor did the doctors allow me to work over a forge in the morning in case I had another episode. In a word, I was screwed. I learned enough that I could probably trim my own horses, but not enough to make a business from it. Additionally, I had that super installment loan to pay off, so it looked as though I had to get a job.

So around December of '06, I signed on with a temping agency that placed me at SoundPoint Audiology, a growing hearing aid company with clinics in 18 locations across four states. I worked in the corporate headquarters, at first answering calls and scheduling patients, and then moving back into more administrative-type tasks where I finally took over all of the claims filing for the company (or, as I like to call myself, "insurance nazi"). I worked there for over a year until the house sold and we started on our trip

That "we" is my mother and I. I moved back in with her while I had mono. She is an accountant/aspiring full time writer and artist. We both had trials and tribulations during these past couple years and have come to the mutual conclusion that what ever life is supposed to be, this ain't it. I am at a loss of where I should turn next, or what venture I should set upon, or if I should just give up my notions of the future and settle down where I am. Nothing seems right except that I'm done waiting for my dreams to fall into my lap; it's time to go out and chase some.

So we sold the house (which is an epic tale in and of its own right) and are going on an adventure across the country. We will soon acquire a travel trailer and whisk about where ever the wind blows us. After 23 years in Minnesota, I'm damn sick of winter, so the first stop is down south to the Mexican border, a few miles from the Gulf. I think I'll work on my tan.

Other tentative plans include the Pacific Northwest, New England, and a few spots in between. I'm not sure who we'll find or what we'll do, but it looks to be a thrilling route. We plan to paint, draw, write, meditate, and muse along the way. I will share some of these as they come to me. We're also taking our two dogs, my cockatiel, and 8 fish, so as to complete the gypsy image.

There are folks to visit, vistas to view, and a nation to explore. This blog will be both a log of my travels and an opportunity to share and connect with the rest of the world. Please feel free to comment if you'd like.

Cheers,
Amber