Could use some good thoughts and prayers . . .

Well, they finally fired my husband . . . we were half expecting it because they always fire people who end up injured, but we really thought we were going to be able to avoid this. So my husband has no job . . . we have no health insurance . . . half of our 401K is being used to pay back the "bridge" disability benefits since his short term disability ran out in March and he was never approved for long term . . . and Chrome has injured himself again. I'll post pictures on his blog later if I have time. 2011 has been a really bad year for me . . .

Sunday Stills - In The Sky

This week's Sunday Stills challenge is in the sky. He said "This can be anything in the sky, planes,clouds,birds or just about anything you can come up with..:-)" so by doing sun, moon, clouds, birds, rainbow I guess I'm following the rules, however these are archive pictures because I just didn't have time (not to mention horrible weather) to take pictures. I've shown some of them before, but a bunch are ones I haven't shown before. Enjoy.


And this last one is a panoramic shot I took with my cell phone. :D

Catfishing & Minks

I've been doing a lot of catfishing with my husband and friends lately. The last time we went we saw this adorable mink (pictured above). I've never seen one in person before. So cute! It reminds of a ferret or tiny otter and I want one lol! When I was a kid I always wanted a pet otter hehe. I caught him on video too.

He didn't seem to be scared of us at all. :D

Sorry I haven't been posting more. The weather is so nice I just want to be outside all the time. When I'm not at work I've been spending all of my free time fishing, riding horses (finally found someone that rides in my area yes!) and riding four wheelers (belongs to a friend). Oh and playing cards. :) I really need to get back to training Chrome and Jackal. Oh and I missed Sunday Stills this past week. Oops. I guess I just sort of needed a break from blogging. I'll try to get some pictures edited and posted. I have a gazillion gorgeous sunset pictures. :)

Frustrated . . . and Jackal fun.

I'm so frustrated with Blogger. I was reading and commenting on blogs when it went down. I could still read them, but without being able to comment I didn't see the point. You may not know this, but I'm a comment addict. I love getting comments and I love leaving them. I try to always comment, although sometimes if I'm behind or busy I'll read a post and not leave a comment. So when Blogger came back up and I went back to check the blogs I'd commented on (because they were appearing as new in Google Reader again) I realized it had deleted all of my comments!! I tried to make comments on all of the blogs I'd read, but if I missed you I'm sorry, I did comment, they just got deleted. I also was wondering why I hadn't received comments on my last couple of posts on Chrome's blog and figured they must have gotten deleted too. So if you commented I didn't get them. Sigh. Darn Blogger.

So on a happier note Jackal has been having some fun. We took him with us when we went fishing at the lake. I don't have many pictures, but I like the ones I took. :)

The lighting was wrong on the two above, but I was blocking him from leaving the dock since I'd taken his leash off. :)

My friend was talking to him in this one and he was giving her his silly hound dog look.

Doesn't he look so happy and relaxed?

I also have a video for your entertainment. Normally I play a talk back game with Jackal where we bark at each other, but I didn't want to bark on camera (lol) so I blew in his face instead. He doesn't like me blowing in his face much but he still played along hehe. Doesn't he just look so vicious? I love my dog. :D


We haven't made much progress on our Freestyle routine. We finally got the news that my husband can go back to work soon (although it will still take a while to sort out paperwork) so we've been spending as much time together as possible, since I won't be seeing him much when he goes back to work (he works sixty hours a week, rotating days and nights). I've also been working extra hours and we're trying to get estimates done to replace our roof. I hope we can get it done soon. It's so stressful dealing with contractors, banks and insurance companies lol.

Mother's Day

I know I'm way behind posting about Mother's Day . . . oh well, I've been busy hehe. I took my mom a bouquet of flowers picked from my yard. I was really not looking forward to visiting my parents because I didn't want to see all of the damage from the tornado that went through my hometown. I knew it wouldn't look the same. It was very sad, but a lot has been done already to rebuild. Here are some of the pictures I got. This was taking the back roads to their house. I didn't take any pictures of the middle of town where the damage was worse. I was too overwhelmed.

There were a lot of tarps on roofs.

It's hard to tell in the picture, but the root ball on that tree was at least seven feet tall.

The house is down a little hill, but still look at the size of that tree.

This was a gorgeous old barn where a man had cattle and it's completely flattened.

There were a lot of roofs being rebuilt.

The roads look nothing like what they used to.

There were trees down everywhere. The path of the tornado was around a half mile wide.

This is the graveyard where I took my Sunday Stills pictures.
The tree on the right is laying on the one to the left.
Below is a view of the same two trees before the tornado.

This view is from the other side, but it's the same two trees.

An electric pole snapped off and hanging.

It was really sad seeing the damage, especially down main street. :( Once I got to my parents house I did enjoy myself though. Storm and Jackal went with us and they had a blast. My mom's Yorkshire Terrier was happy to see them since he's the only dog on the place since my grandparents had to put their dog to sleep. Poor guy is lonely, but my parents don't want to deal with anymore animals. So I hope everyone had a great Mother's Day! I promise I will get caught up on reading blogs soon.

Sunday Stills - Doors & Doorknobs

This week's challenge for Sunday Stills was doors and doorknobs. Most of the rooms in my house don't even have doors because it's a fixer upper so I decided to wait until I visited my parents today for Mother's Day and took some at their house. Unfortunately their lighting is worse than mine and I had my camera settings all messed up so they didn't turn out great, but here they are.

My mom's french doors. I wish the lighting was better. It's really pretty.

The knob to a set of wood slatted bi fold doors that lead to the room I had as a kid. :)

The lighting is weird on this one. You can see the pink reflected in it from my shirt. :)

My husband's car door. It's a door so it counts!

The knob to my front door. I actually like this one even though it's blurry.

Ducklings!

Whew! Had to take a break from mowing so I figured I would edit some pictures and tell you about our newest editions. Duckling! One of our Muscovy hens successfully hatched out nine ducklings all by herself with no help from us. I'm so proud of her. :D

Our Muscovy drake (male).

The Muscovy hen (female) that hatched out the ducklings.

Mom with her babies.

The adorable ducklings!

I can't wait to see what color they are.
Most are black and yellow, but some
are a bluish color and some chocolate.

Aren't they adorable?!

Jackal Fetching Leash Video

Okay here is the video of Jackal fetching his leash, which was his March trick. I really thought this one would be difficult, but it wasn't. He did so well!!

Jackal's April Trick Update

I didn't make as much progress as I would have liked with Jackal's April trick, but it's still decent and we can keep working on it when I'm done with our Freestyle routine. I ended up switching from my front door to the doors of my entertainment center because the front door is difficult to close due to the weather stripping. Here is the video.


The door closing scares him so I'll have to work on that. I'm hoping that he was just being overly sensitive because I was frustrated and impatient. We shall see when we practice on it again. I'll post the video of him fetching the leash for his March trick tomorrow. Sorry it took so long to get that one together hehe. Let me know what you think about this video.

Sunday Stills - Rust

This week's Sunday Stills challenge was rust. I had so many plans to get some great pictures because we have a ton of rust covered old farm equipment . . . however the weather didn't cooperate. :( It's been absolutely flooding rain, so I took some pictures indoors. I have poor indoor lighting so they are a little blurry, but I think they turned out decent. :)