30 days in wildlife drawings: day 2

Day 2 was technically yesterday.

After a 6 hour drive and some craziness upon arrival on base I was too tired to post. But I did manage to squeeze in a drawing.

Day 2 is the wildlife creature you're most frightened of.

I didn't use a reference photo, so this drawing is more my style. Which is more fun than realistic.

I'm terrified of sharks. They are the scariest thing in the world! I'm also not a big fan of swimming/large bodies of water where I can't move or fight or anything.

He kept trying to come out as a goldfish. Stupid shark. 

Till next time my lovelies, 

God is good; but don't dance in a small boat. 

30 days in wildlife drawings: day 1

My super radtastic friend Kai made up a 30 day drawing challenge for us to complete together. Since I've been in the dumps about Gawk's death and everything she'd thought it would help me out.

She's so right.

Day 1 (to which I will post a picture when I get hold of Jex's laptop)

We took a quiz to see what animal we were. This quiz to be exact http://www.serengetibook.com/your-safari/what-animal-am-i/quiz/

Apparently I'm a graceful Giraffe.
Man these animals are derpy looking. Just flipping through pictures of the creatures made me laugh. It was a good day.

You can see Kai's awesome art for day 1 here.

Come join us!
You don't have to draw realistic stuffs. You can draw cartoons or stickies if you feel so inclined.

Till next time my lovelies.
~The Light Heart Lives Long

An Empty Chair

It's funny how quickly everything that seems important can fall to the way side with a single sentence.

Suddenly it doesn't matter that you're not a size 3. The silverware being mismatched is not longer an issue. It's no big deal that your salary doesn't allow for grand vacations or fantastic shopping sprees. Your car gas mileage doesn't mean anything anymore.

Everything that completely and totally consumes our everyday lives is suddenly trivial in the space of a heart beat.

When someone completely irreplaceable dies.
Gone.
Forever.

The ground falls out from underneath you.

Who cares how many calories were in the fucking bagel, or whether or not you can get organic produce?
Who gives a shit about the tear in the curtains or the mud in the carpet?

You hear those three, most dreaded words in the universe and everything stops. It stops moving, it stops mattering. And you fall.
Desperate to keep moving, keep doing, distract yourself enough and maybe the broken record inside your head will be drowned out. Maybe if you move fast enough you'll stop falling, maybe you'll fly. Maybe you'll reach the surface and see that it was all a nightmare.
But it's not. It's horribly, heartlessly, real. And there's not a thing you can do.

Gawk is dead.
She's gone.
I will never see her again.

Death is not something I handle very gracefully. I can't sleep. God I wish I could just sleep.
But if I stop, even pause to take a breath, I'll hear those three words again. And again. And again.

If you pray, say a prayer for her family. Her husband who is in the hospital, sisters one of whom is in the hospital, and parents. Please.

OHMG! Is that the Sun?!

Greetings Friends!

This is Ashes reporting from her less hectic life.
After a storm damaging our roof, killing most the garden, cuts to the military making our paychecks very very small, and buying a new car I finally have something good to post about! Yaaay!

I made a collapsible hula hoop. Oh yes. It's awesome! It's also way too big to hoop with in the house, but that's ok, I also made a smaller one. I went from -1 hula hoops to 2! It's amazing! *laughs*

Yup I'm purposefully sounding manic, for the hell of it.

Life really is doing better though. Our new car is super fancy. I told my friend, because you can TALK to my car, that I really want to make all kinds of Star Trek references when I'm in it. I've already asked it about sky net. It says it doesn't know anything, but I know the truth. *laughs* Still haven't figured out why it won't recognize my phone so I can tell it to call people.
Oh yes. It calls people for me. Well it would if it would recognize my phone! I think the car thinks it's better than my cell. My cell is, after all, not a 'smart' phone. It just has a fold out tactile keyboard. (I totally just tried to spell fold as phold, what the heck brain?)

I'm still trying to learn more hoop tricks, but I fail, and comically hit myself in the face or launch the round piece of irrigation tubing at my husband. Though I think that one might be a little bit of karma.

Oh, and I'm going to be a Zumba instructor. Soon. I'm so excited, and freaked out. One the one hand it'll be a fun job and I'll never have to actually 'work out' in the traditional sense ever again. Score!
On the other hand, I'm not so awesome with strangers.
As you've noticed by my choice of words and references I'm kind of awkward. My kind typically are. Throw computer parts at me and I can help you, throw a room full of strange women, maybe even a token male, and I might be able to help you... maybe... it depends.
Luckily the first class I'll be teaching will be all the really rad elderly people from the church Jex and I hang out at. Who knows, maybe I'll get a kids class after that and work my way up to the frightening mass that is my peer group.
But that's off in the shadowy future.

Till next time my lovlies!
God is good, but don't dance in a small boat.
 PS, I don't know why but I have this urge to post pictures of the wreck.

Notice how our car, the red one, is trashed while the silver one took next to no damage. Figures.
Good news is that my knee is finally healing. I smashed the ever loving crap out of it on the steering column when we collided.

The moral of the story; Honda beats Ford in Life Paper Scissors.

Where have I been?!

So sorry to have been absent.

The universe has decided to take a huge dump right on top of my life.

Most recently our car got totaled. Not too bad because no one was hurt or anything...
But today the other party in the accident decided that they were injured.
That's just great.

So now I'm going to see what precautions I need to take to keep them from trying to take everything Jex and I have worked so hard to build up.

If anyone has been in this situation let me know how it went for you. I can use all the advice I can get. I really think I'm at the end of my mental rope.

Hopefully I'll have a happier post for you guys later.

Talking to my self

Ever have those days when it feels like you're talking to yourself?
I'm not talking about not getting comments on your blog or being ignored by your spouse; I'm talking you're staring at the bread in the Grocery store and you realize that your thoughts are no longer silent.
You realize that while analyzing the contents of two competing whole wheat breads that your mouth butted in on your private conversation and decided to alert the whole world. It's like that part in those kids movies when the inventive  and capable hero kid hits the on button on the intercom so that the evil bad guy's words are broadcast for all to her. Yay! the dictator is toppled there's confetti, ribbons, and cake.
Only it's not that fun in real life. Of course when you glance around there's some big white lady giving you the 'oh-my-god-i-hope-i-don't-catch-crazy' look and some young mother shielding her child from your ravings. Or worse, a really nice dude who just smiles at you hoping that you merely smile back and turn away so he can escape before you try and talk to him.

I don't know if this happens to you, but it's happened to me a lot recently. I hate my mouth.

Also the people I talk to randomly disappear. Well, not really disappear so much as they wander off in the middle of talking to them.
For example I'm doing dishes and talking to Jex who's sitting at the computer table close by. He's totally responding. So I continue, hear nothing, then turn to find he's gone.
Or even worse, what you say gets totally ignored.
This I blame on society though. We're all bent on what we have to say rather than what others have to say... not that I can say much about that without being a complete and total hypocrite; I'm a blogger. *nervous smile* But really when you say "Wow it's really grey out today. Do you think it'll rain?" and the other person responds with. "Let me tell you if that **** doesn't call me back I'm gonna kill him. You know how frustrating it is to wait on some one else before you can do anything?"
"I'm a military wife, so yeah."
"You have to put yourself into .... blah blah... two whole days.... blah blah blah..."
"You just want to complain don'cha?"
"blah blah I can't hear you blah blah blah."

I'm convinced that I'm crazy or I blink out of reality for these moments. What other explanation is there... other than that I'm boring... which is probably true.
What?
I'm in my 20's and I quilt. The vast majority my friends in the area are over 50 (which I maintain is totally cool but other people find quite strange). I write stories I tell no one about because, well, I tend to run off to lala land and talk waaaaay too much about them.

But I'm going to fix that.
How? By dying my hair blue! That will fix everything! lol

No not really.
I think the next time I realize I'm talking to myself I'm just going to weird out everyone even more by turning it into a play.
Oh yeah, the epic bread duel. Only one will make it into the cart! Only the best with rise! Take that fiendish unbleached enriched flour take my whole grain fury! Oh but what's this Corn Syrup! Noooooooooooooooooooooo! *ala~luke skywalker*

When people disappear I'll keep talking as if they never left and I have schizophrenia... no better yet I'll turn to my imaginary friends Iv'gar the purple dragon and Fiffle the fire breathing fox and tell them about how rude the other person just was. (^_^) Then continue my conversation with their very pleasant, if a bit mythical, company.

Then when I comes to the latter I've decided to reply with sentences that make no sense and counting how many I can get away with before they noticed I'm not playing along.
Like this:
Ignorer: "If I don't get a text in the next 10 minutes we're done."
me: "And I'm sure the flying pig would agree, applesauce."
Ignorer: "I mean really is this how you treat people? It's just rude."
me: "So are mudkips I hear." *nods sagely*
Ignorer: "Two whole days and not a word back. Seriously."
me: "Even the magic academy isn't that capricious."
Ignorer: "Capricious?"
me: "I think I used that word right."
Ignorer: "What the hell are you talking about."
me:*smiles brightly* Two points for me!

But the boring thing I am going to fix by dying my hair blue. People with blue hair are much more interesting than people with normal hair colors. No really. I'll put up pictures with ISpy this coming Thursday.

The Light Heart Lives Long~
till next time my lovlies

P.S. I will finish telling you about the Sunshine Trip. This was just on my mind today... or rather on my mouth as it began flapping about halfway through the thought. lol

Sunshine Trip: Day 3

We woke up to babies. Apparently tiny people don't need sleep like big people do. They had kept Cait up all night and then decided to be done with Druid and Faeriman's spare bedroom.
Which was really lame because we'd decided to sleep until late that day. You know not get up at the ass crack of dawn and get on the road as the first few tendrils of light are shining IN YOUR FACE. But what had to be done had to be done.
This turned out to be the day of God's timing.
I also think this is the day we heard Drunk Grandma preaching on the radio... if it's not it's close enough...
Anycrazydesertradioprograms, we got on the road and made good time. Everything was going along swimmingly. No really. The babies realized that they were going to be in their seats for longer than they wanted to and simply dealt with it. Nymnym was still kinda afraid of the trailer but she'd stopped sitting on my head when I was in back with the babies.
I think this is also the day that Jex sat in back with the babies. He did amazingly well for a dude who is still a little weirded out by tiny humans. He still won't touch a diaper though, wuss.

We got to our dusk fill up and discovered that Jex had completely rearranged the back seat. There were spaces on either side of the car seat because of the way they sat in the Explorer. He'd filled those spaces up to give the person in the middle more leg room. Nice. But we'd have to roll down the windows to get the babies out. Not a problem actually. The car seats held the kids up just about even with the window ledge so it wasn't too bad.
We filled up, changed diapers, got much needed caffeine. Everything was going swimmingly, there was even grass for Nymnym to pee on... oh that right I didn't tell you, when we got to the desert Nymnym wouldn't pee because there was no grass. We're pretty sure she held her bladder for an entire state, maybe even a state and a half.

We started to pull out and I rolled up the windows, most of them anyways. You see, Kitten's window wouldn't roll up. Jex and Cait were trying to wiggle it and force it and everything as I pulled slowly out of the truck stop. Nothing was working. Which was strange because we've never had problems with that window, ever.
Kitten is his father's son, it gets to be 70 degrees and the boy gets shivery. And it was fast approaching night time, in the desert, in December. So after a while we pulled over and tried to fix the window.
We dissected it and called AssbreakerTony when we couldn't figure out what the crap was going on. There was also this little beagle hound mix little squatty legged dog that kept trying to steal Jex's tools and come home with us. To add some craptastic frosting to the frustration cake we pulled over near a railroad crossing. Between the conductor purposefully (oh it was totally on purpose) blowing the horn to freak us out (and it worked I shrieked and jumped in a full circle before figuring out what happened. Apparently train horns turn off my intelligent brain and replaces it with Derp) but when we were troubleshooting the window with Tony trains would come by and make it near impossible to hear him.

Day turned to night. Then the phone started to die.

Luckily my husband is made of awesome. He used to be an electrician and we just happened to have a length of copper wire left over from trying to fix the tail lights on the trailer.
Jex hotwired the window.
I'm not kidding. It was great and amazing and there was much rejoicing.

So we climb back into the car and go to get back on the highway and the highway is a parking lot. Jex says it's ok because the access road will take us all the way into Gallup, where we've decided we will be eating dinner.
Why was the highway a parkinglot? Another wreck. But here is where it turns into some super rad, this can't just be coincidence, stuff. When we pulled over Cait was watching the road when the lights on the highway went all crazy. If we hadn't pulled over we probably would have been in that wreck.
Not only that but the delay made it possible for us to eat at Grandma's Burritos in Gallup (that's really the name of the town, it's in New Mexico. I usually don't use town names because OPSEC is burned into my brain. But no, if you ever go through I want you to know the best place to eat EVER!). Which was amazing.
Adovado with green chili. Best thing in the universe next to fresh Tirimisu and German Goulash. 

We ended up driving through the night because it made sense and the babies were being awesome. And it was good, for a while.

The light heart lives long~