Awesomeness. Lots of it.

The past few days have been crazy insane, but in such a good way.

I went to Oklahoma City and ran a (slightly more than) 5K leg of the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon on Sunday. It was an amazing experience. The marathon itself is a fundraiser for the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum that honors the victims of the bombing there 20 years ago. With over 25,000 runners, this was by far the biggest race that I've ever participated in, and it was incredible.

 I ran faster than I've ever run before, and amazed myself with what I accomplished that day. I ended my leg of the run with a smile on my face, and didn't stop smiling for the rest of the day.

But more on that later....

I got a ton of stuff done outside today. I mowed the grass (always a huge job), finished weeding the huge front flower bed, got some more flowers planted, watered stuff, got some more seedlings transferred out to the garden (hopefully these actually, you know, survive), planted some more flowers, watered stuff....you get the idea.

Baseball season officially started tonight for Daniel. We rode our bikes up to the practice field and on our way back, we got to see some wildlife that we don't get to see very often - at least not sitting still.

But probably the best part of the last few days....

Remember that memorial quilt that I was working on? It was for my friend's mother-in-law, whose husband passed away in January. I was given a bunch of his work shirts and pants to use to make a quilt. My friend gave me a basic pattern idea, we talked about various details, but for the most part I designed it as I went along. I was terrified that the mother-in-law wasn't going to like it.

After we got done running the race in OKC, my team and I went out to eat. We were sitting in the rocking chairs in front of a Cracker Barrel, waiting for our table, and I scrolled through my facebook newsfeed. There I saw it - my friend's post with pictures of her mother-in-law seeing the quilt for the first time. It was all I could do not to burst into tears right then and there.

Right there. It just doesn't get any better than that.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I know I've been nagging on my facebook page, but I'm going to do it here too just in case you missed it. This coming Saturday is the Great Strides Walk for Cystic Fibrosis. I am participating in that to raise money for research for a cure for this horrible disease that directly affects our family. If you would like to make a contribution, you can do that here.

But wait! There's more!

In order to encourage people to donate, I've agreed to do a couple of things.

For $1000, I will dye my hair purple (not the wash-out kind, either) AND I will get rid of my ugly rainbow-colored crocs that everyone loves to hate.

Seriously though - please help if you can. It would mean so much to me.

A little bit of wildlife

While we were camping this weekend, we saw lots of wildlife - although some of it was much more alive than others. It was wonderful to just kick back and watch everything without the hustle and bustle of the real world to interrupt it.

Here are a few shots of what we saw.

ZOMBIE TURTLE!!!!

Crane. There were lots of these.

Ducks. Lots of them too.

Snakes. They were all over the water, and some of them
were extremely persistent.

Signs of raccoons.

This just makes me giggle.

I think he was trying to convince us that he
was to be feared....

....or that he was Loch Ness's cousin.

Crane - see the fish in its mouth?

Hey look! A crane!

Not sure what kind of birds these are, but they're
fearless. And fast.

Dragonfly - one of the few bugs that we saw the
entire weekend.

I waited all day to get this picture.

Another shot of Speedy.

Flying crane.

This little jerk was extremely persistent. He would NOT
go away, and he thoroughly enjoyed hanging out about
5' away from where I was sitting.

A pelican. In Kansas. I had to google it to be sure.

I still have a ton of pictures to go through and post....slowly but surely!!!

A new start

Today was the day. My first day of work in almost 6 years.

I had to stop and really think about when the last time was that I worked. Daniel was just a bitty baby, maybe a month old - and I remember working that last shift all too well now because when I got home that night, the person who was supposed to be caring for him was passed out drunk. At that point, I knew that I couldn't continue to work unless I found a daycare that I could trust...but I wasn't allowed to do that. So instead, I stayed home.

I don't regret it a bit. I loved being at home. But now that the kids are in school, it'll be nice to go back to work even for just a few hours a week. The little bit of spending money will be nice, but I think just getting out of the house and having real live adult interaction on a regular basis will be the best part of it!

My first shift was good - it was a bit overwhelming, but it was good. I'm worn out and I was only there for a few hours, but I'll get used to that eventually. I'm actually looking forward to going back tomorrow, so that's a good thing!

Anyway, the day started out with the normal running around to get the kids to school. The ice was still coating everything, but the sun was shining bright and made for some good shots along the way - although the stupid flash kept going off and so you can see every speck of dirt on my windshield. Boo.

I did actually stop and roll down the window to get this
shot - and a bunch more. The deer are almost always
in this same spot, but usually not this many of them at once.

You can even see the ice on the power lines.

I just thought this was cool after getting the other picture
of them the other day.

Random shots

The past few days in pictures......just to get caught up a bit.

Newest project, for a quilting swap thing - yes, I know it's
not a square yet....

A random itty bitty rainbow on the way to Sarah's game.

That's my girl, and that's a point for us.
Unfortunately, we didn't get enough points.

On our way to school this morning. Too bad I still had the settings
on the camera adjusted for basketball or it would have been clearer.

This one actually appeared to be about an 8-point.

Such a beautiful morning.

The boys got their prizes for selling fundraiser stuff.
Alex got a wig, among other things.

Of course, Daniel had to try it on.

I can't let them have all the fun, can I?

Thanks, Murphy. I appreciate it. Not.

Yep, it's been one of those days.

My "good" sewing machine has been throwing fits, so I finally decided to quit fighting with it and busted out the big old one. When I say "big old one" - I'm not exaggerating.

I love this machine. Absolutely love it. I love all 36 pounds of solid metal that runs so smoothly and quietly, compared to the roughness of the 14 pound plastic one. A friend gave it to me years ago, and it's gotten many, many hours of use from me.

It's old. But it worked great - for about an hour. And then it froze. And it's dead. It did this to me once before and it eventually came back to life, but I don't know if that's going to happen this time or not. I think I'm finally going to just have to bite the bullet and take both of them in to get them serviced - as soon as I find someone who will do it and not charge an arm and a leg for it.

So now I'm stuck with no machine to use - but thanks to a plea on facebook, a friend is going to loan me her machine. I'm going to take off as soon as I get the boys to school in the morning and head to Wichita to get it from her and hopefully, it will work *crossing fingers*. I'm running out of time to get this thing done!

On top of that, the ceiling light in my laundry room decided to quit working today. No, it's not just burned out - something's up with the socket. So I have to call the landlord and see if I can get him out here to fix it, because of course, that's the only light source in that room.

However, in an effort to not be completely and totally negative tonight....

I did manage to get out and walk about 4.5 miles today. Just walking, not at speed or anything, but I got out there and did it. Now, if I can just keep that up....

On one of my walks, I went to get the boys from school. We were walking back with a little girl who is Alex's age (and her mother and little brother) and as we were crossing the bridge over the local (dried up) creek, something caught my eye. I looked down into the puddle that used to be the creek (seriously, it's about 3" deep at most) and sure enough, there was a critter down there. We all stopped and watched him moving around for a few minutes, and then walked down off of the bridge and to the water's edge to see if we could see him closer, but he had disappeared. He was a good sized one too - probably about 6" long.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love this camera? I took that picture from the bridge above the water. I'm not sure how tall it is, but that crawdad was probably about 20-25' away from us and I still managed to get that picture of it.

So....it definitely wasn't the most stellar day ever - but there have been worse.

Playing on the roof (TMOART:12)

After the family reunion, we stopped back at my parents' house for a bit. We had only intended to stay for a short time so that we could get back to the campground for the kids to swim before bedtime, but that plan didn't work. When we got there, I found one of my brothers on the roof of the house.

ON. THE. ROOF.

OK, so he was cleaning the gutters and wasn't just up there playing around, but still....it looked like fun so I joined him for a bit. Heights have never bothered me, so I didn't even think about it while I was doing it. We cleaned out the gutters on the house, and then climbed up on the garage roof to do the same thing.

While I was up there, I missed the wildlife on the porch.

But I did get to see this beautiful little specimen who came to visit the day before the reunion.

Sadly, we didn't get to see any bears while we were there. We had The Dude all worried about getting eaten by a bear while we were camping, but we didn't see a single one on this trip. *sigh* Really about the only other wildlife that we dealt with was a couple of really rowdy raccoons the first night that we were camping. They were running amok around our tent for a couple of hours, squawking and getting into stuff at our neighbor's campsite - but of course we had left the camera in the van and didn't get any shots of them.

There's always next year.