Petey the Dog

 

Yes I am allergic to dogs, but that does not mean that I am immune to their charms. We make a weekly ritual of stopping at Petsmart every Saturday before grocery shopping. Usually we just peruse the cats and go home, but a couple of weeks ago we met Petey and her siblings. We went back on Sunday to see if anyone was left and there was this cute little puppy with a huge soft puppy belly and an enormous cold wet nose sitting there all alone. We could not resist.
She's been with us for three weeks now and it has not been easy. Our house smells like a kennel while we try and house train her. The kids sometimes hide in their rooms for a break from her boundless energy.
But at night when she gets tired there are fights over who gets to snuggle with her. She is a mix of beagle and daushund, and definitly more beagle compared to her short leggged black and brown siblings.
I'm not totally sure it will work out for us with her and the cats and my allergies, but we are giving it a try. Don't get all up in arms we aren't going to dump her again, we have a grandma willing to take her if we give up and can't handle it any more.
For now she is a sweet little girl who keeps shitting on my rugs and wants desperately to curl up on my desk while I try and write. It's a love/hate relationship.

Spring Break

So it's Spring Break and I'm bored out of my gourd. I just drove all the way into town to go to the post office and the library. Then for fun I took a cruise down the main drag and was lured in by our fancy new Dunkin Donuts. It's a big deal that we have that Dunkin Donuts. No the donuts are not the greatest, but it's there and I had to pull in even though it was 11:30 and I wasn't even hungry. I had to make that trip into town a little bit more interesting. I bought a dozen and a chocolate milk, downed a chocolate glazed cake and a powdered vanilla creme with my milk in the parking lot and then headed home.
That will be the highlight of my day.
I feel like we are missing out. It seems as if the whole town went out of town this week. All the college kids left of course, but also a lot of the townies too. The mall was deserted on Monday, Target on Tuesday, and Sam's Club on Wednesday. I remember last Friday when all the kids at school were talking about all the cool places they were going and I was envious, of 8 year olds. Of course they were just going to Mexico, or Phoenix, or Cali, but still I was totally jealous.

We are stuck at home penniless, trying to catch up on cleaning and paying overdue bills.
We do have those two big trips coming up, so it's not like we aren't going to travel, we just aren't travelling this week like everyone else. It 's frustrating. The weather has been kind of crappy and when it is sunny it's accompanied by a bone chilling wind of at least 20 mph.

I feel like I should be doing more. So here I am. If I can't be doing something big and important at least I can be here writing. I love to write, but don't do it often enough. Lately a lot of the crap I have been putting up here has been put up in the interest of getting more page views per day, not like it's working, but still I am editing myself heavily in order to appeal to somebody, but I don't know who.
I write here because I like to broadcast stuff. I like to have an audience and I sometimes feel like I have something important to say. Other times I just want to get some stuff off of my chest, exercise my fingers and try and make someone laugh or feel like someone else out there has problems too. It's not all roses, unicorns and rainbows. I like to read about other people and know what's going on with them and compare my life to theirs, and maybe you like to do the same. It's like literary voyeurism.
Your welcome.

All of that censoring I've been doing has meant little or no posts here. So I'm going to try and stop thinking and try to just write with no censoring.
I hope you enjoy.

Taxes on a forgiven loan

Let's get the business out of the way first. I am currently awaiting a phone call from my accountant about whether or not we will owe $22,000 in taxes this year. Why you may ask? Well it's all about that forgiven second mortgage.
See the deal is that the tax exemption is only on mortgage loans forgiven for the purpose of initially purchasing the home. Since we took out the loan after the purchase... after we had put down $140,000 on the house and had no cash left, we will now owe taxes on the forgiven amout. So apparently taxes on $79,000 for us comes to around $22,000.
Is there a way out of this mess? Our accountant is looking. Since it is spring break around these parts I probably won't hear from him this week. I'm on pins and needles. Needless to say we don't have an extra $22,000 laying around. I'm not sure how the IRS handles that sort of thing, but it will be an interesting ride and I will document it all for you here.

LA Weekend in photos

Ooh I'm excited. LA always gets me all tingly.
It's a break from being a mini-van driving mom. It's a break from being an adult who plays with kids all day. It's a break from our little mountain village and the 12" of snow predicted to fall tonight.
Our plans got a monkey wrench thrown at them last week when an employee fell and broke his wrist. We now cannot leave until Friday night. It will be a short trip with only Saturday to spend in the sunshine.
Breakfast will be provided by the hotel here.

We will then venture to the LA Convention Center to meet this man.

Dinner will be had here.

Maybe we can even get Rick to agree to dine with us.
After dinner we will swing by the mall to do a little celebrity sighting and stop by the American Girl store.

Then we will settle back in to the hotel to watch Pay-Per-View Movies all night. In the morning we will stop by here for a little snack.

Then it's back on the road home.

It's not that exciting I know, but after months in the mountains it is refreshing to venture out into civilization even if it's only for a day. We'll come back refreshed and ready to spend two more months in the cold and ice. It really is the little things that make life interesting.

Waxing LA

So I live in a mountain village. It's cold here. We were a lot of fleece and not-so-attractive sensible shoes. We need our hair. It's cold here and that's what hair is for... to keep ya warm.

With that in mind I keep my hair long, yes of course the hair on my head, I'm no lesbian, but also the hair on my face, again reiterating my non-lesbian status.

In the summer I get my mustache, chin and eyebrows done like every 6-8 weeks. It's summer. It needs to be done. But in the winter I slack off, my face just gets too cold and chapped. I need that extra hair on my face.

But with our trip to LA next weekend I feel the need to go in and get a quick clean-up. I only get that feeling when we go to some city where looking like a cool mountain chick is not an acceptable look. LA is definitely one of those places. You just cannot have a mustache in LA. That's what those border checks are for, not fruit and illegal immigrants, but bad facial hair. They really don't want you in the city if you plan on looking like a neanderthal. It's not allowed.

This was a difficult idea for me to wrap my mind around when I first transplanted to SoCal from Illinois. In Illinois, as in Flagstaff, facial hair is a necessity. I had never heard of waxing in Illinois. I mean sure you might get your undercarriage waxed for a vacation, but your face? Never.

I come from a long line of hairy German women. I myself missed the worst of that gene, but my mother is perfectly content to walk around with a full German woman mustache. My sister who lives permanently in SoCal and has dark facial hair gets herself taken care of frequently so that they allow her to continue her residency. I on the other hand, have the hairy gene, but was blessed with my father's fair skin and hair. I tend to the blond and light brown range, so my mustache is only out of hand when those rogue bristly grey and black hairs pop up and mark me as in need of a waxing.

Yes it hurts, but the results really are mind bottling. It's a small subtle change when your chin is smooth and your eyebrows are perfectly shaped. It really does make you feel like a new woman. So I'm gonna get my smooth on for Rick Steves next week and try and make myself presentable enough to be able to shop at the Grove. I am a mountain woman, but it's February and I need to shed my winter hair.

LA Times Travel and Adventure Show 2013

It's coming again.... are you ready?

It's the LA Times Travel and Adventure Show!

February 23-24 at the LA Convention Center, only $10.00 to get it.

All my favorite people will be there: RICK STEVES, Arthur Frommer, Rudy Maxa, Amazing Race Host Phil Keoghan, and for reasons yet unknown to me, Andrew McCarthy will be there too.

Of course I will be there Saturday watching my favorite tour guide, Rick Steves, give his European Travel Skills lecture from 3:00 -4:30.
I'll probably drop in on Phil Keoghan's lecture too, but we'll have the kids with us, so we'll probably have to keep the lectures to a minimum.

If you've never been, it's super cool, but only if you love to armchair travel and love brochures. I myself have a very powerful need to collect brochures. Am I ever going to visit Sudan? No, probably not, but if they have an awesome brochure I want to read all about it. There are giant color catalogs from all the cruise companies, strange little booklets for green adventure tours in Costa Rica, flyers from  Land Rover tour companies wanting to tour you through the silk road, and just mom and pop places that want you to stay with them in Northern California. It's a melting pot of travel tastes.

Carl and I have been starting to think about possibly starting a tour company of some kind, so I'm going to be there to scope out the competition this year and find out what's new and cool in travel. I love Europe, but hasn't it been done to death? Carl loves off-road travel, but how many Hummer, Jeep and Rover tours does the world need? I'm going to find out.

I'll report back in a few weeks and this year I am going to get my picture with Rick if it's the last thing I do!

The Cluny Museum

Right down the street from our hotel in Paris is this amazing place that I have never been before, the Cluny Museum. Yes, you can read about all the cool art inside, the unicorns, the tapestries, etc, etc, but just look at that building! Why do you need art when the building looks like this?

It's one of the oldest buildings in Paris, a 15th century house for the Cluny Abbot built over an ancient Roman bath. Does it even get any more historical than that? Ewww I can't wait. This is just one of the many places that is on my MUST DO list for Paris. I am going try and spend lots of time exploring the left-bank of Paris, especially  St Germain and the Latin Quarter, an area I never even stepped foot into on my first visit.

I want to feel all of the really old parts of Paris. I'm not too worried about the big sites; the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Champs Elysees. I'm not worried about eating fancy and drinking wine. That's not my thing, but I do want to feel the history and to walk in the midst of history. I want that far away feeling that tries to transport you and makes you feel like you are part of something bigger that IS history. I don't often get that feeling here in Flagstaff.

Visiting the Grand Canyon last weekend, which is way older than Paris, that feeling just isn't the same. There is only a geologic sense of history, but not the human sense of history. Here we have nature and a lot of man vs. nature, but in cities the feeling is different.

I remember the last time I went on a big sight seeing trip to Boston I was overwhelmed with walking in history on the Freedom Trail. You can see the grave stones of Paul Revere and John Hancock. You can see the bell tower where the lanterns were hung to signal that the British were coming. It is overwhelming. Any one who has any kind of love of history and humanity will feel the immensity of standing in these historic places.

It just gives my goosebumps.