ouch, my kidney

well, really Her kidney.


a friend of a friend who we have met on numerous occasions took a spill while out mountain biking Wednesday. She hurt Her kidney and had internal bleeding. She hopes to be out of the hospital soon, but doesn't have health insurance and cant return to work for a while. Below is the official write up from the Colorado Mountain Bike Association.

Help Nancy Kelly!

Nancy Kelly, Founder of the Dirt Divas and COMBA Board of Directors member, sustained an injury to her kidney while leading a Dirt Diva's ride at Lair o'the Bear on Wednesday July 22nd. She is currently in Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge while doctors monitor internal bleeding that resulted from the trauma. Luckily, Nancy's condition is improving rapidly and she hopes to be back home soon. Please send her your love and healing thoughts.

Nancy is a cornerstone of the local riding community. Through her work with the Dirt Diva's, COMBA, and local shops, she has introduced hundreds of women to the sport of mountain biking. Unfortunately, helping your community does not always come with large financial rewards -- or even health insurance. Nancy's stay in the hospital will hopefully be short, but she has already amassed a large amount of medical expenses for testing and hospital stay.

Join us in coming together as a community to help one of our own. While Nancy is resting and healing her body, we can help her heal the financial wound by contributing using the secure button below. Thank you!

If you prefer you may send checks to help Nancy with her medical expenses to:

ATTN: Nancy Kelly Medical Fund
COMBA
PO Box 280415
Lakewood, CO 80228-0415

Kinko Fry

i have really come to love KinkoFry. this comic makes my heart go pitter patter.

road trip to the balck hills

A couple weekends ago we headed to the Black hills for a family wedding. the wedding was held at the Flying V in New Castle Wyoming.

Bride and Groom

Family

After the wedding, Mr. T and i headed over to the Black Hills of South Dakota. We took a Lantern Tour at Jewel Cave- which was awesome.
We lucked out and had a cool rainy trip- instead of 100 deg and humid. We Found a homemade pie and ice cream shop in Custer SD.
Then we ventured over to Custer State Park, where we walked and climbed around Sylvan Lake. It is beautiful and different than we would have found in Colorado. My interest in Sylvan Lake steams from a family road trip photo album from the 1920s. My great great aunt and some friends borrowed dads car and took a road trip from north eastern Nebraska to the Black Hills of South Dakota. the camped and stopped to make jam along the way. Below are the photos i took and a couple of the photos they took.
Ladies on a hike. in the book, they write that they got up very very early to hike to this point, hoping to be there when the sun rose. i believe that the sun rose quicker than they could hike, but they had a good time anyways.
A fish made from a car at Carhinge in Alliance, NE.


it was an awesome trip.

and new begins

Thursday i was fired. i suppose i could say laid-off, but since it was just me and fir job performance, fired seems more correct.
to be fair i have been waiting to be fired for 2 years, and have been unhappy at my job for 4.
i am sure i wasn't doing a good job, because i felt that i was told a number of completely contradicting terms, with out explanation of what they really wanted. and they felt that i should just "know." there was a section of the "process" that i really didnt know, because my former boss did her best to have her assistants do all of the work, but not have quite enough information to be successful if they ever got out from under her. to the prase "just do it like Susie does." is really not helpful, since i was never involved. then there was the woman i worked with in another department, who would tell me everything was good and fine and then complain to the department head that i was doing things wrong. well, yes, because i didn't know that you wanted it done differently than the other 4 people in the department i have previously worked with, since you didn't mention it to me. i have to say, i am happy they fired me instead of moving me back down. i would have quit.
so now i am free... and out of health insurance at the end of July. i am hoping to find something, even if its not a career move, that has health insurance, and we will see what we can do.

Where have we been?

We went:

bowling at Lucky Strike
dress shopping
to a neighborhood festival
to the vet w/ all three cats in tow
Ren Fest
to see Christo speak
for a pedi
to the swimming pool

we are not:

keeping up with the weeds
and the lawn mowing.

it seems we are never home, or at least that we work way more than we have time for fun.

i suppose there will be years where we are not busy, and the garden will be fantastic, and the chair and the door will get fixed. and the sprinklers will work right and we wont eat dinner at 9pm every night.

i think i will like that time too.

Lady Gaga - Bad Romance (Banjo Cover) - Anna Vogelzang

Like her

Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel

Old Crow Medicine Show

song for this week: Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show.

movies- Milk

We watched Milk a couple nights ago. before the movie started Mr. T was kind enough to tell me the guy gets shot in the end. thanks honey. i hadn't remembered that bit on my own.

it was good. i know nothing of Harvey Milk- before my time and never mentioned in history class.
i only hope it was portrayed accurately. i always have to wonder about movies that portray a single side to the story- as most do- just how realistic the portrayal of the hero character really is.

i do admit

i do admit that faery things have a very very very fine line between fun, elegant and enchanting and absolutely bat shit nutty.
i actually like very few actual faery things. a few art pieces, flower faeries, movie looking things like the below post.
please. do. not. buy. me. anything. faery.
or anything cat. we don't need anything w/ cats on it either.

faery tale wedding.

i recently stumbled upon photos of the most beautiful faery wedding.

if i had a dream wedding, is would be it. more or less...

CAMPING 2010

Camping was successful. we managed to only have adventures that we wanted to have.

i only took 1 picture. mainly i decided that the multitude of photos i took last year were good enough.
we ended up with 8 people the first night and 6 the second.
the campground was packed, but we were able to get a section on the far end, that worked out rather nicely.
Tim went on a 16 mile hike with our 2 friends in the army to find a waterfall. Boog was also sick so he and i did a more leisurely 3 mile version on the hike.
the weather was beautiful and the company grand.

cant wait for our next trip.

i have so many pictures to get off my camera. tim w/ hair. the peep party and so forth. want a clean camera before we head out camping this weekend.

headed on another epic camping adventure this weekend. sadly it looks like it will only be Tim, Boog and i on this trip. I'm a bit worried because the 3 people combination was how we ended up on the most epic camping adventure ever, last year.

the place it really beautiful, i wish a few more people could join us.

it wouldent be a blog post if it wasnt about the weekend.

i can barely sit up on my own this morning. sooo tired.

got something like 140 plants planted this weekend- and i didn't even weed the back garden or get seeds in. or mow the lawn.

i did get the car washed, waxed and cleaned out.
we did help tim's dad w/ mulch
watched some fun movies [leagaly blond, Sherlock holmes, princes diaries & julie/julia
went out for drinks with friends
went to a high school graduation. [congrats to the grads this yr.: michelle, molly, medora, cecil and amy.]
and some how didn't sleep nearly enough.

also, i don't blog about the week much because i am afraid that it would end up an endless tirade about my job. my job is alright. it could certainly be worse. it could be better. but its easy to start bitching and never stop. people are nuts [in a bad way], and i try to not let it completely dominate my life.

a non weekend update.

recently, it seems, i only update with a run down of the weekend. mostly, i think this is related to the fact that our week is fairly scheduled.
most of the time things are good.
Tuesdays are game night and banjo lessons.
Wednesdays are kickball
and Monday and Thursdays are figuring out groceries or what ever.

in kickball this week, it was theme night. we went as ninja turtles and lost to the care bares. clearly the Care Bear Stare really does trump all.

Tuesday we hosted D&D and had mac n' cheese.

we also started watching season 1 of Mad Men. apparently Angel's son is just an asshole- or at least no one will cast him as anything else.

tomorrow i am headed to the high school graduation of a childhood friend. she's headed to CU at Co. Springs in the fall.

now, hopefully the meeting that was supposed to happen in my office an hour ago, will happen soon, so i can go home.

a weekend not full of bad movies

we only watched 2 movies this weekend. and only one of them fell into the "bad" category.

Friday:
kokoro
shopping
Iron Man 2 w/ Wolvie [who was sad and without power at home.]
- the movie was enjoyable, but since i don't remember a thing about the previous one, I'm not really comparing.

Saturday:
6:30 am, depart for Ft. Fun
8am graduation at Moby
11am Lunch at Chili's
1pm Graduation party [different friend]
3pm head for home
4pm nap
4:30 head for babysitting and birthday dinner
5:02 toes licked by dog
6pm consume cake that resembled a bleeding cat head
7pm Movie time.
- we watched Sherlock "low budget,not to be confused w/ the blockbuster hit" Holmes. that featured a dinosaur and a dragon. this fine piec of film making was brought to us by the same people who did Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus."
11pm. bed.

Sunday:
sleep.
plant shopping
running errands
gardening
sunburn
more gardening
dinner
bonfire.

weekend complete.

more bad movies

We are officially on a bad movie kick. Not all are bad, but a good number of them are.
recently we have watched: American Pie- Band Camp, When Harry Met Sally, Oceans 12, Cool Runnings and Scream.
coming from NetFlix this week we have Twilight: New Moon. I hear its terrible.

comics

i love comics, always have.

have tried to draw a few. never get very far, its not that i give up, but that i find it really hard to sit down and draw at the end of the day. being in an art based field, where my creativity has to be "on" at all times, it is hard to come home and do some more. drawing a comic is completely different than what i do at work, but i have it lumped into that creative category, along with the craft projects i no longer do.

came across this little rambling today, and thought i would share it with you. you being all the people who ever wanted to self publish your comic.

expectations

Tim has been blogging about expectations, along the lines of characters and movies. But, i feel that he has only touched the iceberg that is expectations.
Expectations of school, relationships, jobs, vacations etc. wildly influence how we handle situations when they arise.
At some point i started making an effort to not have expectations of vacations, because i found that i was then pleasantly surprised by the outcome, because i had not been building up in my mind how it was going to be.
I have not followed this with anything else in life. which to an extent is good, it helps you create and move towards goals, and hopefully move away from things when they no longer work.
What we never talk about is how to grieve with the loss of an expectation.
sometimes it's as simple as not getting the grade you wanted and sometimes it's more serious life decisions that goes against the wishes of one spouse or the other.

How do we deal with this? How do we make the decision of what is right for us and how do we move on?

movie friday

Forgetting Sarah Marshall:
was fun and really quite funny. i didn't hear much about this film when i came out, but we finally got around to getting it it and I'm glad we did.

Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year:
a Bollywood production that was neither 3 hrs long, or musical. Netflix called it a "romantic comedy" and while the one guy got the girl it was such a minor sub plot that i forgot they were even dating. i wouldn't call it a comedy either. but it was a good movie, about a guy out of college trying to enter the career of salesman and what he learns. I would categorize it under indie flicks.