Peace Out Blog World!

I have done a terrible job of keeping this blog updated this year.  After some long thought, I think it is time to retire this blog.  Thank you to my loyal readers over the last 2.5 years for following my crazy clumsy antics, personal stories/experiences, rants and raves.

I have had a lot of life experiences over the past 2.5 years that have truly changed my life path: move to IL, started a new job, got engaged, bought a house, started another new job, got married, met many new and amazing people, started to bowl on a league (scored a 198 in my last week of league this past spring), spoiled my dog, fell more in love with my husband each and every day, etc, etc.  There have been some bumps in the road as well but they have all shaped me into the person I am today.

I will still be on Facebook and am only a phone call away if you want to chat!  Peace out!

-Bessie

Our family expanded!

Let me preface this: No, I am not pregnant so don't get any ideas...

After a year and a half in the making, our family expanded by A LOT last week.  My mom got married to Steve last Friday in a lovely ceremony back in my home town.  Between my mom’s three kids and Steve’s five kids, we made up quite the clan on the alter (4 boys and 4 girls).  Six of the eight kids are married (Spouses were ushers and personal attendants).  Five of the eight kids have kids (If I am counting correctly there are 7 grandkids already with one on the way – Congrats to April and Klay).  Again, if I am adding up correctly that would make for 23 of us!  If I count up my four step-sisters on my dad’s side, that would leave me with 2 brothers, 2 step brothers, and 7 step sisters for a grand total of 12 of us including myself.  That is a lot of kids!  Good thing we all get along!

In all seriousness, congrats to my mom and Steve on their new marriage.  Chris and I wish you a long, loving, happy, and healthy marriage.  We had a great time on our trip up for the wedding even though it felt like we spent more time in the car than we did in town.  It was worth the drive to see my mom so happy.

Peter Cottontail

So as of this last week, we have a new resident living in our backyard: a very cute baby bunny rabbit.  I don’t know if he lost his mother or if he just likes eating the bird seed that drop from the bird feeder but I am beginning to have a love/hate relationship with this rabbit.

On the one hand, he is super small and cute and fun to watch.  On the other hand, I think he ate all of the leaves off of my bean and pea plants and is starting to make a home underneath our patio stairs.  There is only about a 2.5 in gap between the stairs and the house so at some point he is not going to be able to get in and out of there. I want to block his way in there so that he doesn’t get too comfortable and never leave but every time we go in the back yard he is so quick and runs in there.  I don’t want to block him in because that would be cruel and the smell would be awful after a while.

He keeps Gypsy quite entertained as well.  I think she has the same love/hate relationship as I do.  When she watches him from the patio door she will sometimes bark at him and try to sound intimidating which doesn’t faze the rabbit.  When I let her out back to go to the bathroom, if the bunny is out, she will get as close to it as she can before it starts to run and then she doesn’t quite know what to do.  She is not very intimidating for being a lab/pit bull dog.  I think she just wants to go up to it and smell it before it runs away.  I don’t think she would try to eat it.

As cute as this bunny is, we don’t want it to get too comfortable in the backyard.  Any thoughts on how to get it out from under the steps so that we can block off the area it is going in or are we better off waiting for it to get too big to fit under there?

Bessie

198!!!

Yup – you read that correctly.  On the last night of bowling for the season I bowled a 198!!!  I am still working on the consistency piece, but I bowled 95, 198, & 161 on Friday night which gave me 7^th overall for the ladies for the night.  In my defense, the first game was bowled on lanes 5-6 which are the worst lanes in the alley.  The oil is so awful on those lanes that my normally sharp curve ball rolled straight that whole game and I couldn’t get it figured out.  Lanes 1-2 (where we bowled the 2^nd game) and Lanes 3-4 (3^rd game) are much easier on my curve ball so I felt like I was back to normal.  If I would have had just 10 more  pins throughout the night, I would have finished in the top 5 and won money.  Oh well, it gives me something to look forward to to next season J

March Madness

I will be the first to admit that I don’t follow college basketball until the NCAA Tournament.  Don’t get me wrong, I love watching basketball and know a lot about the sport after watching my brothers play for years and kept book for Tom’s traveling team, but I just don’t enjoy watching it on tv as much as I do in person.  Once March comes along though, I really enjoy watching the tournament.  It usually amounts to a lot of good close games, some epic upsets (sorry to see that was Duke this year), and some fun excitement (or not) seeing how my bracket picks are doing.

In the past years, my brackets have been pretty terrible.  By the end of day one I am usually out of the mix already because as I said before, I don’t follow the teams during the regular season.  I usually base my picks on rankings, throw a few upsets in there if I like the teams/schools and hope I do well.  This year, after day 1 I had picked 16 of 16 games correctly.  HOW AWESOME IS THAT! My husband was dumbfounded after seeing how well I was doing and seeing how *cough* terrible he was doing.  The one game I remember him asking me about was Colorado vs University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Chris: “Why did you pick Colorado over UNLV?”

Me: “I’ve visited the University of Colorado.  It’s a pretty campus and I really liked the school so I picked them.”

Chris: “Seriously!  You have been to Las Vegas too.  Why didn’t you pick them?”

Me: “Because I haven’t been to the school campus and I really liked Colorado” hehe!

I’m not normally the girl that picks sports wins based on team colors, mascots, etc but I had to pick some upsets and in that particular game I chose based on the school campus.  Not the best strategy, but I did end up picking the right team and was certainly doing better than he was on his bracket.

I had some ups and downs through the rest of the tournament, but ended up picking the championship game teams and winner correctly to finish out in 3^rd place out of 109 brackets in my brother’s league.  Pretty good for not watching during the season!

As I mentioned earlier, I much prefer to watch games in person than on tv.  This year, we were lucky enough to have Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games in St Louis.  Chris and I finally had a weekend off from bowling for the first time in months so we decided to pick up tickets and go to the games.  I got to see my favorite team, the Kansas Jayhawks win both of their games last weekend and suffered through watching UNC win one game before Kansas pulled out the win against them on Sunday. Note: Duke is my second favorite team so I always cheer against UNC.  It was pretty cool to see three tournament games in person.  Having only been to one Minnesota Gophers game in my life (which I wouldn’t count as good Division 1 basketball), this was by far the best D1 games I have seen in person.

Although I HATE to play sports as a result of my complete lack of coordination, I love to watch and know much more about sports than the average girl.  This sports year is looking to be a little daunting for my teams (MN Twins and Indianapolis Colts) I will continue to cheer for them in hopes that they can each pull out a decent season.  My husband is lucky to be married to me with the amount of sports we watch together J

Bowling

Chris has played in a bowling league for a few years now.  I remember going to watch him bowl and hang out that first winter we started dating and have been going along ever since.  This past season one of the wives of the guys that Chris bowls with asked me to bowl on the women’s team.  It made me chuckle because I once (in the not so distant past) bowled a 39.  A 39!! That is out of a total of 300 possible points!  I was a terrible bowler!  She said she didn’t care because I would bring a lot of handicap points with low scores like that and she just needed an extra person.

As many of you know, I don’t like to make a fool of myself in public.  If it’s something I’m not good at, I just don’t do it to avoid the embarrassment.  To put it into perspective, this is a very small alley in small town SW IL that has a total of 6 lanes.  Everyone in the place knows everyone else. I reluctantly agreed after a lot of begging from Amy. 

I inherited a bowling ball from a friend of a friend, ordered some awesome bowling shoes online and asked the owner of the alley to give me a lesson.  He taught me how to throw a curve ball and my game started to improve immediately.  I ended up with ~87 average after the first week of league and prior to last week, I was at a 104 average.  Not too shabby for someone that bowled a 39!  I have gotten to the point now though that I have figured out what I am doing wrong but am struggling to figure out how to fix it.  Once I do, I think my average will go up at least another 20 pins.

Case in point – last Friday.  I was either right on mark or very wrong.  I threw two scratch spares in a row.  Imagine what my score would have been had I thrown the strikes on my first throws instead of ditching it into the gutter.  I also threw my first turkey (3 strikes in a row) ever during my second game and followed it up with two gutter balls.  NOT CONSISTENT!  Very frustrating to say the least.  I bowled an 87, 108 & 160 on Friday night.  I almost doubled my score from the 1^st game to the last game.  It will get better with time.  At least that averages out to 118.  Much better than my 104 average and the 160 was my highest score ever with the exception of a 164 in a 9 pin tournament the weekend before (I had 1 nine-pin strike in that game so I did most of that scoring on my own).  Hard to believe I even played in a tournament last weekend considering the 39 from earlier!

I have had a good time with it this winter and made some fun new friends on my team.  We do some drinking, some bowling, but most of all, we have a great time.  Next year I will aim for the most improved player award.  I am having mixed feelings about the season being over in a couple of weeks.  Sad to be done for the year, but glad to have Friday’s back to be able to do other things too.  After the weather we have had lately, I am quite looking forward to the summer.  It’s been nice to have the windows open to let the fresh air in.

Bessie

Silly Dog

Gypsy has had an eventful week this week.  On Sunday, we took her to the dog park because it was beautiful outside.  Most trips to the park, we usually see about 3-4 other dogs at the park that she tries her hardest to ignore while we are there but we try to get her over there to socialize and play nice with the other dogs.  On Sunday, there were about 30 dogs at the park (no joke) because it was so nice out.  Being her usually snobby self, she did not want to play with the others so she stayed right next to Chris and myself the whole time we were there.  We even had one dog try to come “smell” her and play and her owner called her back and made a comment that “that dog doesn’t want to play with you”…poor Gypsy.  She didn’t snap at the dog, she just responded to the “smelling” by plopping her butt down on the ground and didn’t move.  Maybe someday she will enjoy playing with the other dogs.  Anyway, we stayed at the park for about 20 min till we could tell she had enough and proceeded to head home.

On the way home, she looked really tired/stressed from all the dog activity so she laid down on the back seat the whole ride (she normally has her head out the window).  Within an hour of getting home, she wasn’t acting like herself – very lethargic, wouldn’t come when we called her, wouldn’t jump onto the couch.  I took her out back to throw her toy which she normally chases immediately, but she would take like 2 steps and stop.  She wasn’t limping or anything but she just wasn’t right.  We ended up taking her to the weekend vet and found out that she had a neck/shoulder injury on her right side.  Not sure if it happened at the park or when we got home.  She is now on prednisone and pain pills for two weeks…poor baby.  She is also on very limited activity restrictions during those two weeks (no walks, no chasing toys, no stairs other than to go up for bed and come down in the morning).  The vet said she wants to hear that Gypsy is laying down watching soap operas all day which means a lot of tough love from us.  The pain pills mask any pain from the injury so she thinks she is fine even though it is still healing so she has been bored out of her mind with us the last few days.

To get her out of the house, on Tuesday night we drove to PetSmart to buy her a harness (vet said no more collars when on a leash for walks) and let her ride along.  We did not bring her inside like we usually do because of the limited activity restriction so she stayed in the car.  Chris was feeling bad for her so he bought her a small bully stick treat to give her when we got home.  After PetSmart, we stopped at the gas station to fill my car up and decided to both run inside to get a beverage for the night.  We were not in the store more than 5 minutes and when we got back to the car she was swallowing the last piece of her treat, sticker wrapper and all…needless to say we were not impressed.  First off, she had to climb into the front seat and onto the floor to get into the bag to get the treat which is off limits with her injury, and second off, now she had a sticker wrapper in her stomach.

Chris usually works from home 3 days a week with his job so he had been keeping an eye on her this week during the day but he had to go into the office on Wednesday so I ended up working from home to watch her.  Thankfully no vomiting of the sticker wrapper so hopefully she passes it the other way…I will not be inspecting to find out.  She seemed to be fine all day yesterday other than being bored so hopefully she is on the mend.  In the meantime, she is getting a lot of cheese treats so that we can mask her pills in them to get her to swallow them.  I don’t think she even tastes the cheese as she swallows it whole because she is so excited so the medicine doses have gone down very easy.

Hopefully this is a minor blip in the road for her.  She is only ~5.5 years old so hopefully she has a long happy life in front of her yet where she can go back to chasing her toys, playing tug-of-war, and going to walks – three of her favorite things.