So it’s been insane over here. Life has been moving so quickly and we’ve all just been pulled along for the ride. (Oh look who’s getting all cheap poetic literally 7 words into a post ova’ here…)

How so, you say?

Well I’ve recently travelled for work more than I ever have before. Greenville, SC  for a work conference and presentation, Big Sky, Montana for a work conference, Fort Worth for a presentation, my husband being in Washington DC leading a group of students on a trip (he’s a teacher), and the Rio Grande Valley and South Padre Island for a vacation (much needed).  Heck, and that’s even without that one trip to Florida for a product test installation that got cancelled! Some of it was great, and some of it damn near killed me.

Did I mention we’re also doing demolition and remodeling in our laundry room as well as shopping for, buying, and getting permits for a shed- a much more involved process than I ever could have imagined? It’s… a shed? Why so complicated? Also it’s unpainted, so we’ll be painting a shed, outside, in July, in Texas in a couple of weeks when it’s finally delivered and installed.

As for the remodel- of COURSE it uncovered two random holes in the walls right in the area we wanted to put in open shelves… of course it did. No remodel on a 109 year old house can ever really be simple, you know? We still have most of it to do- and my brother is now on his way in to stay with us for 5 days with his two kids, so not sure when all this painting and such is really going to get done. We keep SAYING “we’ll work on it this evening…” maybe it’ll be this evening. Could happen.

Couple of pictures for ya:

So on the Big Sky, Montana trip I mentioned earlier I brought in a new hire to the sales team so I could train him on working conferences. He mentioned on the second to last day that he had been telling his wife how he was only an hour away from Yellowstone- the place he’d most wanted to visit in the world, ever since he was 9 and saw the National Geographic about it- and how his wife told him he should try to go. (He’s in his late 40s and from Honduras, newly emigrated to Canada and covers the Canadian territory) He said kinda sadly that he told her that he just couldn’t do it, because he was working. To which I replied- “Dude. Go get your coat.”

The exhibitor hall was mostly empty at that point, we’d put in a full day’s work already, and Montana is my territory, not his- when would he have another chance at this? I was damn sure going to make this happen. We headed out at just after 2 and got back at 11pm- 9 hours in a car went by shockingly quickly, honestly- aside from that hour drive back in the pitch dark through the mountains which lasted about 30 years.

We did the ENTIRE loop through the park. Saw damn near everything. Buffalo, waterfalls, Old Faithful (Hundreds of people sitting around staring intently at a hole in the ground is kinda surreal), the Yellowstone Grand Canyon, Kepler Cascades, Yellowstone Lake, the  Plateau all of it. My favorite part? The Plateau for sure- something about a river through a beautiful grassland… loved it. My coworker kept acting like kid- throwing his arms out and exclaiming- “I can’t believe I’m HERE!” Something about it just… you make your life, not the other way around, you know? I felt good to have been able to make something like that happen and to cross it off my own list as well.

In other news, the garden has gone gangbusters during all of this. I’ll post pictures next time though- it’s already too late in the day to take pictures that aren’t completely blasted out by the sun- yay Texas in summer, amiright? But I’ll just say that tomato and eggplant harvest is in full swing. (That’s what we call a teaser)

We spend more time outside at night because of the damnable Texas heat during the day. Like last night with the glass of white wine while looking at Jupiter through binoculars- we could see 2 (maybe 3) moons… freaking amazing, lemme tell you! Unreasonably, and based on NOTHING- I have the idea that one of the moons we could see was Ganymede… let me Google it and see if that could possibly be true… It totally fucking is! Weird that it’s the biggest one… I thought the biggest one was named Titan? Huh. Turns out Titan is the biggest moon of Saturn (2nd largest in the solar system) and Ganymede is the largest of Jupiter (And largest moon in the solar system). Information that in one form or another must be stored somewhere in there enough for a quasi-correct, somewhat incorrect couple of hunches to have crept up like that… brains are so completely weird.