Snakes, Sharpies and Soup

This weekend I came face to face with a real snake for the first time in my life.  I mean, something other than a gardner snake, ya know.

We were just hanging out on Charlie's porch, being overrun by kittens, putting new fenders on the jeep, discovering pinterest, ya know...anyway, one of the horses started freaking out, so Jesse wandered over and saw this big, nasty, fat, snake.  All big, and slithery, and gray...it was nasty.  Of course, it was the one time Jesse didn't bring his shotgun and if Charlie had any in the house they were hiding.  He did have a pistol, so while I put the animals in the house he started throwing rocks at it to get it away from the carport thing so he could shoot it.  It wasn't responding well, though, so he chopped at it with a shovel.  He did get it, but just the end of the tail, which squirmed around and wriggled for quite a while.  It was nasty.
Anyway, in the end, he shot it many, many times with a .22 and then decapitated it with a big tree pruner thing...ya know, a big pole with a rope that chops when you pull on it.

Jesse took a picture of it before mutilating it, and we googled water moccasins and they looked remarkably similar.  Naaaaassttyyy!  Later Jesse was reading (shocker!!) a book about Texas snakes and found a non poisonous kind that it also could have been, but the brutal slaughter of a dangerous predator makes a much better story.
In and amongst the exciting moments, though, was a lot of downtime.  I had to work Friday and Saturday at Party Planet, but only at night, so I spent most of the days watching X-Men (aka wife education), reading Game of Thrones, and creating epic sharpie art that haunted me in my sleep.  Jesse got tired of it quickly, and said I was neglecting him, and I may have gotten slightly high on sharpie fumes, but it was all in good fun.  I was feeling artistic and it gave me something to do.

I also flexed my artistic muscles and made some fantastic chicken tortilla soup.  It has cornmeal in it!  I do trust The Pioneer Woman.  She knooowwws.  Mmmmhmmm.  Even Jesse said it was good, and that is amazing because:
A. It's soup.
B. It had black beans.
C. It also had tomatoes, which Jesse considers a vegetable, even though it's actually a fruit.
So that was a domestic win, I think.
Then on Monday night I spent an hour and a half (almost) making three different Chinese foods that I have

never made before, all deep fried, two with different sauces, and one that was marinated.  And they were all done within like, 10 minutes of each other, which is pretty good for only one frying pan.  It wasn't spot on perfect, but it tasted basically like heaven to me.  I was incredibly hungry and I like chinese food.  The egg rolls, though, were pretty fantastic, starving or not.  Especially since I made my own wrapper and everything.  Chicken, carrots, celery, onion and a teeny big of ginger...Totes having some for lunch today!
....Ok.  Back from mowing down the last two egg rolls.  Still delish, Bee Tee Dubs.

So I was driving home from Charlie's yesterday jammin out in my Tahoe, like a cool person...arm hanging out the wide open window, wearing my sunglasses because it was sunny and I didn't take time to put on makeup...I pulled into the parking lot, continued to sing to myself and dance around a little bit...and then I finally got out of the car and saw the neighbor girl sitting on her porch giving me a strange look.  Classssy.
What else do I have to tell you?
Oh yeah!  The lunchwrap supreme.  I'm gonna go back in time a little bit...I didn't really bring any lunch food with us while we housesat, but I had tortillas, cheese, and ham, and the perfect opportunity to perfect the LunchWrap Supreme.  Basically a ham sandwich grilled in a tortilla.  Do it.  Do it right now.  It's amazing.  Again, I was probably just really hungry.  I want a banana split right now...Ok, Rianna is over and out.  Thank you for your time.

Apartment Life

Home, sweet home!

This weekend we moved out of the ranch house and into an apartment that is a mile from Party Planet and 2 miles from the shop.  Compared to the 10 miles we have been driving every week, this is like heaven!  I could walk to work!  At least when I'm working at Party Planet, anyway...

Speaking of Party Planet, I worked a graduation party for some people from Graham last night, and got to talking with a couple of parents.  I mentioned that I had moved from Oregon ("Why the heck would you move from the best place in the country to Breckenridge?!") and that I had coached dance team there.  Turns out she had read something in the paper about Graham High School starting a dance team for next year.  Well, as you can imagine, I was pretty darn excited to hear that, and she even took my contact info and promised to let me know if she could find out who is coaching.  They were pretty cool people ("You're funny!  Let's take her home with us. . .If you ever need anything, you just look this company up in the phone book and ask for Randy.  We'll come and get you out of Breckenridge.  We'll call SWAT.  'We need an extrication in Breckenridge...'  Good luck, you're gonna need it."), and they sent me home with a little box of cookies and $50 tip.  Cha Ching!

 Anyway, I am hoping that meeting them was a sign.  Not only are there places in Texas that aren't cursed, as Breckenridge seems to be, but maybe dance team really will follow me wherever I go.  I love teaching my littles here, but it would be amazing to be back in a High School.
But as Ma Ingels would say "The Lord helps those who help themselves" (even though that really isn't in the Bible anywhere...), so as soon as I got home I googled Graham ISD and discovered the Bella Blues.  They have already held auditions, so obviously they are up and running without me (how could they??), but I shot off an email to the "sponsor" anyway, because I've never not gotten a job I really wanted...why should now be any different?
Unfortunately, when I read her reply this morning, she really seemed like she thought I was a student wanting to join the team...even though I specifically said "I coached dance team at Oregon City High School" and "I would love the opportunity to. . . be a part of the coaching team".  I suppose I should have said "staff", instead of "team"...maybe that's where she got confused.  She just sent me info for the second round of tryouts and told me not to be shy.  Maybe I should just show up at tryouts and say "hey, you should hire me because I am not in high school."  Why do people think I'm in high school??  She couldn't even see me, it was just an email!
Sigh.  Anyway, I sent a reply that should have sufficiently disillusioned her, so we'll see what happens from here.  And in the meantime, I will continue reorganizing and fussing around the apartment, while watching pom videos, because being proficient in pom would probably come in handy here in Texas.
The kitchen is pretty tiny, and I keep moving things around, and I can never remember where I put anything, but it's not too bad, as long as I'm the only one in it.  Not that Jesse is ever really hankering to be in the kitchen.  I made some rosemary romano crackers yesterday and they were pretty fantastic, but he dubbed them "hippie food" and won't eat them.  Whatevs...All the more for me!
I put the blue rug that my wonderful mother made me for Christmas in the bathroom and was so happy, because everything is now blue and green!  Granted, about 50 shades of blue, but blue nonetheless, and it makes me feel just a little bit classier (even though I do still use bar soap.  It's in a harochi [sp?] bowl though, so that's classy, right?)


The classiness is totally taken away when you go downstairs and see Jesse's living room decorations.  There is a hook in one corner for a hanging lamp, but since we don't have any lamps, Jesse took it upon himself to hang a raccoon tail and a coyote tail from it instead.  Totally feng shui.  Makes me want to do yoga, or something.  I am pretty excited about our new couches, though.  Got a fantastic deal on them: Two almost new leather couches for $200.  Can I get another Cha Ching?  They're pretty comfy.

 The bedrooms are a little small, but nothing too bad.  "Cricket's room" is currently a stick-everything-that-doesn't-have-its-own-place room, so I'll have to do some reorganizing before she gets here, but I'm glad we have the second room, because as comfy as the couches are, I have slept on a couch for extended periods of time and it's not great on the spine.

Next project, modge podge wedding pictures onto the surfboard so it's actually art on the wall instead of a big slab of wood stuck in the extra bedroom!  That will be my summer project...while I'm not working...

History.

I realized today why I love historical fiction.  It's the never ending story!  No matter where you go, who the author is, what story they are telling, it all ties together, and your old friends are constantly popping up to say hello.

I just finished a book this morning by Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth, about a bunch of people in medieval England building cathedrals.  Obviously I had a general idea of the time frame, but I'm not very well learned when it comes to English history, so I couldn't quite put it into context.  Until I was almost done with it and a new King was rising, who was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine.  I said to myself "Ah ha!  I know that name!  This Henry will become father of King Richard and Prince John!"  It made me excited to feel like I knew him.  It's like reading a story about one of your friends' parents, without realizing until the end who they were.  And then, at the very end, who should come into the story but Reginald Fitzurse!  Later in life he was one of Prince John's buddies, which, of course, I only know from reading Ivanhoe.

And all that means I could go straight from reading this book to Ivanhoe, and feel like I never stopped, even though they were written by completely different people in totally different time periods.  It's fantastic!  History truly is the story that never ends.  Of course, I prefer historical fiction because it's much less dry than reading a history textbook.

In other news, this ranch house is soon to be a part of our history, because we found an apartment in town, and we're moving next weekend!  As of the 16th, our address will be

400 N. Parks St.
Apt. 5
Breckenridge, TX
76424

So much easier to remember than this one, which is all numbers.

It will be nice to be in town.  Jesse isn't too excited about apartment life, and I'm not too excited about an apartment sized kitchen, but it will save sooooo much in gas!  At least, that's the hope.  It's two bedroom, which is good, because if it wasn't, Cricket would end up sleeping on the couch for a couple months.  That would be no bueno.  I've done that, and it gets hard on the back after a while.  Especially if it's a corner couch.  However, we don't have a corner couch, we've actually managed to score two pretty nice leather couches for only $200!  I'm fairly excited about that.  I guess the company bought them on a super duper sale and no one is using them now, so they're selling them to us for about half of what they paid, so we're getting a super duper uper good deal, and who can turn that down?  People who live in the middle east and sit on pillow instead of couches, I suppose.  Thankfully, Texans use couches.

The biggest downside to the apartment is that our rent will double, but we knew that would happen, no matter where we went from here.  But I got hired on full-time at East Elementary as the first grade teachers' aide, so starting in September I will be getting regular paychecks and have my insurance paid for, and all of those things that will make our rent and two car payments much easier to swallow.  We just have to make it through the summer!  I see alot of beans and grass in our future...See, history has a way of coming back and being quite useful.  Thank you, Mother, for teaching me how to make food out of nothing!

My personal history has taught me many things; as long as we've got rice, we will survive; you can always stretch soup; homemade bread is cheap, and sometimes miracles happen with green beans.  God has never let me go hungry, and I don't believe that He intends to start doing so now.