ALTUS, OK!!
To start off, I thought I'd go back a few months to somethings that Hal and I have been doing. Back in November (on the 11th to be exact) we went to Stake Conference in Lawton, OK. It's an hour drive from here. We decided, since we were going to Oklahoma anyway, we'd drive to Altus (Hal lived there for 4 years when he was a kid) and visit some of the old "haunts." We couldn't actually get to the house where they lived (on the air force base), but we did go by the stadium where Blaine and Cindy used to play soccer (It was locked up tight!)
The elementary school where Hal had GT (Will Rogers), also predictably locked -- it was Sunday, after all! (The school where he actually went was on the air force base, as well.)
And we went to see (and feed) the ducks.
We saw a couple of ducks that were our favorites (the white ones in the middle):
The one with the fluffy "hair" was just cute, and the swan with the funny beak couldn't actually honk, it was more like a wheeze... It's indescribable! but, oh, so funny!Also, on our trip to Altus, we saw something that I'm just fascinated by: cotton!
I didn't know that they baled cotton! But look at that field of bales!
Does this look like "bales of sheep" to you? (Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, doesn't it?)FERRETS...
So I thought that I'd already shared this picture with everyone, but apparently not.
While we were living in a hotel, I would let the ferrets out to play in our "ferret safe" hotel room. I would let them out to play, and just never put them back in their cage. The door was open so they would go in and eat and drink, and could fall asleep in their cage if they wanted, but they could also fall asleep anywhere they wanted in the room. Garret (the big, dark, fat one) has always just fallen asleep wherever he wants, but Rocket would rarely sleep anywhere but in his cage.
This is one of my favorite pictures of them ever. They're sleeping between our bed and a bedside table. This became their favorite place to sleep, and they would sleep here everyday.Aren't they just precious? We adore our ferrets!
A STORY ABOUT A BUG.
This next one is just "hilarious". Okay, so now I enjoy telling the story, but at the time...
Backstory: My shower is kind of broken. The little plunger thing that you pull up to switch the water from the faucet to the shower head is stuck up, so the shower is always on. Hence, if I want a bath, or to soak anything, I have to turn on the shower head and let the water collect. (It's on the list of things to fix, but it's not really that big of a deal, so it'll just wait 'til we remodel the shower...)
Okay, so I'm in the shower... for some weird reason, I've decided that I'd like to soak my feet in the water after I get all done showering, so I'm catching the water (which turned out to be a good thing!).
I've got shampoo all over my head, and I hear this noise like a chain saw. I'm like what is that? Then it stopped, so I rinsed my head, and reached for the conditioner. As I did I looked down and saw a GIANT SIZE RED BUG swirling in the water that I'd been catching. I, not liking bugs in the least, especially ones that join me in the shower, panicked. I jumped up on the edge of the tub and considered making a run for it, but as I'm not done in there, not to mention soapy and wet, I didn't. So I sat there and watched the stupid red bug swirl around in the soapy water 'til he stopped struggling. Then I scooped him out (with a toilet paper tube -- I'm not touching him!), drained the water, and continued my shower.
After my shower, I looked at him again. He's only like and inch long (not quite so giant) and it looks like a red hornet. I put the dead hornet in an old paper cup I had to take him to show him to Hal when I picked him up for lunch.
When I showed Hal my dead hornet, he was dutifully impressed and very sympathetic to my terror. Then we realized the hornet was moving! Apparently, he didn't drown, he just got to soapy soggy to move anymore. I brought him home, filled his cup full of water so he couldn't fly away, and took pictures for future enjoyment:
This is him. He's "happily" swimming...
This one is one that I zoomed in on so ya'll could see his pretty color:
I've decided to name him The Hornet From Hell (Doesn't he look like that's where he hails from?)After his photo soot, I took him outside and squished him. Dead. Never to return. He still gives me the creeps just thinking about it now!
The moral of my story is... well, there is no moral, just an amusing story to everyone I've told it to, and terror for me.
As a couple of side notes: apparently, hornets don't drown. Their shells just get soft enough, and so full of water, that they can't fly anymore. After they dry out: good to go!
And after telling some guys in our ward I learned this: These delightful hornets live here. They're natives! They're just as common place as golf ball size spiders and cockroaches. As a matter of fact, we have some that live in our chapel! They buzz around the ceiling all summer long during sacrament meeting. To this I say: "How lovely..."
CHRISTMAS TIME!!!!
So, I know Christmas was a month ago, but...
We had a wonderful Christmas! On Christmas Eve, some friends in from the ward invited us over to their house for dinner and games. We spent the entire evening over there eating, playing games, singing songs, and watching their kids open presents and be super excited for Santa! It was so much fun! And it made Christmas be so much... better.
For Christmas, we did stockings and opened presents, and all of that. We had a wonderful time. It was kind of lonely to just have us for Christmas, but kind of nice, too. We've never done that before.
All four of our stockings. It was so fun and cute to do this! Santa even cares about ferrets at our house! They get things like pencils (oh, the smell!), and old toothbrush's (yummy rubber-like handles!) and ping pong balls!
Our beautiful tree!
My wonderful little brothers made us these ornaments. (The little white peanuts -- sorry, Cindy, we've had peanuts in our house -- tied on with red string.) They're snowmen! They've got little faces painted on them and everything. They've got eyes, an orange "carrot" nose, and a red scarf (that's how I decided to attach them to the tree...tie them with their scarfs!). They were just so cute! I made Hal take a picture of them hanging on our tree!After we got all done opening presents, we got a box, cut holes in the ends of it (at the bottom), and put all of our paper trash in it. And Voila! Instant ferret toy! They adored it all day, and for about a week until I stole all their paper and threw it away.
We also got our ferrets a neat toy that rattled, jingles, crinkled, and squeaked. We didn't know that Rocket responded quite so violently to a squeaker -- we've never tried one before. After we knew, we went right out and bought a clearance squeaky bone! Garret can hear it, and he'll take a turn at chasing it too, but he's not as high strung and energetic as Rocket (hence, not quite as funny).This is our Christmas squeaky toy! Yes, it hurt quite a bit when he bit me... the hazards of working an animal into a frenzy and getting your fingers in the way...
The "bags" were another Christmas present. (I made 'em!) The red one is a fleece bag with a jingle bell and stuffing in it. The blue one was for Garret, but Rocket likes it more. It's got crinkly plastic in it. Rocket likes to hide his bags in a secure place: in his litter box... Yummy!
At the end of the video, Rocket is "killing" the toy... it always gets killed when he's hauled it off to the "cave", or hiding place. It sometimes gets squeaked to death, and sometimes shaken to death, but IT MUST DIE!!!!
We all had fun for Christmas!
And I think that more or less catches us almost up to present day fun! It's a long enough blog at any rate...
