Four badass chicks from the Moulin Rouge…Or Savannah. Whatever.*

It’s not often in a lifetime that you meet people that just get you. It’s even rarer that you meet three of them. Even better? The four of you have the kind of ease together that you can be in a car for five hours straight without anyone thinking about turning on the radio. Twice.

I couldn’t have asked for a better gift than to spend my birthday with these three women, and even though it was firmly established that none of us would be going gay for each other there’s a kind of bond that you only find with your girlfriends. There is no better way to recharge your batteries than to laugh for days. I love you girls, more than my luggage.

I also got the chance to spend time with one of the smartest women I know and the biggest teddy bear on the Internet. I am truly blessed.

These are a few of my favorite photos from the trip. The whole set is here.

*Photo courtesy Britt Reints.

Somehow “what do you think about painting the cabinets and walls and maybe putting down some new linoleum?” has turned into this.

It was just going to be a quick, cheap facelift. Emphasis on cheap.

Because really, who has money to spend on a kitchen renovation? Definitely not me.

It turns out that you can look at the world’s ugliest kitchen for six years and tell yourself “as soon as we get such and such paid off we’ll do the kitchen” until suddenly you can’t anymore and you’re willing to light up your Discover card to make it go away.

True story.

What happens when your brain is on overload and you just need to stop? Stop planning, stop doing, stop working against the clock, just. stop. thinking. at. all.  You lose yourself down a rabbit hole of coolness.  If you want to play, all of these were created on www.photofunia.com.

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Friday nights are kind of a big deal in our house.  We have a thing about Friday night.  It’s pizza and beer night, and usually my BFF comes over and we hash out our week and laugh our asses off.  There is much hilarity and it’s the perfect end to a week.

This week was different.  My girlfriend was sick and stayed home.  Hubs and I made pizza, but it wasn’t the same.  There was no hilarity, there was just pizza and a little beer.

The boy had plans for the evening so after dinner he bailed to hang out with his friends.  Hubs and I were watching movies and looking forward to the rest of the evening as only parents can when the kid(s) are out of the house for the night.  You know what I mean.

Until the phone rang.

“Mom, you’re going to LOVE me.”

Well of course I love him, but this didn’t sound good.

“I’m stuck.”

“What do you mean you’re stuck?”

“Well I thought it would be fun to go 4-wheeling for the first time ever and I was stupid and now I’m stuck in the mud.”

He told us where he was and we had a bad feeling because it sounded like the place where every dumbass with a truck gets stuck at one time or another if they don’t know that it’s all lakebed clayey silt that blows up like marshmallow fluff when it’s saturated, like it is now since it’s been soaking for a good two months.  In other words, it was exactly the place where we always point and laugh that they were so stupid as we drive by and bask in the glow of our superior knowledge.

The exact same place we warned him about when he got his truck because we knew it was only a matter of time before a teenager with a 4WD vehicle would feel his oats enough to give it a go.

So we put on our boots and jackets and got the Jeep on the road and sure enough, that was exactly the place where he was stuck. All the way up past his axles. Fuuuucccckkkkkkkk!!!

Pardon the crappy iPhone with an almost dead battery pic. I didn't think to grab my camera before we left. Much like we didn't grab a shovel.

It turns out that he picked a spot that was smack in the middle of the muck, it was pretty damn dark, and parts of it were covered in standing water.  Oh and he was wearing shorts and hi-tops in 35 degree weather.  Advance planning at it’s best!

Did I mention that he didn’t actually have his truck in 4-wheel-drive?  And now that it was stuck we couldn’t get it in 4-wheel-drive?

Now I love my Jeep, but it’s not exactly a truck.  It has a tow package, with tow hooks on the front, but it doesn’t have the kind of powerhouse engine required to break the suction in this La Brea Tar Pits-like mud.  We moved the Jeep into position in what looked like a drier section of the dirt, but just like quicksand, it fooled us and it wasn’t long until we were stuck up to our axles too.

Is it weird that I am alternately laughing and wishing I had a better camera with me?

There was nothing left to do but call for a tow truck.  We waited out in the cold-ass dark to flag down the tow truck because we couldn’t give him an exact location beyond “on the side of the road in the back of the valley before the little church.”  There are drawbacks to living out in the sticks.

I could mention here that I found all of this rather funny, especially the comedy of all the things he did wrong.  It’s a lot funnier when the sum total of your function in this situation is calling for the tow, holding the credit card, and live tweeting the situation.

I could also mention that at one point I was also stuck in the mud and hubs and the boy had to grab me and pull me out.

Once the tow truck came it moved pretty smoothly.  The guy had a shovel and once our axles were freed enough he attached the winch.

Who has two thumbs and passed up an opportunity for a pic of hubs with his butt up in the air? Not me, that's for sure!

The rest of the evening was pretty anti-climatic.  Both vehicles were pulled out.  I handed over my credit card.  We drove home, flinging mud from our tires the whole way.  The boy spent the morning cleaning up the mess on the vehicles and hosing the mud off the clothes and boots.

Valuable lessons have been learned about carrying shovels, staying away from the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Mud for the rest of eternity, putting your vehicle in 4WD, dressing appropriately for the weather, that it costs $300 to get two vehicles pulled out of the goo, and the consequences of having a mother with Twitter and Facebook accounts and her very own blog plaform from which to broadcast your dumbassery all over the interwebs.

Learning is fundamental.

Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I wish I could spend the holiday with all of you.  Have a very merry!

Do you ever get to the end of a year and wonder where the time went?  We speed through our lives so fast sometimes that we forget where we’ve been.   Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to have a visual record of an entire year?

One of the things on my to-do list this year was to learn more about photography. While I have learned a lot this year, I haven’t been consistent with practice.  Just like anything else, the more you do the more you learn.

I have seen several Project 365 groups and the idea has intrigued me. The basic premise is that you take a photo every day for an entire year and post it to a designated Flickr group. Read more about the idea behind Project 365 groups here.

We all know that I’m not one to jump into an already established group,  and it can be really intimidating to join a group that has hundreds  or even thousands of members, so I decided to start my own.  It will be open to anyone, there are just a few simple rules.

1. Be nice to each other. This is not meant to be a forum for critique unless it’s requested, so I will ask that comments keep that in mind.

2. Put the day in the title of the photo. (ie 1/365 for day one). It doesn’t have to be the only title, but it gives you a timeline and helps keep a record of how your skills have progressed over the course of the year.

3. Take a photo every day. It doesn’t have to be with a fancy DSLR. Point and shoot and camera phone photos are fine too. Use whatever you have at your disposal.  This is supposed to be fun, not expensive.

4. Try to upload at least weekly, more often if possible.

5. Subject matter is purely your own choice, but no naughty bits please. Flickr has a place for that, and we are not there.

There will be challenges to spice things up and to give you ideas when you’re blocked.

If you’re interested, post a comment. The Flickr group link is here. The project starts Jan 1st and goes to Dec 31, 2010, but you can jump in anytime. I hope a lot of you will join in because it will obviously be more fun with more people. I know it sounds intimidating to take a photo a day, but many of you write daily blog posts and I think that’s much more challenging.

At the end of the year I plan to take all of my photos and make a Shutterfly book out of them.

So who’s with me?

I’ve had a few things go awry lately, but instead of dwelling on the negative I’m going to take a page out of LeSombre’s book and look for the silver linings.

We had some sudden bad weather after a relatively mild late fall/early winter that dumped a foot of snow on us and brought temperatures down to the negative teens.  Yes, NEGATIVE teens.  In Nevada.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t live anywhere near Vegas and winter here is the real deal, which is why we have such great skiing.  It’s just extremely unusual for it to dip so far into the negatives and the last time I can remember it going so low was in the 80’s.  (don’t quote me – I’m not a weather dood)

Since I live in the back of beyond things always go wrong at my house in the winter.  We have a well, which is one high-maintenance motherfucker when the temperatures dip.  We have a pump house that’s been Tyveked and insulated and heat taped and heat lamped to within an inch of its life and STILL one tiny little pipe froze this morning and cut of my water supply at a crucial moment in my hot cocoa preparation.  I was lulled into a false sense of water security because I got to have a nice toasty hot shower and flush the toidies before cutting me off.  Chocolatus interuptus.  I chose to ignore the universal weight loss smackdown message staring me right in the face as I looked back and forth between the empty faucet and the yummy goodness of the cocoa powder in the bottom of my cup, and instead got out the phone book and called the well dude.  I may or may not have shed a tiny tear for the loss of my cocoa, but that may also have been a tear of fear over the potential cost of this latest water shenanigan.

Silver Lining: The well dude was at my house within a half-hour of my phone call, and he brought with him a blow torch.  I love a good blow torch!  I could digress and get all nostalgic about the time I got out the blow torch for my cakery and pulled off a hat trick that saved the day, but it’s not really relevant except that I really do love a good blow torch. Anyway! The guy was at my house all of ten minutes before the water was gushing out of the pipe again and he only charged $105, which is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the things that can go wrong with a well.

Other random silver linings from the past few days:

• If your Jeep is going to get stuck in four-wheel drive, it’s better to have it stuck in 4HI than 4LOW.  I can still go on the freeway in 4HI.  It has since unstuck itself, which makes me think that the lever was probably actually frozen in place.
• That moment when your windshield washer fluid goes from a solid block of ice to usable window cleaner is golden and makes me smile every time.  It also makes me remember to stop letting the oil change guys fill it up because they don’t use the kind with anti-freeze in it.  Washer fluid without anti-freeze should be banned.
• I got to see a rare gold (sparkly gold, not yellow gold) Fiero stuck in a snow bank.  Who even has Fieros anymore and why would you drive one in a foot of snow on unplowed roads?  No wonder it was crunched at both ends!
• When your office parking lot is covered in 2 inches of ice, you don’t have to slow down for the speed bumps because they’re not there anymore!
  

So it’s been a trying few days, but there have been bright spots.

I’ve started a class that is helping me learn to meditate.  Part of the class is, of course, practice.  Every evening after everyone else is (supposedly) in bed, I get out my zafu and mat and set my timer.   The first week it was just 10 minutes, and all we were supposed to do was maintain posture and keep our mind on our breath.

Sounds easy, right?

Here’s how it went.

Rustle, rustle, rustle, settle, settle, settle….I finally got in position and set the timer.  I rested my hands on my knees and closed my eyes and just put my mind on my breath.

In.   Out.  Feel it fill the belly.

Cough, cough, snoorrrrrrk! (The boy has caught a cold.)

Back to the breath….in…out….fill the belly….

SLAM!! Wooof wooof wooofffff..wooof! Sasha, who never barks at noises outside, has suddenly decided the neighbor’s car door is TOTALLY NOT OK!

No! Back to the breath! Mind on the breath….calm breaths…in through the nose…

HACKA HACKA HACKA SNIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFFFFF…..

Mother fu… mind on the breath…only the breath….

(from the back of the house) Coco! No! Lay down! stomp stomp…Why can’t you…mumble mumble mumble….CRASH as the bedroom door gets almost ripped off the hinges…stomp stomp stomp down the hallway and outside with the dog…

What the shit??? Serenity now! The breath…remember the breath….

How long has it been? Surely it’s been 10 minutes.  How long is 10 minutes anyway?  It’s only 10 minutes!

Remember….breathe in…..breathe out…

SNNNOOOOOOOOORRRKKKKKK!!

Jeezus fuckballs, people!  What do I have to do to get a little quiet?  SERENITY NOW, BITCHES! SERENITY NOW!  RIGHT NOW!

Somehow I think that was a little counter-productive.