Smelly Kelly

I eat stinky stuff.

I come by it honestly - this is a family trait, and may be genetic. One of our family recipes, passed down from generation to generation, is literally a mixture of crushed, raw garlic and white vinegar. Growing up, there were more jars of pickled vegetables in the refrigerator than anything else. Sardines were eaten directly from the can and last week I caught my mother drinking the pickled herring juice directly from the jar.

We smell.

Santa Buddha

Down the street from our house is a Buddhist Temple. It's really a great set-up, especially for those houses directly next to the temple. I mean, what could be better than neighbors whose primary activities are meditating and seeking peace? The monks have taken over a corner lot and house, which appears to have been a private home at one point (including an attached RV garage, but I'm guessing the monks aren't tooling around in a Westphalia.)

HailNo Does Thanksgiving

250 million year old wood

We decided to do something a little different this year for Thanksgiving. Since we had just seen family in Texas for the cutest, smartest baby's first birthday, and since we're heading back to Hand Land for Christmas, we decided to do our own thing for Thanksgiving.

Our own thing generally involves remote corners of the world.

We considered camping, but two things happened. 1) It blizzarded, and there wasn't really a good path for getting the pop-up out of the garage where we are storing it (read: really big drift in the way.) 2) where we were thinking about going had a change in the weather and got really cold. So, we packed up our camp stove, grill, picnic basket, food, hiking gear and boots, and headed to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, sleeping in a motel instead of the pop-up.

The Petrified Forest is awesome.

When Rabbits Attack

WARNING: This post contains graphic fictional and non-fictional representations of animal violence. No, not violence against animals, animals committing atrocities.

Eric and I took a walk around the back lot this weekend, and realized...

We may be dealing with rabbits like this:

I'm not kidding.

Better Things to Do

1930's remnants

In my last blog, I mentioned having better things to do than sanitize the casa. Like going to California. Going to California is better than house cleaning.

California has provided not one but two mini-vacations for us this fall, and they turned out to be perfectly timed, before and after this whole moving houses thing we keep doing. Eric had a lot of business in the Golden State this year, and I was able to meet up with him for weekend adventures, thanks to some great Southwest sales and the fact that its only a 2 hour flight from DEN to LAX!

Confession

I am a dirty, filthy pig.

Selectively.

If you came over to my house last night for our annual Christmas Vacation party (and braved the weather, because we ALWAYS seem to pick terrible weather days for our annual extravaganza) I hope what you saw was a clean house.

It wasn't necessarily that way until, oh say, an hour before you showed up.

Harvey

I'm behind on blogging, as it happens. There are so many things to catch up on, and a couple of blogs on current events that won't make it to daylight (go ahead and assume you know which events I'm talking about and what teeth-gnashing stand I'm making).

However, I feel there is one thing we need to discuss, right away, and that, my friends, is the current state of wildlife around the new place. I know, this is neither the most relevant or political of topics, but perhaps we just need a moment away from all of that to focus.

Focus on the animals.