Happy New Year!

I'm excited for the new year!  What is in store for us all in 2011?  I certainly don't know but I look forward to finding out.  As my computer cat and I think toward January, I know that he is very happy to be here at all!  You see, in July, Daytona was hit by a car and left in a driveway in Sgt. Bluff, IA.  Paw Prints got a call about an injured cat and of course, Beth (my Paw Prints partner) said to take him to the vet.  Several hundred dollars and a surgery later, Daytona was nicely recovering.  I was in Yellowstone on vacation with my family at the time, but was aware of the situation.  When I got back, I went to the vet to take him home for recovery instead of leaving him there.  He stayed in a kennel for a few days, then was very timid and wouldn't even come upstairs for weeks.  Slowly and surely, his leg gained strength and he was soon bounding around with my other three cats.  He's currently "up for adoption", but I like to think that he's already my cat.  He follows me around the house, loves to purr on my lap as we do computer tasks, and he plays well with the others.

Daytona

I appreciate the person calling Beth about him.  I appreciate the vet who repaired his broken leg.  I appreciate my husband for letting me bring him home and letting him still be here.  He's basically part of the family and I really do love him! One little blessing for me, one huge blessing for Daytona.  That leads me to my next venture of the winter/spring.....RUNNING FOR A PAWS.

I'm on Week 1 of my marathon training program.  I started on Monday the 27th and have 18 weeks ahead of me.  It will all come to a head on May 1st in Lincoln, Nebraska.  I'm hoping to run the marathon of a lifetime and also raise money for Paw Prints along the way.  It's a lot to take on, but Sioux City is so much better off having Paw Prints here.  It's the ONLY place in the area in in most of the entire tri-states where you can bring a cat or call about a stray cat and know that if we can help with it, it will never be euthanized.  It's a safe haven for cats where they can just be cats~ no kennels (unless in time out or behavior training).  We can only take in so many cats and we have to have funds to do so.  So my passions come together and I will do my best at raising my goal and running my goal time.  While I hesitate to disclose my goal running time, I will be happy to disclose my fundraising goal.... $5,000.  It's really not that much considering that $100,000 was raised in December alone for toys for kids.  Anyway, if you're reading this, I hope you can be a part of this goal.  Join me in making Sioux City a standout for the way they treat cats.... join me in Running for a Paws!

Running for a Paws II coming in January!

I will be back in January.  I've got a new fundraiser, new goals, and another marathon to train for. This time it's serious.
I ran the Des Moines 1/2 Marathon in October.  I trained relatively hard and was very happy with my race results.  I found my zone and beat my goal time by just over 30 seconds.  Boy, was I happy.  As you can see from my picture, I was hurting at the end, but I had the goal in mind and didn't want to look back and be disappointed or regret not trying harder.  My time was 1 hr 44 min 27 sec.  That's about an 8 minute mile pace.  I was very happy about it!
So I'm taking the next few weeks off blogging, not as if I've really been doing a great job at that anyway.  I need some down time.  I'm jogging about 5 miles max so I can heal and run for fun again.  I got very burned out at the end of this training session.  Right after Christmas, I'll be back at it.  I have lots of ideas, lots of goals, lots of ambition and drive.  We'll see if we can make this Running for a Paws the best ever!

Near the finish at the Des Moines 1/2 Marathon

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Race for Hope...and other things

I really have missed blogging.  I am in the middle of so many projects now that I seem to let the blog time slip by.  Ok, really, I've been reading lots of books lately.  I used to be an avid reader, but with kids and projects that are never fully completed, it always seemed easier to pick up a magazine.  Now that we bought another car to replace the old one that needed a lot of work, the magazines (or mazagine as Ryan calls them) are no longer.  I will have to find a way to NOT get sucked into buying them off the shelf though...maybe bring a strip of leather and bite on it during checkout time?
Today is my son's 8th birthday.  I'm so proud to be his mom and I love the person he is and will become.  What a lucky person I am to have him in my life!
I ran the Race for Hope, a fundraiser for specific things for the June E Nylen Cancer Center here in Sioux City. The race started at 8:30 and because of the nice rain on the roof, I stayed in bed until 7:30.  I got up and checked the radar to see if it should be ending and it looked like it would be relatively clear by race time.  Wrong.  Right before the thing started, and it starts late EVERY year, it poured on us poor souls.  It was cold, puddley (not sure if that's a word but it's appropriate right here) and a mess.  The trail is a really nice fine gravel and perfect when it's dry.  It had a lot of puddles in areas, especially the beginning.  I dodged the puddles as much as I could and my feet stayed dry until the last two miles of the 9.3 mile course.  I felt great throughout the entire run, and was very proud of my 1 hr, 15 minute finish.  And in those conditions!  I assume I ran better due to the cold 43 degrees than anything, but speedwork that I've been doing sure didn't hurt.

Dirty Shoes after the Race for Hope

I took this picture because I felt very humbled by the race experience. As I was driving there, in the pouring rain, I thought that I could just turn back home if it was raining at start time.  Then, as I was walking towards the start line and bathrooms, this thought came to my head "This has GOT to be easier than chemo".  It was decided.  I was going to run this race regardless.  So I did.

We got our countertops tiled last week. Andy took the sink out on Wednesday and he put it back in Sunday.  This has to be one of the reasons why paper products were invented: home improvement projects that take a lot longer than what you though.  Granted, the tile guy worked his rear off, but it's still not the way we think it should look.  Andy has to finish the backsplash too.  The reason I mentioned this is because of the paper that my shoes are sitting on in the above picture.  He put protective paper on the wood floors, thank goodness. 

That brings me to our new car.  It was a hard decision to spend too much on a car.  But with the current one being 12 years old, we knew we could be in for a boatload of repair costs.  Plus, we don't trust the thing, nor do we trust most repair shops.  Yes, there are a few we trust, but when one tells us that there's no leak when we can clearly see the remnants of it on our driveway, we have a good reason not to trust them. So we went to the Billion Auto thing at the event center and ended up doing something we said we wouldn't.  For the first time ever though, we think we actually got a good deal.  One of the best parts is that the new car gets 20 mpg in city driving.  I about flipped when I filled up this morning and it took just under 10 gallons.  WHAT???!!!  Granted, it wasn't empty, but still. I'm used to a Ford Explorer V8 that is doing well at 17 mpg, and that's a lot of highway miles, and I can't fill up for less than $40.  The second best thing is that we got a free trip to Vegas. Here we go again!  And no shows, no tours, no nothing this time, only fun!

Ok, I guess that's it for the catching up.  The 1/2 marathon is coming closer so I will be putting in 2 hour long runs on the weekends. It's really too much to handle at 5am, actually 4:45am.  By 1pm, I'm totally beat.

Off to play legos with the birthday boy and have some fun with their friends after school (mine got out early today).

A new race to train for

After taking several months to heal my leg injury and to not worry about training for any running event, I am now "in training" for the Des Moines 1/2 marathon.  It came about rather strangely and I have to give my friend Rachel all the credit.  She has been running this spring and summer and entered her first race in early August.  I went to run the race so she had someone to be there in the beginning since she hadn't done it before.  Although I've run in dozens of races, it can be nerveracking for me, so I totally understood why she wanted someone there. 
Honestly, I dreaded going to that race.  I didn't want to get up early, I didn't want to be tired, I didn't want to compete and see all these other really fast runners in great shape, I didn't want to at all.....until I got there.  My competitiveness returned from vacation that I never realized it took.  When I got home, I was all energized about racing again, which is the last thing I expected myself to feel like! It didn't hurt that I got first in my age group and 8th overall (ok there were only 50 runners!!).  I decided (with Andy's help of course) to train for and run the race in Des Moines.  Talk about a change of attitude.  The 5k I ran with Rachel went well and I felt good about it.  It's a pretty boring course, but it's flat and there's not very many competitors.  If you want to feel good about your times, I always suggest running in the Pioneer Days 5k!  And speaking of running well, I have to give kudos to Rachel for beating her time goal by 3 minutes!  She rocked it!
I'm still in good shape from torturing myself with the marathon at the end of May, so I picked up the training pretty easily.  I've already had two 90 minute runs and have impressed myself with the speedwork.  I ran hills last week (if anyone here in town is familiar with 33rd St, that's my hill) and before that, I went to the track to run 400's.  I did 8 of them that morning and averaged 1.5 minutes per lap.  Not too shabby.  The goal of this 1/2 marathon is to prove to myself that I can run it in the time I would need to qualify for the Boston full marathon which is 1 hr 52 minutes.  Considering the bad races I've had this year, I certainly expect this to be a challenge, but I'm up for it.  I realized that I have to push myself past the uncomfortable zone and get over the discomfort.  Quit being a pansy and just DO IT!  As usual, we shall see!  And I don't know why I have to have a goal for this.  Why can't I just go out and run and have fun like I used to do? 
As for any other news, I believe Paw Prints is still going to close.  It's really hard to see it happen, but I honestly don't know how we can continue....it's heartbreaking really.
My foster cat, Daytona, is such a sweetheart and I would LOVE to keep him.  It can't happen but I guess I'll just have to keep him until we find the perfect new owner for him!
Well, I'm sure it won't be weeks upon weeks before I write again.  I hope not anyway. Enjoy the 700 mph wind and heat today!

Daytona thinking about his life...

Paw Prints closing

Noodle- currently available for adoption!

Isn't it interesting that it's been EXACTLY a month since my last post?  Complete coincidence for sure!

Changes. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it’s even better. But when this change will come, it’s going to be a sad ending to a great thing. Paw Prints is going to close their cat adoption center. There are a lot of reasons why, but I just don’t feel it necessary to explain the main one, mainly because it isn’t about me. Let’s just say that we suffer from a lack of funding and volunteers….good, reliable volunteers. We need dozens of them and we just don’t have them. We do have some great ones though: Leah, Rachael, Mary, Sharon to name just a few. But it’s not enough. Same as the funding. We do have funds, but it just isn’t enough. So we are going to now concentrate on getting grants to continue our population control issue.


Did you know that a female cat can produce over 4,000 kittens in her lifetime? No, that doesn’t mean she will give birth to that many, but would include her kittens, her kitten’s kitten’s, and so on and so forth. So spaying and neutering is our goal to prevent the thousands of euthanasias per year in Siouxland.

Paw Prints has been the subject of very negative and bad talk from other agencies in the area. These other places go so far as to bash what we do to vets that we use. I just don’t understand. Since when is it bad that we’re taking in homeless cats, getting them vaccinated and fixed a bad thing? We certainly don’t understand where the negativity comes from and we just carry on with it. But it could be so different. Wouldn’t it be nice if when the Humane Society is low on cats, they call Animal Control, who always has a surplus of cats, and take some from them to prevent them from being euthanized? Currently, they ship cats in from Sioux Falls instead of getting them from their own city. Isn’t it called Siouxland Humane Society???? I guess Sioux Falls is close enough. I guess.....

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could send people to each other’s adoption centers if they had a certain cat that we didn’t offer? It will never happen. Ever. And it doesn’t make any sense. These other agencies work so hard to keep to themselves and to put everyone else down. They don’t get the main focus, which really should be the health and welfare of the animals. The cats of Sioux City will pay the ultimate price for the things that go on and I hate that.  I hate that I can’t change people, knock some sense into them.

I wish I could win the lottery. A huge portion of the winnings would be put into a fund and we could provide a very nice adoption center with cleaning staff. We could spay and neuter any cat that we could and we could make a bigger difference faster. I wish a lot of things, but I really wish we could find a way to get people to care more. More people to put in a few hundred bucks, more people to come in once a week to clean. But they aren’t there regularly. So we face turning cats away, which has been done the last few weeks. We face knowing that they may face the ultimate when they get sent somewhere…animal control, humane society, a ditch. It’s a hard decision, but I know that some decisions have to be made.


So if anyone reading this would like to adopt a cat or kitten, now is the time to do it. Once we run out of cats, we will close our doors and concentrate on spaying and neutering and getting more grant money to work with.

Oh, I have more I could bluther on and on about, so I shall save that for another day. I guess I'll start a-singing.  CH-CH-CH-CHANGES....

We're home!

Yellowstone Lake with smoke and fog

We left Western Yellowstone on Tuesday morning around 7:30 after packing up our tent.  We thought we would end up and camp one more night in Rapid City, but after consideration, we decided to go for it and try to get home.  At 1:30 am, we drove into Bell Ct.  Ryan had fallen asleep about an hour before we got home and Tyler was still awake since he had been watching a movie, Short Circuit.  When we got them back into their beds, they fell fast asleep and stayed asleep until 9:45 this morning, a record for both.  Since we hadn't told anyone we were going to drive all the way back so as not to worry family, I tricked my mom into coming down and "checking on something" for me.  She called me a little shit and then we spent the next hour chatting about the trip.  She needed to head to Omaha to pick up my sister, so we figured we'd have plenty of time to catch up and view the 500+ pictures we took!
I am so thankful for the great weather we had and the good fortune of a safe, loving driver, a well built Ford Explorer, and an all-round great family week.  I think my favorite part was the experience of camping in different places and experiencing these beautiful places as an adult.
Andy's favorite part was the beauty of the mountains and views of lakes, mountains, valleys, and different terrain.
Tyler loved the cave and Ryan loved being with family.  That was an "awwww" moment.  Really, I am very blessed to be able to do these things and I'm honestly grateful that we didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel.  Well, we have enough money but that's not what we can spend it on anyway.  We would have never thought to camp, especially in Yellowstone.  And the fact that we went to Vegas in June prompted me to think of taking the boys all the way to the Rockies.  Strange how one event leads to another!
Today has been filled with laundry, organizing, uploading pictures to make an album, and the boys playing with their friends FINALLY!
Tomorrow will be back to work, back to getting up early to jog, humidity (there's relatively no humidity where we were), and housework.  The best thing about living in a tent is that it's very easy to clean!
That's all for now.  I'll have more this weekend!

Day 6 - Sunday and Monday morning...

The answer to the last question of my senses overwhelmed by campfires, pine trees, and starts is YES. What a great night we had! We weren’t able to get Monday night at the same park so we’re now off to the west side of the park, where we’ll hopefully be able to get on wifi and upload my last five days.


Yesterday’s adventures were only beginning when we entered the park. Just as we got into the park, we saw tons of cars parked along a non-pullover area, which means there’s an animal to see and photograph. It was a moose and her baby!! Of course, I got as many pics as possible and thought it was as neat as can be. Yeah, we finally saw AND took pictures of all the animals we wanted to! We went immediately to our campground to set up our tent and what do you know, Bismark the Buffalo was right by our tent site. We knew he was close since when we checked in, they told us there was a buffalo roaming around the camp area. I was surprised, to say the least, that they would be roaming around the people and tents. When we talked to the lady at checkin, I asked about how often they see bears and she was very nonchalant when she said, “Oh we haven’t seen one in a week or so” like it had been FOREVER. I just said OK and we went on our merry way, making sure we followed the bear rules. We dumped the firewood out and went ahead and set up our tent, which was difficult since it was very windy. I was already questioning our decision to camp there. The boys ate their lunch in the truck while Andy and I set the tent up, watching Bismark get closer and closer. He just grazed, then took time for a dust bath, and had a good ole’ Bismark time.

Then we were on our way to the mud volcano. That was actually pretty unimpressive, because we ended up seeing the Dragon’s Mouth Spring first. It sounded like what you would imagine a dragon sounding like when he was blowing fire. I got a video, which unfortunately only sounds like the water lapping at the sides of the little pond. The concept of the Dragon’s Mouth Spring is a cave where gas is bubbling up and causing the waves and as the waves go back into the cave, it traps the gas and then the gas escapes when the waves to back out, sounding like dragon’s breath. Very cool. The mud volcano was similar to mud pots, just an area of bubbling mud. Neat, but again, after the other thing, pretty uneventful.

Around this time, we saw that there was a HUGE plume of smoke coming from the forest. Ok, NOT a good thing. It was quite impressive how it grew so fast and high into the atmosphere. It looked fairly close to our camping area but we thought that we would hear something if it got dangerous.

After about an hour walking around the dragon and mud volcano area, we headed to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. There were several pretty points along the way to the main one, so we stopped several times and got some amazing pictures of the canyon. The Yellowstone River goes through the canyon and it’s an amazing emerald color. The falls are about 310 feet and you can hear the roar of them from several thousand feet away. I thought it was neat that Andy and I got to see two Grand Canyon’s in a matter of months!

We ended up at the Canyon Village and had a yummy root beer float made with Old Faithful Root Beer. It didn’t stand a chance between the four of us!

We started our way back to the campsite, thinking it wouldn’t take long. Wrong. There was a huge traffic backup, so I’m thinking an accident, bear, or something like that. It took a good 30 minutes to get to where Bismark’s friends were meandering along the road like they owned it. It was pretty funny to see. What are we going to do, honk? I think not. I think they wanted us to be sure that THEY were in charge! It’s funny that when we first got into the park, we were sooo excited to see buffalo and by the second day, it’s no big deal. Oh, another buffalo, whupdeedo.

We saw helicopters taking water and dumping it on the forest fire, one of which filled up it’s bucket very near us in the Yellowstone Lake. It was neat to see, but sad to think about the beautiful forest being burned, especially since so much of it has already been burned in the last 22 years. The worse fire got over 50% of the park in 1988 and can see the regrowth of the trees. Some areas look like they aren’t growing anything at this point. Very sad to see, especially since a lot of it was caused by people being careless with fire.

We went through another storm, no hail this time, and got back to a damp tent. Only a few small areas on two sleeping bags got wet, so we got them out to dry. The sun came out and the wind was gone, so we were pretty happy about that. We all walked to the little store close to our camp area and to the lake where we could play in the sand a little and get our hands wet. Boy, was it cold!!!

We got a good campfire going after dusk and asked the neighboring campers if they wanted to join us for roasted marshmallows since they didn’t have a fire going. They came over when the fire died down and we had a very nice visit with them. They are from Wisconsin and had been traveling from the Tetons and through both loops of Yellowstone. They were going to head back home, which takes them a LOT longer than it takes us! They had two teenage boys and one 3 year old boy and were fun to talk to. I just don’t have any idea how they packed all their stuff into a minivan with a small luggage carrier.

Oh, we just passed a tiny little pond with lilly pads and frogs, cute!

The night went well, wasn’t windy nor did it seem exceptionally cold. I got warm so took off my extra socks and gloves. The boys slept well too. The only problem is that Andy and I both had our ears wide open and kept thinking that we heard wild animals. Who knows if we actually heard anything, but we both thought there was a wild dog in there somewhere! You can hear EVERYTHING in a campsite so that’s been an interesting adjustment when you’re used to a very quiet house.

We went to see Old Faithful again (that’s THREE times for me and Tyler) while we waited for the only building in the area with wifi to be cleared from the fire alarm.

We’re looking forward to our next adventure tonite. We have plenty of fire wood and marshmallows, so I think we’re set!

More pictures to come soon.....after we find the cord to upload them....