Oh! I forgot to share earlier…

They offered me the job and I accepted!  As of August 31st, I will be gainfully employed in a skilled nursing facility!!!  Yippee!

Making progress on the chicken coop…..

Still needs sides, a roof and exterior paint.

More work to do today!

Today is a special day….Not mine, but for someone I care about very much.  Today is Berry’s birthday.  It’s also the first time I get to tell her “Happy Birthday” in ten years!  It is very exciting.

Funny the way the world works…..Berry is my best friend from high school.  I have known her since I was 15…so for 22 years…Besides my family, she is the only person I am friends with who has known me for so long.

Except there was a hitch.  Until this spring, we had not spoken in ten years.  I am not going to go into details about the why of all this except to say we both were making the best choice for us at the time (for very different reasons)….Or so it seemed….

I can not really properly express the hurt and sorrow of losing my best friend for so long.  It took me years to get over it…Not that it is something you really get over, but eventually, the daily sting of it lessens.  I was okay as long as I didn’t see something that reminded me of Berry or looked through my photo albums of our children playing together. <sigh>  It was hard.

And then through an unexpected turn of events (Facebook), Berry contacted me.  I was unprepared for her to show back up….And very, very concerned about getting hurt all over again…..But I had changed, I am not the same person I was ten years ago…..And Berry had changed……And I was getting a second chance, which is something I never thought I would have.

So, since early February, Berry and I have been slowly rebuilding our relationship.  We started with email and built up to daily IMing.  We have laughed, we have cried, we have peeled back our bandaids and looked at the wound underneath, we have contemplated our regrets and our future….It has been hard but wonderful work!

We finally got together in person a few weeks ago when we met and spent a night at nearby campground.  We stayed up late talking and woke up early and spent the whole day talking.  It was great.

This is one of the harder things I have done in my life….To re-open myself to this friendship.  I am thrilled beyond measure and very worried.  I worry that the same turn of events will occur to lead to another separation…..But you know what? Berry is such a wonderful person and adds so much to my life…I think that re-friending her is worth the risk….Plus, I might not give up so easily if I was to lose her again.

So, today is her birthday…The first time in ten years that I will not feel sorrow and loss, but joy and contentment.  I will not get to see her today, but I have sent her email and IM birthday wishes.  (And I will get to see her later this week for a special birthday dinner). 

I never expected we would get a second chance and I intend to make the most of it!

Working on the chicken coop this weekend.  It’s slow going as we didn’t get to start until after lunchtime yesterday.  However, dh is getting the frame built and I pre-painted the plywood so the interior will be painted when we put it together.  I found some interesting green oops paint at Lowe’s. Gotta love $5/gallon oops paint!

Today, it is supposed to rain later. <sigh> Dh and I both want to go to UU too….So little time, so much to do!

I must say, I am very thankful for my friends. Yesterday, some friends helped me out to get the lumber we needed for the chicken coop.  I truly appreciated their generosity.  It is so nice to have friends who will help you when you are in a bind!

K….Short blog cuz it’s not raining yet, must go use power tools and keep on building.

I must keep busyness in my life so that I am not just sitting desperately beside the phone, waiting for it to ring…..Waiting for the job to be offered…..

Argh! And if they don’t call today, I’ll have to wait through the whole weekend without knowing for sure……

Have I ever mentioned that I am not always a particularly patient person?

It is super gray and dreary here this morning.  Dh and I had a hard time getting out of bed….Gray days like this just make us want to pull the covers up over our heads and stay in bed.   

I have been saving some pictures to share with you.  We live next door to an open 4 acre field.  it is mowed and hayed, so it does not have tall grass on it.  Several years ago there was a spell for several summers where a local hot air balloon company would routinely launch in the morning and/or evening out of the field.  We enjoyed watching the balloons go up.  Somehow, hot air balloons seem so magical! So, it was really a treat to see them frequently.

Then for the past few years, for some reason, there have been no balloon launches from the field.  Honestly, I have missed them.  But guess what!? This year they are back.  There have been two evening balloon launches in the past month or so. And I have lots of pictures!

I will be keeping my eyes and ears open in the evenings so that I won’t miss any balloon launches!

So, my job interview went okay.  They said I should hear back in a few days.  I guess I need to fill out my license application and get that in the mail as I can’t start working without a license!

K…Back to camping pictures, this is the last batch. Some are from a hike we went on and some are sort of general camping pictures.

We went on a 3ish+ mile hike when camping.  We had a goal of making it to see a particular part of the forest that our hiking brochure boasted was rare in Vermont as it has sedge and looked like a savannah.  However, we did not make it that far on the hike.

We passes a lovely tiny waterfall.

And came across Beaver Meadow.

We also got eaten alive by mosquitoes (even though we had bug sprayed).  Nature Boy and I both fell as the trails were slippery from our constant rain.  (I am still sporting a pretty big bruise on my shin from the fall!)  It was not a banner hike…I would say, if not for the mosquitoes, it would have been a good outing.  It would be a lovely hike to do in the fall! 

My other few pictures are of camping randomness…like the practically tame squirrels and chipmunks at our campsite.

And this really pretty flower we saw a lot of down there, but I have never seen growing up here.

That pretty much wraps up our camping trip! We had a lovely time and I look forward to going back to that campground again!

My job interview is today at noon.  I am pretty excited and a little bit nervous. 

Because I spent most of last night obsessing about my resume, I did not get to editing the last pictures from camping….So, we are on a camping report hiatus until tomorrow.

I got some knitting in yesterday. I am knitting Nautie the Nautilus from an old Knitty.  It is coming along pretty well.   It all started a while ago when Nature Boy went birthday shopping with his grammy.  He came back with a stuffed squid. (I know, only a tad bit strange, eh?)  The squid reminded him of his stuffed octopus and so he was having a cephalopod renaissance.  Then he said the fateful words, “I’d like to get a stuffed nautilus next.”

Well, wouldn’t you know, when I saw that nautilus pattern on Knitty two years ago, I made sure to print it off because I knew I would have to knit it some day!   I was thrilled to tell NB I had just the pattern to knit him a nautilus.  It was what I took to knit on camping.  I do have one picture of it when I was first starting the curling shell.

It is quite a bit bigger already, though I don’t have a current picture.

I am enjoying knitting the nautilus and it is so much fun too because every time NB seems me knitting on it, he gets very excited!

Hmmmm…Instead of my own pictures, how about some pictures of the vacation our chicks took while we were away?  The chicks went to stay at my friend’s house to keep her and her 4 and 6 year old company. They had a lot of fun with the chicks!

Do you recognize that sweet girl? It’s Muffin! She has been one of my knitting victims  recipients.

 As you can see, she is growing up very fast!

Not much going on around here.  I am working on my resume for my interview tomorrow.  And we are drawing up plans for our chicken coop as we want to build it on the weekend. Other than that…It is regular mundaneness.

However, I do have more camping pictures to share! I have lots for today.

Since we were on a big pond for camping, we took our kayaks and spent lots of time on the water. Nature Boy had a blast kayaking.  He said repeatedly how much he liked it and asked if we could go kayaking more often!

Here he is kayaking past our campsite.

And later, when I caught up with him.

In the next picture, he is leading me to show me some strange gunk stuck to a dead tree in the water.

This was the morning we were kayaking in the rain.  We kayaked over to the swimmers beach and then swam a while.

Dh had been washing up the dishes at camp and then kayaked over to join us. You can see where all the drops of rain are hitting the water as he kayaked over.

Nature Boy swam over to greet him.

The pond had amazing clear water, all kinds of fish and lots of  water lily pads.  It was a lot of fun to kayak amongst the lily pads.  I learned that lily pad leaves are actually very tough and leathery feeling.  And that water lilies have a beautiful scent.  You could smell it when you got to the patches of lily pads.

Usually, the tops of the lily pads are all dry, but since it was raining, the water had beaded up on the pads. It was actually really pretty looking.

It was a lot of fun to kayak through the lily pads.  We also swam out to them several times from the beach.

Oh! And speaking of the beach…One day when we were swimming, there was a snake in the water!  (I thought of you immediately, Speedy!)  We don’t have venomous water snakes in Vermont…I’m not sure we have any real water snakes at all.  However, some land snakes will go for a swim.  This one was swimming along close to the shore and would pop it’s head up for air occasionally.  It was a long snake too….Usually, we see little snakes, a couple feet long at most.  This snake was longer!  It was cool to watch it swim.

One of our favorite things about camping is sitting around the fire.  We enjoy the whole process, from fire making to watching the embers burn.  We spent a lot of time around the fire talking, cooking, reading, knitting…..It was an attractive place to sit and simply be.

We took turns starting and tending the fire (Seriously! Everyone loves to do it so much that we had to take turns because people are very territorial about building and tending the fire and heaven forbid that someone poke at someone else’s fire!) and everyone got a turn splitting wood.

We also did lots of cooking on the fire.  We made grilled salmon.

And I brought black raspberries from home that we stewed up into a tasty sauce.

We also cooked on the camp stove using my favorite camping cooking item…The camp oven.  I made some modifications on it for this camping trip and was quite pleased with how it came out.  The camp oven has only one rack that comes with it, but it has three different rack heights.  I wanted the option of cooking on two racks…..So, I got a few things at Lowes and improvised…..

If you note the numbered points of interest:

• 1. 12″ threaded metal rod.
• 2.  Wing nuts to hold said threaded rod on either end of the oven.
• 3. A square cookie rack placed over the rod to provide surface area on which to place the pan.

This allowed me to cook two pans of muffins every single morning.  As you can see in the picture, I made muffins with black raspberries.  Then we put the muffins in bowls (torn in half) and poured the berry sauce over them….It was unbelievably delicious!!

We are excited to try pizzas in the camp oven next time.  I might have to get another threaded rod/washer set so we can cook all of our pizzas at the same time.

I have to say, we ate incredibly well camping.  We had salmon and steak and the standard hamburgers and hot dogs.  We also had corn on the cob, broccoli, grilled peppers, grilled summer squash and zucchini…..Lots of fresh veggies and fruits.  Despite the lavishness of food items such as Hunter’s Sharp cheddar and real MacKenzie franks, our activity level surpassed our food intake as I actually lost 5 lbs while camping!

Tomorrow, I will share pictures of our fun physical activities…kayaking and hiking.