Yello!

My new puppy. I’m thinking of calling her Mika. Any housebreaking tips? 🙂

In the midst of wedding preparations, we slipped away during Bike Week for a couple of days at Sturgis. Francis protested that we really didn’t have the time to go, but I really wanted to and he finally agreed that we just needed to take the time for us. We had a great time – Thursday evening at Full Throttle listening to Jackyl and Friday night at the Buffalo Chip listening to Blue October and Chris Daughtry. A trike show was featured at Thunder Road. The music was good, the bikes were fun, and the people were awesome as we made some new friends and connected with some old ones during our stay at Sturgis.

We laughed the hardest though over the continuing challenge of camping and dealing with an air mattress. To give you a bit of background regarding our camping experiences at Sturgis…two years ago we borrowed an electric pump and adapter to plug it into our pick-up only to find it didn’t seem to work. Francis spent about 20 minutes blowing the air mattress up the old fashioned way and had to rest for another 20 minutes after becoming lightheaded!!! Last year, we thought we were smart when we stopped in Rapid City to pick up a bicycle pump to alleviate our air mattress blowing up dilemma…only to find that someone had neglected to put the plug back into the air mattress after they had used it last. So we took the plug off the end of our ice cooler and wrapped masking tape around it in an effort to wedge it into the hole in the air mattress as a make-shift plug. Well, it worked pretty well except that a few hours into the night we steadily kept losing air until we were laying flat on the ground by morning! So this year, we thought we finally had figured this air mattress problem out. Francis got me a 4-minute bed-in-a-box for Christmas with the intention of taking it along to Sturgis this summer. It had a pump with it and built-in plugs that fit – our mattress problems were over… or so we thought! We first put up our small four man tent and then starting blowing up the new air mattress outside the tent. To our surprise the air mattress quickly blew up into a tall, queen-size inflated bed! Now our problem was getting this monstrous air mattress into our small tent. I tugged from the inside and Francis pushed from the outside as a neighboring camper wandered over laughing hysterically as he snapped pictures of our futile attempted to get the giant mattress into the tent. So Francis decided to let some air out until it was spongey enough to push it into the tent. So when it was time to retire for the night, I crawled into the tent (which was entirely consumed by the air mattress inside) and immediately rolled off the squishy, partly deflated mattress and got wedged between the mattress and the tent wall! Francis answered my yell for help and dived into the tent to rescue me which only caused me to become more tightly lodged between the mattress and the tent wall. He couldn’t even see me!!! He finally got me pulled out and the rest of the night was spent trying to sleep on the squishy mattress without getting rolled off again. Next year we need to try again to finally get this air mattress thing right – I mean, how hard can it be? Any suggestions?

When you were born, you were crying, and everyone around you was smiling.

Live your life so that when you die,you’re the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying.  🙂

The family just returned from 11 days in Scotland. I think we may have found the most beautiful place on earth…but then, I just thought that until I saw the next most beautiful place…so now I’m not sure. Anyway, we did enjoy the sights of Scotland. We spent a week at Delgatie, an ancient castle associated with the Hay clan near the small town of Turriff in Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland. We ventured away from the castle each day testing our driving skills and seeing such sights as Loch Ness, Scotland’s coast along the North Sea, the Scottish Highlands and Balmoral (the Queen’s vacation home), The Glenlivet whisky distillery, and the cities of Aberdeen and Inverness. The kids were pretty pumped that we got to see the new Simpsons movie on opening day in Aberdeen (six hours before their friends back home even!). After our week’s stay, we took in the Highland Games at Dufftown before staying one night at Fort Augustus just south of Loch Ness. We drove over to the beautiful Isle of Skye on the western coast of Scotland before heading southeast to Edinburgh. There we spent a day shopping and catching a glimpse of the imposing Edinburgh castle, the Royal Mile, and the nearby monument at Stirling in honor of Scottish hero William Wallace, as portrayed in Braveheart. A few things we learned included how many twists and turns there are on the roads in Scotland and exactly how efficient round-abouts are. We also found out that most restaurants and public toilets close at 5 pm in small Scottish towns. I loved the beautiful wild flowers, expecially the purple thistles which are a national symbol of Scotland. The people were especially friendly and we had a great time. What a trip!