• So the wedding is 2 days away. Most everything is done and I feel pretty calm about the whole thing. I have a feeling that my mom and sister aren’t quite as calm, but that’s pretty indicative of our personalities. The flowers arrived today and tomorrow we do all the decorating. Friday all we will have to do is arrange flowers, so we should be all set to go for the wedding at 5. My future BIL was born here but raised in Mexico and his family is preparing all the food for the wedding. I’m so excited about authentic Mexican foody goodness!

• I have been having some big stomach problems, so I am hoping that I will actually get to eat the food! The upside is that I’ve lost 10lbs in all of this.

• I’ve been really enjoying my new phone that arrived last week. I totally didn’t need it, but I wanted it so I bought it. (What a spoiled brat, eh?) My hope is that I can sell my old phone on ebay for almost enough to cover the cost of the new one. The auction is up to $99 already, so it looks like so far so good.

• Eden has a dentist appointment today. Her second bottom tooth never fell out and the adult tooth grew up behind it. We kept missing the dentist between our vacation and his, so I’ve let the adult tooth grow in more than I had wanted. With the thousands and thousands that my parents and I have spent on my mouth and the thousands that we need to spend on Jim’s mouth, I’m not having much hope for kids with straight teeth. But I’m hoping that we can catch a lot of it early and at least make it a little better. Poor kiddo, I don’t envy her the annoyance of having her teeth worked on.

I’m off, but I’ll try to post photos of our decorating progress and the wedding, even if it’s just cell phone pics!

‘vases’ for the wedding

Originally uploaded by pretendingsanity

Here are the ‘vases’ for the wedding. We are taking wide mouth pint jars, covering them with taffeta, wrapping them with tulle and tying with a satin ribbon. The wedding colors are black and white with the only color coming from bright flowers.
I cant believe that my sister is getting married in one week!

So yesterday we signed the lease on a new space for Tangle. It’s downtown right on Main street and we are so freaking excited – I can’t stand it. Right now the store is located in a small house on a street that gets little traffic so a move to Main street is going to do wonders for our business. We plan to have the new store open September 1st. Tell me about something exciting that’s happening in your life?

Greetings from best buy

Originally uploaded by pretendingsanity

weve been having fun playing with the powerbooks.

I need to find an aluminum-free deodorant that actually works! Toms of Main was working a little bit but just not good enough. I only use deodorant because I’d rather sweat than loose my boobs to breast cancer. I found this recipe for homemade deodorant, but I need to find something to use until I have time to make it and/or if it turns out not to go on clear enough.

Anyone?

Yesterday an nice, soccer playing college student came and took Tuck home. I was amazed at how many calls we got for “Free to good home, 2 year old, neutered, pure bred beagle, current shots. Doesn’t like kids.” I feel like he went to a good home and an owner that can love him and take responsibility for him. We are all sad, excluding Jim, but I know that it was the best thing for all of us.

Continued from before…

After many phone calls and time pouring over the map we thought to call our friends who often camp on their parents land in Cedaredge. Thankfully, they were there camping and were happy to invite us along. So we spent our 4th with good friends listening to our dog viciously bark at their dogs. The next day we got moving early and I took to the phone again, looking for a place to camp the night. Our friends Chris and Shenan had planned to meet us our second day in Crawford, so we were trying to find a place that would take all of us. Again luck was on our side and I secured the last two camping spots in Ouray, one of my most favorite places in Colorado. It was in an RV park, but it didn’t matter, there was shade and so much to do and amazing scenery… and showers!

We spent the evening cleaning up and relaxing. Chris and Shenan offered to keep our kids for the night in their camper so we even had some alone time. The next morning we walked to the local coffee shop before joining up with our friends (and kids!). We spent the afternoon swimming in the hotsprings pool before lightning forced us to leave. So we all piled into Chris and Shenan’s camper and the kids napped (begrudgingly) and the adults played cards. On our way out of town we ate at the True Grit Cafe in Ridgway which is a homage to John Wayne because he filmed True Grit in Ridgway. And we were off to Gunnison.

I wasn’t thrilled about going to Gunnison because I had pictured it as a cute mountain town and when we drove through a couple days before I found out that it was nothing at all like I’d imagined. Also because we had tried to cancel our hotel room in favor of more camping but the hotel made up a new policy at the last minute that they didn’t accept cancellations in July. I had argued and argued with them days before about canceling, but didn’t have the emotional stamina to take it any further. So we just decided to go ahead with our reservations. It ended up fine. We used the time there to bathe(!) and do laundry and I had a touch of food poisoning or something, so I wasn’t up to hiking all over the place anyway. Plus the reason we were in that area of Colorado was to camp at the Dinner Station campground, rated the highest by our camping book. Dinner Station was described as the campground that you visit as a child and continue to visit every year thereafter.

Unfortunately our tastes must be quite different that the author of this book. Dinner Station was past Taylor Reservoir in a field of sagebrush and pine trees and was alongside a creek. It was ok, but by no means an amazing campground that we would travel several hours to visit every year. The campsites were close together, with many of the parking spots right on the road. There was well water provided, but the hand pump it came out of was so rusty that the water was brown. We planned to go ahead and stay but the people in our reserved spot from the night before hadn’t quite packed up yet, so we drove around exploring a bit. We ended up at a campground on the other side of the mountains called Mosca. It was right on a lovely fishing lake and the camp spots were a little more private. Jim was worried about running out of gas and I like the spot better so we just decided to forgo our reservations and stay at Mosca.

The water system at Mosca had dried up, and we had very little drinking water with us. (I had forgotten to fill up our big jug in Gunnison.) We were a little worried about what we were going to do about drinking water until Jim remembered that we still had water in the camper’s reservoir. So we had enough drinking water and we boiled our rusty water from Dinner Station to wash and rinse dishes and one crisis was avoided! We fished to no avail and enjoyed the evening, roasting marshmallows. This campground was the coldest we stayed at, even though the elevation was lower than Lake Irwin. It got down to 33 degrees that night. Times like that, we were thankful for the camper!

Rather than stay another night without good water, we decided to pack up and spend our last two nights camping at a campground that we knew was good. So we headed back towards home and camped at Silverjack Reservoir. It was beautiful and relaxing until the dog decided to go after Honor. Honor was just trying to pet him and he just went after him, barking viciously, baring his teeth and snapping. I picked Honor up to get him out of the way as Jim pulled the dog back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jim so mad. Tuck spent the rest of his evening laying on his back under the table of the camper. We kept him tied up so he couldn’t reach the sleeping children. And we decided that we could no longer keep him in our family. It’s just not worth risking our kids or anyone else’s.

The last couple days, we made sure to keep him away from the kids, and when we hiked down to the reservoir, we left him in the camper. I think this was the first time that Jim got to truly relax because the dog wasn’t tied to him. Plus he caught a bunch of fish. Eden and I got bored and hiked back up to our spot. We spent the afternoon knitting and coloring. It took 12 days, but I finally relaxed! We headed home the next day, completely filthy and ready to come home.

Overall, it wasn’t the lounge around, be limp-as-a-noodle vacation that I had anticipated. But I got to spend some really good time with Jim. Because he was there, the kids behaved and were really enjoyable. The dog stress/incidents were really upsetting, but I feel like we’ve done everything we could with him and hopefully we can find a great, childless home for him to go to.

(click to see the whole set)

Sunday we left home for Glenwood Springs after Jim finished playing at church. We had decided to play our time there by ear and drove around a bit when we arrived looking for a dog friendly hotel. Google via text was my constant companion those first few days. While I made a phone call from the parking lot of one hotel, Jim backed up and ran over one of the tie downs holding the camper to the truck that had come loose, consequently ripping a small portion of the bottom of the camper completely out. That was fun.

We finally found an (expensive) place to stay downtown and settled in. We walked around, ate dinner at subway and then drove to the hot springs to swim. Tuck relaxed in the camper while we swam – luckily he doesn’t mind being in there and it was cool.

The next day we headed up to the GWS adventure park via gondola and poked around a bit, rode the roller coaster and headed back down the mountain. Next we stocked up on food for 6 days and Jim got some parts at Lowes to fix his little tie down mishap. It was a lot of shopping and we finally headed to Redstone around 4. Redstone is a great campground about mile from the actual teeny, tiny town. There is a castle above the town, but we didn’t take the time to check it out. Those couple days at Redstone were pretty relaxed, our spot was mostly out of the way, so the dog didn’t have many passersby to bark at. Jim got the camper fixed and we spent an hour or so down by the Crystal River throwing rocks and relaxing before a bunch of kids pulled up in a 15 passenger van and stripped down, changing into suits to swim in the river. We decided to leave, which ended up being good timing because it started to rain and I had left laundry washed in my new Wonder Clean hanging out. I ran all the way back to the campground which was a good test for my knee and saved the laundry. We got to shower that night and packed everything up so we could leave early the next morning. Eden and Honor made friends with the camp host’s grandson and Tuck got all snarly and mean when the kid tried to pet him.

The next day we took a quick trip back to Carbondale to pick up a few groceries that we had forgotten before we headed up Kebler pass to Lost Lake. This was the campground that we were most anxious to stay at because it didn’t take reservations. I thought we would be fine considering it was a Wednesday but I hadn’t taken into account that it was 4th of July week. The campground was beautiful and consequently totally packed. The drive up the pass had been stressful and I started to freak out a bit because we didn’t have a place to stay. But I consulted our Colorado Camping book, which we used to plan the whole trip, and found a campground on a lake not far from Lost Lake, closer to Crested Butte. The book spoke of the campgrounds popularity, so I was worried that it would also be full. Luckily, we got one of the last spots there.

I ended up being really happy with Lake Erwin, it was so beautiful. The dog, on the other hand, took his opportunity to make us miserable. He barked at everyone that walked by, which happened frequently because we were close to the bathrooms. If a dog walked by he completely lost it. Jim tried every dog-whisperer-trick in the book to keep him under control to no avail. Basically the dog spent our entire trip tied to Jim’s belt loop. (This is where we see that Jim is MUCH more patient that I am.)

We spent some time fishing at Lake Irwin, we took our full day there to walk around the entire lake, fishing in spots. I’m sure Jim would have loved a lot more time to fish, but he did catch one fish when we first arrived. I had a rough week before we left during which I cracked and then completely broke, so dealing with the most. stubborn. dog. was getting to be really upsetting. There was an incident with a cup of tea that I somehow dumped all over my head and smashed into my nose as I was getting up to stop the dog from barking. So our time at Lake Irwin ended with me crying over my dog (and probably the disaster that was the previous week.)

We started out the 4th with a drive through Crested Butte. We would have liked to have taken more time to explore the town, but they were having their parade and the town was packed. I tried to find a kennel in Gunninson to leave Tuck (because we would be back there later) but I couldn’t get ahold of our vet to fax in vaccination records. We drove past Blue Mesa Reservoir (talk about huge!) and along the north rim of the Black Canyon as we headed to Crawford. I had no idea what to expect of Crawford, but I anticipated that it would be something like our nearby state park, Island Acres. Which is kind of like parking lot camping, but they have trees and grass and a playground and showers and real toilets and it’s in the middle of a beautiful canyon, which lends itself to traffic noise, but is still pretty. I was looking forward to the showers.

But it was, instead, a big field of dead weeds without trees or mountains to have any hope of providing shade. The big field was next to a big muddy reservoir that was so full that there weren’t any good spots to fish from. And it was 100 degrees and the swim beach was a mile walk away. There was no way that I was going to stay there. We were supposed to be camping, not roasting in a field of dead weeds. So we drove into the town to make some phone calls. And every single place we called was full. To the brim. And I started crying again, saying over and over again how awful the campground was and the kids were sweet and positive, telling me that it wasn’t that bad. But it really was pretty dern awful and we didn’t know what to do. I was so mad at our camping book because the author wrote of the campground in a pretty positive light, giving it a scenery rating of 6. It was definitely no 6.

And it’s late, so I have to pull a “to be continued…”

Before I write all about our trip, I totally flaked out on my promise to my friend Brooke that I’d post after pictures of the camper before we left. So without further ado:

(before pictures are here)

The only thing I have left to do is re-upholster the cushions.

On our way home from silver jack.

Originally uploaded by pretendingsanity

Were on our way home from camping. It has been fun and more stressful than i anticipated. Im ready to go home despite all the stresses i left there. The best part of the whole thing was having jim to myself for twelve days straight. The kids have been great… The dog not so much. Ill write about the whole trip more when its not via text!