My how the time flies

Well classes started again in Monday. I'm taking 13 hours of classes this semester. I'm also working 22 hours a week. Spud is in karate and cub scouts. Shorty is in soccer and karate and wants to be in brownies. I am losing my mind!

I have a couple of cool classes this semester. I'm taking a digital photography class. I'm so excited for this class. I want to learn how to be a better photographer and I figured that this was how to do it.

I also have a history class that seems like it will be pretty fun. The professor is fun and I really enjoy the whole atmosphere of the class.

I'm hoping to survive the semester, and I'll definitely be posting pictures that I take for class.

Have a great school year everyone!

What to do?

Today I find out that the kids' dad had them keeping a secret from me.

This bothers me a lot. Not so much the secret itself (he's supposedly moving back here) but the fact that he encouraged my kids to keep things from me. And he made them believe that I'd be mad at them for telling.

I don't want to over react to this, but it really bothers me. Add this to the things that happened Tuesday night (see my previous post) and I'm not sure how to proceed. I want to call him and rip him a new one, but I know that won't do any good and will allow him to tell everyone what a b*tch I am.

Anyone out there reading this, please leave me some advise. I really need it. Be anonymous if you want to, just help. Thank you.

And they're off!

The kids started school today. 2nd and 3rd grades. Man I feel old!

The kids spent Saturday through last night camping with their dad. I've finally calmed down, but after he brought them home last night (an hour late I might add) I saw some thing and some things were said that really ticked me off.

1. When he picked them up he told me that he had booster (car) seats for the kids. When they got out of the car at home, no booster seats. He LIED! And they were tooling around in a compact car with four kids in the back seat. I am livid over that.

2. He allowed, and I'm sure even encouraged, my son to call his girlfriend mom. She. Is. NOT. His. Mother!!!!!!!

3. My son came home with both his tennis shoes and his sandals ruined. Those are the only two pairs of shoes he owns. His dad didn't replace them because he "was out of money." Welcome to my world a$$hole! I had to super glue Bub's sandals so he has shoes to wear to school this week. I don't get paid until Saturday.

And the thing that pissed me off the most...

4. My 7 year old daughter now thinks she's fat. Her daddy made her think this. She is NOT fat. She has a belly right now because she's about 2 weeks from a growth spurt. I fully expect the new jeans I bought her for school to be too short in a month. He sees them once a year and judges how they must live based on that.

After this summer I'm seriously thinking that they won't see him next year. I know it's important for kids to have their father in their life, but when their father makes them feel bad about themselves (not to mention his constant use of the f-word and his obvious lack of concern for their safety) I think he does more damage than good.

I hate that my kids have to suffer because of my choices. Bub and Shorty, I'm sorry.

Thanks for reading my blog, and please feel free to comment.

Another day, another rodeo

I just got home from another rodeo and had to post a couple of my favorite pictures. Here they are in no particular order....


Imagine me giving out an evil cackle over this picture.

Working hard or hardly working? I think we know the answer to that :)

As always, thanks for reading my blog and please feel free to comment!

Spud goes to college.

Saturday was the big day. Spud moved off to college. Classes don't start until September 2, but he's on the football team and had to report early. The funny thing is that he's about 45 minutes closer to me even though he's about 3 hours away from home. I don't have to drive as far to go to his games.

Shorty had spend last week with my parents so I met them for lunch and saw a bit of Spud's school on Saturday. Then Shorty, Bub and I went school shopping. It was nice to have multiple national chain stores to choose from. That's the one big drawback to living in a small town.

So far my parents are holding up well. They've been married for 32 years, and this is the first time in 31 years they haven't had a kid in the house.

Dad has gotten very used to having Spud around to join him in his adventures. It's hard on him being alone while Mom is at work. I think it will be harder when summer is over (Dad's busy season) and Dad has less to occupy his time. The change will be hard on all of us. I got used to going to Spud's games and then spending the weekend at Mom and Dad's, and now I'll go to the games and then drive home. I've gotten really used to spending a lot of time at my parents' so it is going to be strange spending so much less time with them. There are times when I wish things would never change, but I know they must.

Thanks for reading my blog, and please feel free to comment.

All the pretty horses...

So I went to a rodeo to take pictures of our horses. I also took this picture of Dad and Spud for our web site (Which, by the way, I finally figured out how to build...yay for me!). I also took some action shots to use on the web site and in our book that we use to keep track of the breeding program. Here are some of my favorites.
This is Boy George
Air Born
This guy hit the dirt courtesy of Lorena Bobbit (the name was not my idea, I wanted to name her Proud Mary)
The next generation.

P.S. Anyone who wants to gripe at me about the "abuse" these horses suffer, save your breath. Each one of theses horses has the potential to be worth more than I make in a year. Economics alone would prevent abuse, even if our morals didn't. I would give a more emotional rationalization, but money seems to talk.

As always, thanks for reading my blog. Please feel free to comment.

Fair Pictures

So I entered three pictures in the fair. I figured it upped my chances at a good showing. I ended up receiving a purple and two blue ribbons. I was pretty darn proud of myself. Here are the pictures that I entered.
This received a purple.


These two received blues.

Thanks for reading my blog. Please feel free to comment.

My how the time flies...

Unfortunately it's been longer than I wanted it to be since I last posted. In my defense things got really busy around here. Bub spent a week at my parents' house, and Shorty felt that we should do something with our mother/daughter time so we did a lot of nails/make-up nights.

We then spent a weekend at Mom & Dad's where we celebrated Bub's birthday and went tubing on the river. This is an annual family event, and I absolutely love it. Well except for the fact that we hit the river at 2:30 in the afternoon...when it was already 102 degrees out. I will never get on the river after 8am again. It was way too hot!

This week work has been insane. Our office has been going through major upheaval on many different levels. We have a brand new head honcho (she hasn't even moved into her house yet) and both staff positions that are below her are in acting status while we look for permanent people for them. The inmates are running the asylum.

On top of that, the head head honchos have decided that our servers are a waste of money, so we are moving to a centralized "data farm" in KC. This is a MAJOR thing. We have to clean-up and organize all our data (read: get people to give us the stuff they've been hoarding on their hard drives for the last...forever!). And guess what....Windows 2000 (which is what most of us were still using) doesn't work in the new environment, so we have to replace almost every computer we have. Conservative guess on that is 130 computers to swap out. It took me a day and a half to swap out mine (keep in mind that I'm considered one of the more tech savvy people on the payroll).

The icing on the cake is the fact that the budget is due next week and we've been told that anything that remains of this year's budget will probably be diverted to more important programs so we can't buy anything else until October 1.

In case you didn't know, I work for a government agency so we'll more than likely be operating under a continuing resolution until after the new president takes office. This makes it hard to set a budget because we don't know how much money we're being given to work with but we can almost guarantee it will be 10% less than last year. We operate on half a shoestring here.

The upside is that I get to go to a rodeo tomorrow and take pictures of our bucking horses in action. I'm also trying to set up a real website for our bucking horse business. I really wish it was as easy as blogger. *sigh* I entered three of my pictures in the county fair and I'll find out Sunday how they did. I hope they did ok. There were some really nice pictures there.

Hope everyone else has had a less stressful couple of weeks. Thanks for reading my blog and please feel free to comment.