Tbug

The Mercantile – Pawhuska, OK

There’s a long-running joke at my house that I have an arranged marriage for Tbug. I’m going to marry her to Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman’s oldest son Bryce.

This joke started sometime last summer. Truthfully, he’s a cute boy. He’s a farmer/rancher. I always say farm boys are the best. Tbug wanted to own a horse ranch someday, or so she said when she was younger. If he sticks with the family business, they run Mustangs plus all the horses they use for everyday ranch work. Win-win…

Then for my own reasons… they go snow skiing in Colorado and I always wanted to go. They can just take me too (and my husband… of course). Hello, his mom is The Pioneer Woman. I mean come on. And finally, if Abug would have been a boy, she’d have been named Bryce. I’d finally get my Bryce. There are more reasons for the joke and it keeps getting added to, but those are some of the big ones.

The Mercantile

Ever since the Merc has opened I have wanted to go. Pawhuska is only about 2 1/2 hours from here so not to bad. But it seems like every plan I had made to go, didn’t happen. They all fell through. I was starting to think it would NEVER happen. FINALLY, it did. I guess patience is key and sometimes I don’t have that.

A couple weeks ago I was talking to my sister in law about wanting to go. She said we should make plans to go. I kind of scoffed in her face and said I refuse to make any more plans like that because they keep falling through. Then a couple weeks later I mentioned to my husband and said she would go. One thing led to another and they made plans for us to go. (more…)

Christmas 2017

After we came back from Ft. Worth, I swear we all came down with the plague that everyone I know is fighting.  Ugh! In fact, here I am, still fighting it. It’s awful! But enough about that….

Three days before Christmas Abug and I decided we needed to work on Santa cookies. Santa was coming and with his long flight across country and the world, he needed some good sustenance, so we went with making Red Velvet Peppermint Kiss Cookies. We figured he’d get Chocolate chip everywhere else so we’d give him something a little different. That’s the way we roll in this house.

And might I mention, my kid is a country kid, but she’s worse than her mommy about having dirty hands. Making the Red Velvet part of the cookies, the food coloring along with some of the oil transferred to her hands (and mine) and she hated that! WOW!

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Chiefs vs Eagles – Season opening home game

Sunday was our first home game of season. We won the season opening game against the Patriots. I’m not sure they were happy about that… lol.

Sunday was season opeing home game though. That meant it was a loud and proud day. It was a lot busier than preseason games… Wow! We didn’t get our “normal” spot on the grass for tailgating. That was fine with me. I’m easy going.

We decided to eat breakfast. One of the ladies walking around said that that was a new one on her. Most people were doing steaks and burgers, etc. I thought to myself, this isn’t the first time we’ve done breakfast….

The gates were supposed to open at 8:30. They opened at 7. There was a guy from Arkansas who is a season ticket holder who left home at like who knows when to be the first one in the gate. They said he’d been at the gate since 3am. Crazy. I’m not that crazy, although I kept saying we needed to have our heads examined because we were up at 5am driving to KC.

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My 34th Birthday

 

Here we are, halfway through the next month and I still haven’t recapped/talked about my birthday.

I should tell you I hate birthdays. Not because I don’t like getting older. No, I’m fine with that. That means I’m still alive. I just hate the day. In more recent years I haven’t had good birthdays. It’s been forgotten by family and friends (not all, please don’t take offense if you remembered!!!). It gets treated like another day. It’s just not a big deal. And I guess I feel like it should be a big deal? I don’t know. Maybe I’m full of myself… ha.

When hubby and I got together, it seems like he gets week long birthday’s and I barely get a day. I guess I was a bit jealous of that. The reason he gets that is that if his birthday falls during the week, we’re supposed to get Tbug to celebrate, but that doesn’t always happen. So we celebrate on his birthday. I’ve thrown him surprise birthdays. Plus we’ve celebrated his real birthday on a weekend we had Tbug. Multiple times all of this has happened.

This year, my hubby decided to give me a week long birthday. This morning I saw a quote on Facebook:

I know good men still exist because I am lucky enough to have one.

A friend from college commented that she couldn’t help but think back to our Memoirs class and how much she learned about him. Maybe this is something I should have written about in class… Although I’m not far enough removed from it to use for a memoir.

Anyway, let’s quit procrastinating and let’s discuss

my birthday.

My birthday started out the weekend before my birthday, if you ask hubby. I had been wanting to eat at the Japanese Steakhouse for a while. He decided we were eating there and that was the start of my birthday.

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Southern Oklahoma – Part 2

And we’re finally back for the rest of the story… aka AC & UB’s part 2. Let’s just start off by saying we had so much fun that I kind of hated to leave. But, let’s look more in depth at the fun we had…

Wednesday

Aloha (that’s the horse) is one of the best, kid friendliest horses but she had one flaw… she’s a PITA (pain in the @$$) when it comes to saddling her. She’s extremely frustrating. UB & Tbug worked on that all week to the point that by mid week Tbug was saddling Aloha by herself. Now that may not sound like much, but that’s HUGE!

AC had Wednesday off. She had a hair appointment while we were working horses. When she was done, we were just finishing up with riding. Remember, southern Oklahoma in July=try to beat the heat working horses. When it gets hot, the horses and cows get tired, hey do you blame them? The summer I spent with AC & UB, we worked horses at midnight so that it wasn’t so darn hot. At least 6am is better than midnight… I think….

Anyway, as we were getting done riding for the day, AC pulled into the driveway. UB decided we needed to run in to town and eat at Scout. This restaurant was interesting, but the food was excellent. This early morning stuff got to Abug and she slept all through lunch.

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A Week in Southern Oklahoma – Part 1

Over a year ago, my aunt and uncle made Tbug a deal that she could come down and spend a week with them at their house, riding horses. Last summer, hubby and I couldn’t get her there. At Thanksgiving they made the offer again. Hubby and I knew we were going to get her there this year, No. Matter. What.

They extended this offer to me when I was a teenager and I actually got to spend a couple different weeks with them. I’m telling you, other than it’s hot in Southern Oklahoma in July, it was an excellent experience and when I told hubby, we knew it would be a good thing for Tbug. Spending an entire week with UB and working on her horsemanship skills. What better way to spend a week than riding horses…

Earlier this spring Tbug’s mom said that she had 3 weeks this entire summer that she had nothing going on. The first was the week of the 4th of July, the other 2 were the first 2 weeks of August. I finally got it worked out between all of our schedules that we were going down the week of 4th of July. Tbug got home from Cheer camp Friday June 30th at 11something at night and we made arrangements to meet up with her mom around 4 something July 1st to head to AC & UB’s.

Friday Night

Friday evening after hubby got off work, we spent the evening checking the running lights/break lights on the trailer. We figured if we were going to be driving at 4 something in the morning and beating the sun awake, we better have lights on and working. Out of like 30 lights, at least half were burned out (or so we thought). We ran to Walmart to buy new light bulbs, when we got home hubby went to replacing lights. Out of all those lightbulbs that “didn’t work” only 2 had to be replaced. The rest were just a loose connection that hubby tightened up. Not bad for a 23 year old trailer.

Saturday

I wasn’t kidding when I said we got up and left before the sun even rose. Who knew 3 something existed? Hubby and I had a pile of stuff to load up first thing, then we loaded horses, ourselves, and headed out to meet up with Tbug and her mom. They were on their way to North Carolina. I guess we’re all crazy… getting up early to drive somewhere, right? Serious, crazy… lol.

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Dream Big but not too big

One of my new favorite movies has got to be My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. I remember when the first one came out, it was cute but I never thought it was nearly as funny as everyone else did. When I was in grad school we learned that your perceptions of the world are changed over time due to age, learning, experiences, etc. Now I like the first one, too, but I still think this is the better one. Normally it doesn’t seem like seconds and thirds of movies are as good as the first, but I believe this one is and I hope that there are more.

Let’s ponder one of those above thoughts… life experiences change how you perceive things. Hmmm… why would I pick that to focus on? Simple… a couple weeks ago I spent the week at my aunt and uncle’s in southern Oklahoma with Tbug. She’s 14 now. How in the world did that happen, she’s just 6, right? No, unfortunately she has moved on to those teenage years.

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Memorial Day Weekend 2017

Memorial Day Weekend was spent at Beaver Lake. The night before we left to go down there, Deb and Grady said they were having difficulty getting all the trailers down so we volunteered to pull the dive trailer down for them. When we got to the lake, I had to giggle at the “big” truck pulling the little trailer. It’s a bathroom cleaner thing for campers but that sight just made me giggle so hard.

These 3 are back together again. Wow, did they make quite the team… they are the next round of shenanigan makers!

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