Fighting the need for dopamine 😜

Happy Saturday friends!

Around here thing have been...well...knock on wood...just GOOD. Calm. Easy. Comfortable. Healthy.

If you've been around here since the beginning of our arrival to NC you'll remember: me breaking my ankle and foot at the same time, a bee sting that earned me an epi pen, Mom dying, covid, long covid, a house fire, Aunt Katy dying. So, comfortable hasn't been the norm these last five years.

I'm content.

What the actual hell.

I find myself peering behind every door thinking: Oh no, what's coming?

But...nothing.

KNOCK ON WOOD!

Now, in the past, I would think: Yay! Things are good! Time to get a puppy! 

Or goats!

Or livestock guardian dogs!

Or sheep!

Or chickens!

But lately I've been hearing my Aunt Katy's voice in my head: Maybe, you could just like, enjoy the calm...?

Whaaaaat??? 😂

The autistic side of me says, "Ahhhh...delicious. This is amazing."

The ADHD side of me says, "It's too QUIET! Let's make some noise! Let's do something NEW AND FUN!"

She often wins the argument 😜

But I'm really, REALLY trying to wallow around in the calm for a bit :-)

My brother is the same way and would get the same advice from our aunt. He ignored it a year ago and got this little creature:

And she promptly sucked all the calm right out of his life. I will be going to visit them in mid May, yay! And Penelope and her wild puppiness will immediately dissuade me from getting one myself.

And even though we are coming up on the one year anniversary of Aunt Katy's crossing, I'm still calm. I think she is happy to be with Mom and Grandma. I still have tears over it all but I feel her happiness with them and that feels good to me.

MONDAY ONLINE ART CLASS:

For the Monday online art class we will be painting this fun little bookshelf:

The paint is a suggestion, the detail comes with the pen.

As always, take a quick little look! See all the basic shapes? Rectangles for the shelves and books, circles for pots. These are your shelves, you can put whatever you want on them!

Monday, May 4th, 7:30-9pm ET. Online via Zoom (download here.) Easy, fun, come have fun with a small group of nice women :-) Cost is $35 (contact me to sign up and for Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal info).

HOW TO WORK WITH ME

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses, without horses, in-person, or online, your choice. 

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now. 

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose inside, outside, or outside in the herd. 

And of course Women's Circles! The Wednesday circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like.

MEMORIES 🎶

Facebook showed me some great memories this week:

ManChild was almost 4 here. Midgie was 3 I think. It was her first day with us. ManChild was the Dog Whisperer:

The way he's dressed 💜 such a Colorado kid:

Sweetness in one of our late spring pastures in Colorado. That grass, goodness! We only fed hay 6 months out of the year, the rest of the time they were on grass:

In Colorado, on a farm, as long as you sold $1,000 worth of product a year, you'd get a HUGE tax break. Our friend Laura had sheep so we bought a set of 5 from her and sold lamb (lamb is typically around 8 months old and 100 lbs when they are taken to the processor, not baby lambs). It knocked our taxes down on our 15 acres from 10k to 5k. This is one of our sheep. She came to me with an orange tag in her ear and Laura called her Orange Tag. One day I asked her her name and she said, "Gertrude." 

I laughed and said, "Oh yeah? Gertrude huh?"

And very regally she said, "Gertrude Orange Tag."

Ike was one of Laura's retired working dogs. I stole him ;-) Ok, not really. I was dog sitting, we fell in love, and I begged her lol. He was such a good boy and he and ManChild just absolutely fell in love with each other:

Our first two sets of twins. We kept the two girls in the foreground (Layla on the left and her sister Olive on the right) and they became moms eventually too:

HOW TO WORK WITH ME

Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses, without horses, in-person, or online, your choice. 

Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now. 

Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose inside, outside, or outside in the herd. 

And of course Women's Circles! The Wednesday circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like.

THE RANCH:

House finch:

Sometimes they even scare me:

Jaffee was fine, of course.

The turtle raft is still the hot hang out spot. Our current record is 18 turtles and a green heron:

Our pomegranate tree (sadly only ornamental) is in full bloom right now:

The gardenias are getting ready to pop! Imagine the smell around here when a dozen gardenia bushes burst into bloom!

Planted my witches cauldron finally, this is the one I found half buried in dirt one day. Once it gets growing it will be stuffed full of petunias and impatiens (did you know that there is no 't' at the end of impatiens??? I only learned this recently. Corkscrew rush in the middle:

I caught these pics of Bonnie walking Blu, they are best buds. The bright blue of her shirt was so pretty with the copper penny color of his coat:

Every time I see a rat snake, it's bigger than the last. Good. We need more of them here, the moles and voles are ridiculous!

The new arbor is being built!

It's about half done here. I keep asking Brad, are you SURE it's level? YES lol, the land slopes toward the pond there:

On Friday I was planting ajuga under the big old Japanese maple in the front so I swapped out some friends. First Sweetness. He's trustworthy and allowed to be loose:

Then Jaffee, who says, "I can be loose too!" But I haven't gotten there yet, he's still on a rope. I'm going to have to though! Because after Jaffee, I let Blu out, also on a rope. Everything was great until it very much wasn't. Poor Blu got his back feet tangled in the rope and just freaked the eff out. So scary. So, no more rope. Time for training. I trained Sweetness and Rayn to be loose with me. I can do the others right?

Right??

Right...

And finally, I'm so happy with the way this chandelier planter turned out!

It's newly planted so you can't really see much going on in there yet but it has dwarf mondo grass in the center of each and creeping jenny that will drape over the edge. I got this old chandelier for free last year on marketplace for just this reason but then life got in the way. I got it planted last weekend and THEN realized that I wanted to paint it. Whoops. It's been sitting on my kitchen island for most of the week while I painted and sealed it lol. 

When Bonnie was out on Friday (the day I write this) I said I didn't know what I was going to write about...haaaaaa! 

Hope you all have a great week!

Thank you for reading :-)

This is an AI-free newsletter! While I love to use AI to help me figure out a piece of software I don't understand, my intention is to use it to help me with the drudgery, never with writing, art, creation. All em dashes are intentional and mine, I was using them way before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman's eye :-) 

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