Sand Through The Hour Glass

Time just keeps on ticking and seems to keep building more speed every day. Already, it has been three weeks since I last blogged, and a lot has happened since then, but finding the time to sit down and blog has been more than a trick. We still have not had internet hooked up here at the house – thanks in part to our neighbors who are unknowingly supplying wireless internet to our laptop. Add on too that our laptop is in need of some repairs – the cooling fan on the processor went bad and that results in over heating, which in a computers worst nightmare. In fact, there are cases where computers have actually began to melt from over heating. Laura and I have been rather resourceful though, we have limited our time on the computer to 10-15 minutes and then the computer is shut off for no less than half an hour before starting all over again. So, we have become quite quick and checking e-mail and moving on to other things. I suppose that has not been all that bad though, we spend more time together, and the weather has been nice lately, so we might as well be outside enjoying it!

Speaking of weather, I should make mention of the tornadoes that strolled through Kearney on May 29. Our place was just a few blocks from where a tornado touched down and flipped some cars and took a roof off an apartment complex. We escaped without any damage though. Here’s some visuals for you.

The tornado was on Thursday, and on Friday I took the camera along with me to work. Every month I drive a route for work to check wells and monitor groundwater levels. We have had some extensive amounts of rain in the past two weeks, and in some places I found water levels to be eight feet higher than they were at the beginning of May! The flooding was quite something to see as well. While I was out checking wells I happen to walk upon a fawn laying in the grass trying to hide from me. I nearly stepped on it though, so I grabbed the camera and shot a few pictures of the little guy. I'll add a few shots from some flodding in Buffalo County that I experienced during our ground water measurements. The farmers were out pumping water across the road to try to reduce flooding to the crops, but there was a lot of water to remove from the fields. You can see from the last picture that the roads were washing away as well. That made for an interesting passage as I had the truck in four wheel drive and crept along through the water. Yes, I know that you should never drive through water, but I had already come from several puddles much deeper than this, so I had 'tested the waters' several times prior.

Flipping back a few months through the blog pages I noticed I have not posted a picture of the finished stained glass window. I may have mentioned this in a previous blog, but I finished this in Missoula before we left. It sat in Missoula until April when we moved back to Kearney, we dropped it off in Cheyenne during the move. It has yet to be installed, but at least it is complete. The pictures isn’t very good, and hopefully I can get a better picture of it sometime, but for now it’s good enough.

…and how about a few shots from our move? To be honest, we didn’t take very many pictures, other than when we were sitting along the road waiting for a tow truck to take us into Butte, Montana. We put the fire out under the car, the result of the rear differential melting, and then drove into Anaconda, Montana to get some assistance to get us into Butte to assess the damage. We ended up selling the car to the salvage yard and rented a 2009 Explorer to finish the move. Laura didn’t mind that so much though, the car only had 3,000 miles on it when we picked it up.

Really the view was quite nice, and the weather was as nice as it looks in the pictures. Nice, cool, and calm. We couldn't have asked for a better situation to break down in, although, the fire and being in the middle of the move, selling the car for dirt cheap were all negatives, but hey the view wasn't bad!

Well, as you can imagine things are not getting any slower around here for us. We are a month away from the baby arriving so we are getting excited for that, and trying to get the house in somewhat of an order before things really get out of control. It seems we have about everything we can think of needing, but no doubt we will be smacking our foreheads when we realize we still need this or that for the baby. What fun would it be to have everything before we needed it all though?

...and now I can see that I am approaching the 15 minute barrier to have the laptop running, so with that shut the lid on the laptop and go do something constructive, maybe destructive, with my time until I can return and check my e-mail.

Until again

-=Nolan=-