Tales from the Love Shaque: I'M STILL AROUND !!!

Oh wow. It's been FOREVER! Grab a cup of coffee & let's jump in.

I have to dust off the ol' blog here.

Holy crap! It's been over 6 months since I've last posted!

So this will be cliffnotes for now.

Look how adorable this is - My mom chatting with one of her great-grandsons on Mother's Day!

The end of May / beginning of June I went on another road trip, first to Cincinnati to pick up my "sister-from-another-mister" who I was stationed with while on my first boat in the Navy. Then we drove down to Houston to meet up with sister #3 and spent a week with her. We spent Memorial Day at the National Cemetery in Houston and found a couple really cool veterans memorials around town. Then we drove up to Dallas (3+ hours) to see Kenny Chesney in concert.

AT&T Stadium in the back

Kenny was on Saturday night, we didn't get back to the hotel until like 6am and we had to be checked out of the hotel at 11am Sunday to head home. Sis #2 and I made it to Nashville when her car decided to break down. So we had to leave her car at the shop there and rent a car to get home. Oh - and she took her dogs with her and one day they'd gotten into a fight and her old pug was hurt pretty bad. Once we got our rental, we had to find an emergency vet for him and they had to end up euthanizing him. I'll just throw this out there that this is the second time I've been in / near Nashville and it's been a disaster.

So I got home around 5:30am Tuesday after driving thru the night in pouring rain & construction and got a 2 hours nap or so and went into work. And then that night, I was starting classes for my SARTECH I certification.

That was actually pretty fun. I definitely earned that certification! There were 4 of us being certified - for Search & Rescue Technician / Field Team Leader. We had 3 classes that week, 3 classes that next week with both class work and hands-on learning, then we had 2 written tests. The last challenge was the night-navigation course. We were given 3 maps of varying degrees of accuracy - like a handdrawn one you'd get showing a trail system, etc- of (thankfully) a camp that we have trained at a lot and 6 sets of coordinates. We had to plot where the coordinates were and then go find them! There were PVC pipes wrapped in reflective tape in various places, each marked with a number or letter, so we had to write down what was at each of our points. We started as soon as the sun went down around 9:30pm. I finished up around 1:30am and that included going back out with one of the other guys to find a point that I'd gotten wrong. That's a lot of walking around out in the woods alone!

July 8 was mine & the Spouse's 16th anniversary. We went and got our annual his & hers pedicures. But we didn't really go anywhere until after Labor Day. Then the Spawn was causing drama and we wasted vacation days to stay home for a couple days, then did a day-trip up around the thumb of Michigan.

Lake Huron

Then came Halloween - I started setting up my cemetery the last weekend in September.

October 1 I volunteered at the Motor City Haunt Club's Haunted Garage Sale. I had to be there crazy early, but I also got the opportunity to shop before the doors opened to the public!

I helped the vendor carry this in from his trailer, and not long after, carried it back out to my car!

October 8/9 was K9One's Halloween Camp. They're another local search & rescue team. Always a lot of fun! There's always an underlying story, this time 6 kids were playing with a Ouija board and summoned a voodoo priestess from the dead. So we had a bunch of games and challenges based on the story and we end up having to organize a search Saturday night and a big one Sunday morning.

Pat, the lady in charge, asked me if 2 skeletons could come play for the weekend. Then she asked if they had names and Hawaiian shirts?