Here is my Mom and Dad's new Dog. With the help of my brother they came up with the name after Scooter Libby.

Did I mention that at his last vet appoinmtent two weeks ago he weighed 6 lbs. Ha ha

Finally here are the vacation photos.

Can someone explain to me why people have the need to be right all of the time? Or why "friends" have to form aliances? I guess for 40 years I have been wrong about friendship. I thought it was about trust, forgivenesss, loyalty, and love. I thought it was a two way street. Sometimes you give sometimes you get. Why does it all have to come down to you hurt my feelings so now I am not going to be your friend, I will go out of my way to talk to everyone but you, I will ignore all of your invitations, I will never invite you.

Maybe someone should define friendship to me so that I will get it right for the next 40 years.

I thought a map would be helpful for this story. (Map is just the Northeast corner of NM) After our camping trip we decided to swing down into New Mexico to visit my parents in Nara Visa. Strangely enough it is so small they left it off my example map. Nara Visa is at the intersection of Highway 402 and 54, Northeast of Logan. To get to their house from Colorado you go on I 25 from Trinidad CO to Raton then to Clayton and then another 60 miles down 402 to Nara Visa.
While we were in Trinidad we received a phone call telling us there was a bridge out on 402. I did the smart thing and called the NM State Police and asked them whether it was closed or not. They say they were allowing passenger cars across, no commercial trucks. So we were good to go. We drove all the way to bridge only to find the Highway putting up signs to completely close the bridge. Okay let me refresh your memory. We are driving a Tahoe with a 28 foot camper attached. We just went down a hill that curves to find the bridge that we were told was open is now closed, we are only 35 miles from my parents house. Not happy campers anymore. Not only do we have to find a way around but we simply have to turn the vehicle around. With Terry's good driving we were able to get it turned around without problems.

Now we have to find a way around this problem. Here are our options, go back 5 miles to a nice paved road that will take us all the way to Dalhart Texas (1 hour) and then from Dalhart take 54 directly West (1 hour) to Nara Visa. NO way do we want to do that. It is 8:30 at night. Next option County roads that are not paved and finding one that will get us back to 402 eventually. The County roads were showing up on our GPS so we decided to take Option #2. In the meantime we stopped to call my Dad (never know if your cell phone is going to work in this area) and he gave me the name of someone to call to find out which dirt road to take. Of course that person wasn't home.

While I am doing all this cell phone work Terry hears a kitten and goes exploring. He and Dylan find the kitten in a tree. We are about a half mile away from any house so the kitten was lost. Terry also discovered that something had skinned the kitten's tail. We had to rescue him. To get to the tree he was in you had to walk thru knee high grass and of course now it is dark. Terry has a flash light and all 5 of us are walking around this tree. Terry can't stand up under the tree due to all the dead branches so it is up to me. I am holding Jason and take about 3 steps while holding onto one of the dead branches when I step on something and it moves, I scream, let go of the dead branch, which hits Terry in the forehead. Terry shines the light down at my feet where there is an empty beer bottle. OOPS.... Okay we get the kitten (who is very tame) and we throw him in a rubber maid tub in the camper.

Now to find our way. We know we need to head South so we pick a road and go and go. After a couple of miles the road no longer looks like a county road, we are now in someones pasture or cornfield. So we have to back the trailer up till we can actually pull into the corner of someones cornfield and turn around. (No corn was damaged in this activity). Then drive back a half mile or so to a better road. Now we see a few tail lights and think maybe someone is leading other people on a detour. So we get on the same road and use our GPS to look ahead and find that if we make a few turns we will find 402 again. We are happy and laughing and feeling like we are going to get there before midnight. Again remember we are out in the middle of nowhere, there are NO lights besides our headlights.

We are on a great road headed the right direction when we see a curve ahead on the GPS. Great we are really on the right road. What we didn't see was that the road is a 90 degree turn. Terry didn't slow down enough so half way thru the curve the 28 foot trailer behind us starts to swing out. I say a few choice words, grab Terry's sleeve of his shirt and he says "Everyone hold on". He then intentionally drives the Tahoe into the bar ditch (on a dirt road your road is usually built up and so there is a ditch on both sides of the road) and now we are in the ditch and the trailer finally stops swinging to the side and after what seems like minutes we finally stop. I am still not breathing Terry gets out to make sure the trailer is still attached. When he gets in and he says something about that being exciting and Dylan looks up from his video game and says "what curve?" All is well and we stop shaking and start breathing and drive extra slow. The road we are on does lead us back to 402 about 3 miles South of where the bridge was out and it only took us about an hour. We arrived without any problems to my parents house at about 11:00pm.

What did we do with the cat? I called the local Vet (50 miles away) and asked her to fix it and try to get someone to adopt it. I will find out later today whether I have a $100 vet bill and if someone fell in love with "BOB".

I haven't thought much about Greensburg since that terrible night when a huge tornado devestated the small town. When returning to Fort Leavenworth after our vacation we took the most direct road from my parents house in NM, US Highway 54 which runs thru the middle of Greensburg. I honestly did not know what to expect as we approached the small town. The tornato hit May 4th. Now the area is green and the trees amazingly are still alive with leaves everywhere. Funny looking trees, but still alive. The rubble is still in huge piles along side the road, and you see many foundations. There are still some very damaged buildings standing waiting their turn to come down. And there were buildings that appeared to be untouched. The hospital/clinic is make shift tent buildings and many banks and such have moved mobil trailers in for offices. I took a few pictures as we were driving by. One of the most amazing things to me is when they talk about tornados they always talk about metal being twisted around trees. We stopped at a rest stop out side of town to go to the bathroom, the rest stop was untouched by the tornado, as we were pulling out there was a tree with metal like that would be on a roof of a building wrapped around the trunk, other that that the tree looked untouched. Sorry I didn't get a picture of that. Here is a website for the town of Greensburg KS.
www.greensburgks.org/news

Our trip to Colorado was a complete success. We camped near Jefferson Lake. The elevation of our campsite was close to 9900 feet. The weather was perfect. We spent one day at the Lake, made several trips to the Beaver ponds surrounding our campsite and Terry and Dylan made a trip down to a river near . Terry's brother Tim and his wife and two boys met us there. The boys were covered with dirt from head to toe everyday. Mosquitos were in abundance. Terry had to haul water from a pump well at least twice a day to fill the camper. Pictures will soon follow.

On July 4th I was feeling very poorly and since we were headed to Colorado for our big camping trip the next day I decided to go to the ER. I was having some pain when I tried to breath deep. I got into the ER pretty quick, but as it always happens in the ER several sicker people came in after me. So I waited and waited. Finally the docter came in and decided we needed to do a chest xray and a very basic blood test. After much more waiting the Chest xray came back fine and after much more waiting the blood test came back slightly elevated for chances of a Blood clot. The doctor said we had to do a CT scan to look for the Clot. Much more waiting for the test (they had to call someone in to do it) and then much waiting after the test for the results. In the end the doctor came in and said it was fine, and they had no idea what was giving me trouble so I should just go home.

I got home just in time for the fireworks. They were spectacular.

My friend Julia has been telling all of us about a pool in town that is really fun for the kids. A couple of days ago Dylan went with his friends and we went by to get him and finally saw it. WOW. Cool pool. Water slides, kiddie pool, rain machine. Yesterday was nice and hot so we decided to take the kids. Jason was in like a fish, I really had to watch him becasue he kept going to where he could barely stand and try to swim. He does really well and it is too funny to watch him. For those of you who don't know I signed him up for very basic swimming lessons and the first day the instructer freaked him out and after two days of him crying the whole time, she said I should transfer him to the child and Mother class. What a waste of time that was.

Tyler wasn't feel 100% so he didn't do a whole lot, Dylan was his usual fishy self. We were only there an hour and had lots of fun.