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It is tough. It is almost a mourning process. You have dedicated yourself to her since she was born, it is not easy to just let go.
Snapchat or any other communication like that is amazing. I love Snapchat because it is so quick an easy. My kids and I share a lot of fun quick chat, pics, or vids that way. My kids also shared their location with me on Snapchat, but I did NOT abuse that. I never questioned what they were doing by seeing their location. NEVER. They did hit me up for stuff when they saw me at the grocery store though. LOL

Please do not post on social media about how sad you are. Don't make continuous post about how hard it is going to be and how much you will miss them. Don't make a single post about that.  But do vent your feelings here!  It is so good to release that feeling - but do it somewhere like here.  Many of us have gone through the same thing!  It really helps to just talk to someone, even if it is here, and not a person right in front of you. 


As mentioned above - look at it as how well you have prepared her to fly! It won't be easy for her either, but it will be harder if she knows you are feeling so sad too. You can be her support, because the homesickness will hit her hard too. Knowing that Mom wants her home will make it too easy to quit and give up. Don't let that happen!

Moving cows to a new pasture.
When will that happen. Today. Sometime. Probably. But maybe not. But probably. So be ready.



Life on the ranch. Never put anything in the oven that requires watching on days like today.

I have all my emergency alerts turned off. They just blast me out of bed during the middle of the night.

Not once when an actual emergency has directly affected me has an alert gone off. I have been in the direct path of 3 tornadoes. Nothing.

If Des Moines, which is 2 hours away, might get a cloud going over - everything goes off. I did have my location services on.

We are in an area that is poorly covered by NWS or any of the TV weather services. I do not rely on them.

When we had terrible weather coming in Mid December - I found a guy on TikTok who is a meteorologist who covered what was coming at me 100 times better than anything else that is supposed be be keeping me safe. He isn't from my state.

I don't want Amber alerts or anything going off on my phone.

The Morning Show was really good. It hooked me in. I am waiting for Season 2, if it ever happens!

I just changed all my FB and Insta passwords yesterday.

I have been getting the DM's that are like "guess who died" or something else shocking. I can usually see a preview without opening, but I opened one yesterday morning.

It seems like anyone who has opened those all of a sudden get hacked, and start sending out those damn messages - so I changed everything to get ahead of it.

I also keep my contacts private - that way I can't get Cloned on FB. I hate that ... it's so simple to just keep your friends list private so they can't send out that crap.

I don't have great luck with the Command hooks on my outdoor vinyl siding. I have tried to use them for hanging wreaths, and they don't last too long. It might be the weight of the wreath, but they are not super heavy ones, and I have tried using more than one hook, to take the load better. I have tried in both the front of my house - which is open to the elements, and on my porch which is more sheltered. Neither spot worked for wreaths. I have used the small hooks to put mini LED lights around the inside of porch and those did work fine.

I found these siding hooks and have used them for years with great luck. You slip the clip into the siding seam - where a section is. 
*oof -- sorry for image size. 



You can find them on Amazon: Vinyl Siding Hook

That had to be the biggest WTF just happened moment ever! Lord that would be scary. The seat belt made a difference there! A fractured back is scary though. Glad they went back and had it checked out.

Don't come to my neighborhood please. I hate storm chasers with a vengeance. They tear around hell for leather and will certainly kill someone, someday. I have seen them barreling down country roads with tall corn - and that WILL end up killing someone, because every section has a cross roads and when the corn is tall, they are 100% blind intersections with no stops signs. You have to know to slow roll and look at every single mile intersection. If I see them on a gravel road, I'll park so they can't get past me until they slow down. Everyone I have encountered is a pure asshole. I know there are genuine weather guys out there -but the 'storm chasers'. Nope.


Not just Texas. I know a lot of families that struggle with insurance. I hope the go fund me helps them and that they can get insurance. That sucks.

I am rural, so no cable option. The phone company does not send internet out as far as I live, so my options have always been limited. I used satellite internet for a while - do NOT do this. It is awful.

I now have a semi-local company that covers my area with a radio type signal. It is a 'line of sight' type service. The signal gets sent from their offices quite a ways north of me an bounces through various stations until it gets to the closest town to me. I have line of sight to the grain elevator and the signal is sent from on top of that to a dish in my yard.

Unlimited data and it is fairly fast (for what we can normally get) and the service is 100% impeccable. They are top notch!

$100/month.

They are loads of fun to get! I was so pleased when someone sent me one for my birthday one. It was super neat!

One of my friends has a subscription to Boques - which is fresh flowers. Occasionally I get a box with flowers from her. She just randomly sends the box to a different friend each month. When you get something like that, when you least expect it - WOW!

Ha! I am definitely over complicating it for myself! LOL
I mostly use mine for watching movies/TV while doing dishes in my Kitchen....

Good to know that it can work easily for video calls.

I will never look at a Badger (American) the same! This is so apt!

As I said, I keep a big space between me and them. I have really only encountered them at a distance - usually across a creek. They like to dig their dens into the creek or river banks around here. The speed at which they can dig is ferocious! When they are running it looks like a high speed road kill moving. They are very squat and wide.

I am out in the great wild outdoors every day.. I have seen 2 live badgers and the one dead one - so encounters are rare, but amazing. I keep a spotting scope in my Gator to look for fun critters. It's amazing how they blend in!

Badgers are SCARY! I keep a very VERY wide berth around them. Whew!

This is why I want it.

But for the cost of it - it just isn't worth it. I can not get delivery, as I live 30 miles from my closest Walmart.
I don't really do the online shopping thing, to pick up (and why would I pay for that!).
I do order a few things from Walmart. com - but it is free if you go over $35 - so I just wait for that total to hit before I order.

I just think scanning stuff would make checkout so much faster. We have the self checkouts now, but they are the tiny ones with no belt or space to unload your cart and a very small space to put full bags. They are all crammed together in a square space so people are jammed up together trying to do the self checkout. It's a super pain to do if you are by yourself. Easier if you have someone scanning and someone bagging to keep space open.

We did get some solar panels to make a portable power source for several wells that we need to use to water cows in pastures. It, so far, has been successful, but not without issues. The solar panels charge a battery to use during dark, but when we have several days of low/no sunshine, we had to end up running a gas generator to power everything. But overall it has been a successful venture.

I know this is different than what you are looking into - but I wanted to mention the tax benefits. We were able to use the purchase of the solar panels for a great tax benefit, and that paid for a large chunk of the cost of the setup.