Happy Holidays!

Overall, this was a happy holiday season for the Crawley-Kelly-Landes household. We got to spend some quality time with both of our families, Boo seems to be healing nicely, and we got some cool gifts to boot. Thursday and Friday was a whirlwind of brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents and nephews. It was a good time with lots of food, drink and presents. With that said, I was looking forward to Saturday when we could head to the land and return to a semi-normal state of living. We were able to spend a few hours on Saturday checking on our patient and trying out some of the new toys. Boo seems to be out of the woods since he has been seen actually running around. Jenna swears he is already sweeter. Actually the biggest change is that Chula appears to be nicer. My theory is Boo is less annoying, so she is less agitated when we see her. Maybe she's just taken with the Christmas spirit. There's no way to tell. As for new toys, check out Jenna's new shiny, battery powered chain saw. Watch out trees.

And the "fancy" cup holder with the monogrammed water bottle.

Actually that was a $3 aluminum cup and a $1 magnet dropped in the bottom to hold it to the tractor. I was getting tired of holding my beer between my legs when going for tractor rides. As for the fancy pants water bottle, while a poor substitute for a Lone Star, it fits quite nicely in my cup holder.

What I don't have a picture of is my 500,000 BTU propane torch. I requested a slightly smaller version for burning the thorns off of cactus for the cows to eat, but my overzealous father bought the biggest one he could find. It is awesome! I hooked up my BBQ grill propane tank and proceeded to melt a large stand of cactus. I'll admit, the first time I fired it up and it sounded like I was holding onto a jet engine, I got a little rattled. Once I got over the sound (and the 2 foot flame coming out of the tip) I started to see the potential. Needless to say, I don't have any pics because I had one hand on the torch and one hand on the water hose. I'll fire it up when Jenna's around to document the awesomeness one of these days.


On the house front, we met up with a potential contractor on Sunday. We spent about 3 hours discussing our plans. Rudy (the contractor) met us at the land and we gave him the "grand tour". At which point we jumped into what we want, don't want, etc. After about 1.5 hrs, we moved our discussion to Cafe 290 for some coffee and queso. We both really liked him and how engaged he seemed to be. This impression was strengthened when he called Jenna on Monday 3 different times to discuss various topics regarding the house. He definitely got the ball rolling, so we're meeting with his "dirt guy" on Wednesday to look at the house placement and get an estimate of what the site prep will cost. It's refreshing to work with someone who seems interested and engaged instead of being brushed aside. Overall, it's been a pretty productive week, house-wise.


In summary, it's been a good couple of weeks. Now we have the new year coming up and all that entails...hanging out with old friends, and looking forward to new promises and adventures. Bring it on 2010!


Happy Holidays!