Missing: 1 orange wiener!

I am convinced that my dog, Maggie, is the weirdest little creature I've ever met. One minute, she's running all over the place, playing with her toys, stealing my socks.....and the next minute she is nowhere to be found. This freaked me out the first few times it happened, but now I know the drill.......she's hiding in my bed to take a nap in peace!

When you look at my bed, which is almost always made, you wouldn't be able to tell that an 11-pound dog was in there! She wedges herself right up against my pillow (the long way, of course - see pic below) and all of this is under my comforter and a decorative pillow that is on top. What a stealth little wiener!

More and More Hockey

On Sunday, I went to another Dallas Stars hockey game - I'm getting addicted!

Here's a picture of them introducing the team - I love the star that they jump through....


The special effects and lighting has come a long way - it's awesome!

And like all good hockey games, there are fights. Apparently the rule is that they won't break up a fight until a knee hits the ice. This fight that I saw at the game lasted for about 5 minutes (a LONG time for a fight when they lost their helmets and were punching each other!).

I'm sure other NHL teams have this too, but I thought it was cool that they had two functioning zambonis working in between periods, as well as a 'fun' zamboni that holds a bunch of fans that won a contest to be able to ride in the pimped-out one. How awesome!

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

Any good trip to a new city just isn't complete without a trip to a brothel, right?? Well, our trip to San Angelo wasn't even almost complete until we toured Miss Hattie's. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, San Angelo was a crazy wild place to be. This one street that Miss Hattie's is on had 16 saloons and 13 brothels (Eau Claire friends - think Water Street)! But of course, going into a brothel should be done on the 'down-low' back then, so they built a tunnel from the bank over to Miss Hattie's so that the men could look respectable by walking in the bank and doing their business......and then they would go through the tunnel to do some other 'deposits and withdrawals' - as the tour guide said. haha

Here's the staircase from the street straight up into Miss Hattie's:

The brothel was run from 1896 to 1946, when it was raided. When that happened, Miss Hattie just disappeared in her car and no one ever heard from her again. There aren't even any pictures of her!

This is a 'fainting chair' - it is original to the house and the ladies used it when they passed out from their dresses tied too tight!

This is the 'waiting room' where the men would sit while they waited for the girl that they requested.

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out

Well, it finally happened....The temperature in Dallas/Fort Worth finally fell below freezing for the first time this season last night (and it's the first time it's been below freezing since I moved down here in March). Yes, 32 degrees is cold, but man - you would think that it was a blizzard outside the way the TV weather people talk! I even got up early this morning and walked Maggie as the sun came up and just had on a T-shirt, sweatshirt and pajama-type pants. I didn't die!

It just goes to show that all things (including temperatures) are relative!

The Grand Daddy of Retail

HOW BIG IS WAL-MART?

1 . At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every day.

2 .This works out to $20,928 of profit every minute!

3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.

4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.

5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest private employer. And most can't speak English.

6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.

7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.

8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy (including Winn-Dixie).

9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.

10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are SuperCenters; this is 1,000 more than it had 5 years ago.

11. This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at a Wal-Mart store. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 billion.)

12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart

LET WAL-MART BAIL OUT WALL STREET!!!

Fort Concho/The Cult

While we visited San Angelo, we toured Fort Concho which is right in town. It was an old military fort that has been restored to show how it originally was back in the day.

One other (unfortunate) claim-to-fame of Fort Concho is that it is where the children were taken when the authorities broke up that religious cult earlier this year. Since most of the buildings at this fort were set up as barracks and it wasn't that far from where the cult compound was, it just made sense to house the kids here until they placed them in other foster care (and eventually gave them back to their mothers).

And one thing that I just couldn't resist taking a picture of........Crotch Powder! It was on display at the hospital building and Mayce, Dave and I laughed pretty hard when we saw it. Yes, we're immature, but it was hilarious!

The Power of Prayer

THE POWER OF PRAYER:

God only gives three answers to prayer:

1. 'Yes!'

2. 'Not yet.'

3. 'I have something better in mind.'

San Angelo/Fort Concho

The day after Thanksgiving, Mayce, her brother Dave, and I went to San Angelo (about an hour from her parents' ranch).

We shopped at Eggemeyer's, which was the coolest gift shop EVER. It was HUGE and there was so much stuff, it was just overwhelming!

Just outside of San Angelo, there is a restaurant called Lowake Steakhouse. Apparently it is so good that there is a heli-pad and landing strip in the back where you can land your helicopter or plane and go inside to eat. I guess it's so out in the middle of the country that it would be too far to drive for one meal - so people fly there! Also - they did so much business at this restaurant, that they had to create a post office and zip code for just that one restaurant!

Another thing I learned was that mistletoe is a parasite in that it is a airborne spore that just attaches to whatever tree will take it, so to speak. One tree that is susceptible to having mistletoe attach to it is the mesquite tree. Mesquite trees are basically the only type of tree you will see in west Texas since there is pretty much NO rain there and the mesquite tree has such a deep root system that it can get water from way down deep in the water table, not surface water from rain. Here's a picture of a nice big mesquite tree!

And here's a picture of some mistletoe that was growing on the tree:

I just loved that big mesquite tree so much that Mayce and I climbed up in it to take a few pictures!

An interesting article about women......

What I Know for Sure About Women
By Mark Leyner

1. Even little girls, in all their blithe, unharrowed innocence, have a presentiment of sorrow, hardship, and adversity...of loss. Women, throughout their lives, have an intrinsic and profound understanding of Keats' sentiments about "Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu."

2. This sage knowledge of, and ability to abide, the inherently fugitive nature of happiness somehow accounts for the extraordinary beauty of women as they age.

3. Women have an astonishing capacity to maintain their equilibrium in the face of life's mutability, its unceasing and unforeseeable vicissitudes. And this agility is always in stark and frequently comical contradistinction to men's naïvely bullish and brittle delusions that things can forever remain exactly the same.

4. Women are forgiving but implacably cognizant.

5. Women are almost never gullible but sometimes relax their vigilance out of loneliness. (And I believe most women abhor loneliness.)

6. In their most casual, offhand, sisterly moments, women are capable of discussing sex in such uninhibited detail that it would cause a horde of carousing Cossacks to cringe.

7. Women are, for all intents and purposes, indomitable. It really requires an almost unimaginable confluence of crushing, cataclysmic forces to vanquish a woman.

8. Women's instincts for self-preservation and survival can seem to men to be inscrutably unsentimental and sometimes cruel.

9. Women have a very specific kind of courage that enables them to fling themselves into the open sea—whether it's a new life for themselves, another person's life, or even what might appear to be a kind of madness.

10. Women never—no matter how old they are—completely relinquish their aristocratic assumption of seductiveness. And here is one last thing I know—and I know this with a certitude that exceeds anything I've said before: that men's final thoughts in their waking days and in their lives are of women...ardent, wistful thoughts of wives and lovers and daughters and mothers.

Mark Leyner, a husband, a father, a son, and a brother, is the author of eight books and a co-writer of the movie War, Inc.

Dammit!

I found the funniest name I've ever heard of for a cat........Mayce's parents named their cat Dammit! The cat is 16 years old and requires a glass in its water bowl (she prefers ice in her water too)! Ha!

And here's a few pictures of a 2-day-old goat (not the black baby goats that were born on Thanksgiving, this one was about 2 days old when I got to hold it!):

The baby goat was so sweet and was very calm - just loved being held. So sweet!

And after we took these pictures of this baby goat, either this one or its twin got lost and we couldn't find it. But overnight, the goat's momma found it and brought it back. YES!

Here's a pic of Dave and I on the 4-wheeler after we were in the field looking for the lost baby goat:

Day Is Done......

One thing that amazed me in west Texas was the beautiful sunsets and the HUGE open sky and landscape. Since I've been taking some photography workshops, I'm trying to play around with the settings on my camera, so here are some of the pictures I got of the same sunset on The Nanny's ranch:

This next one is with a "Cool" setting on the camera - LOVE IT!

The next one is with a "WARM" setting on the camera:

West Texas Adventure/Thanksgiving goats?

This year I spent Thanksgiving out in west Texas at Mayce's parents' ranch - what an adventure it was! It is about a 3.5 hour drive southwest of Fort Worth (about an hour from both Abilene and San Angelo). It was like a whole different world than the one I live in every day!

On Thanksgiving, Mayce's Dad came in from the goat pen and said that one of the goats had just given birth and there were twin babies outside! We went out there and checked them out - they were hanging out with their mama.

Here is a picture of the mama goat yawning - I bet she was really tired!

Here is Mayce's Dad carrying the new babies inside the goat pen. Mama is right behind him, watching out for her babies.

Here are pictures of the rest of the goats and a picture of Mayce, her brother Dave and her Mom Terrye.