2006 : Reflections

While the hubby doesn't really understand my New Year's nostalgia, (he doesn't really get into celebrating New Year's Eve), I can't help but feel the urge to look back on my year and think about all that's happened in 2006. Since tonight is going to be a quiet one (I'm not feeling too great and Chris has to be at work tomorrow morning, so no celebrating for us), I figure now is a good time to do all that reflecting. For brevity's sake, I'll do it in the form of some lists.

The Big Stuff

→ I lost my grandfather (dad's dad) in March. Missed the funeral because the death was sudden and I was in New York City already.

→ I lost my other grandfather (mom's dad) in July. We knew it was going to happen, so I was able to get up to Indiana in time to say goodbye and be there for the funeral.

→ I was able to reconnect with my cousins in Indiana while I was there, which was a real blessing.

→ In November I gained a sister-in-law when my brother got hitched.

Number of weddings attended: 4 (Jean Clark's, Tiffany Crenshaw's, Nahum & Melissa's, and my brother's)

Number of funerals attended: 1

I went to Art Museums or Galleries in:

→ New York City (too many to count in too few days)

→ Philadelphia (Philadephia Museum and a couple galleries)

→ Washington, DC (Hirshorn and National Gallery, mainly)

→ Atlanta (The High Museum, twice)

→ Savannah (the new Telfair, 3 or 4 times)

→ Gainesville (The Harn)

I went to a concert in:

→ New York City (Camera Obscura)

→ Atlanta (Sufjan Stevens)

→ Jacksonville (mewithoutYou, Anathallo)

→ Gainesville (Less Than Jake)

Places I visited WITHOUT going to galleries or concerts:

→ Columbia, SC

→ Indiana

→ West Virginia

→ Lakeland, FL

→ Fort Myers, FL

I went to one film festival (Savannah Film Fest), and took too many road trips to count between movie-related trips, funerals, weddings, concerts, and our vacation in March. I don't even want to THINK about how many miles we put on the car.

2007 : Projections

As for what 2007 has in store, only God knows where we will be at the end of next year and what all will have taken place. So far we know to plan on one wedding in February, and one film festival in February. We are hoping for more film festivals to add to the list (only time will tell). As for travels, again only time will tell, but I'm hoping that 2007 will grant us the opportunity to at least visit the west coast, perhaps making it to Seattle, Portland, and/or San Franscisco. Guess I'll have to start living the year to find out!

Happy 2007 everyone!

Package In The Mail

Today we got a package in the mail from Chris's dad in Texas. If anyone knows anything about my husband Chris, then you know he's a collector. If anyone has ever been in our house, then you know our house is filled with stuff. But you haven't seen anything until you've seen his dad's house in Texas... this is where he gets his collecting bug. To illustrate, I give you Exhibit A, the Box We Got in the Mail Today.

Some of the things in this box include:

• dead Japanese Beatles (2)


• Dead locusts (3 or so)


• a little toy girl without a head


• patch for Handyman Club of America: Life Member


• pencils


• Envelope full of feathers


• boxes of feathers


• a coupon for One Hug


• little labels in french


• Wasp Nests (3)


• two bottle caps for Orange Crush


• one little yellow bullet?


• dried sunflower heads (the note says I used a paint Brush To Remove The Fuzzy stuff on The sunFlower. It's still good Bird Food. Recycle.


• antlers


• part of a skull from an animal with big flat teeth


• part of a turtle skeleton (?) with a "Barrel Full of Monkeys" toy in it (the note said: Behold "Creature Man" alias "Too Face" Looks like he ate a monkey. poor monkey.)


• Thorns from a Texas Thorn Tree


• One of those seeds covered with white stuff that floats around in the summer(very carefully packaged


• One tiny bird egg


• Some pieces of wheat


• Shell from a bullet


• a Clam shell (I think)

Everything was packaged with much care and deliberately delivered... Chris was thrilled, and I documented everything... the notes are my favorite, so I made sure to take pictures of the notes. All very much fun, quite a change to my day. Last time he sent us stuff, it included a few bird eggs and a couple of birds nests that he attached to very small photo frames... very precious but all stuff we have to be very careful with... I'm not really sure where all this stuff is going to go; we don't have a lot of space (as anyone who has come to see us knows very well). Anyways, Chris wants to do some photographs with some of this stuff, but I dunno when he'll get around to that.

Oh, Internet, we love you.

Well I was feeling a bit stressed today (busy day) until I saw this movie, which has brightened my mood considerably. I don't know why a silly news broadcast from the 90s would make me so happy, but, well, it did. You should watch it. I think it's worth the 5 minutes of your life.

crazy life

Well, if you haven't been reading Chris's updates on our week at the Savannah Film Festival, then you should do that now, because I'm not going to bother recapping what he's already done a good job of sharing. I'm to exhausted from my insane (but exciting) week. I will say that we had a great week, we met a lot of awesome people and got some really great feedback on out film, and people seemed to really love it, which has made us very excited and eager to try and get this shown to more people. As of this writing, Chris still has to post the final update from Day 6 with more news of our week, which he will do as soon as he has time.

Also my brother got married this Saturday, so that's made for a fun and busy weekend. The wedding was beautiful and there was a lot of family down for it, and we all had a great time. My only regret is that by the time we got here, we were so exhausted from our film festival week that we were hardly coherent to visit with family and friends.

That's it for now. I need to get some sleeps.

Fall Back!

Well, I decided it was my civic duty last spring to post a Spring Forward reminder, so I figured I should do the same for all you peeps relying on me to remind you when it's time to Fall Back. And Saturday night it is! We get 2am TWICE on Saturday night, and an extra hour of glorious sleeps.

I, for one, will be most greatful for the extra hour of glorious sleeps, because this weekend is the beginning of the busiest 10 days of my year (at least), and the beginning of the Savannah Film Festival, which Chris and I will going to all week. If you haven't been following along and you don't know why we're going to the film festival and why it matters, it's because we've made a movie and it will be playing at the film festival, which means we get fancy all-access passes and can go to all the shows and panel discussions. Rockin fun times. Then my only brother is gettin' hitched during the closing weekend of the festival, so we'll be missing out on the last two days of the festival because we're going down to south Florida for the wedding. It'll be exciting! I'm looking forward to seeing all my family that's making the trek down for the wedding.

Okay, too many things to do, I've done my update and warned you of the time change, so I'm off to be productive.

the sad truth

I think I worked for a place just like this Dilbert comic, especially the part where I was promised for over a year that they were ordering new computers for us (and it was still just in the promise stage when I left the company). It's so funny it makes you cry, but those aren't happy tears.

changes - all fixed

had to make some hosting changes with this site, so there's been a little downtime... but I think we're all set and back to normal now. lemme know if there's any trouble with the site, so I can fix it.

An Amazing Trip

Chris and I took a few days off from normal life recently and went to see a couple of shows and visit friends in Gainesville, FL and Atlanta, GA. The Lord really blessed our time. We caught up with a BUNCH of old friends, some of whom we'd completely lost touch with, and others that we just don't see often enough. We had some amazing time of fellowship with so many old friends, and the Lord used many of them as an encouragement to us.

When we first talked about going down to Gainesville to see Less Than Jake and visit some friends, it was going to be about 2 or 3 days out of town, and I could justify that in my mind as something that we could do. But then when we talked about going from Gainesville up to Atlanta to see Sufjan Stevens as well, and visit friends there, I was torn between really wanting to do this (it was the week I had off from teaching, after all), and feeling guilty about the idea of playing when I have so many things to do, and when money has been tight lately. But in truth, there are always a million things to do, and money always feels a little tight. And there are times when we need to play. We need to fellowship. And the Lord really confirmed that in our trip. We really needed this, and there was nothing to "feel guilty" about.

Anyways, the short recap of what we did... we played with the Geary's in Gainesville, and even went to Paynes Prairie to see some alligatorss (big ones- yippee!). 3 year old Cyris made us laugh a lot, and Baby Izzy is learning to walk. We stopped by the Christian Study Center and caught up with Dr. Horner and Nora Wickam. Later that day we got a call from our friend Amy who was in town from Orlando, and found out from Nora that we were in town. So we go together with her and Heather for dinner. That night we went to see Less Than Jake, had a good time, and got some sleep.

The next day we went up to Atlanta. Got there in time to spend a couple hours at the High Museum before they closed for the day... they had a bunch of photography that Chris wanted to see. Found a hotel, took a nap, then got together with my old art-school friend Beth for dinner. She took us to a most amazing restuarant called R. Thomas, with yummy organic food, and took us to her apartment to see her paintings. We had a great time with her, then went to a most awesome teahouse (11:11 Teahouse) to chill and check some email in their herb garden. I got some great tea, and we were harassed by random cats (real fuzzy cats, not hip slang for people). While we were there, our friend Stefan called... he, too, was in Atlanta! (he lives in Charlotte) HE was hanging out at a restaurant waiting for Brooke's shift to end. He gave us directions to here (including directions like "when you get to the end of this road, men in red coats will take your car away"). We got lost a couple times, but eventually made our way. We had drinks with Stefan and Brooke there until they kicked us out, then Brooke took us to another place where we hung out until THEY kicked us out. Then we went home to sleep.

The next day we met up with Brooke and Stefan again, and we ran around Atlanta all day, went to the Flying Biscuit for lunch, wandered into shops, learned that hanging a bag of water with a penny in it in your doorway wards off flies, and had an encounter with The Granite Curbs of Atlanta, which, we learned, pop tires if you get too close. That evening we got together for dinner with a bunch of friends who were going to the Sufjan concert, including 3 more Savannah people, 2 people who drove in from Gainesville, and a friend from Chattanooga. It was fun to see this concert that brought all of us together from all over the place.

I could also go on and on about how amazing the concert was, and how great Sufjan's music is, and how honest and joyous and beautiful it is, but I'll stop now.

Anyways, now we're back to life and getting work done and it turns out although I have a lot to do, it's manageable. And being out of town for a few days didn't mess anything up. And... it was awesome. The End.

Insomnia

Those of you who know me know that I do my best design work at night. For whatever reason I can be much more productive after 8pm than I can during daylight hours... and although I may spend a whole day trying to get design-type things accomplished, I seem to just be flailing about until evening. It's just the way my body works, and I've always been like this... even in high school I would half-doze through the school day, come home and take a nap (my mom would usually yell at me to wake up because she didn't understand why I was asleep in the middle of the day), eat dinner with the family, then be wide awake and ready to socialize and study until 2 or 3 in the morning, when I'd catch a couple hours of sleep before starting all over again.

Well, I lost out on a lot of productivity time over the weekend with that wretched food poisoning (I think we did settle on it being food poisoning, fever and all, because apparently that comes along with a good dose of bad food), and today I really needed to make up for it. I spent most of the day doing random work that needed to be done, took a nap from 6-7, had some dinner, and have since been staring at this computer screen, zipping away on about a thousand different tasks. I've marked a LOT off my "To Do" list tonight. The problem is, at 3:30 when I was at a good stopping place and wanted to get some sleep, I couldn't. I'm still wide awake, thinking of all the other little things that I need to do.

So here I am, almost 5am, with more little things checked off my list, trying to figure out what else I can get done. I know that tomorrow is going to be pretty miserable now that my sleep schedule is entirely out of whack, but there's not a whole lot I can do about that. So. At least I'm (finally) being productive. Considering the fact that my July was an exhausting behemoth from which I still feel like I'm trying to recover, I feel like this has been the first time I've had some control over my life in about 2 months. I must say I'm a little relieved.

yuck

Chris and I got food poisoning* from our dinner last night and have been basically out of commission all day. Throwing up takes a lot out of a person, and it's worse because we're both sick so we can't really help each other. We had to ask a friend to bring us soup, crackers, and gatorade (which she did immediately, bless her heart)... anyways, not fun. We've been in an out of sleep all day and our whole bodies hurt and we are pretty pathetic. I hope I can get a good night's sleep tonight so that hopefully tomorrow we're feeling better for church, etc.

I know, not the most exciting post, but it's what my day has been, nonetheless.

*(Aug 27 Update) Turns out it may have been a virus and not food poisoning, because we've been sick a couple days now with fevers and whatnot. Definitely not fun.

Why Organic?

God's really put the idea of fair trade it on my heart a lot recently... I know I've blogged about it a couple times in the past, but right now I'm praying about what more I can do locally to spread awareness, specifically within our church and/or local churches in general, to let people know how their dollars can make a real difference in human lives. If you would pray for me in that respect, it would mean a lot.

So today I was looking at the website for a Fair Trade organization that my pastor told me about (he just bought coffee from them for the church the other day) and I ran into something that just amazed me.

This farmer was talking about why he only grows organic coffee.

"There are two main reasons that I now run a completely organic farm. The first has to do with my Dad. I grew up on a coffee farm. My father was a farm hand on a large farm and he used to spray the herbicides. The owners made him wear the tank on his back when it was filled with harmful chemicals. One day they spilled the chemical liquid all over my father’s back. Fifteen days later his skin completely peeled off and he became so sick he could never go back to work again. He has recovered some, but at the age of 65 he still can’t walk properly as a result of the accident.

Fourteen years ago when my son Luis Gonzalo was one year old, I sprayed herbicide on some of my crops. My young son had a cut on the bottom of his foot and he walked barefoot onto the place where I had just sprayed. He started to turn purple. We rushed him to the hospital and he went into a coma for three months. He was sick for seven years and is still somewhat affected by the incident. After that event, I was convinced that I would only grow crops organically."

I've started to be able to pinpoint that a lot of my health problems are related to pesticides, growth hormones, and preservatives in a lot of the food I eat. When I started cutting those things out of my diet by only buying organic and preservative-free foods, I felt a lot better. So I know that it makes a difference. But these stories just floored me. How can farmers even think about putting these things on our food? Why does the FDA approve of this stuff that can hurt us? (but really, don't get me started on the FDA and whether or not they are concerned about our health) ... I really just don't understand. Really, when it comes down to it, you're asking people "If I give you money, will you feed poison to all these people?" and a lot of people say Yes. They say "If I don't have to see them or think about the effects, and if it means I have a more comfortable life, the sure." And that's where we get the majority of our wealthy. And that just breaks my heart to think about.

I'll probably ramble more about this kind of topic as I learn more about it.

Update

Oye. I feel more than a little exhausted. This past weekend Chris, Paul, and I drove up to West Virginia to go to Tiffany's wedding. We had a good time... the wedding was beautiful. Tiffany did a spectacular job of planning a wedding on a shoestring budget, and had everything under control. She even personally stamped about a million napkins so they'd have personalized napkins. They were super-cool. And I finally got to meet her friends Spike and Samantha, both of whom I'd heard about here and there for the past 8 years, but neither of whom I'd ever met, since one lives in Pennsylvania and the other in Portland. So that was cool. But still... driving 20 hours round-trip within a 40 hour timespan is a little tiring. Just a little.

Now I'm back to normal life, and working on a bunch of freelance projects along with my jobs, and of course, maintaining stuff for the movie. There's still alot we have to do with that this month. I predict very little sleep for this girl in the month of August... hopefully September will fare a little better. And if not September, maybe October will prove restful. I know I'm looking forward to NOT going out of town for the whole month of August.

Anyways, if you're one of the large number of people who haven't really heard from me in a coon's age* then I must apologize and give you the following explanation - I'm exhausted, and I still don't have daytime cellphone minutes until August 3rd. And I haven't made nighttime phonecalls because... well... I'm exhausted. Plus my past two weeks have been spent either out of town or with company before going out of town or recovering from being out of town. Do we see a pattern here?

* (can you tell I've been to see my grandma lately? I mean really... "a coon's age?" who says that?)

recovering

So it's been a long time since I posted anything... because life has been a little too hectic to remember to take the time to post anything. So I figured I'd give a brief (as brief as I can) update on what's going on.

My grandfather has been pretty sick, and so last weekend my dad and I traveled up to Indiana farmland to say our goodbyes to him. My mom had already flown up a few days before, and my brother also flew up briefly to see him. In the one week I was there, we said our last words to my Pappy, spent the first 2 days watching my grandfather's health fail him until he finally passed on (died in the same home he was born in, 75 years earlier), spent another 3 days dealing with all that comes with that, then 2 days for the calling and the funeral, and I left the next evening to get back home. It was a pretty intense week... since I live so far away I don't get to see my family up there very often, and there's a LOT of family up there... many of whom I don't know or hardly know. With so many friends and family coming to visit with my grandfather's death, though, we spent a lot of time visiting and getting reacquainted with people... for the first few days there was almost ALWAYS company over from the time I woke up until just a couple hours before going to bed.

It was a really important week. I was really greatful to be able to see my Pappy one last time, and to be there for all that followed. He was a strong believer and in his last week did not seem to have any fear of what was to come... he knew that it was time for him to go to heaven, and he had no doubt that's where he was going. Just hours before he died we believe he started seeing Jesus sitting with him, because he kept pointing and my mom and my aunt at one point heard him say "Jesus" as he pointed. He also gave a thumb's up as he gave his very last breath.

I guess because I knew he was weary of this world, and knew he was going Home, I didn't have such a hard time with his death as I would have if we weren't prepared for it. So I was able to enjoy and treasure the other important thing that happened on this trip - getting reacquainted with my family there. Great Aunts and Uncles, grandma, aunts and uncles, cousins, second-cousins and our "honorary-cousin." We played cards and laughed and joked and ate lots of meals together. I shared music with my 17-year-old cousin and talked to the boys about what to think about for college in the next couple years. We played with kittens and laughed at dogs and watered plants and planted a tree and pulled corn stalks where they didn't belong and plotted how to catch a rouge chipmunk and ate cookies as fast as my mom could bake them.

While all this was going on, Chris was scrambling back at home to get everything ready for the premiere of our movie in Cleveland, and Wednesday night he and our good friend Angela drove up to Cleveland for the World's Largest PEZ Convention. They spent the weekend selling shirts and other merch and pre-selling DVDs, screening the movie, and hanging out with PEZheads. They'd call me with questions when necessary, and kept me updated. Then Saturday evening they made their way 4 hours south-east to where I was at my grandmother's house, had dinner and hung out for a couple of hours, and then the three of us drove all night and into the next day to get home.

One day later, the apartment is trashed and I'm doing my best to get things cleaned up and organized and back to normal, I go back to Vidalia tomorrow for work, but I still feel exausted from the long drive and just the jolt of everything that's been going on... I could have slept all day, but that wasn't an option. Just trying to get back in the groove of things.

This next weekend is Tiffany's wedding in West Virginia... that will be another 9 hours up and 9 hours back in 2 days time. This time with new company... my old friends Amy and Paul are both carpooling with me, so that will be fun. I just hope I'm well rested for another weekend out of town.

bread update

Right. So my sprouted bread project? Big disaster. We're talking cooked top, but with uncooked liquid bubbling out of holes in the top, apple-crisp style disaster. Pretty nasty. Big waste of time. I don't think I'm cut out for intense baking. I'll stick to buying Ezekiel bread at the store.

On an exciting note, since I've started my organic food diet/detox, I haven't felt as hungry, and have a lot more energy, and feel like a better person in general. Very exciting. And I've even lost a little weight in the past week... a couple pairs of pants that haven't fit in a year or so can be zipped up, and I'm hopeful that if I give it another week, I'll be able to actually wear them comfortably. Good stuff.

busy bee

Well, I have a couple of weeks off of teaching, just working for GTA for the next couple of weeks. It's nice to have a couple weeks where I don't have to go out of town, either for work or for anything else (now that Wedding Season is taking a pause). Don't get me wrong, I had a blast going down to Gainesville for weddings and getting to see friends, but I am happy to have some time at home without rushing off. I get to recoup a little before our two consecutive weekends in Cleveland this July.

I have been keeping busy at home, though. With the movie premiere coming up, we've been doing some filming to fill in some gaps, and I've been working on some animation segments, as well as some DVD menu designs. It's going pretty well, and I'm having fun doing it, but it means I've been staring at the computer screen way too much.

I've also been reading about food issues, since my food allergies have been getting really bad, and am trying to get myself on a low-chemical diet... ya know, eating food not filled with hormones and pesticides and preservatives. For one thing, I'm allergic to at least one preservative, and for another, the growth hormones in the meat we eat doesn't stop acting like a growth hormone when it transfers from the cow's body to ours. So for the next two weeks, along with trying to eat mostly organic, I have to abstain from alcohol and caffeine... I figured a time when I'll be home for a couple weeks is the best time to go through that. Excitement.

So as an experiment, I'm trying to make my own sprouted bread. I have a feeling I'm in for disaster, but I got a recipe and I'm sprouting a bunch of seeds and beans, and then I have to grind them up into flour and make bread outta them in a couple days. I'll let you know how that goes.

Lazy

Well, last Thursday was the end of Chris's spring quarter at SCAD. A couple weeks from now he begins his final quarter, and by September he'll be done with SCAD. This past quarter was especially wearing on him, so we took this liberty this past weekend of being completely lazy bums, watching 22 saved episodes of the TV show 24 in just 3 days. We can never handle watching this particular show one week at a time, so we've been saving them up all season to have a marathon, and this weekend was the time. Now, before you go crazy thinking that we watched 22 hours of TV, I do want to remind you that without commercials and the "Previously on" that begins each episode, they're actually only 40 minutes long, so we only watched about 15 hours of TV over 3 days... not really that unreasonable, considering it was our lazy rest-up weekend. And boy, did we need it.

Now I'm back to work and everything is back to normal for me, and Chris gets to spend the next couple of weeks cleaning, organizing, and doing the millions of things he's been putting off since he's been too busy with school. I love this time because the apartment actually starts looking neater (I'm not allowed to touch his piles of stuff because I won't know where they go, so I have to be patient until these times when he's ready to clean them up).

So life has been pretty uneventful, although busy with work and other normal life stuff. Nothing much else to tell.

church

Many of you may know that for the two years we've lived in Savannah, we've had a really hard time finding a church home. There are a few placed we've tried to settle into, but to no avail... we never really felt at home anywhere, and that meant we skipped church more often than we went - it was just too hard to drag ourselves out of bed to go someplace where we didn't fit, and didn't even seem like we were really worshipping. Recently we decided to start looking again, and started with an internet search for different churches in the area, broadening our scope past reformed/PCA and more towards non-denominational. The first church we visited with our new gusto was an awkward disaster - no one spoke to us even though we looked totally lost and couldn't find the worship room, and the pastor spoke to us via a videotape. Alas.

The second church we checked out was the Vineyard Church in Savannah. I had gone to a Vineyard for a couple years in Gainesville before Chris and I started dating, so I kind of knew what to expect, but also knew that Vineyards can vary from one another enough that it wasn't necessarily the same as my old church. Long story short, we've gone back every week, and we've really enjoyed it. The pastor is really engaging AND actually teaches AND isn't afraid to tackle the touchy subjects. It's a young church overall, so we've met a lot of younger married couples as well (hooray for married couples!)

We were invited to a homegroup the second week we were there, and have had the opportunity to get to know the pastor a bit more through that, too. After knowing us for all of three weeks he came by our house to lend Chris a book yesterday, and knowing that our car was in the shop (just making sure the brakes they fixed were really fixed, because we had been hearing weird noises) he asked if we wanted to borrow one of theirs for a couple days. Thankfully we didn't need to take him up on it, but I was more than a little surprised at the offer.

So that's our exciting news. Hooray for a church home! And it couldn't have happened at a better time - right after my schedule changed so that we can't go to RUF on Wednesday nights anymore. For every season....

Showers

This weekend is Bridal Shower Weekend. Tomorrow night I'm helping to throw a shower for Tiffany in South Carolina, and Saturday night I'm helping throw a shower for my friend Greta Lyn in Savannah. So this should be a fun, if not slightly hectic, weekend. I'm looking forward to it. I am a bit worried about the shower in SC though, because the girls helping out that live there are being very uncommunicative (I asked on Monday what time they wanted me to get there, and they still haven't told me a time. They even scheduled the shower for earlier than Tiffany's fiance can be there, so the guests of honor will be late to their own shower, all because these girls don't actually talk to anyone). So pray that I will be patient and make the best of the situation and not let any of this mess up Tiffany's party in any way... I really just want her to have fun.

Now the Savannah shower, no worries. Should be smooth sailing.

TV execs are starting to get it

A while back I rambled about how TV execs aren't taking advantage of the internet as another means to get their shows (and advertisements) seen, and instead are prosecuting people who pirate TV shows, treating them as a threat. Well, it seems like they're finally starting to get it - making TV shows available for download the day after they air (with commercials) or letting you purchase them on iTunes (without commercials). Gold star!

Goose Chase

This past weekend we were in Atlanta doing some PEZ filming, and stayed the night with Chris's brother, Sam. We had a great time, and since Sam lives on a farm, had some interesting "animal encounters" that definitely aren't the norm for two downtown Savannah residents. So I took a lot of pictures of the area where he lives. Along with just enjoying some peacocks, we held baby kittens (they haven't openned their eyes yet), some baby ducks, and I was chased by a (very viscious) goose. Here are some photos of our trip:

Sam lives is the little cottage in front of that horse stable.

The peacocks were right outside Sam's house and woke me up in the morning. The male was showing off for all the females and wasn't at all concerned that I was standing right next to him

These are the ducks we got to play with

This is the only photo I managed to take while I was actually being chased by the evil goose

This is the photo I tried to take when the evil goose was flapping his wings and yelling at me and trying to bite me and I was running away.

This is Sam with the magical power to chase the goose away with some secret goose-chasing-power that I certainly cannot harness. Sam had to keep him away so I could leave.

Chris on the farm

Aside from being attacked by an evil goose, we had a good time. It's always fun to hang out with Sam. And I love animals when they're not attacking me, so that was cool.