Birds must just love Oklahoma because of all the juicy bugs we have here, and they seem to like our roof in particular. Sometimes it seems like just a matter of time before the pigeons that congregate on the skylight above our room come pouring in! Starting a few days ago I heard a fluttering noise in the chimney. I figured the sound was coming from the top on the outside and simply traveling down into our living room, but it quickly became clear that the sound was, in fact, coming from the chimney.
Distressed at the thought of a pigeon being trapped in our chimney I waited it out to see if it escaped, the noise stopped so I hoped that was the case- and not that the poor thing had died. The noise stopped, but picked up again the next day, and the next. That nerd was living in our chimney.
After a few failed attempts at pounding at the wall and blaring youtube clips of Peregrine Falcon territory protection calls, the only thing I seemed to be tempting to leave was Lance. So we decided to smoke it out, figuring that if it could get into the chimney, it could easily get out, right? With us armed with cardboard boxes and a fly swatter, the fire was started, the flue was opened, and the grate was shut.
Into the flames flew a tiny soot covered bird. We flung the grate open, releasing our squatter into our living room, then the kitchen, then straight past the open door into the office- with Lance in hot pursuit.
It was finally goaded out the front door, clearly shaken, but then again I'd be pretty torn up too if the bottom of my house opened up into a fiery inferno.
Browsing the blog archives for July 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
I spent entirely too long trying to get another red Ford Escape to start, after putting all my shopping bags in the back- before I realized it wasn't our car. That is all.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
We're pretty much all moved in now! Save for a few boxes with knickknacks, its so nice to have everything in its place- and we have a LOT of places to put stuff. As I said in my last post, our townhome (aside- do we call it a house? apartment? what? townhome sounds real dweeby!) has one bedroom downstairs and a loft upstairs that we use as our bedroom. I've been trying to fill empty spaces as best I can without spending tooooo much money and knowing that its better to wait for pieces I really like than to just buy stuff to fill voids- so currently there's a large corner of our downstairs living area that is empty. Lance and I have been brainstorming about what to put in there, so far we've come up with:
- a pool table
- a foosball table (gee, who came up with those ideas I wonder...)
- a giant repica TARDIS
- a reading nook
- a dog bed, with a dog to put in it
- an arts and crafts table
We went to a party last week that Lance's class held to celebrate their first solo flights. In a tradition borrowed from the Navy, all the students wear ties. Instructor pilots come and tell funny stories about each student's flying misadventures, and then cut the tie- where they cut it is indicative of how hard they were to solo, higher up means they were really tough, lower down meant they were awesome. There are even stories of some people's whole tie getting cut off! Lance's cut was somewhere in the middle. I held my own at understanding all the pilot jargon, otherwise I just laughed when everyone else laughed! ('oh, he botched his ELP and fell out the bottom of the area because he didn't check his data card in preflight? You're right, that IS the funniest thing I've EVER heard! *charming laughter*')
It was fun to meet more people from Lance's class and see people I had met before, and I even met a few wives and girlfriends, everyone is super friendly. The party was preeeeetty crazy though, so I don't know that it was really conducive to having a great conversation with someone, but I really look forward to getting to know everyone more.
It rained here on Sunday, which truly is a blessing, especially if you consult with all the church signs in Enid saying to "pray for rain". Living in such an agrarian community is different, you'd think it would mean there would be better quality produce in the stores, but no. The base is surrounded by fields:
Bonus points if you can spot the difference in my profile- if you noticed the big bump on my nose, you win! I dropped something on my face and suspect I broke my nose, it hurt a lot all weekend, but the bump has gone down a little!
Summer rain is still a weird concept to me, if its raining I should be in duckboots and a slicker, not shorts and a tanktop! Anyway, while the rain brought many good things with it, it also brought a ton of these uggos:
I thought there was one following me everywhere until I saw that they were all over the ground! You can't see the scale of them in the picture, but they're about 2 1/2 inches long! Lance said there were a bunch of them flopping around on the runway too.
By now you may have noticed the 'flickr photostream' to the right of this column- there you'll find photos that are added and updated a lot more regularly than I update this blog!
Also, if you've got time to read my dumb blog, you have time to do this:
http://www.greenbeanscoffee.com/coj/index.php
Also, if you've got time to read my dumb blog, you have time to do this:
http://www.greenbeanscoffee.com/coj/index.php
Monday, July 18, 2011
Pending receipt of all of our wedding photos, I'm postponing a post about how AWESOME our wedding was, and focusing more on current events, like the fact that I'm writing this from Lance and I's first home! Because of a snafu with base housing, we're going native and living in Enid in a 2 bedroom/loft/townhome- it currently looks like this:
Further, more finished, photos to come--pending receipt of furniture.
Although its a mess, its SO nice to be out of Lance's dorm, looking back I don't see how all of our stuff physically fit in there. It nice to be able to walk to the gym and commissary, but now that we're only half a mile from a Starbucks I think I'll be just fine! We've been up to some other fun stuff since arriving, hopefully these pictures and captions tell it well:
Why, yes, we did have the cutest cake toppers ever- this is them with us as we landed in OKC (cool kid slang for Oklahoma City, get with it ya'll!)
Google says Montana is "Big Sky Country", but Oklahoma sure gives it a run for its money! Although I bet its probably less than 105 degrees in Montana, and the bugs aren't as big as fists...read on...
My first encounter with what I think is a very poisonous brown recluse. After calling both Lance and my mom to cry and scream about it, I valiantly killed it with a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Harry has saved my life, and the world yet again.
We love Harry Potter and we don't care who knows! Lance passed a checkride so that put us in the clear to hit up the midnight premier of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2. It was meh- I think I need to see it again to formulate a better opinion on it, but it definitely could have been better!
We dropped a bit of fetti this week buying sofas and a table, etc, for our house- but we got some awesome deals, I can't help thinking that the stuff we got would have been a lot more expensive in California! I'm so excited to see how it all comes together!
There was a lot of cool stuff going on this week, between moving and Harry Potter- but the highlight of my week was definitely going out to the flight line and watching Lance prep his plane and take off for a solo! It was really neat to see the plane he talks about alllll the time, and to have his friend there explaining what everything he was doing meant and did. So far Lance is doing great at pilot training, but I still can't believe they let him go up there all by himself! The above picture is from takeoff, here are some more:
