20 Miles to Happiness

Rain, rain, go away!!

2011-05-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

So usually we have this cute little creek babbling through our backyard. Now we have this raging brown monstrosity that just keeps getting higher and faster everyday. Usually we are screaming for rain here because everything is so dry and brown. Lately it feels like it has been raining forever!

We did get a brief respite on Saturday... just long enough for me to get my hopes up that nice weather was on its way and to plant my garden. I think my poor little seeds are probably drowned now. The weather network is just depressing as it shows no end to the wetness.

No point to this post all except for me to whine about our crappy weather. Maybe I'll come up with something cheerful and insightful for my next post. Or perhaps the creek will keep rising and float me away in my sleep ;)

How did I end up here?

2011-05-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

If you would have asked me in my graduating year where I thought I was going to be in 10 yrs you would have heard. That I was going to be a graphic designer most likely single, living in a 1 bedroom loft apartment in Vancouver.

Fast forward 12 years......I am a mother of two, as good as married, living on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere..... huh!!!

If you had told me this was going to be my life I would have laughed in your face. Kids were NOT in my cards, and the country life was definitely not my style. If you had told me my cute little sportscar was going to morph into a minivan I would have run screaming the opposite direction. If you would have told me I was going to trade late night parties for late nights up with sick kids I would have been like "yeah right".

So how did I end up here? I call it luck! I was lucky that the graphic design school I applied to right out of highschool told me I needed more life experience. I was lucky that I dropped the loser I spent 4 years of my life with in time to meet Jesse, the one I want to spend the next 40 years of my life with. I was lucky that I was so terrible at remembering to take my birth control pills. I am lucky to have ended up here, where I am suppose to be instead of there where I thought I wanted to be.

I don't really believe in divine intervention, or destiny. I know I could have ended up in a million different places living a million different lives, and man am I lucky to have ended up here!!

Right now I am waiting for "my guy" to come home. He has gone to pick up a goat.......... in my van!! Now ask me what I would have said to that 12 years ago :)

Here goes nothing!

2011-05-10T09:31:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me recently if I had a blog. That got me thinking....do I need a Blog? Do I have time for a Blog? I never really understood Blogs. What would I write about? Would anyone care?Then I started thinking about the diary I had when I was a teeny bopper, no one read that and I wrote in it faithfully. So does it really matter if anyone ends up reading this, no not really, it is more for me. It also feels a lot less cumbersome if I feel like I am writing for me instead of the world. However in case anyone does decide to read this, a short introduction should occur.

I am Tia, I am a stay at home mom. My interests are kind of all over the map and mostly I think I like to dabble in as many things as I can. I like to read, draw, take pictures, knit, cook, bake, decorate cakes, garden, raise farm animals, I spend too much time on the computer and probably watch too much television as well. I like to pretend I enjoy exercise but the $700 eliptical machine covered in dust in the corner of my living room tells me otherwise. I am also enjoy retail therapy which usually manifests itself in the form of waldorf dolls and clothing for my kids. I used to like to shop for myself but 35lbs of baby weight later that is not so much fun anymore. I enjoyed brief obssessions with couponing and World of Warcraft. The WOW phase ended with my moving to a place with what I shall call "hilly billy" highspeed (which is somwhere inbetween dial-up and broadband internet) and the couponing proved much too time consuming. I have a little shop on Etsy (Bitty Bags) where I sell knitted backpacks made to fit waldorf dolls. It keeps me almost too busy sometimes. You will also find me hanging out on a facebook page called Gals and Dolls which is sort of a commune for a bunch of adult women who share my "mild" obssession with waldorf dolls.

I am the mother of 2 children, Kaden 4 and Skylar 2, who bounce back and forth between being the sweetest little things you have ever seen and the kind of kids you debate about leaving somewhere on the side of the road. *Note* the last half of that comment was sarcasm, I do that sometimes, learn not to take me seriously.

I am not married but do live with Jesse, the father of my children and have for the last 6 years, I don't really care for the terms DH or SO, though sometimes I am found of the term S.O.B., so usually I refer to him as "the guy". You know when something breaks in your house or you need something fixed and you have to call "the guy", well it's times like those I am super glad he is "my guy". He can fix, build, or design just about anything. I think between the two of us we are good parents, we aren't "super parents" but our children are clean, fed, happy and haven't broken any bones yet, so we must be doing something right.

We live in British Columbia, Canada. Now while most of BC is lush and green our little chunk is dry and dusty. It is almost a desert in the summer and still gets damn cold with a lot of snow in the winter. Fair? I think not! It is still very pretty in its own way, there are a lot of mountains and sagebrush and the odd evergreen tree here and there if it has not been decimated by a wretched little insect called a pine beetle. The photo at the top of my blog is a picture of my patio. We live on a ranch in an extremely old farmhouse that originally was built by Jesse's grandparents, like I am talking built in the 1940's. My inlaws live on top of the hill about 1 minute away, which can be a blessing and a curse but I won't get into that now. On our ranch are about 150 cattle, 25 or so horses, 8 pigs, 10 goats and about 15 chickens. We have a black lab, named Tiny, who is the sweetest dog you have ever met, but appears to have been out chasing butterflies when they were handing out brains. I'll post some photos of the brood in future posts.

Well I suppose that's all of us! Maybe next time I'll write something really profound. Well, probably not, but you never know!