Buckaroo

I think it's time for a funny dog post. A couple of weeks ago my Aunt Sharron came to town and brought us a really fun house warming basket. She filled it with all kinds of goodies from around TX. Of course she included 2 toys for Titus too. One is a little stuffed cowboy complete with hat, belt buckle and lasso. The other is one of those long floppy squeaky dogs that you always see on Petsmart commercials. Anyway, Titus is usually fascinated by squeaky toys, but the non-squeaky cowboy is his favorite right now. Here's a short video of him playing last night. I call this buckaroo- I think you'll see why.


With all this rough play, you can imagine that the cowboy has lost some of his "accessories." I should have taken a "before" picture, but instead I only have this "after" picture. Titus LOVES his cowboy!

(By the way, this blue room is still a multipurpose room. It's where we lived for the first few weeks until our upstairs carpet was installed. Last weekend it was a dining room for 20 people. Eventually we'll put some furniture in it and it will be a 2nd living area. It's also Titus' playroom!)

Updated office

Here are a couple pictures from my office update (at school). I'm not sure if I'm done yet, but it's gettin' there.

Before

After

Before

After

My exciting night

Josh and I had to make a very quick trip to NM to get our car from Mom's house this weekend. Since it ate up a lot of time, Josh decided to go straight to school and get work done as soon as we got back in town. I headed home, unpacked, did laundry and other housework. Around 9pm, I decided to call it quits, take a shower and go to bed. Well, when I got out of the shower, I found a snake in the bathroom (and of course Josh is not around)! First check the tail. Whew- no rattle. It's only about 18 inches long, so I'm not too worried. It acted scared and tried to hide from me, so I figured I had time to get dressed and call Josh. Josh said he wouldn't be home for several hours- great. Then he added, "You could probably just leave it and it wouldn't hurt anything." Thanks, hon, but I DON'T THINK SO!!!! There was no way I was going to bed with a snake running loose in the house.
I quickly realized that we do not have any good snake catching tools in the house. So here's what I came up with.
Tools for the job: 3 foot long BBQ skewer used for roasting hotdogs while camping, a yard stick, a 5 gallon bucket
Goal: Catch the snake alive (yes, I'm a biologist, we try not to kill unnecessarily)
Strategy: Use the skewer and/or stick to pick up the snake and get it in the bucket without harming it (some of you may already be laughing!)
I should start by saying that I'm not generally scared of snakes. I will pet them and hold them, but I've never had to catch one. I thought it would be easier, but this little guy was a fighter! I locked myself in the bathroom to keep the dog out which gave me about 3 feet to work with. Every time I tried to touch him with a tool, he would get pretty aggressive and skittish. Then he would hide, then he would get mad, and I was getting nowhere.
New strategy: Pin his head down, grab him and put him in the bucket.
He didn't like that idea either. As soon as I got his head pinned down, he would wrap his body around my stick then pop his head out. Sneaky little guy. I wasn't fast enough either. I could have pressed down harder on him, but I was still trying to avoid harming him.
3rd strategy: Get rid of the snake so I can go to bed!
The snake was pretty mad at this point, so I couldn't leave to get a better tool and risk losing him in another room. I just had to bop him with the yard stick. He immediately flopped over on his back. I poked him to make sure he was dead. He was dead, but I decided to give him an extra bop for good measure. Yep, still dead. Getting him in the bucket was much easier when he wasn't fighting! I left the bucket on the front porch so Josh could see him. My heart was still racing, so I called Josh to tell him of my battle. He didn't seem to care, he was too busy working. So I called Mom- she was very proud of me. That's what Moms are good at! She encouraged me further by saying, "There are other poisonous snakes in TX that don't have rattles, so it's probably good that you got rid of it." I still didn't know what kind of snake it was, but I could go to bed and not worry about it anymore.
I brought the snake to school this morning and a professor in the Biology dept confirmed it was just a rat snake. Aggressive, yes- harmful, no- oh well. Since it was dead, the professor took it to use as a specimen, but he would have preferred to release it alive. I would have too. Maybe Josh will be home next time and be able to handle it better than I did. At least our dog never saw it. Titus would have thought it was a toy and would have probably ended up with a few superficial bites.
So that was my exciting night. What did you do last night?

Brokaw family pics

We took some family pictures about a month ago and just got them back today so I thought I'd share my favorites with you.

The only one I really like of me and Josh

The Brokaw clan

The sisters

Sisters with Mom

The brothers with Dad

Our nephews

Breaking in our house

We had our first family get-together in our house this weekend. It was Josh's Mom's birthday, so we decided to host the event after only being in our house for 2 weeks! I think it went pretty well and I really enjoyed having a house big enough to fit everyone. I think we ended up with 16 adults, 2 babies, and 2 kids. That's 20 people! We hope to have many more events like this in the future.
We still don't have our new carpet installed upstairs yet (should happen Wed and Thurs), so we're just living downstairs for now. Once our 2nd living room is no longer our bedroom and office, we'll have even more space for guests! My Mom is coming to visit this weekend, so we've got a guest room to get ready too. I wish we were able to spend more time at home, but we have just been so busy. Maybe we'll be able to catch up in a few weeks- HA! For now we're enjoying beautiful sunrises, sunsets, and short walks along country roads.
Here are a couple of pics from our last few weeks.

Titus' spot in the truck on the trip from WA- we're already in TX at this point. Look at how hot and tired he is!

Josh's Mom with her 2 grandsons (our 2 nehpews) Benjamin and Jackson

Our first scorpion

Titus helping with the refrigerator packaging


Family birthday night

Settling in

We're so excited to be in our new house! There were a few issues that came up that almost delayed our closing, but everything ended up working out just fine. We stayed up until midnight last night working on stuff inside and finally made ourselves sleep. So far today, Josh spent 8 hours mowing the lawn while I scrubbed 2 bathrooms and the laundry room. We already need a trip to Lowe’s and Walmart. Maybe we'll get a box or two unpacked tomorrow!
I think Titus likes this new house already. When we were moving the canoe last night, Titus started prancing around the front yard like he knew he was home. He enjoys chasing grasshoppers outside and already understands that it is much cooler if he stays downstairs instead of upstairs when he's inside.
Oh yeah- during our first night in our new home we already had 2 guests: a brown recluse spider in the kitchen sink and a scorpion in the bathroom sink. I wonder what we'll find tonight! Gotta love country livin'!

Our first week in TX

All is well (and hot) down here in TX. Our trip went as well as it could except for when we left Albion. We didn't quite get away as early as we had hoped. We were finally ready to leave at 9am. I was in the truck with Titus and Josh was in the U-haul. As I was about to start the truck, my feet were suddenly attacked by wasps! I jumped out of the truck and went dancing over to the Uhaul. My feet were burning! I didn't know how many times I got stung, but it hurt. I decided just to deal with the pain and went back to the truck. Pretty soon I see Josh coming over to the truck. He opened the door, and wasps started flying around the truck again. Well, we had 3 nests in the door jam of the truck and each time the door was opened, the wasps were able to fly inside. We had been driving the truck the evening before and several times that week without any problems. Anyway, we spent about 30 minutes messing with the wasps before finally making a safe departure. My feet burned for awhile and then just got really hot. Since then, I've had itchy feet and a small rash, but nothing too bad. So other than that, our trip was perfect. Titus was a great traveler and kept my lap very warm for most of the trip!
It still feels a little like we're on vacation since we're not in our house yet. We're sleeping in a garage apartment on an air mattress and just have a little food and some clothes unpacked. We were able to unload the Uhaul at our new house and just store everything in the garage- much better than having to use a storage building and move all that stuff twice! We've made some purchases for the new house and really look forward to moving in this Friday. We have also both settled in to our new offices and are getting reaquainted with ACU. It seems like we've been here much longer than a week since we've been so busy and have accomplished so much already. So that's been our week. We feel a little out of touch with everyone, but I'm sure we'll catch up soon. We'll try to get our new phone number and address sent out as soon as we have them (they are plowing us a new driveway that will most likely change our address, so we don't even know what it will be yet!) Have a great week!