Am I joining a new club?

Might be! My FMS has been pretty interesting lately. I finally gave in and went to the pain clinic. Was put on an med regimen that seems to help in the pain sphere. A side effect has been loosing more weight. I am down to 148 at last doc visit. One not so fun thing has been a complete lack of appetite. I have never been a large eater but now I actually have to remind myself to eat or I can go the whole day without a bite and not notice. It has however made me notice more when I am having sensitivities to food. My most recent flare began after eating my favorite meal. Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, and brown gravy. Within hours I was in the bathroom with stomach cramps that were excruciating. I proceeded to be sick through the night. I was so weak and sick through the next day that I stayed on the couch all day. Then the next day I woke with a horror of a migraine. I think our presidential candidates tried to have a boxing match in my skull and caused my brain to swell. It was awful. I luckily already had an appointment at my clinic scheduled. I am loving them. I was very against going due to my past history with drugs and the horror stories but they are a whole body wellness kind of place. I have done physical therapy there and message therapy. Been great. Anyway my doc had some big concerns. Due to my sensitive stomach she suspects Celiac's or at least some significant food allergy issues. Hence the new club. So I need to find a good GI and get checked out. She also wants me to find a new primary doc. They handle a lot of my needs but some needs need a PCP and mine just hasn't done some things I guess she should be. My hematologist who monitors the lymphocyte issue said as much when I saw him in April but to have another of my team make the same recommend must mean its true. She feels I need more blood monitoring due to being a chronic illness patient. She also thinks I need someone who does more than write a prescription. Which I agree with. I guess I just figured she was doing what she was supposed to be doing. So wish me luck. I am trying to take my health in hand but the road is a long one, longer than I ever dreamed. I had really hoped that a diagnosis would mean fix but at this point I will take what I can get. Much love to all!

Bee drama or HOLY PSYCHO BEES, BATMAN!

^^Two phrases I never imagined myself saying^^

We picked up our two new hives last week and took them out to the ranch with the other hive we have out there. (I REALLY need to come up with names for these hives, it's getting confusing) We left them alone for a couple of days to settle in and then went out to check on them. We opened the hive and realized they were doing quite poorly. Brood patterns were really bad and they were just overall weak hives with little honey stored. We checked the original hive and went home. We ordered new queens for all three ranch hives because two of those queens were two and a half years old and none of the three were doing well.
   The queens arrived on the 13th and we happily went out to install our new girls. The purchased hives were pretty easy to deal with. We found the queens, picked them out of the hive and I stepped on them. The queens were all pipping at each other and that was really cool. I had heard that on youtube, but never in person. Amazing.
   We got to the original hive and realized something was different. We could NOT find the queen. We searched and searched and still never saw her. We saw some queen cells though and that was worrisome. I did not dare leave the new queen in case the hive went on the war path and killed her. I went back home and did some research. The queen cells we saw were emergency cells. Uh oh. That means we lost our queen at some point. I looked up the age of the larvae we had seen in the cells and determined that the hive had been queenless for about a week. Pretty much since the last time we were there. Uh oh. We must have either squished her by accident, or lost her somehow when we left the new hives. Good thing we already had a queen to install. I went out the next day and put her in her new home. The bees were surprisingly mellow. This had always been a fairly aggressive hive but I didn't even light my smoker.
   Fast forward three days and we go out to check the queens and turn them loose into the hive. We also got our new beesuits and were quite excited to try them out. I put mine on and then taped the one spot where a bee could get through, right on the neck. Hubby told me I was paranoid and a pansy. I told him I didn't care, I would rather not get stung, thank you very much. We started with the queenless hive and HOLY PSYCHO BEES, BATMAN!!! These bees went into attack mode right from the moment we walked up to the hive. They would not give you a friendly headbutt warning, they went straight for the jugular. Luckily the neck on MY suit was taped up. But my non paranoid, non pansy husband ended up with half a dozen bees inside his suit. One went up his nose while another sunk her stinger right into his adams apple.
   He sucked it up long enough to release the queen and we watched her disappear down into the hive like she was supposed to. We battled the workers long enough to make sure they didn't attack the attendant bees that came with the queen. There was a lot of butt wiggling and threats, but no one seemed overly pissed at them, just at us. We put the inner and outer covers back on the hive and retreated. They chased us quite a ways down the road and we finally got away from the determined little critters. We smoked our suits to mask the sting pheromones and braved the kamikaze insects one more time to fasten the straps around the hive. Whew, that was pretty intense.
   Now on to the new hives. These girls wanted new queens! They had almost eaten all of the candy in the queen cage and eagerly accepted the queens into the colony. They escorted her right down into the hive and never really even flew out of the hives. They were gentle enough that we could have removed our gloves and touched them. What a relief after dealing with those other attack bees!
   We are going to wait a week and then go back out and check on the hives to make sure the queens are ok and laying eggs. If that crazy hive has killed their queen, they are toast. I am tired of dealing with them and their attitudes. I will split them up and distribute the frames between the hives I bought to boost them and will start over with a new package of bees next year.

Come to the Dark Angel side!

I have recently had the privilege to become great online friends with Hot Sauce, the female half of Dark Angel Medical. She and her awesome guy have taken a pretty awesome idea and made something that I think all of us in the survival and/or prepper (whatever you want to call yourself, hehe) community can really benefit from. They make emergency trauma kits. But that honestly is a simplified statement. I am not an expert at all. I am just a major fan. This is directly taken from their about us page:

We are a veteran-owned business with a combined total of over 20 years of medical training and work in both the military and civilian healthcare fields, Pre-hospital care, flight medicine and intra-hospital work with concentration in emergency and critical care medicine as well as competitive shooting.

We are very proud to offer the D.A.R.K. (Direct Action Response Kit), what we believe is, a superior product to the standard IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit)a.k.a. BOK (Blowout Kit). The components have been carefully chosen based on personal, hands-on experience and the feedback from “boots on the ground” in our current theaters of operation.

We want to give every person who deploys these kits the ability to survive a life-threatening situation.

The thing that I really love is the facebook linked to their website. On it Doc runs trauma scenarios and then leads the discussion in how to handle those issues. For those of us with only basic training it helps and has inspired me to want to renew my training. My last cert was when Bug was little. She is now 11. Add that to the fact I want to get my RO cert and renewing my CPR and basic trauma certs would be a darn good thing. I know that once I build a good bag for my truck a DARK is going in it. So check them and their product out!! You won't regret it!

surprising twist.

   The boy that was hit by the pick up truck yesterday is ok! The reason life flight left without transporting anyone is because there were NO INJURIES!! 

   After seeing the scene I saw yesterday, I am in awe that no one died. I am soooo relieved he was not seriously hurt. 

   Hopefully it will cause that boy to be much more careful in the future and the driver to slow down and be much more cautious.

   My boys were much better behaved at the bus stop this morning and even though we were the last ones there, I also noticed that all of the other kids were lined up nicely behind the boundry we had given them.

   

Trajedy

   I saw something today that I will never be able to erase from my mind. I saw a mother lying in the dirt cradling the head of her son who had just been hit by a truck.
   I was coming home from town with DH, following my son's bus down the road, just talking about nothing in particular. As we rounded a corner near my house we saw red and blue lights. Uh, oh. that is never a good sign. We saw a red F250 sitting mangled in a ditch and could tell that it had rolled. Then we saw the boy. He was close to the same age and size as my oldest son. I KNEW my son was in the bus, but for just a moment, I saw him in the dirt there. His mother was lying in the dirt next to him with her face close to his, with her arms wrapped around his head. I burst into tears because for a moment, I put myself in her shoes. I was horrified, I was furious, I was devastated. I was her, and her son was mine.
   The truck had been going way too fast and hit the boy before rolling. The kids on the school bus he had just gotten off of saw the whole thing. I have no idea if the boy survived, but I know the helicopter came and left without him. I don't think that is a good sign. I have been trying to find out all day if he made it.
   Suddenly, none of my problems matter. Nothing I am going through even comes close to what his family is feeling tonight. My kids are all home and safe. My family is whole. I am blessed. I am thankful.

For my next 30 years....

Today is my birthday. The big 30. I have had some teasing, some even apologizing as I hit this number. Like 30 is a bad thing. Honestly as I look back over my life I am so very happy to be having this day and the life I have had up to this point. For a long time I was 100% convinced I would die young. My FMS symptoms started in my teens and with so many saying that it was in my head or that I was crazy I was truly convinced that I either was going crazy or something was so wrong but no one could see it because I was meant to die. So I never really expected to hit this birthday. I have had my share of heartache as well. Loosing my babies was probably the worst emotionally followed by the loss of my grandparents and my love's battle with his own issues. Those things though helped shape the beauty that is my life. They helped form the bounty that is my marriage. Many think I make up our relationship but today when I opened my birthday card J.W. had written, "It feels like yesterday you were 17 and I had just fallen in love with you. I know many years have passed but I promise to make each day feel like it was only yesterday." Yeah that is my guy. All day Maggy has been texting me "Happy Birthday" over and over so I know how excited she is that it is my birthday. My email has been beeping like crazy with messages and my facebook even has some sweet words. It is humbling and amazing to feel so much love from so many. I see all of that love and can't help but be excited to turn 30 and eager for the future. I don't know what it holds. I know there will be heartbreak, there always is in life. I also know that there will be joy and love and passion. Thank you guys for being a part of that even if I have been a bit absent lately!

major score

   Hubby and I went to check our hives this evening. Our medium hive, the one we moved back home is really packed with bees and honey. Doing great. Our Nuc in the front yard is also doing very well and will need a new box very soon. The big hive in the canyon....not so much. While not struggling, it is not growing either. It has enough honey stores to get through the winter, but none for harvest.
   On the way home we were discussing where to go from here. How many hives we wanted for next year, where we wanted to get them, ect. We had only been home about a half hour when a beekeeper neighbor called to say he was getting out of the bee business. He wanted to know if I wanted to buy his two established hives and his extractor for $300. We will be picking them up next week :-)

Wildlife and drought

After I posted about the porcupine, I realized I hadn't shared my skunk story with all of you. Last week, my chickens went bonkers at around 5 am. I went out to check on them and could see something trying to tear my live trap apart. I went out and low and behold....there was Stripes! Or one of the original Stripes' relatives. 

   Hubby had plans that morning which required him to take the truck. I had no way to transport stinky and so me being just a curious as the kids, started going out to see how close I could get. It was well past the little guy's bedtime so he slept and occasionally would open an eye and look at us (At one point, we had nine people standing less then a foot from the cage) and give us a look that said "Do you mind? I am trying to sleep here!"

   The kids hand fed him peanut butter sandwiches and I got close enough to take some really cool pics. I had no idea skunks were so cute. I killed some time before Hubby got back researching pet skunks. Good thing for Hubby, I found out they are illegal in most states including ours. The kids were disappointed.

   Once Hubby returned we threw a tarp over the trap and put Stripes in the truck to his new home. If he hadn't been half tame, we would have shot him and been done with it. But just look at that face!

   We found an area away from all homes and chicken coops with running water nearby and opened the door to the trap. He waddled his fat little but right out of the cage and into the bushes.

   I think the drought has a lot to do with the wildlife coming down into the valley this summer. There are some really big bucks wandering around the neighborhood this year that no one has seen before. We usually have four or five skunks all summer. My neighbors dogs killed three in a WEEK! I trapped and released this one. We have had coyotes come right into yards and try to eat the family dog. We even had fish and game put down a mountain lion ACROSS THE STREET from my house this spring. I just read an article this morning in the paper about a mountain lion trying to get into a casino yesterday in down town Reno. A badger walked into a grocery store in Sparks and all he wanted was water. This winter is going to be tough on all the creatures. I just hope we gt enough snow to make next year better.

Porcupine

I finally got this pic to save to my computer so I thought I would share. This is what the porcupine looked like before I put him down. Now you know why that dog looked like he did. The little scrapper was determined to pull every quill out of this thing. He almost succeeded.

exciting morning

   My neighbor called me this morning to ask if I could help her get a few porcupine quills out of her dogs. She told me that each dog had five to ten quills, not a big deal. She went to pick up her teenage son to help hold the dogs.
   I got some supplies ready when her younger son came running up to the front door. I thought he was coming to tell me that his mom was back, but he was screaming and crying that the dogs had trapped the porcupine under the camp trailer and could I come quick.
   I grabbed my gun and magazine and started loading the mag as I walked down the driveway. As soon as I had the mag loaded, I broke into a run. My neighbor turned down the street just as I sprinted across the street and into her yard. She got there almost the same time I did and immediatly started screaming. We got the big female dog away from the porcupine and locked in the garage. The terrier was not about to let that nasty critter get away from him and just kept attacking.
   We finally drove him away from it by throwing rocks at him. Once he was locked in the garage and away from the danger, we turned our attention to the porcupine. It was completely bald on it's back and tail. It was injured pretty badly and was dragging one back leg. We had to use shovels to get it out from under the trailer. I still couldn't shoot it as it was huddled up to the tires. I ended up using a shovel to scoop him up and toss him away from anything that could be damaged. He was still trying to slap at me with his bald and bleeding tail so I had to have the teenager draw his attention by tossing rocks so I could get a clear shot ( I REALLY didn't want to just shoot it in the back) It worked and I fired a shot that didn't drop him, but was fatal.
   The kids of course all came running out of the house where they had been told to stay. So once I get them all back I went back to check on him and he decided to walk away. The second shot dropped him and it was done.

Now to turn our attention to the dogs. This is the female, she is not nearly as tenatious as her little brother. The pictures get more greusome as you scroll down. If you are squemish at all, stop here.

This is the male that is now at the vet. They had NEVER seen this many quills in one dog.


This is the porcupine. You can't tell from this pic, but he is almost bald.