Still alive… maybe

We still don’t have internet at home, which is actually kind of nice. We have to find other ways to entertain ourselves and going to the bakery to be able to connect means I get to eat pastries! Perfect.
Chester, VT is still amazingly cute and also awesome. We’ve gone on little road trips and poked around Grafton and Springfield (where we ate a hot dog and some convenience-store-hot-roller taquito thing in the parking lot and watched the trucks bumble around) and did a goodly 2 mile hike.
What else?
Vrooom
Galactic head
Maddie
Chester is very handsome
Maddie, I love her so much
mt something or other!
Soon, Chester will tell you a thing!

The thing that is true is

I live in a new state for the first time in my life.
Dang!
So what happened on our drive to Vermont? Well, we ate lunch at a picnic table near the dumpster at a Bob Evans. I had a screaming meltdown in the parking lot of a Days Inn next to the Toledo airport. I learned to drive a stick shift in Chicago, in Chicago traffic, during a Chicago rain storm. It was like Lake Michigan belched its whole self up into the sky and fell in great pleated sheets on us. I ate a lot of peanut m&ms. Chester didn’t puke.
It is obnoxiously bucolic here. It’s almost as if nature hired Disney to make this place all beautiful and Vermonty. The trees are just starting to change and it is amazing to watch. We live in a little town, a little cute rural town with a little bit of tourism and a lot of very cute everything!
Our truck had a squid
HOLY CRAP!!!! SQUID!!!!
HOLY CRAP! SQUID!
We live in a big, jumbly house. One part was built in the late 1700s and has been added on to so many times over the years. It’s all doors and stairs and halls. Our apartment is little but it’s cheap and we rented a storage space for most of our stuff.
Our home
Right out the front door (too bad about the power lines, it’s actually really awesome)
Out the front door
Obligatory pre-move-in apartment photos
Mostly empty
Mostly empty
Maddie
Maddie doing what she does
Obligatory moved-in-but-not-unpacked photos
So much to unpack
So much to unpack
Dogs in Nature
Jerkwalters in nature
Jerkwalters in nature
I live by this
Mountain
We’re getting our plan together. I’ve started collecting resources and making lists of things we need to learn, we’ll spend the winter doing that. We’re also taking advantage of our (intentional) no-job situation and using that time to go out and explore. There’s a lot of hiking and investigating to be done. Mostly, right now we are tired, though.
There should be internet set up in our place this weekend, but I’m super loving the internet-accessing bakery up the road (because what I need in my life is more pastry).

Duke Chester III of Nokomia

Many moons ago (I really should have written this a long time ago but I am brainholed and easily distracted) I got up and checked my email and there it was, a picture of a portrait painted of Chester. I kept staring at it in a bit of disbelief because who would paint a portrait of Chester (sorry, Chester, but yeah)?
One of the Pantsters, a very creative and artistic (that really fails to sum up her talent and her ability to create such beautiful art, sorry) had seen a photo of Chester on my flickr jiggity.

Chester is a good dog.

A rare moment of quiet for Chester.
(the craziest part of that photo is just how clean my carpet was. Like diggity clean.)
She grabbed that photo and made for me a gift that will always be so very dear to me.

Chester 12Pound


Darlissa Riggs
, so very talented in ways I can’t even list. She is always on top of one beautiful endeavor or another. I am always in awe of the range of talents she possesses.
Just the honor of having my Chester 12Pound immortalized on canvas was awesome, but she also shipped the original portrait to me. It hangs on my wall.

Chester

I am so lucky in this life to have my awesome friends and family. So many wonderful and generous people surround me and sometimes I am unable to find the words that truly express my love for them.

IMG_6221

Probably a good thing she saw the other picture first.