May Update

Another month has come and gone. And here I still am, in the desert. I have been here 4 months so far. Only 5 more to go. Boy is time flying. Or not! But being here 4 months means that my little Samantha is also 4 months old. She is getting huge. She was weighed in at the Doctor and she came in at a whopping 11lb, 13oz.

Thankful Maria has been keeping me up to date on her growth through pictures and videos. Every day she grows cuter. I can’t wait to get home and be able to meet her. Maria always is telling me about how she is smiling all the time and how she loves to “talk” to her toys the TV and the mirror. But every time the camera comes out she clams up and just sits there. I can barely get a smile and can never get a laugh or babble. Who would have thought that my daughter would be camera shy? I sure hope that she will outgrow that one.

The Dogs are slowly getting more and more used to Samantha being around. They still for the most part ignore her completely, but there are times that they pay her a little attention. Samoa stays near her a lot like she is guarding her. She has no problem sitting on the couch with Maria if Sam is also up there.

She keeps trying to lick her feet if she is sitting on the floor while Maria sits on the couch holding Sam. I think for the most part Samoa will do fine with her. Cali on the other hand keeps her distance. Maria did recently send me a video where Cali comes up to Sam when she was on the floor and gives her a quick sniff. But as Maria says in the video Sam had just pooped so I am sure Cali was just interested in what could smell so bad. As Maria says Sam can make a smell that would even beat me. I am interested and even worried about how they will act once Sam starts making her way around and gains the ability to really reach out and grab at things. Before we had the thought of having a kid I would play with Samoa by grabbing at her tail and she would turn around and go after me. Nothing really rough, and it was very easy to get her to calm down quickly if she started to get to into it, but Sam wont have the same control. So she will have to be watched closely. And as always Cali is afraid of everything so I don’t think there is anything to worry about there. If Sam goes after Cali I am sure that Cali will just go and hide. The only problem is if Cali has a bone in her kennel and Sam tries to get it. Cali is very protective of her bones and even snapped at me…Once!

My Running To Disneyland is going well I am closing in on the Oregon/California border. I am at 321.34 miles as of this writing.

Maria is just about finished up on our move. We decided to move into on base housing. I really never liked the idea, but it is so much closer to everything and will help us to save money. The house that we were living in was about 30 min from
base and that put it 30 min farther away from anything. We were living in a very small town and if we wanted anything that was not in the town it was at least 30 min to go. So being closer to the “city” will be nice. Also the house is only 1.25 min from my office when I am home. So that means I will not only have more time at home, but I can come home and shower after my morning PT instead of showering in the gym and I can come home for lunch instead of sitting in my truck. And also it means that I won’t be burning through $200 in gas every few weeks. And as I mentioned we will be saving money. Our old house took almost all of my housing allowance. Then we still had to pay for the utilities and the gas to and from work. With on base housing, we don’t pay for utilities as long as we don’t go over what is considered to be the “normal” amount used. And if we use less than a pre set amount then we get money back. So that should be nice. I have a friend with 3 kids and his wife runs a daycare out of their house and he gets money back every month, so I am hopeful. The best part (at least for me) is that I will have a greater chance of ridding my motorcycle to work now. I can take my truck to PT, and then on days that the weather is nice I can take the bike after. And if the weather turns bad, it is only a mile home. And I won’t have to worry about hitting a deer coming through the forest on my way to work.
I will miss the quiet of being so far away though. And my drive home helped me to calm down from my day.
We were not expecting to be moved into housing so fast. We were #98 on the housing list when we first started, and were told it would be 3-4 months before we would get a house. So Maria was planning on clearing out of our old house, putting everything into storage, and driving home to stay with her parents for a few months. And then if all worked out, she would get the house just long enough before I came home that she could get everything unpacked and ready for me. Then about 3 week before she moved out of the old house she got a call saying that there was a house available if few wanted it. So she took it. The upside is that we don’t have to worry about me coming home and not having a house yet. The downside is that we would have saved at least $2500 a month for every month that she was living with her parents. But oh well.
So our new house is a cute little duplex. It is a lot smaller than our old house, but that is not too bad. It is a three bedroom 1.75 bath. Each bedroom is a little smaller than what we had but our stuff fits nice. The big difference is that the garage is only a one car, so not only does Maria lose her nice indoor parking, but we have to stack the cars into on narrow yet long driveway. Also we don’t have a formal dining room anymore. But that really does not bother me. It just means that we can actually sit at the dinner table yet still watch TV!!! No more sitting at TV trays. Even though it is a duplex we don’t have a common living wall. The common wall is the garage. That is the really nice part. There are some other (nicer) houses on post that we could have chosen from, but they all have common walls that are the Master Bedroom. That is a NO/GO. We have a very small yard that we had to pay to fence in. We had the choice to either rent a chain link fence or pay to put in a permanent wood fence. I wanted to go with the real fence, because then we could get a 6 foot fence to keep the dogs in, but there was no way we were going to pay $2000 to put a fence in to a place that we would not be staying in. So we went with the Chain link. The limit on the height is only 4 feet and I am really worried about her dog Samoa getting out. But we will have to live with it. If she gets out, and gets picked up we will have to get rid of her. I know that Cali (my dog) wont jump the fence. She is too afraid of the world to do that. We might just get a smaller yet taller “dog run” and set it up inside our yard area. We got permission for that. And then if we are going to be gone for the day we can just put them in the dog run. We did that in Barstow and it worked well.

Okay well, that is the update for the month. I have more to put about the weather, but this is long enough for now. So until next time…

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