ColoradoBennett-Happy Schmappy Birthday Cor-dawg

First, a quote from David O.
"Real life is response to the best within us. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, is to deprive one's self of the real joy of living."
So Brooke, I'm so sorry about they days from Hell that you spoke of and I'm so glad you complain to the blog, it's great therapy. I'd like to speak of my mini-day from Hell, yesterday. Adam left for the mtns in the early a.m. and Tracker jumped the fence shortly thereafter. Our neighbor with the sheep who hates us, came over pounding on the back door (not knowing that it's no longer our door) to complain about Track I assume. The angry neighbor must have spied on Max at this point and decided to once again call the police and complain that Max is too skinny. So at 9:30 I pile the girls in the car and head off to playgroup but decide I better check the messages on Adam's phone and find out if anyone has Tracker. A nice family down the street had o'nasty in their house and they just fell in love with him. I had to literally drag him away from them and they said "oh, we just love animals, if you ever need to give him up please call us. We'll take him." So I told them that was very likely because we'd be moving soon and we are looking for a good home for him and blah blah blah. So I take the mangy mut back home and chain him up and take the girls to the pool. After lugging in all our stuff (minus the cooler with our lunch) and paying a crazy price for the pool, a kid poops in the water five minutes after we get in. So we have to sit out for over an hour. So we all huddle together with our playgroup friends and eat an early lunch (after I book it out to the car for ours) and Sierra wants to eat what all the other mom's bring and not the hand pealed organic grapes I brought (just kidding, but you all will mock along with the other moms at the healthy crap I eat and try to get my kids to eat). So we shower at the pool and head straight from there to Kaia's Dr appointment where she has to get 5 shots. On the way I have a call from the county animal control that Tracker is locked up. When the officer came to check on our abused and skinny Great Dane he saw Tracker frolicking in the street. He tried to put him back, but Track just jumped the fence and happily jumped into the back of the cop car. Luckily the mother of my sister, Janelle (Lyd, I have this long lost 14-year-old sister who is the daughter of my bio dad that my mom married and divorced when she was 17), works at the animal control dept. and recongnized Tracker and the officer who was talking about skinny Max. So she helped me get out of a $75 ticket and the $25 licensing fee and I only had to pay $40 to retrieve my precious rot-gut dog. Oh, and I couldn't fit Tracker in the Jetta with the girls and I so I had to enlist the help of Pop with his big truck. So Pop helped me tie the chain really tightly around Tracker's collar when we got home, and then he kicked him (which is better than shoot him, which is what he wanted to do (and not a hard kick, least you think we really do abuse our dogs and you call the cops on us too)). So anyway, now our county records have a note in it that says our neighbors are harassing us about skinny Max and that cops should no longer be sent out (this is the 5th time this has happened that we know of!). So I call the family that loves Tracker and said, "I'm bringing him over!" But then I decided to talk to Adam first. But to really complicate things, my cell phone--which is the only phone with long-distance to call Adam in the mtns--broke and I couldn't get him. Then the Young Women and Young Men are doing Temple baptisms on Tue and they are supposed to have 10 names each from their own families and time is running out. So I had to go get Sarah and James, drive them to Sister Ito's house, discover that they are missing all the birth places and death places on all of their names, drive them back home and set up the same system for the next morning. While running to the pound and to take the youth to the family history expert, I forgot that I signed up to feed the elders dinner. So at some point I had 4 hungry elders knocking on my door and I totally stood them up. I have unbelievable guilt about that because if I was on a mission, dinner appointments would be so very important to me. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I backed the car into the garage door, too, just to add to the stress and guilt. Anyway, I finally got a hold of Adam and he was like "heck, yes, get rid of Tracker" so that is my plan today. Anyway, that's my story and now I feel a lot better having shared it with you all. Happy Birthday Cory.