Fences

Hey Craig,

Had a garden question. 

 What is the wildlife like around the garden area. Are there animals that would eat delicious new plants? I'm trying to decide if we need to put up a fence. 

Hi Summer,

Yes there are quite a bit of rabbits so we are going to train you on the 22 so you can shoot them and provide dinner. ;-)

This is going to be fun. 

What your baristas want to tell you but never will

Anybody who has ever worked in the service industry, whether they are jerks or the nicest people you've ever met,  has a list of things that annoy the living shit out of them. When I was working in the coffee industry several years ago in Hawaii I asked a few of my friends to write down a list of their pet peeves about customers. You should have seen their eyes light up. It was like giving a pyromaniac a gallon of gas and a box of matches and telling them to go have a good time. I ran across two of them today and still found it amusing so I thought I'd share.

Steve's list
1. Ya, ya, ya, I know...Nonfat, sugarfree, vanilla latte, extra hot, with 2 pumps and no foam. And are you looking for a publisher?
2. You know, you can tell a lot about a person by the coffee they order. High Maintenance? Probably...
3. I do not get paid enough to listen to you bitch.. Let me find someone who does get paid enough.
4. Seriously? You've been standing in line for 5 minutes and still don't know what the hell you want?
5. Yes...people like you are the reason you stood in line for so long. Know what you want and have your money ready.
6. Tall is bigger than small. Where did you go to school?
7. "Sugar-free caramel" is an oxymoron you ignorant ass.

Heather's list
1. A large, nonfat, caramel latte is NOT NONFAT.
2. I am a barista, not a tour guide.
3. I am a barista, not a restaurant connoisseur.
4. I don't set the prices just to piss you off. In fact, I don't set them at all.
5. Just because I work at a coffee shop doesn't mean that I'm not smart.
6. Just because I work for minimum wage doesn't give you the right to make inappropriate comments about me.
7. I know exactly what you're doing when you order your cafe macchiato iced in a medium cup.
8. You have no idea how much I want to spit in your drink when you talk to me like that.
9. If I were as mean as you are there WOULD be a loogie in your drink.
10. Don't use the fact that you haven't had YOUR coffee yet as an excuse to be an ass.
11. Listen when we repeat your order back to you. We do it because we know you are bound to change your mind.
12. We repeat your order back to you so you know how riddiculous you sound.

Yeah. That's happening.

So I leave a week from today and I am more than a little stoked. Perhaps the 14th is not quite so epic as the 11th but whatever. The number needed some pizzaz so henceforth it will be set aside as the start of epic journeys. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Let me introduce you to the place I will be going to. And please, let's reserve our jealousy until the end.    Ladies and gentlemen, New Zealand. 

It's a farm. With cows. Baby ones too. 

Look! A river runs through it!

That's 700 acres of untamed beauty.

This is Craig. Owner and CEO. Man with the best office view ever.
Please take note of his stockings. I'm more than a little excited to meet him .

So yeah. If you need me I will be planting a garden near Napier, going fishing in the afternoons and learning how to shoot. It's about time I got ready for the zombie apocalypse.

3:30 AM

I have learned in my 27 years of life that nothing good happens after 2 am. Well it is currently 3:30 am and I am still up. What's worse is that it is now Monday morning and I get to wake up in 4 hours to go to work. Shit.

My mind is racing because the government did something right and processed my passport in record time. I don't know why I'm surprised. I paid them enough. But here it sits next to me and I am completely jiggered. I wasn't planning on starting the ticket buying process until later this week when I assumed it would arrive. I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this sudden change and calming down an ego who is currently freaking out.

I am excited. And nervous. And well, a myriad of other emotions. As I stand on the edge of the precipice that is my next adventure I am contemplating:

1. The Amazing Race and why I didn't follow through on submitting my video.

2. My dreams of becoming a children's book author and why I never seriously pursue it.

3. What I hope to gain from this journey.

4. What I have learned up to this point.

5. What I had for dinner that has kept me up this long.

It's lame. And awesome. I'm dreaming a lot right now, and for those of you who have heard some of my dreams, that can be a pretty wild adventure in and of itself. My brain is cataloguing and problem solving around the clock and there is very little I can do to slow it down. I don't want to slow it down. It needs to do it's thing, but seriously. It's 3:53 now and it's MONDAY.

I've decided to set out on my adventure on September 11 because, thanks to Americans and their phobias, it is a super cheap day to fly. *At this point I would like to pause and say hello to Big Brother because I've no doubt triggered some sort of homeland security alarm by using "Government, passport, ticket, nervous, precipice, follow through, September 11, Americans, fly, Big Brother" and now "Homeland Security" in this post. I'm glad you're here. My name is Summer and I'm just a 27-year-old who is in the middle of a dynamic quarter life crisis. Feel free to follow my adventures anonymously.  You might just find that you like the stability in your life, a lot. Ah heck, tell your friends. Terrorism, Al Qaeda, bomb and Bin Laden for President. Tomorrow should be a good day at the office for you. You're welcome.

So back to it, September 11 is the magic day in theory and it's coming up fast. I got to do something I've never done before yesterday. I entered my home city into Skyscanner and then selected "Everywhere" as my destination. THAT was liberating. The world is my oyster bitches. I sure hope I come out a pearl.

And that's all for now. I'll perhaps elaborate on my crisis at some other time, but for now I'm going to give sleep one last shot. Happy Monday everyone. I hope you had more hours to prepare than I.

Traveling

So I'm getting ready to travel and I'm pretty stoked. I sent my passport off for some upgrades last week and now I'm just sitting here waiting... Where will I go? What will I do? Will I get stranded? I hope so. Adventure is out there and I intend to find it.

One thing I love about traveling is the advice that comes in before you go. Every tidbit has it's own story that confirms it's validity.

Here's my list so far:

1. Drink Water. Unless it's brown or has things swimming in it.
2. Know what poison Ivy looks like. It's a bitch.
3. Try all of the things!
4. Listen to your instincts.
5. Brush up on military time.
6. Know how far your lodging is from major sites.
7. Don't ask what's in it. If it tastes delicious just say thank you.
8.  Travel until you get home sick, and then stay a few more weeks.

What would your advice be?

Things I shouldn't be doing at midnight

Midnight is a witching time for me.

I seem to come alive somewhere around 10:30 pm. That's when all of my creative and productive juices start to squeeze out of the fruits of my mind. I get urges to start art projects, run outside in the moonlight and tonight, apply for credit cards.

It's been on my list of things "To Do" for awhile. I've been putting it off because Dave Ramsey's face along with a giant pair of menacing scissors kept popping to mind every time I ventured onto a credit card site. I'd just like to take a moment to say "I'm debt free!!" because of Dave's magical debt snowball, but darn it! I'm will be traveling soon and I would like some cash-back rewards thank-you-very-much.

So there I was. At the end of my day. Feeling a little down because I didn't get all of the things on my list done when I thought, "Ah! What the hell? Let's look at the credit card options again and see what we find." So I looked at the two tabs I had open, because I assume they were the two options I was vacillating between and decided objectively on option 1, which was on tab 2. It was for people with "Excellent" credit.

Now I haven't had a credit card in awhile and as such I don't have the foggiest clue what my credit score is, but I thought I would flatter myself with an excellent one just for giggles. The worst that could happen would be rejection, and I figured I could handle that. So I filled out their form and played with artwork for awhile.  Did you know you can customize your card for free? I didn't and was therefore  delighted. Resisting the narcissistic urge to upload a duck faced image of myself I settled on a very sensible stock tree, but mirrored it so I could feel like I had some creative input in the process. I hit save and found myself back on the fill-in-the-blanks page. I scanned over my information once more, wincing as I passed over the "annual salary" and "current job" boxes. "They're going to rat me out for sure," I thought as my clicker unscrupulously checked the "Yes, I've read and agree with the terms and conditions... something about my unborn child... ya da ya da ya da" box. And suddenly I was on a page with a very polite thinking bar graph saying something about please waiting while authorization was processing.

"I should probably go to bed," I thought about 10 seconds in. "This will probably take..." and just like that, I had a credit card. I'm not entirely sure what I signed up for in the end, I'm just trusting that past Summer did her homework. We'll just have to see in 7-10 business days.

I have ADD it's a mental condition where, wait. Did I condition my hair this morning?

I have been fighting this stereotype for years. I know I have a hard time concentrating. Watching me in my office alone is a scary thing. I think scientists would be baffled for years if they tried to logically map the journey I go on from answering e-mails to organizing costumes. This of course is why it takes me days sometimes to complete tasks. All of them are getting done, just at the same time, and therefore it takes longer to get any one thing completed in a timely fashion.

This morning I was reminded of my condition when I decided to put up the laundry line. I had heard the dryer running and seeing that it was a gorgeous day decided to let Mother Nature help me with some of my chores. It is after all, her day. (Mother's Day. Not Earth Day. Just to clarify.) I needed to get tape to attach it to my balcony so I headed into the laundry room. Realizing that there were distractions in abundance en route I started chanting "Tape, tape, tape, tape" in hopes that I would remember my purpose when I arrived in the bathroom 15 feet and 5 seconds later.

I entered the bathroom chuckling to myself about the idiocy of it all and was about ready to open up the cupboard door when I glanced down and saw that the washing machine was empty. "Oh man!" I exclaimed. "I thought I had put a load in before I took Jasper out."

So, I went back into the hallway, picked up a pile of clothes and stuffed them into my tiny front loader. Satisfied that I had accomplished something very great indeed, I headed back to the kitchen where I stood in triumph drinking my morning cup of Earl Grey and staring at the Netflix screen.

"Why was I looking at Netflix?" I wondered, mainly because I generally don't enlist the time sucking companion unless I'm doing chores. "Oh no," I thought with dread. "What was I doing before this?" And that's when I heard the dryer. I need help.