Happy Bday to my Hunka Hunka

Yes, not only is February the month of looooove, but it is also the month of my Hunka Hunka Burning Love’s birthday!  Happy Birthday to Rickey, my sweet husband who is absolutely more than I could have ever hoped for in a best friend, husband and father.

We recently discovered Flying Wild Alaska on Netflix.  Basically it is a reality show about his first flying job… just the names have been changed.  We have watched it for a couple nights in a row now, with several episodes still calling our names.  Rickey is (I was about to say “having a sleep over”) overnighting away from home tonight which is extremely rare for him in his current pilot job.  So we won’t be watching FWA tonight.  Anyway, the show brought back MULTIPLE memories of our time spent in the North when he was flying for Little Red Air Service.  Seriously, the flight crew that spent the same three years up in Fort Vermilion would have at least two seasons of episodes simply from the stories I know about.  And as all good pilot’s wives know, there are many stories that we are glad we still don’t know about.

Those were exhilarating years we spent up in the freezing tundra, but I must say that our last 16 years in the desert have been my favorite!  We have traveled more, laughed more, forgiven more, cried more, spent more, prayed more and have definitely loved more in the last 16 years.  Thanks, Rickey, for making my life so thrilling by living out the calling on your life to be a man of integrity and passion.  I love you!  XOXO

Desert Beauty

Four years ago we were studying the flowers, plants, animals, landforms, etc. of the Sonoran Desert in which we live.  There was this great activity in our curriculum that explained how to make a desert plant terrarium, so I bought this little round cactus for the enclosed desert botanical garden.  That’s as far as we got with the activity.  Since then, it has been just that… a little round cactus on my kitchen window sill for four years.  Being a cactus, I only water it once a month by setting it in a pan of water for an hour or so.  Then, THIS year, it decided to show off.  This beautiful orange blossom opened a few days ago revealing the true beauty of the desert. WOW!  The flower is only an inch across and the cactus is not quite three inches tall.  Teeny.  Perfect for a little desert terrarium.

Awesome Flowers!!!!

Oh, you have to go see my sister’s photos of her springtime flowers up in the great Northwest.  Makes me unlove the cactus growing at my house in the desert.

http://christysthoughts.wordpress.com/

So absolutely beautiful.  Makes me green with envy.  Congratulations on your green thumb, Christy.

The Ultimate Fund Raiser

Ingenious.  It’s the best word I can think of to describe the current summer camp fund raising project currently going on at our church.  It’s called “Flamingo-ed.”  We got flamingo-ed last night while we were at our daughter’s play… so it was someone who knew what time we would be at the play.  Here’s how it works: a church member hires hit men from the youth group with CASH to flamingo some other unsuspecting church member’s yard.  There is a clue note left at the scene of the crime.  Ours read:  “It’s gonna take a lot of loonie to get rid of this bird, aye!!!!”  So, we can surmise that it is someone with a chip on their shoulder about Canadians… who was obviously educated in an American school.  Aye should be spelled EH and the plural of loonie would be loonies. Brother.

With 50 flamingos spinning their wings in our front landscape, we have a choice to make.  #1 Contribute to the youth group to have them removed. #2 Add a little extra moola and label someone else’s yard.  #3 Buy insurance from the youth group to ensure that we don’t get flamingo-ed again.  Funny thing in the desert is, the ground is so hard, the only place the flamingos can plunge into the earth without a jack hammer is near sprinkler heads or where water pools.  I’m thinking we need to pick some unsuspecting fellow church member who truly has desert landscape WITHOUT sprinklers…. so the youth have to bring a sledge hammer and a spike to successfully complete the task. (That is a bit of my evil side coming out.)

Needless to say, if you have church family that have a collective good sense of humor, this is an awesome fundraiser.

www.LindaCrosby.com