When I was last regularly posting, it was about a year ago when Anthony was facing the set backs at work. While I posted for a while from the library, and then sporadically there after, it was all pretty hit or miss, so a brief update from the year is in order.
Anthony continued with his reduced hours into the fall, but we did fine with budgeting, didn't really suffer much in a financial way and enjoyed having him home for a three day weekend every week.
Because we were doing okay with money and the dog wanting continued, we adopted Ranger at the end of July.
Actually, as I see when I look the picture folder, July was a busy month, with a foreign exchange student for a few weeks:
(On the very hiking trip shown above, I lost our camera to the stream. It was very sad - it just rolled right down the bank and into the water. We lived without for many months, then bit the bullet and purchased another. This picture was off of our student's camera. )Several day hiking trips - this one is to Castle Craig, which was very cool:
Two back packing trips - one was very laid back with doing 9 miles in three days up to a favorite spot - Elk Meadows:
While the other was much more hard core - 5 days and 48 miles in the Bull of the Woods area. Just to make it more challenging, Davan was sick for the first couple of days on this one:
And, last, but not least, Davan's first away camp. She was gone for a week. She loved the camp overall, but there were food issues (short version - they said they were fine with accommodating vegan, but it wasn't true):
And that was just July! Actually, most of the other months this year weren't quite so packed and some highlights I've already posted here.
We did do a fair amount of camping and hiking this summer, but that was fit around Davan's heavy camp schedule. She pretty much taught a camp or participated in a camp or sometimes both most weeks over the summer. She did several Do Jump camps, an AWOL camp, the above away camp, and then taught younger kids at Do Jump as well.
In the fall, she started up with Zig Zags again and, also, by jumping on the opportunity when a couple of kids pulled out of Tic Tocs (the younger performance troop at Do Jump) at the last minute, has been doing Tic Tocs this year as well. She's been quite busy between both troops, two adult classes at Do Jump, a class at AWOL (just in the fall), starting dance (jazz in the fall, with the addition of two classes of ballet a week this winter), a winter class at Night Flight, and teaching at Do Jump. Whew.
We've been able to pull all this off money-wise by both her and I doing work at Do Jump for work trade. She is teaching and I am doing office work. This has allowed us to pay very little out of pocket there.
Davan is into her performance season. She has a couple of dance competitions (one past, one yet to come), the Tic Toc show - 100 Echos - this weekend with last weekend being packed with extra rehearsal for said show, the Zig Zag show - Seeds of Hope - coming up for two weekends in May, plus, of course, extra rehearsals, and two dance recitals in June. One of the dance recitals will be similar to what she did in December, but the other is a whole show - Alice in Wonderland. She'll be dancing with her ballet class, but also got a part as the Jester, for which she gets to do a solo and a group dance. The solo is being crafted for her as a dance/cirque type piece and she's really excited about that. Extra rehearsals have started for that already, so we're fitting that in, too!
I've decided to do a triathlon again this summer, so I've been getting out on my bike and swimming regularly in addition to running with Ranger. When Ranger first came to live with us, I pretty much gave up bike riding in deference to taking her on walks and such, but I missed it and wanted the tri challenge again, so we're making it work.
And now, on with regular posts!
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