(Note #1: From now until Valentine's Day I will be chronicling how Mr. Blue Eyes and I met, as well as sharing some personal journal excerpts from the early days/weeks/years of our relationship. WARNING: Journal excerpts will contain large amounts of over-the-top, thick as maple syrup, fresh from the pine tree SAP. I was young and in love and I wrote about it shamelessly. If you are allergic to sap you may want to take a Claritin or just avoid these posts all together. If not, read on or click HERE to see a list of the archived posts.)

(Note #2: Sorry I didn't get anything posted yesterday. It turns out that the world doesn't actually stop turning and my kids don't stop having needs when I'm trying to sit down and write our love story. Reality can be cruel sometimes.)

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I jumped into my car and raced (for me 'raced' mostly likely meant going 5mph over the speed limit) over to my sister's place of employment to show her the note. I was bursting. How did he know where I worked? Why did he happen to be in the parking lot, at my work, on a week day when he lived an hour away? How did he know which car was mine? How did he know that I wanted to call him?

Once again it seemed our paths had randomly crossed.

I waited until evening to call, until after my parents were in bed. This was back in the days when telephones still had cords attaching them to the wall. I needed to wait until I had some privacy and quiet.

Whatever butterflies I may have had in anticipation of making the call were quickly quieted when I heard his voice. I don't know if I can even explain it, the way the sound of his voice affected me... It wasn't just that he was kind and interested in me. There was something about his voice that immediately made me feel like I was...

Home.

(Now we will take a 10 second break for Farmer Gal to fan herself. This is powerful stuff, people.)

We talked for three hours, and I think we would have talked even longer, but he had to go to work. He worked the 11pm-7am night shift at the time. It was just as well, because we needed something to come between us. Even then, even only over the phone, I distinctly remember this feeling of falling... into one another. Becoming lost in one another. From that point forward and into the first year or so of our relationship, had we not had school and jobs and other obligations, I think we would have never been apart.

So, how did he end up in my work parking lot on a week day? (Remember... he slept during the day normally, so it was especially odd that he was even awake at that time, let alone driving by.) A friend from work needed to go to his home town -- about two hours north of where Mr. Blue Eyes lived at the time -- to pick up some furniture and needed an extra hand. As luck would have it, the town I worked in just happened to be on their way, and Mr. Blue Eyes must have heard me mention this -- and what kind of car I drove -- when we met at the casino. He later told me that the doors didn't work on his friend's truck, so he had to jump out, Duke's of Hazard style, to put the note on my car.

We talked about our families, our lives, past relationships, pets... I think we even talked about meeting the summer before and I got a little needling for turning him down. My mistake, maybe, but as our relationship progressed I learned that everything had happened in God's time.

He had plans for the next couple weekends, so it wasn't going to work for us to get together. He said he would call when he was going to be back in town.

And he did.

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Coming up in the next installment... Journal excerpts. Face-to-face meeting. Mr. Blue Eyes and Farmer Gal sitting in a tree pasture. The details are about to get... juicy.

In the meantime, a word from our colorful sponsor, Miss Peaches...

"Feeling overweight? Feeling blue? All you have to do to perk yourself up is jumparoo!"

"Bounce up, bounce down, and wear a pink hat... You'll be lookin' good in no time flat!"

She never liked this thing much when she was a baby, but now that I've taken it out again for a baby I'm watching, she can't get enough. I'm not sure what she's thinking, but I can tell you one thing...

The girl's got ideas. Oh does she ever. And her mother may need to get out of the house more.

(Note: From now until Valentine's Day I will be chronicling how Mr. Blue Eyes and I met, as well as sharing some personal journal excerpts from the early days/weeks/years of our relationship. WARNING: Journal excerpts will contain large amounts of over-the-top, thick as maple syrup, fresh from the pine tree SAP. I was young and in love and I wrote about it shamelessly. If you are allergic to sap you may want to take a Claritin or just avoid these posts all together. If not, read on or click HERE to see a list of the archived posts.)

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Fast forward... Summer of 1998. Minnesota. Hot. Sultry. Sawdusty.

That summer I was newly single, living on the farm with my parents, working at a little wood cabinet shop, spending a lot of time riding horses and a little bit of time going out with friends. After a hard year at college and the end of a hard relationship, I was sort of quietly lost within myself. My somewhat mindless job afforded me a lot of time to think and reflect, as did the time I spent riding horses, and I was thankful for it.

One fateful weekend night a couple old girlfriends and I decided to go out to one of the local casinos. Don't ask me why... I'm not really a casino goer, I don't gamble, and there was nothing special going on at that particular casino that would have drawn us in. It was totally random.

What was also totally random was running into some guys that my girlfriends knew. I didn't really know them, but I guess I knew of them; kind of the 'small-town everybody-knows-everybody' syndrome. After a few minutes, however, one of them became vaguely familiar.

He was cute. He was sweet. He seemed shy but his eyes twinkled. He was tan from the summer sun and his brown hair was bleached a bit, as was the hair on his arms, which I was drawn to for some reason.

(I know... I was 'drawn' to arm hair? What can I say? I'm just being honest here. For some reason tan forearms with blonde arm hair did it for me. As did the dimples. And the blue eyes.)

We hung around with this group of guys for the rest of the night and now it was my turn to be intrigued. Who was this blonde-armed, blue-eyed man? Where had I seen him before? Why was he so familiar? Why did I just want to scoot up next to him and smell his neck? For the life of me I couldn't figure it out.

As my gal pals and I were driving home, it hit me: He was the guy who had asked me out the summer before. The guy I had turned down. The somewhat inebriated and forward midnight swim partner. Except he was no longer inebriated. Or forward. He was quiet, reserved and respectful. He was all spiffed up and smelled... Yummy. It was my turn to be drawn in.

I spent the better part of the next few days kicking myself... Why hadn't I gone out with him? Why had I turned him down? Why wasn't I drawn to him then, and why was I so drawn to him now? It was almost instinctual... The way I was attracted to him now. It was beyond understanding.

But for the following weeks he seemed to once again disappear from my life. I returned to my secluded wood-working, horseback-riding lifestyle. I thought about him every day. I chastised myself for not taking advantage of his offer a year before. I hoped that we would run into one another again, but I wasn't brave enough to call him. From the little I knew about him he was living about an hour away and only came home to hang out with his friends on some of the weekends. He had an entire life that I wasn't part of and knew nothing about. I didn't feel like I had any right to insert myself into it.

At the end of a long day at the cabinet shop I stood outside talking to a coworker. I was tired. I was hot. I was itchy with sawdust. I turned around to go to my car and there on the windshield wiper was a slip of white paper.

"What?!?" I thought to myself. "What is this? Some advertisement? A parking ticket (in a gravel parking lot)?" It must have been a hard day because I remember immediately thinking the worst.

But it wasn't the worst.

It was the best.

It was a note written on the back of a deposit slip. It said, "Call me sometime..." followed by a phone number, signed by Mr. Blue Eyes. My heart leapt.

(Note: From now until Valentine's Day I will be chronicling how Mr. Blue Eyes and I met, as well as sharing some personal journal excerpts from the early days/weeks/years of our relationship. WARNING: Journal excerpts will contain large amounts of over-the-top, thick as maple syrup, fresh from the pine tree SAP. I was young and in love and I wrote about it shamelessly. If you are allergic to sap you may want to take a Claritin or just avoid these posts all together. If not, read on or click HERE to see a list of the archived posts.)

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Back in the summer of 1998 Mr. Blue Eyes and I were running free, sowing our wild oats, hanging onto life by the seat of our pants, and completely unaware that the other existed, or that our lives were about to intersect at just the right place and moment in time.

Twice.

It was strange that we were, in fact, unaware of one another because our older siblings were good friends back in their days of running wild and free and sowing their wild oats, yet Mr. Blue Eyes and I never crossed paths. Not until one hot summer day by the lake, that is.

I was spending the weekend at my two sisters' lake cabins, with my sisters and all of their clan, of course. All of my sisters are older than me by ten years or more (yet none of them seem to have any gray hair... strange...) and so their kids weren't that much younger than me. By some act of fate, my nephew and I decided to go over to a neighboring lake where some friends from around home also had a cabin. I can't remember how it all came about, but there was something in the works about fixing me up with someone's cousin who would be there. At the time I don't think I really gave it much thought, other than that this guy might be what one would consider a 'wild oat' that needed sowing.

(Sorry, I'm done with the 'running free' and 'wild oat' talk now. It's getting away from me.)

We arrived at the cabin to a group of old friends and some new faces. There was a festival going on in the nearby town that weekend, so anyone who was anyone in our circle of family/friends/people we knew from around home was there. Lots of boating. Lots of laughing. Lots of sarcasm and general full-of-ourselfedness. Lots of libations.

And there was this someone that I was supposed to meet. He seemed nice. He seemed respectable. He seemed like someone I might go on a date with. There was possibility there.

Then there was this other guy. He was the younger brother of a friend of my older siblings. I'd known his older sister for as long as I could remember, but I had never met him. He was... He was...

What's the word?

Drunk.

Somewhat inebriated.

And he seemed to be a little bit intrigued with me. I kept catching him watching me... Watching me with his crystal blue eyes. It caught me off guard... Should I be flattered or unnerved? Throughout the day I felt like a skittish gazelle (I've always wanted to think of myself as a gazelle... I think now is a good time) that he was trying to approach carefully lest I flee.

Sometime late in the night he made his move. I was sitting on a bench at the end of the dock by myself, and I remember that it was very quiet and peaceful, just me and the sound of the water. I heard footsteps coming down the dock behind me and there he was, smiling and sweet. He wanted me to go for a midnight swim with him; I wanted no part of that. We hadn't planned on staying the night so I had no extra clothes with me. He hopped in the water and grabbed a volleyball and we started playing catch with it. Every time he threw it up to me I was sprinkled with water, finally to the point where I was soaking wet, so I decided I might as well hop in too.

We splashed around a little and talked. I didn't know him. I didn't know him at all, yet being with him felt safe. But I was still wary. We walked back up to the cabin and I can still see his face as he leaned against a tree and tried to convince me to go on a boat ride with him. I firmly declined. "You're a little bit drunk and I really don't know you," I thought to myself. Going for a midnight boat ride didn't seem like a good idea.

I returned to the cabin, soaking wet, and ended up sleeping in the shirt of the other guy and uneventfully leaving the next morning. A few days later, the other guy called me and asked me on a date and I said yes. The next night my midnight swim partner called and asked me out as well and I turned him down. The two of them were friends and I didn't think I wanted to be dating both of them at the same time. I dated the other guy for the next nine months and didn't speak to or think about Mr. Blue Eyes again until the following summer, when we met again for the second time...

The second time, when there was no water around to drown out the sparks...

Over the course of the next two weeks, leading up to Valentine's Day, I will post excerpts from my personal journal, written during our early days/months/years together. I will also tell you the story of how we met and got together. The first installment will post this evening.

And I'll tell you one thing... It's a good story.

This leaves me a little perplexed, however. Do I start out this little adventure with the story of how we met, which would be chronologically accurate? Or do I end the whole sh'bang with the story of how we met instead?

I don't... I don't... I don't know. There are so many ways I could go with this whole process. I'm all aflutter with the possibilities.

I guess you'll just have to stop in tonight and see.

Now I'm off to ravage the pages of my old journals to gather content and ideas. It's sure to be scintillating. I'll probably be M.I.A. for most of the day.

Oh, that's right, I have children to take care of.

Good thing I know how to multitask.

"Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him—for this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart." Ecclesiastes 5: 18-20

First let me say that I don't know if this actually involves a ball joint or if I even have a ball joint. (I think I do, right?) But it's what I think of it as every time it is plaguing me, so that's just what we're going with, o.k.?

(Also, any anatomy lessons left in the comments would be more than welcome.)

A few years back, before I birthed any children or realized that my body would not, in fact, remain the vision of youth forever (I have realized that now, believe me... and my gray hairs... they speak volumes to me every day), I was feeling spry and frisky one March day and decided I would attempt to take down a 600 pound calf.

I guess a little bit of back story is required here. You see, this isn't something I (or any woman) would normally just do on a whim. Except it kind of was, at the time...

Marigold, her sister -- whom I shall now refer to as Sunflower, whether she likes it or not -- and I used to be goat tying queens on the rodeo circuit. If you've never watched this before, goat tying involves running your horse to the opposite end of the arena, where an unsuspecting goat is tied out on a stake. You dismount your horse, either still at a run or slowed down (this is where it always gets interesting), run to the goat, flip it over and tie three of its legs up. The goal is to do this as quickly as possible, thus winning the competition, thus winning a pretty belt buckle that you will maybe wear for a few years and then pack away and never look at again for the rest of your ever-lovin' life.

If you're nice to me I might someday dig out some old photos of me doing this and let you see them.

Even if you're not nice to me I might do that because my body was much younger and slender-er then, and sometimes it's just good to remember that you were once young and slender. It helps to silence the gray hairs for a bit.

It also reminds you that you shouldn't do things to hurt your body, even if it was young and slender, because someday, when you're less young and less slender, you might end up having an aching ball joint because of it.

And now we've come back full circle to what I'm trying to tell you about my ball joint. So, this sort of leads in to the 'why' and the 'how' on one lovely March day, I decided to try to flip over a calf.

A big calf.

Marigold, Sunflower, myself and all of our husbands got together that day and thought it would be fun to go over to Marigold's husband's parents' ranch and practice tying down calves. Marigold's and Sunflower's hubands were/still kind of are calf ropers, so this was just something that they did to practice. Mr. Blue Eyes and us women folk thought we might as well do this too.

It seemed to make sense for some reason.

That reason being...

Uh....

(Crickets: chirp chirp, chirp chirp.)

This was not a good idea, for me anyway. I ended up falling on my behind, quite literally and very HARD, and it wasn't the calf's fault (unlike the case of Bush Babe... she's got bigger problems than I did), it was my own stupid clumsy and less than 600 pound self.

As soon as I got up I knew that something wasn't quite right with my left hip, but after walking it off for a few hours it seemed o.k. Still not right, but o.k.

Here are pictures of Marigold's husband, who actually knows what he's doing in this sort of instance... (And other instances. He's very skilled at tipping over cattle.)

Goodness, that man is flexible. He has hip problems too, yet seems to be able to handle this task with quite a bit more skill and grace than I did. I'm not going to show you pictures of me doing this. Oh no. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

Short story long, to this day my hip aches from time to time. It comes and goes, but lately it has seemed to have taken hold and won't ease up. I don't mind thinking of myself as having 'child-bearing hips', but arthritic hips? Are you kidding me?

My gray hairs are starting to pipe up again.

(Gravel road... Whichever...)

Lookin' for adventure...

And whatever comes our way...

The sad thing is, this is the song I had in my head this morning as I was psyching myself up to do the dishes.

It's a humble little existence I lead.

I need some sort of adventure/vacation in the worst way. And to be clear, relative to this humble little existence that I lead, I'm using the terms 'adventure' and 'vacation' quite loosely. For me this could be as simple as eating out somewhere that doesn't have a 'Mc' before or 'Ranch' after the name.

Strangely I chose this particular set of photos because they were the first thing that I came upon that happened to have a road in them to fit with my 'get out on the highway' theme and I wasn't in the mood to look any further, but now that I'm looking at them I realize that they're strangely familiar to this photo...

...which I took less than a year ago when I did actually go on a little adventure. Oh, that's right... I DO get out of the house/township/county/state every once in awhile!

It's a good thing I write these things down to help me remember.

These more recent photos were taken last September. Evidently 2009 was a bit of a tornadic year as far as me and my camera were concerned.

This menacing wall of cloud (I honestly don't know if this is what you call a wall cloud, but it definitely was a wall of cloud, I can tell you that) was forming north of our little homestead and I darted out to get pictures, thinking, "Whew. I'm so glad that it's moving away from us." But as I clicked away I realized to the dismay of my intestinal fortitude that it was, in fact, moving toward us.

All was well that ended well, obviously. No tornado right on top of where we were, luckily, although I do think I recall that this wall of cloud did move on to menace some other unsuspecting souls.

These photos can remind me that there's no place like home all they want, but I ain't takin' the bait. No ruby red slippers for me. I may not have exactly been 'born to be wild', but my motor's runnin'.

My motor... is... runnin'.

In all my jabbering about not acquiring another dog, I forgot to mention that we did happen to acquire another cat.

A few months ago when one of my sisters called, I innocently thought it was just to chat. Soon, however, the conversation took a turn... To kittens. It seemed that one of her cats had given birth underneath the settee in their house, and there were now six little furballs looking for a home.

After we hung up I gave it some thought for about three seconds, then made up my mind that a kitten was not what we needed in our lives at the moment. No sirree, I maturely made the decision that we would not be taking in any kittens. Everyone in my family knows I inherited the 'animal acquisition gene' from our dad, so I was quite proud of myself for not being swayed.

Then one weekend we happened to stop by and I innocently thought it would fun to at least see the kittens. You know, for the kids. Not for me. Not for Mr. Blue Eyes. Fun for the kids. I was still 100% resolved that kitten ownership was not in our immediate future.

But who are we kidding, people?

Whenever we go shopping and we say it's just to look, it really isn't. It's to buy. Whether we consciously know it (which I didn't) or not. It's to buy. Or in this case, to hijack a free kitten.

The whole incident was Mr. Blue Eyes' fault. Firm as he may have been about the puppy situation, he shoved me on top of the landmine when it came to this cat. Do you know what he said? I'll tell you what he said. He said, "Maybe Paula Deen needs a friend."

Next thing I know we're driving away and I've got a kitten in my lap. The whole situation got out of hand quite quickly.

To her credit, the kids thoroughly enjoy her and Paula Deen does seem to love her like her own kitten, so she has lived up to our expectations.

And she's fun to have around.

You know, for the kids.

Not to overstate things, but I am.

I'm a genius.

Martha Stewart should have me on her show.

I am someone who does not do well when I'm surrounded by a lot of stuff. If it clutters my life, it clutters my brain. The older I get, the more I notice that this is true of me.

Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify, simplify! ... Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.

Can anyone tell me who I quoted this from?

And is anyone else craving an apple fritter, right now?

Anyhow, a few weeks ago, the toy situation was getting away from me, as you might gather from this photo:

I think I actually took this after I had already packed up two large totes of toys and banished them to storage in the basement. But notice a) the misuse of one tote and b) the three empty totes stacked in the background. At this point I had a plan, I just hadn't gotten quite there yet.

Today, I am happy to tell you, I'm there.

Kind of.

There's still toys strewn about, but it's much more controlled.

My multi-tiered, scientific-method-using, flow-chart-applicable game plan was this:

1. Pack up all the misfit toys (a.k.a. the ones the kids never played with but always seemed to be lying around) into the two large totes, mentioned above and banish them to the basement.
2. Pick up the remaining toys into the four clear totes pictured. Except there's actually five.
3. Establish and implement the following rule: Only one tote can be 'dumped out' (Miss Peaches' favorite mode of removal from the totes) at a time. If they want to play with the toys in a different tote, they must first pick up the toys that are currently 'dumped out' and put them away before we open a new one.

We also use the baskets in this shelf for miscellaneous odds and ends, books and puzzles...

Notice that my methods do not completely eliminate toys from being hither and thither, but they do cut down the mess quite a bit. And sometimes... Sometimes... I even convince Miss Peaches to 'dump out' the toys inside of the play yard and play with them in it, making it a snap to pick them up when she's done.

See? And look... She's smiling. She likes it.

At first, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't sure how this was going to go. Would they actually be able to handle putting the toys away and not having all of them at their fingertips? In the beginning there were a few tears and meltdows (and the kids had a hard time with it too) but together we have overcome, and let me tell you, when Miss Peaches puts away a whole box of toys all by herself, I almost shed tears of joy.

I've decided to start calling myself 'Mother Stewart.'

You know, like Martha Stewart?

Because at this point in time I feel like my organizational skills are right up to par with hers.

And because I'm a mother.

And because mother sounds like Martha when you say it fast enough.

Now if I can only get them to start washing and folding their own laundry, all will be right with the world.