Birthdays, surgeries, wings, horses, rain and theivery…an interesting couple of weeks.

Bailey’s Surgery

We drove back to the Yakima Valley to have Selah Veterinary Hospital perform Bailey’s tumor removal (lumpectomy). They ended up going pretty deep to get it all, having to take both some muscle tissue and a lymph node. They kept her over night and she was pretty out of it when we picked her up, she had a drain tube that was leaking a lot and her leg was very swollen and red. Her incision was probably about 9 inches long. We were concerned about the swelling and ended up staying to take her back in on Monday. They were also concerned and kept her over night again to do a series of wraps to get the edema under control. We got her home on Tuesday night, continued to do the wraps ourselves and as I write today the leg is looking great and we’ll be able to take the stitches out on Friday. The pathology report indicated that they got all of the tumor and it had not spread so that’s great news. Currently we’re doing a 2-week Benadryl and Tagamet regiment which apparently helps calm cancer cells and prevent them from spreading – who knew? Not us. Now we just need her hair to grow back so she doesn’t have a naked leg! Hopefully we’ll get to have a lot more time with the ol’ gal.

Dad’s Birthday Weekend

If there’s anything convenient about Bailey’s cancer story it’s that we were able to schedule it when we were already planning a trip to the old Yakima valley for my Dad’s birthday. That’s right, the big retirement year birthday! Although I’m nowhere near convinced he’s actually going to retire, as he keeps talking about jobs he has to do. We had a really nice visit with the family out at Dad’s around a big roast with some huckleberry cobbler for dessert! While we were in town we got to hook up some friends too. Thanks Chris and Crystal for you hospitality and great company once again. Thanks Dee and Kelly for making the pilgrimage out to visit us and Bailey out in the hops!

Columbia Store

Oh how I love the Columbia employee store! Our new friends Tracy and Kimber invited us to go to the Columbia employee store. Not the outlet store, but this magical, magical place where everything Columbia, Mountain Hardware and Prana is 50% off if you happen to have a friend with access to the store! Okay, so we said screw the budget and took advantage of that opportunity. Megann had been getting drenched in her Wal-Mart “rain” coat so she now has something that actually sheds water plus we both got a couple of fun items. Thank you so much!

 Blue Black Submarine at OMSI

We’ve always thought it would be cool to see what it’s like to be in a sub-marine and guess what OMSI has? They have a decommissioned fast attack, non-nuclear SS-581 Blue Back sub-marine. It is 219 ft. long and was taken out of service in 1990. This is one of the smaller versions of US subs, with a crew of 85. It was so interesting to see how constricted everything is. I would have barely fit on one of the bunks and had to turn sideways in most of the corridors – I can’t imagine 85 6-ft men in there. Especially when they told us they could only shower every few weeks! The smell would have been horrific. Something else we learned was that their food was actually quite good – apparently that is the way to keep 85 confined stinky men happy – feed them well! We got to see the torpedo room, with actual (disarmed) torpedos, engine room, bunks, eating area, captains quarters and shower. It was well worth the $7 admission!

Portland Meadows

We’re only 5 minutes away from Portland Meadows so we decided to go check out some horse racing! It was the first time either of us had been to a horse track and it ended up being a lot of fun. There are about 10 races a day and they start every 30 minutes. You get to go look at all the horses before each race and then place your bets. The cool thing is that minimum bets are $2 so you don’t have to spend a ton of money. In fact, Megann came out with almost $5 more than she started with. She would have had more but I talked her out of one of the horses she liked. Tracy was the big winner of the day though. She won $25 on one of her $2 bets! This is something we’d do again.

Fire on the Mountain

A local wing restaurant, Fire on the Mountain has been recommended to us by a few people and we finally tried it out. They’ve got bone-in or boneless wings and a wide variety of sauces that you can try before you order. Megann was adventurous with her spicy peanut sauce while Tracy and I stayed more traditional with a sweet BBQ sauce on a chicken sandwich. Everything was delicious, even their house made ranch dipping sauce. Fun, casual and yummy – our kind of place!

People like to steal things from us…

In the bad luck news category some jerk stole my bike right from under our bedroom slide-out. It was an old one but it was in good shape and I liked it dammit! Well, I found a replacement on Craigslist so I now have a bike again, not that I’ve ridden it since it won’t stop raining. In fact it was pouring down rain when we went to look at! It’s an older Schwinn full suspension bike – nothing exciting but it should suite me just fine.

Look for upcoming posts recounting all the things we’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, about RV black and gray tanks, plus why Megann threw up at Camping World!

P.S. It rains here. A lot.