All 50 United States Visited (by me)!

Another bucket list item and 2023 goal completed: all 50 United States now visited! ✅️🥳 I'd been meaning to wrap this up for awhile and snag the free shirt and certificate I'd learned they give you at the visitor center in Fargo when you make North Dakota your last state and stop by. Well, made it! I've officially seen every state and celebrated the finale thoroughly. 😎 Thanks so much to David Sjöstrand for being here for it!

1st Place ECS 11.5 Lower Division

My ECS 11.5 trophy arrived a few weeks ago! (I've been meaning to share. Better late than never!) 1st place in lower division again. 🥳 

I'm still not good enough to enter upper, and though I did my best at the time, which wasn't terrible for me, I also felt my performance for my two mid teams was just less than stellar. I wished I could've done just a little more. I do feel very proud of how hard my teammates worked, however, as well as that I personally stepped up pretty solidly for lower and mayyybe got Urza a few more points than he couldve manageed solo..? 😬🤞😅 In any case, I'm pretty happy with our performance in lower and love the trophy, which I've picked a nice spot next to last year's for, to commemorate the effort! 

Thanks again to Urza for always being such a great teammate as well as to Ian and crew for the wild amount of work and money put into these events and prizes 🙏 and to my mid teammates: Dan for the carry, Dingoshi for working around injury to beast with us, and Hamaon and Kristin for the hard efforts and massive hauls! 💪💞

Link to my lower raw output vid: https://youtu.be/_VcekRGanjs

Meet Vesuvius!

Some of you are well aware and likely hoping this means that I'll finally stfu about it, but I've wanted a big dog to run, cuddle, and travel with me as well as make me feel safe (and vice versa, of course) for THE LONGEST time now, and I've been actively searching for the perfect fit for a good while. Well, July 3rd, while in Phoenix, I decided to ramp the search up a notch and visited three rescues in the area, meeting literally hundreds of dogs in the process (mostly at Maricopa County Animal Care and Control). I'm at a point in my life where I refuse to settle though, so I was very close to throwing in the towel for the day when I met Vesuvius — 105 lbs of two-year-old doberman mix (with great dane?! 😳😆) and the largest dog any of the rescues had. Yup, this was my dog. Initially, I was planning to rename my new dog myself, but with a name like Vesuvius that someone probably painstakingly took the effort to come up with, I couldn't bear to. 😝 I paid the $50 adoption fee — which covered getting him neutered, microchipped, and up-to-date with shots — as well as $14 for a post-op painkiller prescription, drove home to Vegas, and returned three days later to pick up my pup when he was finally ready to go. So everyone, please welcome V to the internet and into your hearts! Dude's DEFINITELY a fucking ornery WIP (thank fuck for YouTube 🙏), but he's also a super sweet, biiiiiiiiiig baby and cuddly af. 😄 Soooo basically, my heart is now spoken for, and I'll never need a human man again, so if on the off chance you're reading this and thinking about how to use it to cleverly slide into the DMs all cute-like, please save yourself the trouble and tip your hat to this fine gentlemen as you move along, maybe to the animal rescue to get yourself a glorious canine (or other creature) of your own instead! 🐶🐾🐕🥰

Weenie aka Little Girl: Thank You For 11 Years 🥺

June 24th, while I was at CEO Storm in Florida, I received some pretty heartbreaking news from my youngest sister Juliete , who was housesitting for me at the time: my chihuahua Weenie, aka Little Girl, had passed away. Juliete had found her dead in the backyard. (We have a dog door/flap.) These were the last couple of pictures I have of her alive. After nearly 12 years together, after finding her two-year-old self in the Craigslist free section back in 2011, there's definitely a void much more noticeable than you'd imagine a six-pound creature would leave. There's no replacing her, so I sure won't ever try, but please stay tuned for my next post for some happier news to lift your spirits back up a bit after taking a moment to think about all the MANY VARIOUS emotions this little, quirky, "turd-on-a-string", pup brought to the hundreds of people lucky enough to meet her. 🥺🐾💞