Lace, Pearls, & Camo: April 2011

Remember me? I just came out of hibernation. Actually, it's more like isolation. School isolation. I have been extremely busy over the past 6 or 7 weeks and I have the planner to prove it. My highlighter just ran out of ink - if that helps my case any. I can breathe now though. I completed 95% of the work for this semester this week and only have three tests left until Summer! Oh, how I can't wait!!

I have quite a few pictures on this post to share the highlights over the past few weeks.

First - I killed my first longbeard turkey a couple weeks ago. In the Spring of 2009, I killed my first turkey - a Jake. This was my first mature bird though. Confused? Let me explain.
>Jakes -- around 1.5 to 2 years old. Very curious and usually the dumbest. I call them the teenage turkeys.
>Longbeards -- always older than 2.5 years. The biggest and hardest-to-kill turkeys. I call them the Daddy and Grand-Daddy turkeys. Nathan believes my turkey was about 3 years old.

moving on...

Nothing ever goes as planned with me and Nathan. The original plan was to kill a turkey after it came off the roost because Nathan had been scouting and saw them many times before. Of course, it didn't work out that way. The morning started with us walking about a mile in the wind and cold rain to the land of no turkeys. After waiting for around 3 hours, Nathan changed the game plan. We then set out on another mile hike. During this time, I managed to fall butt-first in cow poop and knee-high mud. I am not exaggerating, people. Then, in a mature fashion, I threw a temper tantrum. I ranted about how much I hated turkeys and was on the verge of hating Nathan. I hated that my brand-new camouflage was dirty. I'm not sure why I expected it to stay clean. I then proceeded to throw my chair in the mud. It gets better. After attempting to gather myself, we finally made to where Nathan wanted. We finally got to stop walking. We got set up in our blind and I realized it wasn't a wise decision to throw my chair in the mud. For I had to sit in it until a turkey showed up. At this point, my anger was replaced with ignorance and I convinced myself to stop acting like a child. Meanwhile, Nathan is trying to stop himself from laughing at me and telling me just how dumb I was. Bless his heart. It wasn't long after that and a turkey finally showed up. I shot three times and finally killed it. It was a great mud-covered day. I was quite thankful for my warm shower later that night. My turkey weighed 23 pounds, had a 10 inch beard, and one inch spurs. See some snapshots from the day...

Nope, that's not a grizzly bear. It's Baylie. She was quite interested in the turkey... eating it, to be blunt.

I am very excited to share the next bit of news with you.

After searching and saving for nearly a year, Nathan became a 51-acre landowner on April 18. That's right, these pictures are of HIS land. I cannot begin to explain how proud and excited I am for him.

These pictures were taken from the website we found it on. They were taken back in the winter so you can imagine how much greener everything is now. I have been meaning to take more current pictures, but we have been so busy that it hasn't crossed my mind. Hopefully we'll get around to it soon.

I could choose to complain about how busy we've been cleaning everything but I don't want to...

This is a moment we've both been looking forward to. It's such an amazing season of life and we knew it wouldn't be "all roses". We knew we'd have to put in a lot of hard work but the end result will be worth it. We know this is something you don't experience often in life and we're taking it all in.