Lazy Rivers & Plague Doctors

The weekend following Labor Day (yes, I’m STILL catching up) was Riptide 2022 at Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio. It’s a several day competition of Rivals of Aether and Smash Brothers. Mr. C&M competed and the rest of us got to tag along at a significantly reduced price thanks to the tournament. Mr. and Mrs. Ignited Moth kindly joined us and made the long weekend SO much more fun.

For two days, we had the entire waterpark pretty much to ourselves. No lines for the slides, no one else cruising the lazy river. No children screaming. THAT was the life. Swim up bars might be my new favorite thing. Especially when it was actually a swim up hot tub. I think our bones were cooked to jelly by the time we left.

It was the relaxing weekend (except for Mr. C&M, he was stressed competing) that we all needed. We plan to make this an annual event.

Note to anyone thinking of going to Kalahari – the booze is very expensive and only one drink was really worth the money. Food was also expensive but incredibly good. There is plenty to do in the resort. We didn’t leave other than to get supplies for the entire 4 days we were there. The arcade is NOT worth it. The crane machines purposely drop your grab halfway to the hole, every single time. How did we get the plushies below? TOO much money and some were purchased at the convention.

I’ve also decided to keep a travel notebook. It’s a fun way to track what we did while on vacation and also a good reference guide for when we return to places. (This place had amazing food! This place was garbage!)

Does anyone else keep a travel notebook? What fun things do you keep in there?

Special thanks to the Moths for making our weekend an absolute blast and being the BEST travel buddies! ❤

A Move a Quarter of a Century in the Making

Whew! What a whirlwind the past few weeks have been. School started on top of having two long weekends planned. I’ve spent this past week just catching up on my home /school life and surviving work picking up again with the new vaccines. We just hired two new technicians starting this week. The last two couldn’t hang for one reason or another. Pharmacy (healthcare in general) is not for the weak.

Anywho, you might be wondering about that title. Labor Day weekend we ventured north to help my dad clean out and pack up his house. He’s lived there for 25 years. I spent a large portion of my childhood there. Went to high school in that town. He only moved 20 minutes east from where he was residing but it’s a big upgrade. He moved from a house in a large field, into a house in the woods and on a lake. Our old house had a lot of work that needed to be done and now he won’t have to worry about it. The new place needs no work. My dad’s house had 12 showings in 12 hours the first day and sold in 24 hours for $10,000 over asking. It couldn’t have been a better time for him to sell.

Moving is stressful and we did a LOT in one weekend including having a moving sale. The goal was to actually move as little as possible, and we helped take a lot off my dad’s plate. He was able to close on the house and be completely moved out in 15 days. That has to be some kind of record.

I cannot wait to spend more time at the new place. There is state land to play on just down the road. In fact, we took a little ride on the trails in his friend’s side-by-side while we were up. Unfortunately, the weekend turned cold, and we were not able to play on the lake.

Some pics of our adventures!

Now I’m off to attempt to catch up on comments and your blogs! (I just spent TOO much time clearing out my email I haven’t checked in weeks. D: )

Happy Place

Welcome to my new happy place folks. Mr. C&M and I were wandering around, checking out state parks and happened across this secluded fellow.

Spiderworts

It’s a state park and waterfowl preserve. Certain times of the year, endangered bird species come here to reproduce. No boats allowed and you can only fish during certain months of the year (the ones opposite of breeding season). So, Mr. C&M took up his reel and caught a decent number of perch and sunfish while I wandered around taking pictures of everything under the sun with my fancy camera. (These are phone photos.)

A small herd of deer came down and walked through the water, not caring very much that I was there. A great blue heron flew back and forth across the lake catching his breakfast. Massive bullfrogs called to one another and there were red-winged blackbirds everywhere. The air randomly smelled of wild roses. It was perfect and it’s only 20 minutes from our house. With gas prices being so high, this is probably where you will find us for most of the summer.

For anyone interested, there is a wonderful app called iNaturalist, where you can take pictures of plants and search their database in order to learn what you’re looking at. That is how I learned that this lovely purple flower is called Spiderworts. Not sure what it did to deserve that name but there you have it.

I hope you’re finding peace in your day-to-day. ❤

Went to Hell

Sorry for being MIA. I went to Hell.

But don’t worry because I came back again!

You see, there is tiny town in Michigan called Hell. It’s only about an hour from our house. Mr. C&M has gotten into riding motorcycles so for his first bike trip, my dad and his friends came over and we took the road paved with good intentions.

It was one Hell of time.

Once the Hell puns start, you have a Hell of a time stopping them.

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The food was to die for.

Hellions.

The town fully leans into it’s name and the people that work there have fun with it. We had a great time and I will definitely be dragging some people back to Hell with me.

July 2021 Vacation

I finally got around to sending myself the pictures from my vacation back in July. The plan was relaxation, exploring Michigan and trying new beers in celebration of Mr. C&M’s birthday. He’s a big craft beer fan so he did a lot of drinking of beers he’s never tried and beers that we just can’t get in our area of Michigan. He says the birthday was a huge success and now he doesn’t want to drink any beer for awhile lol.

You don’t want/need pictures of all the breweries we went to so here are some of the pretty points of the trip:

Tahquamenon Falls in the Upper Peninsula – Highly recommend.

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Mackinaw Island – We didn’t take a lot of pictures outside as it was pretty rainy half the day. This was the big beer goal. Inside of the Grand Hotel is a bar called The Cupola, Short’s Brewing Company does an exclusive beer that you can only get at this location so of course, Mr. C&M just HAD to have it. The Grand Hotel requires you to pay $10 per person if you’re not a guest of the hotel just to walk around it. With the right swagger, acting like you belong there, no one questions your presence and you can get in for free. At least, that’s how we did it. He says Big Porch Ale is totally worth it. The butterfly house is a lot of fun too.

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Sunset on the Mackinaw Bridge.

A whole day was dedicated to the dogs having fun. We hit a lake for swimming and followed that up with ice cream for everyone.

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My dad bought me an informational book about the Upper Peninsula for more places to check out. I’ve done some traveling in the U.P. as we Michiganders call it, but a lot of it was when I was much younger so I want to get back up there and see what other adventures we can get ourselves into. Honestly, just driving place to place in the UP is fun as the scenery is just breathtaking pretty much everywhere you go.

It was a much needed getaway from day-to-day life and helped refill the gas tank so to speak. It also reinforced my desire to just sell everything, get a camper and travel. :3

Hey! I’m walkin’ heeeeere.

Wooo! New York, you big beautiful city. We had a ton of fun but we are glad to be home. Nothing makes you appreciate your home state like going to city that thrives on chaos.

We had quite the debacle as our flight to NYC was canceled last minute, apparently due to the fact that they moved El Chapo through LaGuardia airport that night. So we were rescheduled for the next morning. I’ve never had a flight canceled before so it was quite stressful. Our rerouted flight flew us first class from Detroit to Cleveland. 4 hour layover in Cleveland and then finally flew us to NYC. Layovers are SO freaking lame.

Day One: Since we arrived later in the day, our friend picked us up from the airport and we went back to his place. Dined on some delicious pizza and then went out to Staten Island’s notorious punk/metal bar Mother Pug’s Saloon. Our friend’s friends made us feel hella welcomed and we had a great night with too much booze.

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Day Two: We spent the next day recovering poolside at our friend’s wife’s family’s house. (That was a doozy.) We barbecued to celebrate our friend turning the big 3-0.

Day Three: Our friend took us into the city. He wanted to make it as New York as possible so we took the Staten Island Ferry, followed by the subway to our first goal: the Nintendo store. Now, if you don’t know, there are only two in the world. One in New York and one in Tokyo. Mr. C&M was completely overwhelmed and in awe. It was worth the whole trip just to see that.

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We then made our way to the famed Trash and Vaudeville. A punk/metal clothing store that we’ve heard of for years and years. It was pretty cool but to be completely honest, not as sweet as we were expecting. We bought some patches and pins and it was fun.

From there, we had the New York taxi experience to get to China Town and our friend’s all time favorite Chinese food restaurant. Wo Hop. We’ve been forever ruined on Chinese food. There is nothing like it in Michigan.

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We headed back to Staten Island to pick up our friend’s pregnant wife. We had Italian food and then went to Brooklyn in search of the ultimate metal bar, Duff’s. The rest of the night was spent meeting more awesome New Yorkers, chatting and enjoying good music.

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  My new favorite pic of Mr. C&M.

Day Three: We went to the infamous Coney Island. It was a gray overcast day but that was refreshing because the previous days had been 90+ and humid as hell. We walked the boardwalk and then went to a pizza joint and had our first Sicilian slice pizza. ZOMG amazing.

Later, we went out to a nice little Mexican restaurant for our friend’s birthday dinner. It was followed up with a Smash Bros. session back at their apartment and then to bed since our flight was early the next day.

We had a great time and will definitely go back to visit our friend again and explore more of the city. The smog attempted to kill me though. I could not breath for most of the trip, to the point I thought that maybe I had picked up a bug. However, upon landing in Michigan and about 30 minutes into our drive home, I could breath out of both nostrils again.

If you have no other reason to go to New York City, just go for the food. We ate like Kings/Queens the whole time.

Holly Jolly Manatees

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack! Well to be honest, I’ve been back for a couple of days but I needed to recoup from my vacation.

Where did my family wander off to you may ask? Naples, Florida, to spend time with my adopted uncle. We drove there and back. That’s twenty hours one way. It was rough but a cool experience that we don’t ever want to do again. Lmao.

The first day we went on a hike through the cypress swamps in the Everglades. This was a really cool experience offered by the National Park Service for free. They do it once a week during their dry season but you have to sign up for it ahead of time.

C&M Vacation Hiatus

Good morning friends! The coffee hasn’t even begun to kick in yet but I thought I’d drop in with a quick announcement that I will be gone for 9 days for a family vacation. I haven’t decided whether I’ll take my laptop or not so I doubt there will be any posts. We’re driving 2 days down, 5 days at the location and driving 2 days back, with the dogs. It’s going to be quite the adventure. If you’d like to follow any potential hijinks, don’t forget to follow me over at my Instagram page. It’s right in my hot little hand so I’m expecting to update daily there.

I leave you off with a cute picture of Samus helping me pack for the big trip.

Pharmacy Lady C&M

I will be scarce this next week. If you’re just tuning into this blog, I work for an independent pharmacy. I helped open it 6.5 years ago. Every once in awhile, a conference comes up that will help continue to grow the business. I’ve been to Pittsburgh to learn how to set up a medication synchronization program. (That’s been a big success.) I’ve been to Atlanta to a vitamin/supplement conference. (We barely use the vitamins anymore but their probiotics are on point.) Now I trot off to yet another state to see what pharmacy wonders we can learn. This time, it will be pharmacy software related. We’ve used an advanced software program since the day we opened but now we’re going to learn about some of the features we haven’t even tried to touch yet.

So I won’t be posting until I return but you can follow my shenanigans on Instagram as it’s easily accessible.

 

Frost & Flurries

If I’ve mentioned it once, I’ve mentioned it a thousand times. Michigan is always drunk when it comes to weather. We can have all four seasons in one day. This morning I woke up to the first full frost of the year. I have a feeling we’re in a for a nasty winter since last year’s was so week. (It rained and was cold the whole winter. It maybe snowed twice and neither time did it stay for longer than 24 hours.) My dad texts that they’re about to get hit with a snowstorm tonight, less than two days before we venture up to where I grew up in Northern Lower Michigan.

I’ll make the trip up north, snowstorm or not because I haven’t been up there in over a year and a half. We deserve a mini-vacation. Plus, when winter does hit, I fully intend to become a hermit and never leave my house except for work and food. (It will probably be my busiest blog season yet! Cabin fever is real thing.) I look forward to an awesome Winter of Epic Fantasy once the snow descends.