Settling in...

Hey everyone! Well, we made it to the coast! We are pretty much settled into our new place and work is going well for both of us. Birdman has a job as a salesman in a Conns (which is similar to a Best Buy) and is liking it ok so far. He seems to be really getting into the competitiveness of the commission sales. The store is in Baytown, which is a suburb of Houston about 20 minutes from us, so not a bad commute at all. My work is going well; meeting lots of land owners, getting the hang of things, and having opportunities to do some neat things. A couple weeks ago, Birdman and I were invited to go assist US Fish and Wildlife band mottled ducks on a Wildlife Restoration Project area. We were able to ride the USFW airboats (those are SWEET boats!!) and caught a couple of alligators to be removed to another location. We saw no ducks on our trip out but another boat caught 18 wood ducks that I helped band and release! I heard later (we left about 2am) that they caught about 91 wood ducks altogether (somebody tell Trey for me, huh?! Heh, heh.) -81 were banded, 3 were recaptures, and 7 were captured but released unbanded because they ran out of bands! Apparently no one saw any mottled ducks, which were the target species. I have been out to inspect the coastal erosion management areas on Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, been on the Sabine Ranch where the largest oil reserve in the US is located, and made connections with the volunteer coordinator and the manager of the Anahuac NWR. I am hoping to get to do some volunteer work for them out there - possibly mammal work as everyone is so preoccupied with waterfowl and shorebirds, no one has done mammal work there for a long time. I am excited about seeing some of the new species (well, new to me!) here like nutria, otters, and muskrats. I also understand that they are always looking for help with prescribed burns and have offered to let me attend the red card courses when they refresh in the fall. I've seen a few alligators since I've been here, but only a couple of any size and those were impressive! They say that the 20 some inches of rain over the last few weeks still puts us low for the year, but the farmers complain about too much as they can't get into the fields when they're swampy! And I do mean swampy! It's nice to have a manicured lawn that takes little effort but I have a feeling that mowing the lawn every week is going to get old eventually. I think I'm getting used to the mosquitoes but I keep being told that I haven't even been to any bad mosquito areas yet, like the marshes... we'll see... And then tomorrow I'm off to help some people work cattle in Jefferson county, do wish I had my horse to take out there, but I have people looking for a place to put her out to pasture here. Well, there's not much else going on that I can think of to tell ya'll, so... keep in touch and take care!

Here is our house.

Don't tell him I put this on here... getting ready for work!

And because I did that to him and I know you will all hassle me until I show you...
Here it is.