Gold Strike Pass

Since Travis & I are pretty much limited in our traveling with him being in rotations, instead of going up to Utah with friends to go skiing, we had to stay here and decided to go 4-wheeling exploring. We took Gold Strike Pass, a road neither of us had ever been on. It's about 2 miles from Hoover Dam and also connects to the east side of Boulder City. It was the usual scenery along most of the pass as far as the desert goes, but there were some great views of Lake Mead, Hoover Dam and the new bridge, Black Canyon, and a bunch of big horn sheep! It was a nice little excursion and we even found a few other things to go back and check out later. :)

Lake Mead right before Hoover Dam

Lake Mead at Boulder Bay. The black square in the foreground use to be the parking lot which was right next to the water's edge. The bridge use to be at the water's height.

Hoover Dam & the new bridge. Almost done-just adding the road on top.

The bigger bighorn sheep that we saw.

Black Canyon. Somewhere down in between all those ridges lies the Colorado River below the Hoover Dam.

No puppies for Lily

So I finally broke down and decided to get Lily spayed. I've been toying with the idea of how much of a cool adventure it would be for her to have puppies. I think that having a female pet give birth whether it's a dog or cat or whatever would be so neat to actually see and have the little guys around for those 1st few weeks before you sell them. So I thought it'd be good to do something like that now. Well, Lily's heat cycle didn't start in November like we thought it would, nor did it come in December so we started wondering if she was mysteriously impregnated! Then I got to worrying- what if she is pregnant with mutts? What if we can't sell the mutts or even worse give them away? I could never take animals to the pound! But I don't want more dogs living here either! So after that train of thought I decided to find the most inexpensive vet and get her spayed. Here's a picture of her cuddling with Travis after the major surgery shock of her life.


She was sedated again right when I picked her up to take her home, so she was pretty sleepy the rest of the night, until about the middle of the night. Lily and I fell asleep on the futon while Travis stayed up late that night. He woke me up to come to bed and as I went to pick up Lily and put her in her bed, she totally tried to bite me! She's never done that before. I felt so bad for her; she must've been in so much pain. So I got Travis to move her, she was still biting at him, and then I gave her some lunch meat with her pain pill wrapped in the middle. Poor Lil.... That was the only major thing she did out of the ordinary though. Yes, she was waddling a little bit for the next day and she wasn't as hyper, but over all she cooped with it well. Glad that's over!

New Year

For our first activity in the New Year of 2010, we went clay pigeon shooting with the Starleys and Jon Purser & his 5yr old son. It was so nice to get out and enjoy the wonderful Vegas winter weather and work on my shot. Travis got a new clay pigeon thrower that allows you to throw the pigeons in all sorts of the directions, so we had to all go out and try it out. Nick so kindly picked it up for Travis at Cabelas while they were in Utah for Christmas. Cael had fun pulling for all of us and even had a couple rounds with the .22.