As erin winds wildly through the open road of route 16 towards savage, cal and I watch dirt clouding behind us in the rear view mirrors, gripping on to door handles and anything grabbable. Alright, maybe thats a bit dramatic, but it was a little intense. We took off early this morning, out and about by 7:30am headed to savage to pick raspberries. A lady named sue told bruce her raspberry bushes are growing faster than she could pick them, so he sent us to help. Three flats of raspberrys later we are all smiling in a field hyped up on coffee with red stains all over our clothes. We took a mini road trip to sydney when we were done to check out a couple of stores and an agate shop/museum in savage. note: agate is a is a microcrystalline variety of quartz (silica), chiefly chalcedony, characterised by its fineness of grain and brightness of color. They are crazy about them here, finding them, tumbling them, and showing them off. They are in fact beautiful if I do say to myself, and I may just be making a necklace out of one when bruces batch is finished tumbling. It was quite a productive day, and being back at the office in front of the computer I am realizing how exhausted I am. Something huge happened today though. I got a call from our landlord (I've been waiting for this call) and he said I can have a dog! I have been on the phone with the eastern montana humane society waiting to here from my landlord so I can adopt a puppy from them. Not sure exactly which one i'm going to get yet, but something of a black lab/husky or lab/collie mix.... about 1 year old. Its going to be a lot of work and very stressful, tiring, and time consuming but i've been waiting for this for a few years now (a stable/settled lifestyle) so I am ready for it. I didn't tell the landlord about the firepit or the painted walls, but some things its ok to just not mention. The only coffee shop closed at 2pm today and I am literally nodding off. Ohhh, I had my meeting with the dean at dawson community college and a women who is the leader of continuing education at the school yesturday and it went REALLY well. They loved my ideas for a cooking class and want to plan and talk further about getting it up and running. If all goes as planned, by fall I will be teaching a credited semester college class. This is obviously more than I planned to happen by age 22 but hey, i'm ready for anything. The only thing i'm worried about it trying to get a bunch of college kids to listen to a teacher that looks like she could be there little sister. With my fire sign aries attitude, i'm not too concerned though. Well now that i'm back in the office, I should probably get some things done. tonight: mojitos with fresh mint from the garden and celebrating our $145,000 state grant that just went through!!! wooooo community kitchen here I come!