Kristy Carlson

Moving Over…

Kristy Carlson — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 07:53:11 +0000

With the decision to move to Burundi came the decision to add more focus to the next stage of our lives, beginning with a brand new shiny fancy pants blog! The reason things have been so quiet over here, is that I have been trying to paint the house and make it look pretty over there on the new blog! Please visit, no more drifting along with driftwood…. now you will be cruising with us on our new adventures. Thanks for following, I’m gonna need your support to make it through this big life changing move!
Luv,
Kristy

A good place to start over there on the new blog would be by watching this video made by the incredible Make My Day Pictures.

Rope Swing

Kristy Carlson — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:59:47 +0000

There really is NOTHING better than swinging on a rope swing. The only thing I can imagine that would top this… if the rope swing was over a nice piece of water to drop into!

My little guy got in on the action too.

Plus there was an old tractor. Life does not get better than this if you are a boy!

And horses, which made this momma happy.

Plus a trampoline and beautiful light, which made us all happy.

Thanks Vasthi and Martin and Megan and Drew.

We luv yah, sooo very much.

Kristy

A Year Already?

Kristy Carlson — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:44:38 +0000

Where has the time gone? Today Neo turns a year old. So much has changed in a year and the days have gone so fast! In one year Neo has been to Cape Town, The Untited States (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, Washington), Kenya, Burundi, and Tanzania. He has been to the game park, the sea, the city and the farm. That’s one well traveled little boy!

Luv,

Bloat: The thing every Great Dane owner dreads

Kristy Carlson — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 06:44:06 +0000

Sometimes you do things you say you never will. Two days ago it just happened. She ate, she drank, she chased a cat and her stomach failed her. It twisted in on its self and she began to die. Our beautiful faithful Great Dane friend was in pain and all I could do was hold her and weep in the very packed vet’s office in front of a room full of strangers. They told me that cancer had caused the torsion (read about bloat/torsion here). They told me they could operate and they WOULD find cancer so we could do the expensive surgery for nothing, or put her out of her misery now. I left the vet’s office bewildered and panicked.

I drove Ella home, and on the two-minute drive from the vet to the house, I called Ella’s breeder Debbie. Debbie told me there was hope. Before I even reached our driveway I turned around and headed back to the vet. I phoned Coffee Guy and, despite our agreement that we would never do surgery if our Dane was a victim of bloat, I found myself saying “We have to try. We have to. I can’t live with myself if we don’t.” He agreed.

Within an hour she was in surgery. Dr. Morris searched her entire insides for traces of cancer and found NONE. He untwisted her stomach and stapled it to her abdominal wall. Later that day she woke up. She was happy to see us, she did not look at all like a dying dog. The next morning I camped out at the vet’s office with her. I brought the vets some coffee and homemade peanut butter cookies hoping for an early release. By 1pm I had convinced them to let her go home.

As I was signing paperwork Dr. Morris tried to pet Ella. She jumped up on the seat behind me and stuck her head in my armpit. She is definitely not his biggest fan, but he saved her life. Actually, the guy who really saved her is Coffee Guy. He had seen bloat up close and personal with the death of our other Great Dane, Durbie. He recognized the symptoms right away and he mobilized us!

I am grateful that we have our Ella back, even if it means our big Obama tax return is gone!

Luv,

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Kristy Carlson — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:25:08 +0000

I hope it’s a great one for you and yours!

I’m taking a holiday from this lovely blog to spend some time with my hooligans, but I’ll be back after Christmas… once I’ve stuffed myself with turkey, gotten a suntan (cuz… yikes, do I need one), read a good book (yeah, right), dreamt of snow, and chased a tiny superhero around the yard.

Here’s to happy messes!

Luv,

Summertime.

Kristy Carlson — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 08:20:22 +0000

It really is hard for me to continue our amazing Zanzibar story when when we are busy getting our fingers stuck in the garden, mixing up batches of cookie dough, having dance parties to “All I Want For Christmas”, ordering our Christmas turkey, answering questions about where fairies come from, and doing dives into the swimming pool. I will get there though, the photos are beautiful and I can’t wait to post them! In the meantime, you can enjoy this little treasure we found while pottering around the garden.

Luv,

Our Ella.

Kristy Carlson — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 06:58:34 +0000

I’m taking a break today from writing about our adventures in Zanzibar (more to come, don’t miss it!) to enter the I Heart Faces weekly photo competition. The theme this week over there is Pets. I took this photo of our Ella Bella a few days after we got back from 3 months in the USA. She had missed us terribly and was willing to pose. Now, since we’ve been back for awhile, true to Great Dane form, she turns tail and runs whenever she sees the camera come out. I’m pretty sure she thinks the camera is a Great Dane eating monster, just like her water bowl and the nail clippers. Cheeky puppy, oh well.

You can see more photos of Miss Ella-the-cheekiest-dane-in-the-world right here and let me know if you think I picked the right one to enter. I am a horrible decision maker, but I know you all love me anyways.

Luv,

p.s. go take a peek at all the other lovely pet submissions over at i heart faces!

Day 6: The Lost Boys of Zanzibar

Kristy Carlson — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 11:05:53 +0000

I was eating my tapas and sipping on the perfect umbrella drink when a little boy raced past me covered in sand. I looked at Coffee Guy and said, “Sorry hunny, gotta go. There are little boys covered in sand. It’s amazing. Did you SEE THAT? Bye!” These boys were not lost at all, but they reminded me of a certain boy who could fly and his little lost men.They even had a ship.

This was the moment, my moment. I have never wanted to call myself a photographer if I was really just a girl with a camera. There is something more to taking great pictures than clicking the shutter. I am not saying I have arrived, or anything silly like that. What I am saying is that I SAW these boys in Zanzibar. I knew my exposure, ISO, shutter speed, white balance, lalala were perfect, so I could spend time just seeing these beautiful boys. It was an amazing feeling, and while I am still shy when it comes to pronouncing myself a photographer, it really has become what I am. Hello world, it’s me. You know, the photographer.

Day 5: Zanzibar or Bust

Kristy Carlson — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 07:25:02 +0000

We landed in Zanzibar at 11 pm, still hot and exhausted from our airport battles. The next hurdle to jump over was, would our bags be there? The last time we had seen them was in Burundi and in our experience, whenever a flight is canceled… the bags go on a little vacation of their own. Thankfully, the bags were waiting for us. They were locked up in a dank musty room, but they were all there and we exited out of the airport into the night air five minutes after we arrived. We looked at each other and said, “Wow, that was easy!” We hailed a taxi, jumped in, and drove off!

Something was going to go smoothly for once, I thought, not at all like the rest of the day had gone. Then the taxi driver pulled the car over into a dark empty lot. He turned to us and said, “We are going to switch cars now.” Coffee Guy and I looked at each other, then back at him, and in unison said, “No, sir, we are not.” Except that I left out the “sir” and Coffee Guy, ever the gentleman, didn’t. The driver hesitated and then said that he just needed to get something out of the other car. My brain really does have a mind of its own, and I was thinking, “What, like a gun?” He jumped out, grabbed his cell phone, jumped back in and we were off. Dark alley crisis averted.

Five minutes down the road, the driver brought the car to a rolling stop on the shoulder of the very dark highway. It was dead. Not us (yet), but the car. The driver hopped out and got on his cell phone. Coffee Guy tried to get out to see what the problem was, but his door had been child locked. The driver peeked his head back in because we were the definition of back seat drivers by this point, yelling at him to try again. He made a half-hearted attempt to start the car from the outside, and it didn’t turnover. Meanwhile, I am trying to keep my silly brain from thinking that he has stalled the car on purpose. Back home, in South Africa, if you are in this type of situation…. the likelihood of your immanent death far outweighs the likelihood of your survival. Am I right South Africans? Holler for me!

The driver started pacing outside of the vehicle. Was he waiting for his other henchmen? Then, with no warning, he waved down another car, jumped in, and left us on the side of the highway. In that moment, in the stillness of that dark highway, in a taxi with no back window, in a country that I didn’t yet know, with a firm belief that this could quite possibly be the last place on earth I see, I prayed the most fervent prayer of my life.

Out loud. Loudly. While crying buckets.

I prayed for the little boy asleep I my arms, I prayed for the little boy tucked up in his bed in a country far away, I prayed for life. I prayed to live. I prayed for God to see us in that moment. I told God I was scared, more scared than I had ever been. In my entire life. I was angry. Angry that we were so vulnerable. Angry that there was nothing we could no, no place we could go. We had to wait.

A few minutes later, headlights appeared behind us. Our driver re-appeared and put petrol in the petrol tank, jumped in, and started driving.

I was still crying silently in the back seat. I didn’t trust that this guy was actually taking us to our hotel. Then, suddenly, the streets were full of celebrating Zanzibaris and traffic came to a halt in the middle of Eid al-Adha celebrations. People were banging on the car, jumping over the car, shouting around the car. The streets were impassable. Finally something gave, and we began weaving through the small alley-like streets of Stonetown in Zanzibar… to our hotel. As we arrived safely, our driver was not the murdering type after all, I vowed not to leave the hotel room until we departed for home. Which, of course, I didn’t do. Zanzibar is a photographer’s feast, but that’s tomorrow’s story.

Luv,

Day 5: Stuck in a travel vortex

Kristy Carlson — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:55:18 +0000

It has taken me several days to conjure up enough emotional mo-jo to write this post. When things go wrong, I’m a “don’t look back, move on ahead” kind of girl. When I think about Zanzibar, I don’t want to look back. I told Coffee Guy when we got home that maybe I would skip writing about the trip all together, because then I wouldn’t have to mention Zanzibar. Anyway, fair’s fair and I promised you I would. Here’s the story…

We left Burundi tired out by all the new experiences our tiny little brains had taken in within days. As we arrive in Kenya, I half wish we were flying straight home. I was missing our little terrorist and feeling ready to be in my own bed. Plus, by this point, Neo and I both had full on diarrhea. But, we had decided early on in our trip planning that we need to go to a place and “process” Burundi together before going home.

We scooted up to the transfer desk to get our boarding passes and found out that our flight to Zanzibar had been canceled. “It’s been WHAT?!?” I said loosing my cool quick and jazzy like. Things got a little heated at the transfer desk after that, which Coffee Guy and I both admit to with a pinch of shame. In the end, a very annoyed Kenya Airways employee issued us boarding passes to KILIMANJARO with the name of a lady who was going to meet us as we disembarked, to show us to our Zanzibar plane, scribbled down the side of our boarding passes. We were supposed to meet her and head directly to our next plane which was set to depart a half hour after our arrival. Oh Lordy, we should have known then!

Once we arrived in Kilimanjaro… there was no one waiting for us. We asked around, and no one knew of the lady whose name was scribbled on our tickets. We headed into the airport building, and it was there that we realized we were in Tanzania. Duh. New country = new visa. We were supposed to fill out miles of paperwork for the Tanzanian government… meanwhile we have no pen, no boarding passes, no meet n greet lady, and our plane is departing in twenty minutes. In a mad panic I grab hold of a random airport worker and say. “We are supposed to be connecting directly to Zanzibar…RIGHT NOW!” I think he saw the red in the whites of my eyes and knew we needed some help. He rushed us through immigration (without stamping our passports) and took us into the fray. Five major flights to international destinations had been canceled that day. The airport was a sea of angry tired white tourists. It was total chaos, and the airport worker left us in it. We had no idea where to go to get on our next flight. Then, we saw the plane leaving without us.

For four hours we battled with the people in the Precision Air office for boarding passes. They took us behind the ticketing counter, and began to work on our boarding passes, until the people the a loooong line in front of the counter screamed in outrage. Back to the office. Back to the counter. The passports disappeared with someone. They re-appeared. Back to the office. Back to the counter. More angry people. More sweating. More crying babies… oh wait, make that just one crying baby, and it was mine. People came and went. Some victoriously holding boarding passes for the last flight out of Kilimanjaro. Some loosing their tempers and coming close to decking the airline employees. Some sweating through their clothes in frustration. Some envisioning a new life in the Kilimanjaro airport.

what it really says is “we know our service is really crappy, but please don’t hit us.”

A group of laid back blinged out Tanzanians trying to fly standby to Dar El Salam made plans for us in case we didn’t get on the flight. They made fun of us for having so little faith… The departure time came and went and we had no tickets, but “it was all ok” they said, because the plane had not even arrived yet. It was over an hour late. Twenty minutes before the late plane departed… we got our boarding passes and so did our pimped out friends. People cheered as the plane took off and jeered and laughed when the airline appologized for inconveniences.

We left Burundi at 9am, and at 11pm we finally touched down in Zanzibar… and the day’s not over yet!

Love,