Yesterday was Carl's 3 year anniversary for being 100% clean and sober. We are all so proud of him. We read a statistic that only 1% of people that make the decision to become sober actually follow through with it for this long, and most of those people are in AA meetings every day. But Carl is special. He says that while he was still drinking every day he knew in his heart that it was not where he needed to be, but he just kept telling himself that today is not the day. Well, the day finally came, and he's made it this far without one day of AA. Many people told him in the beginning that he wouldn't be able to make it without attending the meetings, but he knew better. He found a tremendous amount of strength within himself and from God, and he could not be happier. He mentions all the time how grateful he is for everything in his life, and how none of it would have been possible had he not changed his life around. Here he is with some flounder he gigged about 2 months ago.

Since I moved to New Braunfels, I only see my Little Heather once or twice/ month. We've been doing some fun stuff though in what little time we do have. Last time I picked her up we had a day of cooking. I taught her how to make brownies, mashed potatoes, fried chicken, and sauteed okra. She said she really enjoyed it, and the food came out great. She's a very picky eater, so sometimes we struggle with the whole food thing. While we were eating a commercial came on with a little girl grocery shopping with her mom, and she kept saying things like, "i don't like broccoli" and "i don't like tomatoes". She started laughing, and Carl asked her if they consulted her for that commercial.

I hesitated to put up these photos because of a fear of appearing a hunting and fishing fanatic, but Carl is very proud of the buck he shot last weekend (and I'm proud too)- so here it is. For all of you who know about this kind of stuff, it scored a 197 and is a Boone and Crockett deer. His family owns a ranch in south Texas called the Tecomate, which is where he shot it. Carl helped me to find peace with hunting a few weeks ago when he explained that all the meat gets eaten, and they only kill bucks that are old in age and would die soon anyways. I think this one was seven. Its definitely the biggest buck I've ever seen.

Carl and I went off-shore fishing about a week and a half ago. We went 185 miles out into the gulf to an oil rig and trolled during the day, threw lures at night. We had a lot of fun. Carl fished way harder than me, cause I didn't quite feel up to par. But I was still lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time and caught some pretty good fish. Here we are with two of the fish we caught. Carl's holding a yellow fin tuna, and I'm holding a mahi mahi (also known as a dolfin or dorado.) Our good friend Matt took this picture on our other friend's dock once we got back to Corpus. This was my first off-shore trip, and I'm definitely going back. The yellow fin put up the fight of my life. The rod I was using snapped, and the handle of the reel came off. Needless to say, after all that I had to hand off the rod to the mate. But I was able to reel it in almost all the way.