Its January, 2026.

The last time I wrote a blog was over 2 years ago.

Life looked very different then and a lot has happened in that space of time… I’m not sure exactly where to start so maybe I’ll start from now and work my way backwards.

Since moving back to Bismarck, ND in the summer of 2023 I became one of the zoo veterinarians at Dakota Zoo!

O.M.G! This has been a ride, for sure!

This opportunity is a dream gig for most veterinarians and I am privileged to work with a variety of cool critters as well as some pretty unique zookeepers and zoo staff. Its fair to say that I learn something every time I’m there (which is every few days, generally, but Thursdays are our set Zoo Rounds and Team Meeting days).

Full disclosure: I do not have a Veterinary Zoo residency in my background. Those of you who have followed along for years know I made it into and through veterinary school up in Saskatoon in the early 2000s (2005 graduate of the Western College of Veterinary Medicine- woot woot!!!) and then began mixed animal practice in ND before moving to western Montana where I opened my own solo practice, Seeley Swan Veterinary and ran that for a several years.

Zoo medicine was the furthest thing from my mind.

So its pretty fricking cool that I get to meet, care for and learn about a variety of amazing creatures that I never thought I would be exposed to.

We try to instill empathy in folks for conservation and wildlife and educate people on endangered and/or threatened species and what you, me, your neighbor and every stranger in the world can do to help a variety of species.

Clearly I am enamored with our South African penguin colony, as seen from the pictures. To date, we have hatched a total of 4 chicks, with the twin boys, Doc and Marty arriving in November.

What a time, monitoring select parents for eggs, then making sure the eggs are developing correctly, waiting for hatching and then making sure the parents do their things to keep the little babies alive and fed.

These babies grow at a fairly unbelievable rate. And even though we went through this with Ruby and Erv, its still astounding how they develop.

We weighed the babies every day until they triple their birth weight.

Then we weigh them every second day.

Sexing birds isn’t your typical, ‘lift up the tail feathers and peek’… we sent in eggshell membranes to a lab for DNA analysis and what a kick finding out these twins were both boys.

We had our Exotics Zookeepers come up with 4 choices for names… Maverick and Goose, Luigi and Mario, and Chandler and Joey were the other choices… and then we put it to the community to choose names. For a small fee you got an online vote and the first week of January we announced that Doc and Marty (from Back to the Future) were the chosen names!

The penguin babies have been doing swimming lessons with our veterinary technician, Brandy and Zookeepers and soon they will be ready to join the rest of our colony.

Its bittersweet thinking of the boys being out with everyone else but cute, wonderful and awesome, too.

The penguins in general are just hilarious. I’ve always had a thing for penguins (I still have my paper mache pengy, Kool, from a restaurant in BC many, many years ago) and who knew I’d actually get to meet, hold, handle and get pecked by these entertaining little creatures some days?

And the drama? Who needs soap operas or Real Housewives shows. The penguin colony at Dakota Zoo has it all!

The zoo is so much more for me than the penguin colony and there’s just no way I can share everyone in my first blog post after 2-plus years away from the blogosphere.

Other exciting new things that only happened since moving back to Bismarck are the Bismarck-Legacy girls hockey team that I coach on a weekly basis.

Head Coach, Nick and I had talked a lot in 2024 about creating a culture for this team that included making skating a priority. As a seasoned power skating coach I have always maintained that I don’t care how great your shot is if you can’t get to the puck first.

It took the team a little while to buy into the whole ‘skating without a puck’ thing last season but some of the top players did buy in.

And then more players did.

And we did notes after all of the games I watched and I could work on individual things with each skater because not everyone skates the same or has the same areas they can improve.

And damned if we didn’t win the State Championship with a team of fast, feisty, tough little women who went in as the 5th seed!

This season we had close to 40 players try out for the team… wanting to be a part of the culture. Coach Nick has me skate the girls every Monday and the notes we do after the games are a huge part of individual skater improvement and overall team growth. Its a blast and I love my Mondays and game days with the girls.

I’m ridiculously proud (and a tiny bit protective) of this group of young women.

I didn’t factor coaching an elite Varsity team like this into my life when I imagined moving back to Bismarck in 2023 but I’m really happy Coach Nick reached out in 2024 when he did.

I’ve always enjoyed hanging out with teenagers. Their energy and emotions as they discover the world and themselves is infectious. I loved being a teenager, myself. Its why I chose teenagers as my main characters in my books (still haven’t got the 5th book out… some of it rattles around in my head and I miss Luke, Ben, Gwen, Bethany, Derek and of course Tabitha, Zagros and their twins on a regular basis).

So that’s just a couple of facets of my life right now.

Re-imagined.

In Bismarck, North Dakota.

I miss the spectacular mountains of western Montana but North Dakota has its own beauty that continues to humble me with a bevvy of tornadoes last year, wicked ice storms over Christmas and a current freezy-pop cold snap that we are finally (hopefully) on the right side of as I type.

I miss my real estate office in Seeley Lake but Clearwater Properties Bismarck opened officially in July of 2024 and I’ve got 2 great land listings that are also Sports Afield Trophy Property listings and I’m headed to the Dallas Safari Club convention with Sports Afield next month. I closed a few listings for buyers in 2025, too, so I’ll share more about my real estate journey another time.

I miss my adult skating community in Missoula but I bought new skates here in an effort to actually improve and… well… I AM improving and its a blast! I’m also sharing this skating journey- the good and the not-as-good- with my social media peeps and will share it here, too.

I miss many friends in Montana but I have made so many new friends and reconnected with so many old friends in North Dakota that its overwhelming at times to have so much love and friendship in my life.

So… here we go. Back in the blogosphere.

I hope I can keep this up. The fact I had a couple of hours to commit to this today was incredible in itself. I suppose if I don’t blog for awhile its only because I am doing too much stuff. My hashtag remains, #beallthethings

This was fun! Share any comments or questions you might have below- I always enjoy hearing who reads my stuff. xoxo