Its Been A Minute

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.

South African Penguin baby hatched in November, 2025

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).

Erv, our second penguin baby we hatched last year at Dakota Zoo (2025 picture)

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.

Seeley Swan Veterinary a bazillion years ago with the annual Dog Days of Summer… it was a bit of a zoo, come to think of it!

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.

Ruby… the zoo’s very first penguin S African penguin baby!!!

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.

And this was Marty in his own egg the same day… they were laid a couple of days apart and hatched similarly.

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.

Weighing penguin chicks… Doc graduated to the little tub before Marty did!

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!

More weigh-ins as they have been growing!

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.

Vet checks in the colony with LVT, Brandy in 2024

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.

The Girls at the State Championship February, 2025

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!

The Championship Game in Grand Forks, ND last February!

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.

The Girls last week, supporting one of our captains as she signs to play hockey in a top college next year!

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).

Some fun book readings and sales this past November and December!

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

Re-imagined.

In Bismarck, North Dakota.

When our new Giant Continental Rabbit, Pal, moved to Bismarck a few months ago!

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.

Old friends like my books’ talented illustrator, Ben Brick!

New friends like the beautiful miss Brooke Benson!

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

On the bus with the girls at State en route to the State title last year!

Still loving my role at Interstate Vet Clinic. My clinic days used to have one or two appointments but they are now absolutely slammed and its fabulous!

The Clearwater Properties Bismarck location in downtown Bismarck officially opened in 2024!

Martini has eagerly come along for the ride! xo

So I’ve Written This Book…

My first novel!!!

I’ve been busy this past winter and spring.

I wrote and published a book.

I focused. I researched. I researched some more.

And more.

I drank coffee and tea and corrected and edited and shared with only a handful of people but I sat down and wrote a book.

The dogs during a snowy driveway walk last winter

It helped that the snow never stopped coming down for weeks.

The walls of snow lining the driveway were taller than all of the dogs.

I would plow and shovel in the mornings and write in the afternoons.

It wasn’t like I could play golf.

Or do much of anything outside, really.

Then it got super cold and the big tractor gelled up and the batteries died in the trucks and Loki wouldn’t go outside to piddle and my eyes hurt in the wind and it was painful to breathe and I wasn’t loving the snow as much for a few days but it eventually passed.

Hey, Winter, you’re number one!

I actually loved having the time to write.

To create characters and their families and places in time.

To allow these individuals to learn and react and create a world reacting along with them.

I have always loved writing.

I have kept a journal since I was 8 years old.

I don’t write in it every day and there are gaps over the years where maybe I didn’t have a blank journal to write in or I forgot to bring one along on a trip but for the most part, the last 34 years of my life are pretty well recorded.

The Collection

Complete with the odd plane ticket or concert ticket stub or something special to remember.

My journal has been my best friend many times over the years.

I tell it anything. And everything.

It doesn’t judge me and it doesn’t ask questions.

It doesn’t offer any advice or tell me my thoughts are inappropriate or wrong.

It also doesn’t tell me I’m correct about things or that I’m doing something the right way.

my current journal…love the aloha theme

It just offers me space to share what is going on in my head and in my mind whenever I need to.

Alistair has instructions to burn or publish the collection if I die before him.

What is left of my Dana, Paula and May series

I started writing books when I was 8 years old, as well.

My “Dana, Paula and May” series followed 3 young women around as they solved crimes and wore fancy dresses.

I illustrated these books and my third grade teacher allowed me to put them alongside the real books in the library area of our classroom.

I was lucky to have a teacher who nurtured me and my creativity like that.

The same teacher encouraged me to get the whole class involved in a play I wrote. Something about a prince being granted three wishes.

I cast the play and we practiced it and then we performed it on stage for the rest of the school.

My mom even came in and taught us all how to do The Hustle for the dance-party section of the play.

Man, I wish we had digital cameras back then.

I kept writing.

Not just the journal but some poems and monologues.

My high school drama teacher was also our librarian and she would suggest literature for me to read and we would discuss stories together.

She let me put a monologue on stage for people to watch.

I was lucky to have another teacher believe in me and my zany ideas and fantasies and dreams.

I know my imagination and creation of characters has driven some people nuts.

Like the whole Rhonda thing…

Rhonda Alyssa Koftinoff Fyfe… in my purse

(Rest assured, I will tell Rhonda’s story here but that’s for another time…)

And the singing ferrets and dancing cats and know-it-all Spaniels and the mixed breed, UB who has to comment about every Subaru on the road.

My imagination knows no bounds but I do know when to reign it in.

Or, I mostly have that figured out.

Its just that there is so much going on in my mind that I have to write it down or create it or video it.

This is probably why I don’t sleep much.

I always slept walked and talked as a kid but the insomnia didn’t start until I was 8 years old.

That was a huge year for me.

Our family moved from Vancouver where I was in love with school and ballet.

I was ready for toe shoes and the fast track to being a professional dancer. I still miss it.

For some reason when we moved to the small town of Grand Forks my brain tweaked and I stopped sleeping and my parents worried and my creativity took off.

I embrace it now and know how to sort of manage the sleep thing. Sort of. When I started sleep walking again last year and woke up outside of our cabin in the middle of a campground I realized stress from the clinic was taking over and my creative side was MIA.

So I closed the clinic.

And I wrote a book.

The first one…

I’m so freaking excited its not even funny.

Lost and Found in Missing Lake is a teen/young adult fictional story about a 15 year-old and his dad and stepmom and their small town in Montana.

Luke and his dad want to get serious about running their sled dogs.

Jackie, the stepmom, is a disillusioned veterinarian (a bit on the nose, I’ll admit); Luke helps her out a lot and together they meet some amazing individuals. This is where a bit of fun fantasy kicks in but I won’t spoil it for you.

Luke deals with a new school, having to make new friends, acne, driving and all of the emotional issues of adolescence and he shares it with the reader.

I miss him and his friends and I honestly can’t wait to write more about them. And Tabitha.

I self published because I got bored waiting for agents to respond to my queries.

Every book on writing suggests you should submit to no less than 50 and more likely 250 agents before one will accept your work.

I submitted to 10.

I waited week after week to hear back and finally spent some serious time researching and editing and re-editing and editing some more and getting my friends and hubby to edit and found a great website to help me publish my book.

I’m pumped!

I’m setting up book signings.

I’m getting copies to good friends and people who I want to read my story.

Its a bit scary at times because this is from my imagination… its very personal.

And now its very real and in print and available through all Amazon outlets.

So now its all about the marketing, which is also why I’m writing about it here.

If you read it and you like it, please say so.

Or, get on Amazon and comment on it there. That’s how the book will get more promotion and more people will get to read about Luke and his cool dogs and his hippie English teacher and their sharing sessions and learn a bit of veterinary medicine and discover some amazing creatures as well.

Alistair, Dona, Gary, Whitney, Julie, Joshua, Lindsay and Andrea were my test audiences and sources of encouragement and laughter. Thanks, Gang.

And thanks, Mr.Tournemille and Ms.Cooke for letting me be me… as crazy as ‘me’ is.

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