Monthly Archives: March 2011

Cleaning, Petting the Dogs, The Longest Walk Revisited, Braces and Grammar

Posted on March 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Isn’t it great to know that we have made it to another Friday?  Although we have nothing spectacular planned for this weekend, it’s nice –

excuse me while I go retrieve a handkerchief from Bad Dog, who just saw me looking at her and has decided to lie on the handkerchief and pretend that it’s not really there –

 to know that a chance to sleep in and have some additional family time is right around the corner! 

  • Cleaning

Our first activity of the weekend, however, will occur tonight when Miss Kayla gets to clean her bedroom and bathroom once we arrive home.  I don’t think she’s too happy with that itinerary, but it is necessary! 

  • Petting the Dogs

I got the chance last night to sit down with each of the dogs and pet them for a couple of minutes.  Darwin started it, really; I was going over to him to get him to stand up and go out for the last time before we went to bed, and he looked up at me from his dog bed, which is on one side of our fireplace in the den and his tail started wagging furiously.  Darwin’s dog bed is about two sizes too small for him – we have tried buying bigger beds, but he refuses to have anything to do with them – and it constantly amazes us that he can even fit in there!  So, when he started wagging his tail, rather than make him get up right away, I sat down by him and loved on him for a minute.  While I was doing that, Mandy looked up from the dog bed she was using on the other side of the fireplace with kind of a grumpy “Are you really going to wake me up now?” look, so I went over to her to pet her, too.  Petting Mandy is always a sweet experience; for all her foibles in the chewing and counter departments, she is a very loving dog and has the softest hair I have ever felt on a dog.  In my opinion, it is as soft as an angora cat’s hair would be, but less fluffy and infinitely less likely to send me into a sneezing fit!   Having petted the other two dogs, it just wouldn’t do, of course, to leave Tyra out, so I went over to her (she was on the couch, guarding “her man”, ie., Mark, from all comers except me) and stroked her for a while, too.  I got several tail thumps from her for that one.  It just was a sweet moment. 

  • The Longest Walk, Revisited

I was getting ready for bed last night, when my eyes fell upon the pair of shoes I had worn yesterday sitting by my bureau.  I thought about what I wrote yesterday, and decided it couldn’t be too hard to take them to the closet, so I went ahead and picked them up and carried them through the closet door – at which time I pitched them on the floor two inches from the shoe rack where they still remain, along with most of my other shoes.  Oh well, Rome wasn’t built in a day and two inches beats a whole room as a distance to conquer!

  • Kayla’s Braces

I was on the phone with my mom last night, and had just finished telling her that Kayla’s braces weren’t hurting her anymore, when screams started to erupt from her bathroom – the kind of screams that let you know that something is wrong.  I raced in there, got off the phone with my mom, and then got to play the “Stop screaming long enough to tell me what’s wrong” game – any mother will tell you that if you’re not frazzled when you first hear the screams, you will be by the time you finish playing twenty questions in between the screams.  I usually don’t make it to question 9 before my eyes start flashing and smoke starts coming out of my ears, because it is so frustrating to need to help and not be given any information about how to do so.  It turned out that a wire in the back of her mouth had poked into a very tender place in her cheek and stuck there.  It wasn’t in very deep, and we got it pulled out fairly quickly but there was quite some excitement for a minute or two!  After Mark got home, he insisted that Kayla put some wax on that wire, and put on the Canker-X medicine the doctor gave her, and that helped, too. 

  • Grammar

I have tried to use English correctly in these posts, but”lie” and “lay” defeat me – I have a 50/50 shot at it, but usually get it wrong.  So, if anyone knows, did Mandy “lay” on the handkerchief, or did she “lie” on the handkerchief, and is there a good way to remember the difference? 

Have a great weekend everyone and I will talk to you on Monday!

Nancy

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Posted in Pets, When things don't go as expected, working mom

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Earth Fare, The Longest Walk, General Von Bissing and the Birds

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 2 comments

Yesterday’s dog paw prints having faded into a nice light glaze all over our dark wooden floor, it is time to move on to other topics of conversation, although, for the record, No-no and Bad Dog kept up quite a trail of things for me to rescue yesterday, also!

  • Earth Fare

This weekend, Mark and I had the chance to go into an Earth Fare supermarket for the first time.  Earth Fare labels itself as “the Healthy Supermarket.”  The label “organic” is pretty much standard throughout the store.  It had a large selection of teas – I got a tin of berry green tea for Christmas, so I have been trying some different teas from time to time – I can brew one cup of tea, add 1 teaspoon of real suger and have a small treat for the cost of 1/3 point on the Weightwatchers system.  Its produce section, which was all organic fruits and vegetables, looked really good too.  We bought a few of them, some dry roasted cashews (the store sold them in bulk containers and you scooped out what you wanted), a fresh-baked loaf of sour dough bread and some wheat crackers.  The finishing touch, though, was the discovery at the check-out counter that the store sells what I consider to be the very best apple juice in the world – Martinelli’s Gold Medal 100% apple juice.  Kayla agrees with me.  Mark and I bought 16 bottles on Sunday; we are now down to only 4.  If you ever come across this apple juice, you really need to try it! 

  • The Longest Walk

I walked into Kayla’s bedroom the other day, to note the pairs of shoes scattered throughout the floor rather than sitting in the closet, and started to wonder irritably why it seemed so hard for her to walk the two feet from where the shoes were to the closet to put them in there – until I walked into my bedroom and noticed the three pairs of shoes I had sitting on the floor in our bedroom by my bureau drawer rather than in my closet.  The longest walk for both of us appears to be the path from the bedroom to the closet door.  I really should do better, since No-no and Bad Dog have been known to snatch shoes to chew when no handkerchiefs, socks or other items of clothing are available.   Other long walks for me appear to be the walk from the kitchen counter to the trash can with the empty diet coke can, and the walk from wherever the clothes were folded to the place where they are supposed to reside normally. 

Have you ever lost the TV remote and spent thirty minutes looking for it rather than walk the three feet over to the TV to turn it on?  I did that the other day.  I used to think it was just an amusing peculiarity of human nature but during this latest TV remote search I realized it has now become a necessity.  About 15 minutes into the search I walked over to the TV to turn it on manually, only to discover that, while I could turn it on and off manually, I was completely unable to do anything else without the remote.  There wasn’t even a channel switch!  That added a new urgency to the search for the remote, which was ultimately discovered underneath a couch cushion. 

  • General Baron Von Bissing and the Birds

General Baron Von Bissing was the German (well, really Prussian) military governor of occupied Belgium during World War I.  As such, he was responsible for ordering the executions of dozens if not hundreds of individuals, and the deportation of thousands of Belgians to Germany to work in forced labor situations.  (I am researching his life as best I can, in my copious free time, in connection with a book I would like to write.)  I was looking through the newspaper archives of the New York Times last night (they go back to 1851, and articles from 1851 to 1922 are in the public domain, ie., they are free) and came across a one paragraph article about a peculiar order of the general’s.  In the middle of the occupation, General Von Bissing issued an order stating that the “artifical blinding” of song birds was forbidden in Belgium as a “cruelty” that would not be tolerated.  Now, it’s not that I disagree with the sentiment, but for that practice to bother a military governor who acted as he did with respect to people just seems odd.  I also wondered why anyone would want to deliberately make a song bird blind and why that was a big enough problem in the middle of the war to require an edict of its very own. 

Well, that’s enough for now.  I need to complete a “discission” (Kayla tried to say “discussion” and managed to blend the words “discussion” and “decision” instead) with Kayla about the necessity to get her hair and teeth brushed quickly at this point.

Have a great day everyone!  

Have a great day everyone!

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Odds and Ends

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 1 comment

Good morning everyone!  It’s hard to believe we have arrived at Wednesday already! 

  • Kayla deprived of her morning fire 

Yesterday morning was another one of those days when I had a very hard time chivvying Kayla out of hibernation and into the cold, cruel world for another day.  Once I got her awake, she came be-bopping into the den to get dressed in front of the fireplace – only to find out that access was blocked because we had put some clothes up there from ironing.  Let’s just say her reaction was not positive; tears and drama were both involved.  When she said she was cold, I pointed out, yet again, that if she would go ahead and get dressed, she would start to warm up.  She wasn’t too thrilled with the logic of that statement!

  • No-No and Bad Dog Strike Again

Once I got Kayla shipped off to school with Mark, I then had the opportunity to start to get ready for work myself, in between retrieving items from No-No (Darwin) and Bad Dog (Mandy).  Darwin is “No-no” because when you tell him “No” about something he at least thinks about listening to you.   Mandy is “Bad Dog” because she really doesn’t care what you think about her activities.  (That laid back basset hound temperament strikes again!)  Yesterday morning’s festivities included rescuing two of Mark’s handkerchiefs, a pair of my hose, and Tyra’s dog bed from our bedroom from the miscreant pair.  Then, just for grins and giggles, the pair gave me the opportunity to rescue one of the two handkerchiefs for a second time last night.  (I also just had to rescue a dish towel from Darwin a second ago.)  We really are putting these things up; Darwin is just tall enough to reach whatever Mandy tells him to get.  The amazing thing is that no socks have been involved in the past 24 hours; I would guess that’s because Mandy has not yet seen a pair suitable for sharing!

  • Floor Decorations

It rained hard on Monday, which has left the back yard still pretty wet and muddy.  We have beautiful dark wood floors in the main part of our house, so we now have the added pleasure of random paw prints scattered on the floor throughout the den.  The most definite, and largest, paw prints are Darwin’s, and the second best prints are made by Mandy.  It adds a certain air of individuality to the floor!  That air will be lost once I am sure that the yard is dry enough to keep any attempts at wiping up the paw prints from being an exercise in futility. 

  • Sunday Night Eating Out

I have mentioned before that Kayla’s imagination is amazing to me.  We ate out Sunday night, and I got some grilled shrimp on a wooden skewer.  Because Kayla got baked potato soup, she was finished well before either Mark or I, so she picked up my skewer and started pretending like it was a pointer that she could use to show pictures of a house to us.  She started out by offering us a four bedroom house with two kitchens and a bonus room for $50.00.  By the time she finished, she was offering us a four bedroom house with two kitchens and five bonus rooms fully furnished (the fifth bonus room was for the dogs and came complete with 18 pairs of socks for Mandy to chew) with a large backyard (location of said house to be determined later) for $0.00.  We told her she drove a hard bargain, but that the last offer was too good to refuse! 

Have a great day everyone!

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Posted in Just stuff..., Out of the mouths of babes...., When things don't go as expected

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The Accidental Haircut, Rain, Bananas and Light Bulbs

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 2 comments

  • Mark’s New Look

As mentioned yesterday, Mark also has a new look, quite by accident.  Right before bedtime Sunday night, he decided to trim his hair just a little bit over his ears.  Unfortunately, at the same time, Darwin popped onto the bathroom sink with his paws to see what was going on, and bumped Mark’s elbow just enough to cause the clippers to take a free swipe at about a quarter size spot on the front side of his head, completely shaving off all of the hair on that one spot.  Mark then made the mistake of asking for my help.  In spite of my best efforts (please note that there is a reason God steered me away from a career in cosmetology), by the time I had spent ten minutes on it, it looked like we were headed for a complete hair shave.  The three dogs, who have been shaved with clippers of their own before, all sat in front of the bathroom door looking greatly concerned.  Right before we hit the point where all of the hair on his head would have had to be shaved off, Mark remembered that we had some additional razor guards.  He went and found them, and then was able to blend the hair that was left on the top of his head into the part that was shaved so that he now has what looks like a very close crew cut on the top of the head.  The three dogs finally left their post in front of the bathroom door when the clippers stopped making noise, with a sigh of relief as they realized that the clipping was going to stop with Mark.

  • Rain and Bananas

Rain and bananas are two topics that tend not to go together – unless you have an Australian Shepherd mix named Tyra.  She has two idiosyncracies.  The first is her attitude towards water in general, and rain in particular. 

Tyra does not do water.  Period. Sincerely.  The first day we got Tyra from the humane society, back in 2004, we put her in the spare bathtub to give her a bath, and apparently managed to traumatize her for life.  To this day, she refuses to come into the bathroom if someone is in the bathtub, or within reach of a bathtub full of water.  This general attitude towards water is folded into a more specific attitude toward rain.  Tyra does not like to go outside when it rains – unless a human is willing to put on a raincoat and walk out there with her.  In our old city, I managed to walk her through Hurricane Dennis by doing just that.  I was the only person dumb enough to walk outside at the time, but the dog was desperate, and I was fond of the carpet.  We’re not sure how she does it, but even when we have the dogs outside and an unexpected gully washer comes up, though the other two dogs will be soaked to the skin, Tyra remains bone dry.  We have wondered if she makes the other two sit on top of her or something!

Last night, a front moved through, and right about the time we got home, the bottom fell out, which meant I had to force Tyra out in the rain, which brings us to the other idiosyncracy, bananas.  She moped a little bit all evening, until Mark decided to have a couple of bananas for dessert.  Tyra loves bananas.  You can have her on the other end of the house, with three doors shut between her and the kitchen, and the minute someone picks up a banana, she just knows and begins begging her way to the spot where the bananas are.  She has a little tap dance she does once she knows the bananas are on their way.  So, today, her forced sojourn into the rain this evening was assuaged just a little bit by the banana she got to have.  (Mark gave her one all to herself, since the other two dogs happened to be outside at the time.)  She then sat on the couch for another thirty minutes thumping her tail and looking at Mark in hopes that other bananas would be forthcoming.

  • Light Bulbs

We have very interesting light bulbs in the den of our house.  They are spotlight bulbs, and for whatever reason, they tend to go out at least in pairs, if not in triplets, about every three months.  We finally got tired of it, and bought a large supply of light bulbs that are supposed to last for at least two years.  We replaced the last one today.  (The time before when it went out with two others, Mark was able to tighten it and get it to come back on, while the other two were really dead.)  If any of them go out before 2013, I am going to be very disappointed!

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