More ....

Let the wrestling begin .....

I got to watch a wrestling match earlier this morning.  This was after a game of "your toy is better than mine"  They each had a toy but they were eying the other's toy.  Then, as if on a signal, they would stop, look away briefly, and then pounce on the other's toy.  Repeat for 10 minutes.

Then we had the wrestling :-)

We've had a stint outside and now all is quiet and peaceful.

For now.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

First, Happy New Year!

And so I start 2009 ... being very, very tired because we stayed up way past midnight. New Years Eve is hard for someone who usually falls asleep by 10pm :-)

I'm waiting for the rest of the household to wake up, so I hopped on to the blog.

Last week was a PIP. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly all rolled into one week!

Let's start with The Bad & The Ugly and get that over with. Where to start? Mom fell off a stepladder 2 weeks before Christmas while decorating the Christmas tree and shattered her left knee. Had to have surgery with pins or screws and she is still in the hospital. It will be weeks before she can put weight on that leg and then months and months of rehab. She told me yesterday that the doctor said she had "destroyed" her knee.

The Sunday before Christmas had everything all covered with ice. Luce ran out on to the yard and couldn't stop and bent her outside toenail on her back right paw. Took her in on Tuesday as she was still not putting weight on it and she had to have her toenail removed. However, she is now fine and not limping at all.


Looking pitiful on Christmas Day with her bandaged foot.

Something went wrong with the hot water heater on Christmas Eve, so we only had a bit of hot water every few hours. Which really sucks when you are trying to clean up after a prime rib roast on Christmas Eve, a turkey on Christmas Day and about to have company. It was still under warranty and the company sent out a new part (a control board I think)

Then there was the fiasco in the master bathroom the day after Christmas ... pipe came apart or something and flooded the cabinet and into the kitchen ceiling and the kitchen window seat ceiling.



Enough of that and on to The Good! Well, it was Christmas :-) And, wheee!! I got a Wii! Didn't get a Wii Fit yet though ... they are hard to come by and I don't want one badly enough to pay double for it. The boys laughed when I said I wanted one and Hugh said he wouldn't use it, but, gee, guess what has received a LOT of use since Christmas? :-)



Blaze was in heaven on Christmas - he got a new can of tennis balls! Which one to play with first, oh, the decisions!



And 3 days before Christmas, I got a new car - a Honda Element! Hugh had driven out to Pittsburgh to pick up Evan for Christmas break and said the transmission was slipping in my Envoy. It had a lot of miles on it, so he started looking for a new car for me. Now that I don't have to car pool for middle or high school, I could expand my list of cars. The primary purpose will be for driving the dogs around and the Honda Element is considered one of the ultimate dog cars as it is easy to clean out and it is very boxy in shape which makes it easier for dog crates. It also gets better gas mileage than the Envoy. Oh, and it has an outlet for my iPod with volume controls in the steering wheel - a huge selling feature for me right there :-)



The bumble bee in the inset is an antenna topper that I got for Christmas ... helps me find my car in the sea of silver SUV's in the parking lot :-) My choices of colors were silver, silver and silver. I really like the Element - it is fun and peppy to drive. And surprisingly peppy on the highway as well. Hugh will build a shelf for the crates to sit on in the back and that will give me storage underneath them. We will take out the back seats as well.

Oh, just before Christmas we also bought two chairs for the living room at a company that is going out of business. I really like them. Next will be a footstool or ottoman, but that will wait until I find what I like. Unfortunately, I hate furniture shopping (almost as much as I dislike clothes shopping!) and there doesn't seem to be an Ottomans R Us store around here, so it might be a while :-)



We have had two sets of company this past week, so the house is cleaner than it was. Note, that I didn't say "clean" But it is getting there.

So, I think that is about it. We don't have snow even though it sounds like the rest of the country does ... even places like Seattle, Vancouver and Arizona. We just have either 60 degrees and mud or freezing cold and ice.

Happy New Year!

Just an Update

Just an update because it is now December :-)

The living room is coming along ... the floor is done and we bought an area rug. We are now on the hunt for two wing-type chairs and an ottoman. The drums still need to go away and we need to put in the sofa table and end table. The chair that was in the living room is up in our bedroom and the couch is still, temporarily, in the dining room. It will be thrown out ... poor Luce ... she sleeps in that a lot! Not worry, I put one of the dog beds in the a corner in the living room and will be on the look out for a nicer bed for her. She was already sleeping on the bare floor after it was done, so I have made it a bit more comfortable. She does like her little corner of the room :-)

There is still a lot of stuff in the dining room, but at least we got to eat Thanksgiving dinner in there. I brined the turkey for the first time and, boy, was it ever flavorful and tender! A little salty, but then again, the brine recipe was for a 20lb bird and ours was 13lbs. I did cut down on the salt, but I guess I need to cut down a little more.

I also made this pumpkin cheesecake. Other than the crust, it was SO good! It wasn't a dense cheesecake, but rather, was kind of fluffy. The crust got hard, like a really hard cookie, but it was good too. Other people had the same problem, so I'm not sure what the answer is.

I worked from home a lot last week. Brennan had his last day of work last week on Monday and Evan spent most of his time here out with various friends. Hugh was out of town, so I was able to get a lot done!

I also, finally, got a website up for my trial secretary stuff: www.dognutmom.com Took a bit of fiddling to find a website template that I liked and that I could update on my own. Brennan was going to write it, or find me a template, but I wasn't liking a lot of the choices. We tried Wordpress as well, but I found it hard to customize to the way I wanted it to look. Wordpress is primarily blogging software as is this site, Blogger. This site doesn't really easily allow the separate pages that I wanted. Separate pages are slightly easier to get in Wordpress, but I was having trouble with formatting. The hosting site that I went with has SiteBuilder for free and it just "clicked" with my brain, so that is what I went with :-) I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel or relearn everything every time I update something. Or have to rely on Brennan to do it for me. After all, one of the reasons I did want my own site was to be able to publish trial test schedules, copies of final confirmations and running orders when it was ready and not to have to rely on the webmasters of each individual club to do it. Not that it never gets done ... it does! But things can happen, people can be away, or they have work etc, so I wanted my own site to consolidate it all.

I'll get my first chance to update it when the test schedule for the sanctioned match I am doing is finally approved, which will be this week I hope. I got that done last week as well and it is at USDAA for approval. I am sure there will be changes as there always ARE changes. I was lucky ... only two changes for the February Keystone trial and those were changes in wording that USDAA had just decided on, nothing that I had missed .... but this is a brand new test schedule, from scratch, so I am sure there will be things that I need to change around.

I also need to figure out how to get a list of height cards that I have on file into one big READABLE list and figure out the best way to update it as well. And I want to get results on there for the two October trials. I got some of it on there already. It will be easier to produce when I am wrapping up each trial rather than go back and do two whole trials all at once.

Evan went back to Duquesne yesterday. Hugh decided to come along as he hadn't seen the school since Evan went to look at it in April. However, it rained/sleeted the whole drive there and rained/sleeted the whole way home. The drive there took a bit longer than usual as we had to slow down to 30mph at times due to fog. As we got over to the west side of the state, past all the tunnels, we noticed that the eastbound turnpike was stop and go with lineups miles long. A couple of times it was due to the salters being out and doing their job, but other times, we weren't sure. We're talking MILES long. So, after we got Evan moved back in, we got out the map, played with the GPS and took an alternate route home. Which took longer. LONG day of driving and Hugh did all of it. He wanted to drive and kept refusing our offers to drive. I slept off and on and listened to books on my ipod :-) Evan slept most of the way.

Because there were 3 of us, we were able to move Evan back in one trip. Hugh, of course, was appalled at small size of the dorm room. He was always appalled when Brennan was at school too and can't understand why everyone just doesn't live at home :-)

We didn't walk around the campus because it was cold and raining. Of course it was ... I brought my camera!

Some Changes

We have some changes going on.

This is our dining room right now:


View from the hallway:


What is going on?

Well, this:


Wood floor in the living room.

I'm not crazy about the color, but the carpet was absolutely shot. Someone, not me, REALLY wanted more wood floor, so I compromised on the living room instead of the diningroom. I think this is darker than Brennan and Hugh thought it was, but there it is. Things I don't like are dark wood and brown ... and now here is dark wood and the front door and part of the porch is brown! Not really not liking that.



Luce isn't happy right now as her "hole" in the living room is gone. She doesn't know where to go, where to lie down, and is very restless. I will put down a dog bed or a large mat in her "hole" when it is all done. Blaze doesn't like the sound of the compressor when it goes off, or the frequent vacuuming Brennan and Hugh need to do.

It will look nice when it is done and we get a large area rug in there. Hugh is going too gung ho with change though. I prefer to get ONE thing done, then go on to the next. He also wanted to rip up the dining room carpet while he was at it (and just where was all the dining room stuff going to go?) and get rid of the couch and chair ...

We also got a new mattress and box spring for our bed (first time I woke up without a backache in quite a while!) So, not only is the whole living room in the dining room, but the old mattress/box spring is leaning against the wall in our room. And there are still boxes and bags and such in the upstairs hallway and in Evan's room from when Brennan painted his room. At least I moved and reorganized a lot of the stuff that ended up in Evan's room so that you can see the floor and walk around.

I am trying to be positive because I do not like change :-) However, I don't like every room pulled apart all at the same time. 2 winters ago when Hugh had Brennan painting, every single room of the house was out of whack. Either things were moved out of the room so that Brennan could paint, or a room was full of stuff from another room. Plus, Evan was going to paint his room and had moved a lot of stuff out of there into our room and the basement. That was a mess and was not relaxing at all. Then I had to get ready for one of the Keystone trials, so my time was limited as well.

I have had the last 2 or 3 weeks off from trials, so I have had some time for cleaning. Of course, now with everything moved around, and sawing and such, it will all have to be redone. And I will be gone next weekend for a trial and life is going to start getting busy again. If we can just do one room at a time, it would be so much easier and less chaotic and I would be a little more receptive to some changes.