This silly dog

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Suzanne

What a life this dog leads. This is her spot — I think she started climbing up on the back of the couch to escape Toby, our cocker English Springer Spaniel**. It got to be a habit, and now that couch cushion bears a permanent Katie-shaped indentation. What’s really pathetic is that if I went back through our photo files, I would find MANY pictures of her in some variation of this pose. I decided it was OK to post a new one because it’s Christmas related. (See the Christmas tree reflection in the background? That’s what makes it Christmas related.)

Cocoa likes to sleep on the couch, too, but sometimes, if Cocoa gets there first, Katie decides that Cocoa is in her way. So Katie barks at her. And eventually Cocoa moves. Katie climbs up, but goes up on the back, so there’s no reason why Cocoa had to even go anywhere at all. It’s clear that they have decided that Katie is in charge, even though Cocoa is, what, 40 pounds heavier?

I know, I know. Dogs! On Furniture! It’s only this couch, and the couch is covered with a sheet. It’s funny, though, when the sheet is off, either to be washed, or because we have company coming over, the dogs will look at the bare couch and contemplate it, wondering if they are still allowed on it. Usually they decide the answer is yes.

I was hoping to wrap this post up with something profound or pithy, but unfortunately the 2 hours I spent with 9 5th and 6th graders this afternoon left me with a raging headache that I should have taken to bed an hour ago. So, there you go. Scroll back up to the cute doggie picture and then have a nice day.

**edited later to fix. Told you I had a headache, don’t know why I called him a cocker. I must gave been thinking of her highness, Katie…

Winter weather

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Suzanne

We are just having our first real taste of winter weather — there were flurries this morning, and the dogs didn’t appreciate me taking their picture and not just letting them in already, darn it. Well, Katie was pretty annoyed, but she’s kind of a princess.

It was just flurries today, but the forecast was calling for 2-4 inches tomorrow into Saturday. I’m resolving not to complain so much about the wather this winter. I mean, I live in Iowa, right? I should just get over it, already.

Remind me of that in about a month, OK?

My sanguine* attitude about the snow may also have something to do with the fact that we have been so darned lucky this fall. It has been unusually mild — the boys only started wearing their winter coats on Monday, and this is really the first time we’ve actually seen any snow. There might have been a few odd flakes, but until now? Nothing.

Also, for the last two winters, I had the shop, and had to drag my sorry behind down to it in lots of weather that I would have preferred to avoid. Yes, I am a little bit gleeful about getting to stay home this winter.

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Today was one of those days when I had five different things on my calendar, and unfortunately some of them were 20 minutes away and overlapped others. Unfortunately, none of them involved me finishing the quilt on the frame. Maybe tomorrow.

TTFN-

Suzanne

*I had to look sanguine up to make sure I was using it properly: the dictionary.com definition says cheerfully optimistic, hopeful, or confident. If I were you, I would try to work that into conversation. If you do, please let me know how it went.

Summer Vacation 2010, Part 1

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Suzanne

I mentioned that part of the reason I was taking a blog break was because of our family vacation…that vacation is, sadly, now over, and now it’s time for the reminisicing. Oh, and the getting back to working.

I’m going to be posting about our vacation, and this is going to be some of that self-serving navel gazing that I’m sure some haters of personal blogs abhor. I’m mostly doing this for me, and to share with remote family members, but anyone is welcome to come along on our Summer Vacation Extravaganza recap — you just have to remember that you’ve been warned that it might be boring. Especially because it’s probably going to take me about 2 weeks to do all of it: we have almost 1300 pictures to get through.

Our vacation started on July 3rd.

The hardest part about going on vacation is leaving these two behind:

By this point, the suitcases have alerted the doggies to something of a foreboding nature, and their fears are being realized. Their people are piling into this:

And are getting ready to leave.

Packing for a 2 week vacation and having that entire truckbed was like a miracle compared to previous trips, in which we crammed into my Honda Accord. We had all kinds of stuff with us, and it was awesome.

The truck also rode pretty nicely with the weight in the back.

The boys spent a lot of the trip like this:

(That would be…plugged into one electronic device or another. Playing games or watching movies or listening to music…). They did also spend a lot of time reading, but the electronics made the 3770 miles in the truck much more bearable than any traveling I remember doing as a kid. Plus, we don’t put up with the “are we there yet” questions: we point at the GPS and the GPS tells them if we are there yet or not, and if not: how much longer it’ll be.

Our first major stop was:

OK, not really, but it is where we ate for lunch that first day. Don’t worry, I didn’t take pictures of all of the restaurants we ate at. Just the first one. We tried really hard to limit ourselves to ONE Fast Food restaurant per day. ONE serving of french fries and ONE soft drink per day (and less if we could manage it).

Interestingly, of the fast food joints we did go to, McD’s was consistently the best in terms of customer service (fastest, best at getting our orders correct, etc…). We had terrible luck at Wendy’s, Subway, Pizza Hut (which isn’t fast food, but still, it was horrible), and Burger King was OK, but McD’s always came through for us.

Our actual destination that day was in:

Mark’s Aunt and Uncle live north of Omaha, so we stopped to visit with them, and Mark’s cousin and her family. (A family which grew by one baby girl 2 days after we were there. We were hoping baby would have arrived BEFORE we did. Oh well, we had a good time being entertained by baby’s big sister (who is all of 2 years old…).

Much of the time we were there was spent playing with rubber band guns of various sizes:

(Yes, that is a rubberband gun. Ridiculous, isn’t it?)

Even the big kid got into the rubberband act.They also got to go outside and shoot balloons with BB guns. Oh, and I think they used apples as targets, too.

When we left the next morning, we left behind rubberbands allover the place. I felt badly, but Mark’s Aunt didn’t seem to mind — if we hadn’t left when we did, we might not have escaped (the boys would have gladly spent 2 weeks just shooting rubberbands…), plus she said it made her nostalgic for the days when her son was leaving rubberbands all over the house. (Her son is the young man that just graduated from West Point).

So, that was Day 1 of our big adventure. More tomorrow.

A big blob of pink knitting

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Suzanne

This is the knitting project I mentioned in my previous post. When it grows up it’s going to be a shawl. The original pattern is all garter stitch, and I actually started this shawl in a different yarn in garter stitch. But then I dropped some stitches and I’m a garter stitch idiot — I could NOT figure out how to pick them up. So I started over. And then I started over again on the trip. I’m pretty pleased with my progress, but I’ve got a long way to go, and right now it just looks like a big blob of pink. The sun washed the color out a bit, it’s much prettier and brighter and in person.

I started this Wednesday night last week (in the car…) and Thursday morning in the car? Bad words:

Fixing my boo-boo would have required ripping out all of the garter stitch border, and basically starting over. It appears that after casting on, I twisted the cast on row? I guess. Needless to say, I was not interested in restarting for a 4th time, and ultimately this is going to be seen by ME and my family, and I’d rather have DONE than PERFECT.

I’m having trouble with my camera, so I took some shots outside in the full sun.

The dogs could NOT figure out why I was outside taking pictures and they were inside watching me:

Katie doesn’t know it, but she’ll be getting her summer haircut on Saturday. One of us will wish we had tranquilizers.

Firing up the quilting machine and embarassing the dog

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Suzanne

I haven’t even been able to get to my quilting machine for most of the last week, but today I finally reached the bottom of the piles and started trying to catch back up on some quilting. This little cutie was a quickie. It was made by a young lady whose grandmother brought it to me to quilt. I think the quilter was in the 8-10 year old range, but I’m not positive. Freehand allover swirls (in lime green thread!) were easy to do and helped hide the little bit of waviness around the edges. It was actually pretty well pieced: I wish my first quilt had been that nice.

I’m not really sure how this happened:

There was Mark, taking off his work shirt, and there was the dog, wanting attention, and the next thing I knew, we were sticking her arms in the sleeves and I was running for the camera.