Author: Sarah

Oops – it’s been a few days since my last blog! The weekend was super-busy – we had our 20-month-old niece (and her parents, of course) up visiting this weekend from NYC. So we spent most of the weekend chasing Lizzy and controlling Molly…Molly really wanted to play with Lizzy, but weighs at least twice as much, and is a bit on the rambunctious side still. Unfortunately, even though my house is somewhat puppy-proof, it’s definitely not toddler-proof! There’s something about opposable thumbs, I think. :) Lizzy’s a lot of fun, though – we taught her the word “bagel” this weekend, and for breakfast Sunday I was sitting on the couch with Lizzy next to me and Molly in front of me, feeding Lizzy the soft inside parts of a bagel and feeding Molly the tough crust. I, of course, didn’t get to eat any of my bagel. Oh, well…

Monday we had obedience training for Molly. She’s actually starting to really behave – as long as you have food to offer her! Unfortunately, the trainer noticed that she’s been limping somewhat. We already know she has hip displaysia, where the hip joint is all out-of-whack, but the trainer (who only sees her once a week, and therefore notices differences more) seems to think she’s gotten worse. So, it’s off to the vet next Monday to have her hips x-rayed again. Poor puppy. :( They have to knock them out to do x-rays…last time, Molly was so disoriented she slept for two days straight – which of course was a blessing when she was a six-month-old terror!

Last night was so much fun! I started bellydancing class, which Jenny, Tina and Jo are also taking. (Except they’re in the intermediate class – I’m just a beginner.) I can definitely see how this could be a workout – muscles I didn’t even know I had are kind of achy today. But I think it will be neat. We’re going to do a veil dance, and the music she’s chosen actually has the same rhythm as the rhumba…it’s all coming together now. :)

Tonight, I’m looking forward to a night with nothing to do except read book 4 of Harry Potter and do laundry. :) Oh, and work on my master’s project. Which is actually ahead of schedule, so maybe I’ll just read instead….

Dance the night away…

We had our first dance lesson at Arthur Murray last night. That was so much fun! We learned the steps for the waltz, rhumba, and tried out a little swing. It’s so much easier than I expected – I think it helps that I’ve done music enough to be able to count the beats without thinking. The problem is, I have a good enough sense of rhythm that when we get off the beat because the music slows down or speeds up a little I want to take over and get us back on, but since Denis is the guy, I have to let him lead… I’m sure I’ll get better with practice, though. Now I really can’t wait to start bellydancing on Tuesday!

While we were out and about last night, we went to the pet store and spent a fortune on new toys for Molly. I’m hoping that if she has enough new stuff to play with she won’t try and eat any more woodwork… Of course, this morning I could barely walk through the family room with all the bones, balls, tug toys, fleece toys, stuffing ripped out of fleece toys, and pieces of ripped up fleece blanket all over the floor. Next we need to teach Molly how to pick up her toys. Once we teach her to stop trying to eat her toybox. Sometimes I feel like we don’t have a puppy, but a two-year-old who will never grow up. :)

It finally happened. Lately, I’ve taken to boasting that my 15-month-old Golden Retriever (Molly) hasn’t yet destroyed anything valuable – no couches, no carpets, no woodwork, nothing, nada, zip, zilch. Yesterday we had out-of-town company who weren’t exactly comfortable around hyper-puppy, so when we decided to play games, we went down to the rec room in the basement to play and left Molly wandering around the first floor, where she’s had free, unsupervised reign for months now. Denis and I kept taking turns checking on her every half hour or so – making sure she had enough water and didn’t need to go out. She was amazingly good and quiet – sometimes I’d go up and check and she was sleeping in her crate with the door wide open. Until we went up for dinner and figured out why she’d been so quiet… The windowsill in our family room is now missing a corner. And I mean a whole corner. That’s going to be difficult to fix. Maybe we’ll just sand down the other corner and pretend that’s the way it was meant to be. :)

The fourth was fun, though. We didn’t watch any fireworks – we were in the middle of a rather long game, and we’ve all seen fireworks before – but we had a great time at the bbq that Jenny organized! I love trying out new recipes on my friends, so I found a great recipe for pasta salad that involved beans, corn and salsa. People liked it – yay! My strawberry pie came out a little runny, though – I might not have thickened the glaze enough, or something, but it came out more like strawberry soup. Still tasty though. And, of course, it’s almost impossible to mess up brownies, especially out of a box. :) The rain held off for the afternoon, except for a short shower that was just long enough to force us to put away the cameras and radio and put the food under the picnic tables. All in all, a very fun way to spend a Wednesday. Now if we could just do that every week…

Toys for work

Joy of joys – last night the UPS truck pulled up to our house. I went to the door expecting to get some package with computer parts Denis ordered. Nope. It’s my backordered “Frigits” from ThinkGeek. What are Frigits? Think marbles, magnets, spinny-things, chutes (no ladders – marbles can’t climb them). I can tell I’m not going to get much work done now – it’s so fascinating trying to set these up in different paths…

That’s definitely the most interactive toy I have at work – it’s too big to fit on my desk (plus my desk isn’t vertical or magnetic) so it’s on the back of a cabinet near my office. I also have magnetic words, a mini zen garden, and a bunch of knick-knacks. I think better when I have something to do with my hands (or even the part of my brain that isn’t working on whatever problem I’m trying to solve at the moment). If I could only bring stuff to occupy my hands during boring meetings – like knitting or something – I’m sure I’d pay more attention. As it is, all I can do it bring my Palm and play games on it – not something conducive to paying attention! But it looks like I’m taking notes or something, when in reality I’m trying to beat my best score in one of a myriad of solitaire games. Now hopefully my boss isn’t reading this. :)

What a busy weekend – you’d think that since I had no plans for anything at all (other than church which I have to play piano for at 8 am every sunday) it would have been a calm weekend. Denis’ plane came in very late on Friday…4 hours late, in fact. So that shot Friday night. My mom and I went shopping on Saturday. Because you can never have too many swimsuits when you have a pool in your backyard – especially when they’re 50% off! And I spent sunday cleaning. Yuck. We’ve got company coming for the 4th, and our guest room is a disaster. But on the bright side, I bought and put up a new wallpaper border in my kitchen. (No, I haven’t learned from the last project). Now all I need are new curtains, since they now kind of clash with the border…these projects never end, do they? It was weird, though. I thought I was covering up an old wallpaper border, got up on my stepladder to try and take it off – it was painted on! It was a rather intricate little design (which I hated) that somebody probably spent days painting on. Oh, well. But I’m not feeling too guilty about it – I like my new border much better!

Oh, and Denis did in fact notice the new walls (they are, after all, a different color) and likes them! (Insert big sigh of relief here). :)

The Wall Disaster, Update

Well, aside from the fact that the trim looks bad now that the walls are freshly painted, I’m done. I will never, as long as I live, do that again! Right. At least until next time. But it looks great! I’ve never done any “faux finish” techniques before…why are they “faux” anyway? I mean, it looks real to me. We’ll see if Denis notices tomorrow – it is drastically different from the wallpaper that was up there – but he’s, well, a guy. :) Molly, however, has definitely noticed. Once I finally let her in the foyer, she spent 20 minutes just sniffing around each corner, as though she’d never been in the room before. Of course, she had the same reaction to the pool this afternoon, and it took my brother Dan and me several tries to get her to jump in. It’s not like she’s never been in the pool before. Go figure.

The Wall Disaster
(or, how to redecorate while your spouse is away)

OK, so it was a stupid idea in the first place. After all, if I were the one going on a business trip, he’d probably just hang out and play computer games or something fun like that. When I think of all the wonderful quilts I might have finished by now, I wonder what on earth I was thinking. But I really wanted to change the (awful) wallpaper in my foyer. Simple enough, right? I’ve had some experience taking down wallpaper and repainting, after all. But, everything that could go wrong, has. Now I’m stuck with primed walls, with paint blistering all over the place (why???) and two evenings left before Denis gets back from Japan. Hmmm… Well, maybe he’ll be too jet-lagged to notice. :)

A whole bunch of my friends have weblogs and it looks like such fun, so I decided to give it a try… I can’t promise anything – after all, my journals growing up tended to last about a week before I got tired of keeping it up-to-date – but let’s see what happens!