Just for fun...

Favorite Lolanimals of 2009

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No lie, I would say that "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't" is in my top five of all-time things on the internet I've laughed the hardest at. It was two or three days later and I would randomly remember it as I was in the shower or eating or driving and I'd laugh so hard I'd see spots.

God, this month. It's been one of those months. Have you ever had long periods of time - not just a day, or even a couple days, but seemingly endless successions of days - where everything just. I mean, I have felt like this pretty much every moment of every day of December.

It's like if there were a movie, called Murphy's Law, and you saw it, and looked it up at home later, and found out it was based on a book, and when you went to the bookstore, found out it wasn't just a book but an autobiography, and you read it, and even more things happened because obviously they can never fit in everything from the book into the movie, and then you get to the end and you're just glad that's not your life, and then you turn to the author picture and note at the end and then you realize IT'S ME. I WROTE THAT BOOK.

And it's not big things. The house hasn't burned down, the old blue van still drives (today I got it up to 35 mph!), I am healthy. It's the cumulative effect of a million tiny things: I have to take off my glove to open the door because the doorknob sticks, and that makes me drop my keys, and when I bend over to pick them up my purse falls off my shoulder, and my iPod drops out and hits the concrete, and I pick it up and stick it in my pocket, and as I walk inside, the headphone cord gets caught around the railing and the speaker part gets pulled out from the earbud and the whole apparatus will no longer work. (True story, btw.)

It's all of that, plus the animals. I think five animals is too many. I read somewhere that a dog is like a very bright three year old, in terms of its intelligence and behavior as well as how you should treat it; I think our dogs are more like really dim, perhaps developmentally challenged, two year olds. Spencer plays this game called WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO GO NEXT I WILL GET THERE FIRST, and if he's not tripping me, then he's herding me or making me stop and wait for him to sit still before I can try walking again. He barks at everything, and when he barks, Princess barks. The cats just roam around and attack each other and gallop up and down the hallway and knock Christmas tchotchkes on the floor and cry because they haven't eaten in one entire hour and they're going to staaaaaaaarve.

And then there's the picking up after my family, and arguments over who gets to watch the nice TV, and piles of clean clothes in the living room and I folded all the laundry I am sure as hell not going to put it away for you, and loud people during sleepy time, et cetera.

I need a holiday. A very long holiday.

So it's been an interesting couple of weeks. On Sunday the 8th my parents went to Petsmart to buy a light bulb for my dad's aquarium. My mom moseyed over to the cat adoption room, and when my dad finally found her, they both fell in love with a six month old kitty. He was sweet and affectionate, and very pretty, but he also sounded sick, and we already had two cats at home.

When they came home and told us that they were very close to adopting him, I was heartbroken. All it took was a little bit of encouragement, and they agreed that if I paid the adoption fee, we could get him. So my mom called his foster mom, who wanted to keep him a few more days to get him better. We picked him up on Thursday the 12th. When we met at Petsmart, his foster mom told us that he'd been sick for a while - she actually brought him home from the Humane Society because he'd been sick with an upper respiratory infection and needed to get better. She assured us that he was almost over it, since she'd been giving him antibiotics. Just a cough and a little sneezing, but no mucus anymore.

She lied.

He got sicker and sicker, wasn't eating much, slept all day and night, and had very little energy, and so this past Tuesday my mom and I took him to the vet. She gave us a prescription for an antibiotic and injected him with fluids under the skin. I now believe that his foster mom either wasn't giving him an antibiotic, or was giving him the wrong dose or the wrong kind, because his recovery has been miraculous. The next day, he was running around and playing. Now, just a few days later, he's galloping up and down the hallway and leaping up the walls.

I would like to introduce you to the newest member of the family.



This is C. K. Dexter Haven. He's not scowling at you. That's just his face.

As I've mentioned before, we've been working since this spring on an extension to our old playhouse, which will become my dad's new woodworking shed. It's a pretty big project, and it's occupied most of our weekends this summer. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures at the beginning of the project, when Laura and my dad dug a hole three to four feet deep at the back of the yard, when we put in a concrete block retaining wall, and when we started to put up the walls. Here's our progress since then, however.



Grandpa arrives for a day of work. Phoenix awaits him.





My dad says to stop taking pictures of him while he works, as it makes him nervous.



Ahaha!



Sometimes Grandpa works.



Sometimes he watches.



Always watching: the cats.



AS CHIEF SUPERVISOR, I'M GOING TO HAVE TO ASK ABOUT THESE PICTURES YOU'RE TAKING.



This was the death rafter, here on the corner. My dad came up underneath it twice in one hour, scraping his shoulder. Then I jogged up the hill and ran straight into it with my head; Laura said she heard the entire structure shake. So she painted blue warning stripes on it.

Two hours later, she smacked into it with her own head.







Making a roof!



A window will go here.



Here you can see the retaining wall, as well as how much dirt had to be moved before we could pour the concrete foundation.



Sasha likes to hang off the pool deck to watch from above.



He also kept track that we were using the right materials.




Supervising is hard!

Last week we took the dogs up to a local park. There's a leash-free area there, and we let them run around and be real dogs for a change - normally they're whiny, co-dependent little ramora that cringe at the thought of having to go outside and stay there for more time than it takes them to take care of their business.



This is the only good picture I got of Spencer. He was usually at least 100 yards away from us at any given time, cavorting about, sniffing the entire world, and once charging a group of Frisbee golfers to attempt to give them sweet keeses.




Little Dog was obviously easier to keep an eye on.




The nobility and inner strength of Little Dog.



SHE'S READY TO GO NOW, OKAY.