Growler the Turtle

Dang, how does an entire week go by so quickly without a post? Apparently I don't remember as often without Mike here to harass me about it. It's been a quiet week, it's been nice to relax a bit after the past couple of weeks. We've gotten some more work done around the house, gotten some more stuff unpacked. Today we got a bunch done, although it doesn't seem like it to look at the house now. I keep unpacking and putting stuff away in the kitchen, yet somehow the counter tops are still full. But you didn't come here to hear about house stuff, you came to hear about Growler!

So last weekend we went to K-Mart to buy some important Halloween supplies: colored hair spray (Gara and I sprayed our hair and Mister's tail pink and blue), Twizzlers, and a net to try to catch some wildlife in the pool. Mike spent a lot of time outside during the day, trying to catch various animals as they surfaced in the pool, but he wasn't having much luck. So he headed back out after it was dark and hit the jackpot: an alligator snapping turtle, and a Florida bullfrog! We put them in an aquarium and left it outside for Gara and Kevin to pick up the next morning so she could take them to school (she's a high school biology teacher). She has since let the frog go, because he wasn't eating, but the turtle is doing well and has been named Growler, since he was caught on Growler Day. Growler Day was a resounding success, by the way. Everyone accomplished the goal, and no one fell in the pool. We fully intend to repeat the holiday many, many more times.

non-moving news

Actually, a tiny moving note first. My mom correctly guessed that we had 7 expired phone books in the old house. However, we have already arranged the furniture in our living room, so that prize is no longer an option. You can arrange the kitchen instead. Congratulations!

Last Thursday was Tony's birthday - happy belated birthday! I actually managed to call him on his birthday, and was even the first of his siblings to do so. Technically, Mike did email him before I talked to him, but he didn't call. Granted, he's in Iraq, but that shouldn't really be an excuse. This picture is from when we went to visit in 2008. He was a tiny bit drunk. I'm sure we'll get some new entertaining pictures when everyone comes to visit later this spring. Anyway, happy birthday!

On to the next order of business. We had to say goodbye to a dear member of the family last Friday: Copper the Dog. He turned 15 in December, and has sort of been hurting for the past few years, so it's not like it was totally unexpected. This picture is probably kind of mean, considering he was just put to sleep less than a week ago, but it looks like he's trying to put himself out of his own misery, and it makes me laugh. Poor little guy. Now Munsen is the lone dog on campus, although there are still plenty of cats milling around. Why couldn't one of the animals I'm terribly allergic to have kicked the bucket? Farewell, Copper. Enjoy lying on all the couches you want in Doggy Heaven.

so not dog people

I forgot to mention in my post yesterday that we house- and dog-sat for my co worker this weekend. Dogs are kind of a pain in the ass. This one is, anyway. He needs to be walked all the time and he poops all over the place as he walks. Like, he just squats in the middle of the road, then takes a few steps and goes some more, than walks 10 more feet and goes some more. It's unnecessarily gross. It makes me not want a dog.

Luckily, there are 2 new dogs around that are much cuter, and that we don't have to take care of (ie pick up after). One I mentioned here a couple of months ago, Alfred's parents' new dog, whose name is now Turk (I think they were still deciding on a name last time I mentioned him). He's getting big, but is still cute. He likes to climb in your lap when you sit on the floor. Well, he did last time I saw him, which was like 3 weeks ago, so who knows by now.

The other new dog is Ilya and Mercedes' puppy, Mister. He's a Shih Tzu, and is so, co cute. Partially because he's so tiny, but also just because he's adorable. He gets so excited when anyone pays attention to him. You can just pick him up and he just loves you. You can probably drop kick him pretty far too, not that I've tried, of course.

Actually, the biggest problem I have with dogs is not all the work, but the smells. I hate, and I mean hate, the smell of pet food. And dogs tend to smell. Maybe if you bathe them like all the damn time they're ok, but generally they start to smell. And that grosses me out. It's a good thing Alfred has no great desire to get a dog, either. We'll probably end up with one at some point of our lives, but I'm perfectly happy without one of our own for now.

catching up

Still working on the last week's worth of activities. I had to work on Wednesday, and Alfred stayed home to unpack and take care of some laundry and other chores. When I got home, I was greeted by a new little friend: Mr. Squeakerson. He's a squirrel. Alfred caught him when he ran into the garage earlier in the afternoon. He lived in a laundry basket over night. He was really cute. After some internet research though, we decided he was better off out in the wilderness, so we let him go Thursday morning.

We both worked on Thursday, then went out for a lovely sushi dinner for New Year's Eve. Just the two of us. Aw, romantic. Actually we stuffed ourselves so much I kind of wanted to puke. Then we went over to Ilya to Mercedes' house for New Year's Eve. We ate some more, drank, exchanged gifts, and generally had a rip-roaring good time. We even made it past 1:00! Well, I fell asleep on the couch for a few minutes, but other than that we did well. We made a huge delicious breakfast this morning, too. God, this blog is all about food. Well, you've all met me. Shouldn't be too surprising.

On New Year's Day we hung out with Alfred's family and celebrated Christmas with them. Again, lots of awesome food, nice gifts, the works. We also helped Emily with a project for her dorm (she's an R.A.) It was fun spreading out Christmas this year, it made the holidays last much longer. Then we made some soup to continue our long-standing New Year's Day tradition. This year we tried some dessert fruit soups: strawberry kiwi and blueberry peach. Interesting idea, but they left something to be desired. Too bad.

happy Thanksgiving!

Buddha the puppy says happy Thanksgiving! He loves his little Pilgrim hat.

He likes Crookshanks the cat as well. He likes to bark at her, anyway. She does not like him.

He also likes to run through the bushes when you take him outside to pee.

He's very good about letting someone know when he has to go out. He goes to the front door and kind of bats at the bells that are hanging from the doorknob and then whines if no one responds immediately. He's also extremely cute. Alas, he is not our puppy. Robyn managed to get him the other day in some sort of shady back-alley deal. Someone whose dog had 10 puppies was getting foreclosed on and had to get rid of the puppies, so a bunch of their neighbors took one apiece, and somehow Robyn ended up with one. I'm a tiny bit fuzzy on the details, but that's the gist of it. Not too shady after all, really. He's 14 weeks old. Right now his name seems to be Buddha, but since he's only been around for a couple of days we'll see if it sticks.

Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

us? house sitting? weird!

We've expanded our client base: we spent the weekend house and dog sitting for one of my co workers. We did our best to take advantage of being in a different place. We went out for sangria and appetizers for dinner on Friday, then got some tacos afterwards when we were still a little hungry. Saturday morning I had to go into work for a couple hours, then we met up with Charles, a friend of Alfred's from high school. For those of you who were at our wedding, he was one of our groomsmen, the one with the Superman belt. He was in a bodybuilding competition that day and came to have lunch with us during the break between shows. He hung out with us for the afternoon (and took a nap) before heading back for his evening show. This picture is from his show. He came in fourth in his division. The dog kept licking his feet. Apparently the paint-on tan stuff tastes good to dogs.

Ilya and Mercedes came to join us later in the afternoon, so we drank and played Uno for a couple of hours. The two of them were dominating, especially Mercedes, but I managed to win twice, and Alfred once. After he won his game he decided we were done, so he ended up as the final winner. After Charles left for his competition, we went back to the sangria place for some more drinking and food, and ended up getting pizza and wings for dinner. Pretty healthy stuff. Charles came back to the house after his competition and was attempting to drink a gallon of milk in an hour, but apparently his body was sick and tired of abuse (he hadn't been drinking anything for a few days so that his muscles popped out better or something) and he didn't get very far. Thank God. I was not looking forward to a gallon of white vomit.

Today we headed back home after feeding and walking the dog one last time. This dog, by the way, was pretty weird. This dog was a poop machine, loves car rides to the point of insanity, and searches for cigarette butts to eat when on a walk. There are no sidewalks in their neighborhood, so you have to walk in the street. Twice when I was walking him after dark I totally left his poop in the middle of the road. I'm not touching that. Alfred was a good person and picked up after him. Anyway, we just got finished watching the Jaguars game and eating leftover pizza and wings from last night. We also made beer floats to go with the meal. The game, food, and floats were all good. In fact, a pretty good weekend overall.

Oy

Alfred asked me last night why I hadn't blogged in so long. I told him I blogged from my phone on Sunday. He said he hadn't even checked it in a few days and didn't realize I had posted. In other words, I've been too busy to post at night, and he's been too busy to check it at all. And since I'll likely be busy tonight too, I guess I'll just blog by phone again. I prefer to do it on the laptop because then I can add my tags, and I never remember to go back and do them when I blog from my phone. This is all fascinating, no?

So, we've been busy in the evenings cleaning and getting ready for the familial invasion that begins tomorrow (yay!) Since we weren't home this weekend, I've had to fit all the laundry and cleaning into my few hours between work and bed, along with the usual dinner work. We've had a bunch of other work on the computer to take care of too. And a tiny but of TV (wipe out is back for the summer! And so you think you can dance, of course, which I'm super pumped about. I've been reading spoilers online this morning.) Tonight I also get to make a cake for a co-worker's birthday, her birthday is actually Friday but they're celebrating it a day early so I can come. And make the cake.

Work's been good. I'm trying to balance the actual work with goofing off, so far so good. I catnapped mama kitty yesterday morning and brought her to the new museum, but she bolted as I was opening her cage a bit to give her some water. Damn cat. We're also in the midst of starting up some new tours for the summer so we can make some money for a change. Of course it's happening when I'm planning to take a few days off. Oh well, they don't need me.

This has been a nice way to spend some time. It gets boring all by myself. I like to time how long I go without speaking to another human being. My record was about 2 hours on Sunday. It was broken by a tourist calling me. Damn tourists.

happy birthday Lindsay!

First, I want to say happy birthday to Lindsay! I've been intending to email her for months, but she beat me to it the other day with a super cute picture of her daughter. I think the only picture I have of her is the one I posted last year, so I guess I won't post it again. Happy birthday though! :)

Next, I want to say hi to Meghan! Meghan lives in Kapolei, Hawaii, and apparently just found out about my blog from Mike. I met Meghan when I went out to visit Mike a couple of years ago when he first got back from Iraq. In fact, you can see Mike sitting with his leg propped up in the reflection in the glass door at the right side of this picture. I bet Meghan loves that I'm posting this picture. Hi Meghan!

I considered posting a picture of Mike's bullet wound here, just for fun, but decided against it. Maybe later. Instead, here are some pictures of another wound of sorts. Mama Kitty is still living at the old museum (we're going to try to bring her over to the new place this coming week) and apparently had an accident of some kind. I think her tail is broken. She isn't moving it at all, but doesn't seem to be in much pain. It had some fur on the end of it last week, but now it's gone from about the halfway point down. It looks like a rat's tail. See?

Gross, huh? In person you can see the individual vertebrae that make up her tail. It's kind of cool in a gross way.

Friday was Kara's last day, so I also took a picture of the cake I made for her. Unfortunately the cake was baked over a fault line, and an earthquake struck before we could eat or photograph it.

Really, I frosted it that morning and it didn't have enough time in the fridge for the frosting to set, so it slid in the car. I did all the piping myself. Not bad, huh? Katie taught me all I know. Which isn't much, but it's more than I knew before. It tasted damn good, that's all that matters. And I have a little tupperware container of frosting left in the fridge that I've been sampling over the past couple of days. Mmm, butter and sugar.

All right, I'm going to go back to watching Alf now. I mean, go make granola. One of the two.

the woody woodpecker show

I wanted to just put up a slideshow of these woodpecker pictures, but for some reason I can't upload them, so here they are all in a row:







Based on 4.7 seconds of google research, this is an ivory billed woodpecker. There were 3 of these in our backyard yesterday afternoon, and again this morning. And Mike was army crawling up to them to take pictures. Army's good for something, after all!

Edit: After a more extensive (and sober) search, it turns out the ivory billed woodpecker is super rare and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is offering $50,ooo to anyone who can bring them to a live bird. And I think that these are pileated woodpeckers. No money for me :(

3 weeks later

I guess it's more like 2 1/2 weeks, but whatever. Here are some pictures from our trip to Orlando with Ilya and Mercedes. I posted pictures I took with my phone but actually hadn't looked at the pictures that Mercedes took until just now. There's some good ones! Check out our color scheme. Alfred didn't get the memo.



A reenactment of sorts. Surprisingly, we didn't run into a single other group of people drinking around the world this time.

Apparently I was a little backwards for this pair of pictures.


And Ilya made a friend. How nice.

On Sunday we went to Gatorland, which we hadn't been to before. It was fun, and good for a morning visit since we didn't want to get back home too late.

When we were still in the parking lot we could hear this weird sort of bellowing, roaring noise. It sounded like a sound effect from Jurassic Park. Once we got inside, we found out that it was actually the alligators making the noise. Weird. And interestingly, no pictures of actual gators here. Just some other pals that Mercedes and Ilya made. The baby goats were pretty damn cute.


and.... the end!

I found a dog

Today, just as I was coming out of the new museum with a couple of teachers that I was showing around, this dog came out of nowhere and started trotting around with us. She was white with some tan spots, and had a pink flowered collar, which made me guess that she was a she. She was cute, and not all jumpy and annoying, which was good. She sort of wandered around, sniffing things and going up to people, and I forgot about her, since there are a few people that walk their dogs without leashes around the museum. Well, a few minutes later she wandered into the store. There's a big hole in the screen in the bottom of the store door, so she just walked right on in. Kara (the new girl) started freaking out a bit, because she's sort of afraid of dogs, and started trying to shoo the dog out. I went outside and filled a little bucket with some water, then took it outside to the dog. By then the stupid thing was standing smack dab in the middle of the street, watching the cars drive around and try to avoid hitting her. So I went and grabbed her collar and pulled her out of the street and over to the water, which she seemed to appreciate. I found a tag on her collar with a phone number to a pet tracking service, wrote it and what I assumed was her ID number down, and went into the store to call. While I was on the phone the dog took off again, so I had Kara get on the phone and I went after the dog, who by now had found the group who was eating lunch at our picnic tables. I grabbed her collar again and brought her into the museum, then had the genius idea to tie a piece of twine around her collar so I had a leash for her.

So, I had a dog. I named her Jingles. We walked around the museum a bit, took some trash out to the dumpster, sniffed some stuff. After the group left we sat at the picnic tables, had some water, watched the world go by. Just chillin. Then I got kind of bored, Jingles was just lying on the ground and not playing with me anymore, so I closed her into the picnic area and went outside. Of course, right then her owner showed up, so I took her out to the dog, whose name turned out to be Sassy. I liked Jingles better personally, but whatever. Then her owner told me that this was the third time TODAY that the dog had escaped! I mean ok, it happens, but 3 times by 12:30 in the afternoon? How the hell does she get anything done at work if she's always having to go pick up her damn dog? Plus the lady at the pet tracking place said the dog had been reported found last night. Seems kind of irresponsible, if you ask me, but nobody did, so never mind. :)

it's what's for dinner

(I'll warn you now, there may be a few "that's what she said" moments in this post. Enjoy.)

Last week we got our 1/4 cow worth of meat delivered. It's from the same place we got our lamb from that we visited this summer. (We're eating one of the guys in the last picture of this post.) I had to leave work early, and then they ended up not getting to our house until 3 hours later, so that kind of sucked. But hey, with all this beef, I wasn't complaining!

And so we now have a very full freezer. Full of beef. Grass fed, healthily raised beef. Which is good, because I've decided that beef is my favorite meat. I think I could live on hamburgers and steak for the rest of my life. I mean, I'd probably like to have a pizza now and then too, but if I had to make a choice, it would totally be beef. Incidentally, I decided the other day that if I had to choose one drink for the rest of my life, it would be Kahlua and cream. So apparently I'd be living on Kahlua and cream and beef. Awesome!

We also got our shipment of this really nice wine that we've been getting since our trip out to Napa. So we had a fancy little dinner last Monday to celebrate all of our new food items. We didn't actually drink our new wine, because it came with a little note asking us to let it rest, so we drank last year's wine. Still, it was all quite delicious. Feast your eyes on this.

winter wonderland

I've had a lot of picture-heavy posts lately. I think I'm going to have to have some picture-free posts to even it out soon. I don't want anyone getting too used to all these pictures, cause when my supply dries up I don't want any complaints. Anyway, on to the post.

We put up our Christmas lights this weekend! Yes, I did a lot of work too, but the only picture of me working is from a very unflattering angle and since I'm in charge here, I decide when to post unflattering pictures of myself, and today is not one of those days. There's a total of almost 900 feet of lights up outside right now, and we have another 50 foot strand we could put up. We ran out of daylight and just haven't decided where it will go.

We also did a bit of cleanup yard work. Alfred cut down a bunch of dead palm fronds, I blew off the roof, and Alfred cleaned up branches from the yard. It looks a lot nicer now, plus it's less flammable. We plan on having a few bonfires while my family is down here for Christmas, and thought it might be helpful if the yard wasn't full of dry branches. Palm fronds burn really fast, too. I discovered that while we were working on our house a few years ago. We started a fire in a metal trash can to keep warm (it was some night in November) and when everyone else was in the house I threw some palm fronds on top. The fire was taller than the roof of the house within seconds. I was so afraid someone would look out the window and see this towering inferno and I'd be so busted. I almost shat my pants. Luckily palm fronds burn out pretty fast, too.

We ran into a bit of wildlife around the yard as well. Alfred unearthed what he first thought was a snake, but turned out to be a skink. He was hiding in a palm tree that Alfred was destroying, I mean trimming. Poor little guy lost his home. He eventually fell from the second story roof, but I couldn't find his body so he either vaporized on impact or ran away to safety.

Then when I was blowing off the porch (cause I made a mess from blowing off the roof) this gigantic thing was on the picnic table. I don't know if it was dead or what, but it didn't respond when I gently blew on it with the leaf blower. So I turned the blower on it full blast. That sucker's long gone.

And last, but not least, a dead opossum. At least, that's what I'm guessing it is, judging by its pointy little teeth (at the left of the picture) and its tail (at the right of the picture). I know it's not a bird!

But enough dead animals. Back to the decorations. I put up some garland inside the house, but haven't really gotten much else done inside.

The lights outside took up most of our time. We worked so diligently, then happened to notice that the ones we had lined the walkway with looked a little... suggestive.


It was totally by accident, I swear. Anyway, we adjusted them a bit, and got a couple more strands up, and voila! A winter wonderland!


And next weekend, we get our tree!

happy birthday Katie! and Mike's visit, part 1: animals

Katie-friend, not Katie-sister. Not only is today her birthday, but she got engaged this weekend! Her fiance flew over and surprised her (he's from Germany, and they met in Australia. Such a worldly couple). I'd say it's been a good birthday weekend for her. Happy birthday, Katie!!

Mike came to visit again this weekend, he's been here since Friday night and is leaving tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. It occurred to me, as I was looking through my pictures from the weekend so far, that he's been quite the little animal charmer this weekend. We spent yesterday at Alfred's parents' house, so he got to feed the raccoons.

He actually had one eat out of his hand. Kind of disgusting, if you ask me, but hey. He was excited.

Today he and Alfred came to visit me at work (they even took me out to lunch!) When I went in this morning, Marc Anthony (the chicken) was limping really badly and one of his spurs was torn. I made him an appointment for 5:00, since I had a school there all day, and Alfred and Mike offered to take him earlier for me, so I wouldn't be stuck at work so late. The two of them chased him out of hiding, caught him, and we put him in a garbage can for transport.


They brought him back 2 hours later, down 1 more spur and with bloodier feet. But apparently he's all healthy. And Mike got to make a joke about taking him to KFC and threatening him if he didn't behave. So that's good.

I happen to be smack in the middle of a power hour right now, but that's another post entirely. Stay tuned tomorrow.