How the heck ...

... did it get to be August already?

Poodle meetup

Yesterday was the annual summer poodle party, with close to 50 people and 30 poodles in attendance. The photo session was a little chaotic. The photographers (many) and their dogs were on one side of the yard and the photo subjects on the other. So, I'm not in the photo.

The rest of the time, all the dogs were loose and playing. Jackson and Lucy came home exhausted.

Hulu hoop

I don't watch TV. I don't watch it for many reasons:

1. I have no self-control. If the TV's on, I'm watching it. I will watch whatever's on it for hours and hours. I can't turn it off.
   
2. Since I am not willing to pay for TV, absolute crap is often all I can find.
   
3. I work nights and I don't like to watch during daylight hours, which leaves after-midnight viewing (see No. 2 above). Which means I can be up all night watching crap (see No. 1 above).

Yes, I could pay for better programming, but since I've already got enough things to keep me occupied, it's better for me to just not have a TV in the first place. If I don't turn it on, I won't have a problem turning it off.

Then I discovered Hulu. I had learned about "Glee" when I read an interview with Jane Lynch (she was so awesome in "40 Year Old Virgin"), so I watched the pilot on Hulu. Then I did a search for other pilots and discovered they had almost all of "Lost." Then I heard about "Community." And "Modern Family." I watched some episodes of "Scrubs."

The other night I saw the pilot for "Being Erica," which has an intriguing premise (fixing past mistakes in your life via time travel). (And let me tell you, I wouldn't mind redoing a few bad choices myself.)

So while I still don't watch television, I do watch television programming. What's nice is that I don't have to do it at a certain time, or sit through a lot of advertising. Maybe once a month I have an evening of Hulu watching on my laptop, and then I'm all caught up. Hulu is pretty awesome.

Naptime

I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping. Even as a baby, I wasn't much of a napper. I remember it being particularly bad when I was working swing shift in South Dakota. I didn't have TV, so I got a lot of reading done, often until the sun came up.

Then I got Sophie. Having a dog meant walking every day. And without much else to do, we walked pretty far. Suddenly it became much easier to go to bed after work. And to take naps.

I've come to love a good nap. It helps to have dogs who also love naps. And to have a good spot for napping that is not the bed. The window seat fills that bill, as evidenced by this day-after-the-wedding photo.

It's also possible to have an excellent nap in the car.

Where do you like to nap?

Happy Traveler

Passport prices are going up on Tuesday, I just found out. I was thinking I could slide under the wire on renewing mine, but I won't have all the name-change documentation ready in time.

Did you know you can also get a "passport card"? It's cheaper than a passport, but it's only good at land crossings and seaports. Not accepted for air travel. Too bad. Nobody stamps passports anymore, so a card would be much more convenient.

Rack 'em up

With the addition of another household to this household, my haphazard storage solutions and packrattiness have undergone serious re-evaluation. When you're one person with a fair amount of space, it's easy to just let stuff spread and fill it.

Take the wine, for example (I know you'd like to). A shelf in the laundry room cabinet was a good place for it, then another shelf. The good stuff lived in the basement, on the rack I found in the alley three years ago.
This is just the bottom half of that rack – the top has been out in the garage.
Yes, at last all that wine is getting a proper home, thanks to my handy Sergeant.
And we'll now have more space in the laundry room for the overflow of our combined kitchen goods.

I am a lucky woman.

Happy Fourth!

This is a photo from Friday night. Our friends have a place with a rooftop deck overlooking downtown and the ballpark. I took along fixings for mojitos and we enjoyed watching the post-game fireworks.

I had to work tonight, and it was raining, so I was glad to get my ooh-ing and ah-ing done early.

If you jiggle your camera around on a long exposure, you can get some fun abstractions. Or if you drink a lot, that's what you can say it is.

Knee-deep

Exercising the dogs is a good way to avoid other responsibilities. It's a necessary interruption. Walking in town is good exercise for all of us. Going to the dog park is better for the dogs and worse for us. The dogs run; we stand and watch. Or we stroll. Or wade.

The wading is an attempt to get the dogs into the water willingly. Though water dogs as a breed, they didn't get early exposure and now they're leery. Jackson's pretty easy to persuade. Lucy not so much. But she'll come to me because I ask her to.

We want them to swim because they need to cool off and it is good, low-impact exercise. But I may have to go all the way in before they learn.

A poser

A long time ago I started doing Bikram yoga. If you're not familiar with it, that's a series of 27 poses done over an hour and a half in a very hot, humid room. I liked it OK; it was challenging but not impossible, and I could feel some benefits from it fairly quickly.

Then I let myself get talked into doing a Bikram Challenge: For $60, you could attend 60 Bikram classes – six times a week for 10 weeks. The catch being that if you attended fewer than six classes in any week, you were out, and your money forfeit. My friend and I figured that even if we did it for a couple of weeks, we'd get our money's worth (classes were normally $12 per session).

My friend dropped out after three weeks. Somehow I managed to do the whole 10, including one hellish week where I doubled up on classes three days in a row because I was going out of town.

Oh my god, I had six-pack abs. And my skin looked great. And I had no more lower back pain from hunching over a computer all the time. And I was so friggin' sick and tired of Bikram yoga that I pretty much never did again.

I've been reading another blogger's account of doing a similar challenge, and it's interesting to see a different perspective on it. I'm thinking, hmm, I really need to get back into some kind of disciplined exercise routine (beyond walking the dogs). Yoga is possible, but it's not going to be Bikram. Maybe pilates? Or maybe I should try a mix of weight and interval training.

What do you do for regular exercise?

Bless this union . . .

. . . of kitchen tools.

I'm also thinking I should get those Donna Hay magazines off the floor and onto the bookcase, which means I need to cull some cookbooks. A good blogging challenge in that process would be to cook something from each book and write about it. Hmmm.

You can't keep Lucy down

Another nice capture from the Sergeant. We're taking Lucy to the vet tomorrow to see if her foot is healing OK and ask whether we can get her groomed. It's awfully hot for a shaggy black dog! Jackson got his trim on June 4 but Lucy had to sit that one out.

Go, dog, go!

Jackson is very happy to have an extra set of hands around all the time now. More ball-throwing! More petting! (The Sergeant took these photos with his nice DSLR.)

Lucy is still recovering from her foot injury. After being in a splint for three weeks, she lost all her calluses on the toe pads. When the bandages came off, she promptly cut her pads open on some sharp gravel. So the morning of the wedding, I was hanging out with her at the vet. Again.

They did not charge me for that visit.

Do me a favor

I will continue to be busy for a while, merging households and pets. The bees can take of themselves though, and were kind enough to provide favors for our special day.
Here's a video of the harvest:

I got three stings on my cheek when I foolishly left my veil off too close to the hive after harvesting. The bees were a little peeved. But I was happy!

Thanks to Jen Yu for the shot of the favors and to Photographer Deb for the picture of me!

This is why ...

... I haven't been around much lately.


Many thanks to photographer Jen Yu at Use Real Butter

Up on the roof

A co-worker called Saturday and asked me to get some bees off his neighbor's house.
I tracked down Maggie, who needed bees, and off we went.

In hindsight, a bee vacuum would've been a much better option for a swarm like this. The girls were just too spread out in an awkward, high space, and we had no idea where the queen might be.

Watch and learn!

I got a small sting on my finger through the glove, and worse, one on my lip through the veil when I leaned back. I had a fat lip that night, and a fat jaw the next day. Weird! But I'm all right now.