Sick Puppy

Poor Rip.

A few weeks ago we noticed a little bump on his lip. Resisting the temptation to dash off to the vet immediately, we decided to keep an eye on it. This resulted in watching it grow to about the size of a medium marble (not the big shooter one, but not the pee-wee ones either) and also to abandon the ‘wait and see’ attitude in the future. Our vet said it is probably nothing to worry about, but he wouldn’t really know unless they removed it and biopsied it. This is code for ‘only a heartless bitch wouldn’t pony up the big bucks to have this groody thing removed.’ Or at least that is how I interpreted it. Being that I can barely imagine life with out the Ripper, we scheduled surgery immediately.

He went under the knife yesterday. I couldn’t bare to take him, so the HSH did it for me. He said Ripken definitely knew something was up, as he refused to walk into the vet’s office (a place he typically doesn’t mind going) and eventually had to be picked up by the vet tech, to avoid being dragged, paws locked in the stretched out position, out of the HSH’s sight. He went on to say that that if his tail had been tucked any further between his legs, it probably would have been tickling his nose. When the HSH told me all of this, I practically broke into tears. Thankfully, the nice people at the vet’s office called me right after he had woken up from surgery to let me know things had gone well and Rip was resting comfortably. We have to wait a few days to get the biopsy result back.

Sadly the humiliation continues though, as he is forced to wear a cone so he doesn’t rip out his stitches, and I share these pictures of him, not looking at his best, with the world. He also has a little shaved paw where they put the IV in. Break my heart.


(side note: our vet is very good, but his bedside manner leaves a little to be desired. I really like him despite this, and as someone pointed out to me ‘if he were good with people, maybe he wouldn’t have been a vet’)

Happy New Year!

Well we are only 4 days into the new year and already: What a year it's been! The year started off with a very big "Bang!" when Jelly Bean entered at 11:21pm on the first day of the year. At 9lbs 8oz and 22 inches long the bean was not messing around. Mom (McD) and Dad (CK) are doing wonderfully, but were a little paparazzi adverse. I did get some good shots of the baby though. Enjoy below.

"Stick with me kiddo. I have all the good dirt on your Mom"

Chillaxing

Suck it, Martha

Oh wise internet peeps:
While visiting the padres in Kansas (my parents, not the baseball team) I saw this craft project in a Martha Stewart magazine. I stupidly thought to myself ‘Hey! That’s cute, and it doesn’t look like its very hard.' I have NO idea what i was thinking. For starters, I'm not very crafty. But even a craft rookie like me knows that Martha projects are NEVER as easy as they seem.

My attempt to recreate looks like this. I'm actually embarrassed to share these pictures with the internet but here it goes...
Shannon incorrectly predicted the clothespins would be a pain in the ass. She was right about the P.I.A. part, but it wasn’t the clothespins that sucked to make. Those were fairly easy and turned out pretty cute.

Here are the issues:
1. Where does one find real garland like pictured in Martha? Here’s a clue; not the Houston Garden Center. All they had was this lame ass stuff that is pictured in my version.
2. How is the ribbon affixed to the garland/banister. I’m guessing not scotch tape, which is how it is hanging in my version (note: this lasted all of 23 minutes before it fell under the weight of the attached cards).

I think my version looks terrible. What do you guys think? Honestly. I have several options on what to do next.
a. Leave as is.
b. Scrap the real garland, and find a good looking faux one. It’s not like I’m standing on principle, my tree is fake.
c. Scrap the entire thing and buy the overpriced Snowman card holder I wanted originally. I'm not crazy about it, but am unsure what else to do with the Christmas cards that we are getting.
d. leave all Christmas cards received in a stack in the kitchen (aka the method used successfully for 5 plus years).

In Which My Dog Says "Take That Rudolph"

I often wonder what my dog is thinking. People with no kids have time to do this. A lot of people think they can tell what kind of parent I’ll be after seeing me interact with my dog. I’m not sure how I feel about this. True, my dog is spoiled rotten. My dogs growing up are looking down from the big dog park in the sky thinking “you lucky bastard! I was never allowed to (fill in the blank)!” All I can say guys is: Blame Mom and Dad! I kid, I kid (no really, don’t’ look at me). The rest of my family is pretty appalled when they see what Rip gets away with. When staying with the Newport Martinez (I guess now the In-Transit Martinez) I let their family dog sleep in the bed with me. My brother about stroked out. What can I say? I have a hard time saying no to a cute face that just wants to snuggle. Ok, maybe I am in trouble. Not that it took a genius to figure this out. Has anyone seen me interact with my nieces?

Anyway, I think it was pretty obvious what Ripken was thinking when he was watching me decorate the tree this year curled up on the couch (dios mio HE'S ALLOWED ON THE FURNITURE!). He was pretending he was asleep, but really he was pondering the pros and cons of ornament eating. He decided on two little stuffed glittery reindeer. Oddly, they were in separate sections of the tree, but he sought them out with that beagle nose of his, and had his way with both of them in the time it took me to put a load of laundry in the dryer. (Now my mom is thinking “she was doing laundry?!?”) Photographic evidence below. (of the ornament eating, not the laundry…you’ll just have to take my word on that)

The Bailout

Got this from a guy at the office, and laughed my butt off:

original source here, if you can't read the small print. Although since the HSH drives a Ford, I guess they got us coming and going!

note: I'm clearly not the only one that found this funny as the Barron of Blog posted it today as well. This serves to reinforce my theories regarding original content on the web! Get out of my dome Barron!

Snow, y'all!

Yes, it sometimes snows in Texas. I can probably count the number of times on one hand since I've been here. This includes a memorable time when I was in college. Lots of people went running around in it making sad little snowmen, and attempting snowball fights. (It doesn't count people, if you have to recycle snowballs to return fire.) It was an easy way to pick out where people were from. Kids from places where snow is an inconvenience and not a picture opportunity mainly looked out the window and said 'M'eh. Who knew?' Then went back to whatever they were doing. Studying for some. More likely napping for me. Now, I've been here for so long I get pretty fired about. I thought the snow we saw in Kansas at Thanksgiving would be my only dose for the season. Who knew that Jack Frost would shake his way down to H-town as well? I stayed inside snuggled up (old habits die hard) but the Halfstreet Mother in Law took this picture at her house!

Random Boringness

(NKC emailed with a special request for me to post (Cafferty too, I'm not the only slacker). I'm so boring lately that I don't really have much. This will have to do, unless you want me to take pictures of my Christmas decorations, which are pretty darn good if you ask me!)

I often think I need a more exciting life, then I would have more to blog about. I once lived in London, which sounds exciting, but really it was much like my life here, only less convenient. I recently came across a new blog which I already love. Mainly because he updates alot (unlike some me's). The author lives in Paris, which certainly sounds exciting, and gives him lots of blog material. He has one post that reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten about in London. If you skip down to the section on French showers, I've had almost the exact same experience.

I lived in a wonderful house in central London, with 3 friends, all American, and all working for the “E”mpire. It was really a fantastic experience, right up to the point I got abandoned in London by my company, but that’s another post. This post is about the bathroom the girls in the house shared. In all my time in London, I really never discussed the shower situation, mainly because I thought I was just too dumb to figure it out, and I didn’t want my super smart roommates to discover what a fraud I was. Reading this blog posting though, made me realize I’m not alone. Picture a bathtub, with no shower curtain, and no shower head. Just a hose. And no method for attaching it to the wall, shower head style. I experimented with a variety of methods for bathing in this set up. I tried standing up, but felt completely ridiculous. Plus, as the blog points out, it was a sure fire way to soak the entire bathroom, or freeze your tuchus off as there was no way to both cover your body with the spray and contain it in the bathtub. And there was the whole shortage of hands issue. How do you open the shampoo, squeeze, and apply to hair all with one hand? It's not possible, trust me. The only option in the standing method was to turn the water on and off, which quickly turned my shower into a 20 minute battle of absurdity. The only feasible option I discovered was sitting down in the bathtub, and utilizing my legs to hold the shower head while shampooing or soaping up. It was ridiculous. There is something about sitting in an empty bathtub that is so …humbling…mortifying….ridiculous? (I’m struggling for the proper adjective here, but just give it a whirl once in your own bathroom, and maybe the appropriate word will pop into your head. Let me know how that turns out for you.) Not to mention, it was still pretty chilly, as its not really possible to be covered by the water while sitting. Plus there was more than one occasion where the shower head got away from me and ended up soaking the entire room, and ruining entire rolls of toilet paper at a time. And no, a full-on bath, while tempting for warmth purposes, was not an option. I never feel clean after one, and can you really wash your hair effectively that way? Anyway, just as I was resigning myself to the system, I was asked to leave the country. I haven’t thought about it much since then, but it’s funny to me that I just assumed I was the only one who couldn’t figure this out. In my mind it was one of those logic games that they ask you in interviews and if I thought about it long enough I would figure out how to get the chicken, the fox, AND the bag of grain across the river. And if you ask for help, they will kick you out of the country. Oh wait, they did that anyway.

The one with the blue door was my house. Yes, I would describe this as "wonderful" compared to what many of my friends lived in!