he loves the snow

Wordless Wednesday HQ

old pictures - dogs

I bought myself a little handheld scanner a few weeks ago. It's not the best scanner but it's nice that it's so small and easy to use. So I've been going through some of my old pictures and thought I dedicate this week to old pictures that I find to be noteworthy.

I really started last Friday when I posted a picture of my first car. Today I have two pictures that show our first two dogs.


Here is Don with our very first dog, named Shasta. We were in high school when we picked her out of a litter of abandoned puppies. The other puppies ended up looking more like retrievers, but Shasta looked more like a shepherd. She went to live with Don and his family and I had to give her my love and attention when I spent time at their home (which was nearly every day). By the way, this is what Don looked like in high school. This is the boy I fell in love with =) The picture was probably taken in 1977, the year we graduated.


Shortly after we got married and moved into a rented house, we bought Kirby. He was our first golden retriever (our current dog is our third golden) and our parents considered him their granddog since we weren't having grandchildren fast enough for them. He was a good dog and we did a lot of camping with him. I figured this picture was taken somewhere around '83 or '84.

in case you wanted to know...

It's been a nice and lazy weekend around here. Here are a few random thoughts and happenings:

~~> On the 4th, after our family BBQ and Jake going off to work, the rest of us went to see WALL-E. What an interesting movie. It's not quite the way I thought it was going to be. There's very little dialog so it was slow at times. It's for this reason that I'm not sure little kids would enjoy it, although the characters were very cute. But the storyline was good and it made me think on a deeper level.

~~> After the movie, we hurried over to where a grand fireworks show would be performed. It's the biggest in the area and they were predicting 100,000 people would be in the area. This was our first time to this show but we had a pretty good idea of where we wanted to sit. So we went early, set up our chairs and blanket, and just hung out for nearly an hour. We were on a grassy area next to a large parking lot. There were a lot of people sharing the grass with us. About 20 minutes before the show was about to start, the unthinkable happened. [hehehe]

The sprinklers turned on. You should have seen the crowd scramble while grabbing all their belongings, including younger children. Luckily, we were sitting on the very edge of the grassy area and the sprinklers barely hit us. We only had to casually get up and move away. It was one of those cases where you shouldn't have seen it as humorous, but couldn't help but laugh =D

~~> I started a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle on Friday... and finished it Saturday.

~~> Our dog, Brody, has a cowlick on the top of his head. It makes it look like he has a mohawk. The problem is that it continues to grow and it looks... well, for a lack of better way to describe it - weird. I've always thought it needed to be trimmed but Jake, who is the official owner of said dog, has always been adamant that no hair will be cut.

Don gave Brody a bath yesterday and those flyaway hairs just looked ridiculous. After pleading for a whole day, Jake finally gave me permission to cut it. Oh, it looks so much better.

Before and after....



and what was cut off...

silly dog

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Wordless Wednesday here and here

wordless

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link of the day:
http://www.americasfavoritemom.com/?srccode=AFM_goog

ouch

Remember this (posted here)...

Well, my puppy liked mine so much, he wanted one...


Sunday we came home from church to find Brody's paw bleeding. We tried all afternoon to get it to stop. We made him lay on a blanket and the bleeding would subside - until he would get up and then it would start again. Don went out to buy some special stuff that helps to stop the bleeding. It worked for a while, but once Brody started walking around, the wound opened right up and the blood started flowing. At about the point where the blood was dripping from his paw, we decided we needed to get him to a vet.

Unfortunately, there's no vet offices open at 7:00 on a Sunday night. So we had to take him to an emergency animal hospital. [cha-ching$$... there goes half of our summer vacation.] They wrapped the red bandage around him as soon as we carried him in because they didn't want him to bleed all over their floor. They determined they needed to stitch him up. We had to leave him there and go back to pick him up, which Jake and I did at 11:00.

They gave us this little plastic bootie for him to wear when he needs to go outside. But he can only go out to take care of business. We're supposed to keep him calm and inactive. When he needs to go out, we have to take him on a leash.
And he's supposed to wear this collar to keep him from trying to get his bandage off.

Of course, he hates the bandage, the bootie, and the collar. And of course, we hate having to keep him in the house when he loves to be out in the snow and having to take him outside when it's below 10 degrees.

And in case you're wondering, we think he cut his paw on the metal landscaping trimming we have in the backyard... the ones that he spent all summer tearing off the rubber protection. When the temperatures rise a little and the snow melts, we'll have to go out and rip out every piece of trimming.

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link of the day:
http://www.m-w.com/info/07words.htm

is this week over yet?

Well, once again, my heart is heavy. I'm sorry my past few posts have been more on the negative side. It's been a hard week. Next week will be so much better, and I'll get to that here in a minute.

Right now it's late Wednesday night and I am not looking forward to tomorrow morning. By the time most of you read this, I will have had to take our family cat, Snickers, into the vet's office to be put down. I'll spare you all the details. The bottom line is that he has cancer and it's got to the point where he is not living comfortably. We've known for a year or so that his time was limited. We are thankful that we've had him for as long as we have.

But it is still a hard thing to do and a sad time, especially for Danielle and I. It's Danielle's cat and the two of us were the ones that loved him and took care of him. We will truly miss him.

Here's the really hard part; Dani can't come home from school, but she wants someone to be in the room with him when he's injected and takes his last breath. We've had to have dogs put down before and it's always Don who takes on this responsibility. I've never felt strong enough to do it. But now I have to, and I'm not looking forward to it. I know it's going to stay with me the rest of the day, if not longer. But I know how much this means to Dani, so that's why I'm doing it.

It's been a tough week. We need a vacation. Good thing we have one planned for next week. Oh yes, we do! This vacation has been planned for months and it's perfect timing. You can't even know how much Don needs to get away from his job, even if it is only for a week.

Where are we going, you ask? The same place the photo I posted yesterday was taken. My favorite place in the whole world. Okay, I haven't been to too many places in this world, but it's still my favorite. The photo was taken in... and Don and I are going to... the beautiful island of Maui. Oh yes, we are!

We leave early Saturday and will be gone for a week. We [just the two of us] will be in a tropical paradise in the middle of November with no responsibilities except to decide what kind of drinks we want to sip by the pool or what fresh fish we will order for dinner.

I hesitated telling anyone about this trip. I'm not even sure all of my family knows we're going. It seems like a pretty extravagant vacation to be taking in light of Don's job situation. But it was actually paid for long ago and we had to take it before January 1st or we would lose all the money we put into it. The resort is going to want us to buy a time-share, but that won't be happening due to Don's job situation.

So, we're going to go spend a week in paradise, enjoying time spent with each other, with very little to do, and hopefully leaving the stress thousands of miles away.

note: I am still planning to blog, but we'll see how that goes.

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link of the day:
http://www.uptoten.com/

sibling rivalry

Guess what?
It's Wordless Wednesday!
Enough said.







disclaimer: No animals were harmed in the process of this photo shoot. And it's actually the cat that gets mean!

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link of the day:
http://www.karenika.com/50states/

i don't think he likes his picture taken

it's wordless wednesday. this is all i got today. but i say it's enough ;D


by the way... thank you everyone for your suggestions on what i should i do with all my cloud pictures. they were all great and i might just try them all.

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link of the day:
http://www.motionportrait.com/about/TIdog.swf

jake was not happy!

be sure to check out all the wordless wednesday participants.








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link of the day:
http://www.globalrichlist.com/

mesmerizing

this is my daughter's cat, snickers. he doesn't get much attention around here since the boys in the house claim they don't like cats. every once in a while, dani and i dress him up or put fun stuff on him and then send the pictures into stuff on my cat dot com (link).


when we sent this photo in, there were a lot of people who commented that he looked like the girl on the famous national geographic cover with the mesmerizing eyes. that, or a jedi warrior. what do you think?


head on over to wordless wednesday to check out the list of this week's participants.

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link of the day:
http://mingle2.com/blog-addiction

the difference 9 months makes

here's another wordless wednesday.

kids aren't the only ones that grow up too fast. here's our puppy, brody, and snickers last october and then a few days ago. brody will be having his one year birthday party next month. snickers will be 6 in september.




and, as you can tell, i finally finished with this new design for my blog. i like it. but don't be surprised if it changes some day. now that i'm getting the hang of coding, i plan to continue playing around with it to see what i can come up with. now that i'm done, my daughter has asked me to redesign her blog.

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link of the day:
http://mushygushy.com/
(thanks boomama)

dogs love tennis balls

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link of the day:

http://www.wordlesswednesday.com/

the wag of the tail

i heard an interesting story today. you can read it and see a video by following the link of the day.

it reports that italian researchers are claiming that they can tell if a dog is happy or not by the way he/she wags his/her tail. it goes on to say that they measured the angle of the dog's wag and if it favored the left, then the dog wasn't happy with what it was seeing. but if the angle favors the right, then the dog is happy.

i can agree with the fact that the dog isn't always happy and that it even may wag his/her tail when he/she isn't happy. but what i have a problem with is; what makes the researchers think that they would know what makes the dog happy or not happy? i want to know how they would know this.

so, all night, i've been watching brody's tail wag. i can't tell which side he is favoring. and i'm thinking that when he's wagging, he's happy. he just looks happy. he's a happy dog :)

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link of the day:
http://cbs4denver.com/watercooler/watercooler_story_114211531.html