Dog Door Rush Hour Traffic

Lucy has this habit of running to the dog door, sticking her head out, and then just standing there. Which makes it really inconvenient if Marley or Oso want to use the dog door. Marley and Lucy stood like this long enough for me to run into the kitchen, grab my camera, turn it on, insert the memory card, and take a picture. Marley is so patient. I'd have bitten her tail or something.

If you look really closely you can see where she ripped her drainage tube out. Yuck.

3rd Post, Same Dog

We do have 2 other dogs, but they didn't pull out their drainage tubes this afternoon. Linda, you SO called it.

For Everything Else...

Gas to drive Lucy to the Vet... $1.00

Vet office visit... $42.00

Antibiotic, pain reliever, and some other medicine that, um, does something...$85.00

Emergency surgery... $455.00

Watching Collin and me shove these pills:

into this dogs mouth:
and getting her to swallow them instead of hacking them up onto the kitchen floor...
Priceless.
(Scroll to the bottom of the post "What a Week" to see why we spent over $500 at the vet.)

What a Week

Wednesday

I hosted a baby shower for one of my best friends, Jen. Her and Baby Abbey got a TON of adorable stuff (I heard Zach was pleased as well). We had meatballs and Jen managed to not get any marinara sauce on her belly. I've eaten lunch with her and this was quite a feat. Way to go Jen!Thursday
About 4 in the morning Collin left for the weekend for a Scout camp out with the Young Men. That night my friend Caryn and I checked out the free concert going on downtown at the Gallivan Center. We saw Iron & Wine. (I wish I could say that I had taken this picture. It was so packed I couldn't even SEE the stage.) Friday-Saturday
The plan:
Friday 4:30 pm- Get home from work and watch the Scarlet Pimpernel (Go Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman!)
7:00 pm- Read uninterrupted (Collin had Lucy on the camp out. I'd forgotten how nice it was to read and not have to play fetch every other page or so).
10:00 pm- Go to bed (at a reasonable hour for once).
Saturday 9:30ish- Wake up, organize ALL my closets and cupboards until Collin came home.

What happened:
Friday 4:30 pm- Got home from work and watched the Scarlet Pimpernel
7:00 pm- Read uninterrupted
10:00 pm- Went to bed (so far so good)
10:30 pm- Got a call from Collin saying that Lucy had been attacked by a German Sheperd and her leg was swollen to twice the size.

10:45 pm- Called the emergency vet to see what we should do. I decided that we would wait until morning and take her to our vet.

11:00 pm- Waited 2 1/2 hours for Collin to come home. May or may not have dozed off.

1:30 am- Collin came home with the most pathetic, sad looking little dog I had ever seen. Her back leg was so swollen and she wouldn't put weight on it. She just hopped around looking miserable.

2:00 am- We went to bed and put some ice on her leg. Nobody got any sleep.

Saturday 7:45 am- We took her to our vet and were pretty much turned away because they already had another emergency surgery going on.

8:00 am- Got her into the vet that is down the street from our (possibly former, they weren't very sympathetic) vet.

8:30 am- Dr. Jason Examined Lucy.

9:00 am- Lucy was taken in for surgery. They had to put her under and shave all the hair off her back leg. She had 4 puncture wounds and her leg was full of pus. They cleaned out the infection and inserted a tube drain that we have to take her back to get removed.

11:30 am- We picked Lucy up. When they brought her out she had one of those lamp shade things on her head, a bandage on her front leg from the IV, and a tube sticking out her back leg. She looked even more pathetic than she did the night before.

12:00 pm- We came home and we all watched movies and slept the rest of the day.

And here she is today. Those must be some pretty awesome pain pills. The look on her face seems to say "What? It's not normal to want to play fetch with a tube sticking out your back leg?"

Graphic Picture Alert: Here is the aforementioned tube. You can't see it in that last picture.
Needless to say, my closets and cupboards still need organizing. Maybe next weekend...

Happy 90th Birthday!

Rita Willis Brown, my Grandma, will turn 90 on the 18th. We had a party for her today. Here is a picture of her when she was about my age.Grandma (on the right) and her two sisters, Earline and May.Grandma (on the right) today with her one surviving sister, May.My grandparents and their kids (my mom is the cute one in the bottom corner).Grandma and her kids (Dennis, my mom, Kelly, and Susan). Grandpa passed away 10 years ago.Me, Grandma, and my sister Jenn.

Grandma is probably the biggest Jazz fan I know. (If anyone knows of a way I could introduce her to a few of the Jazz players, let me know. She would LOVE it).
The grandkids. Well, about half of us. Some of them lived too far away to come.

Happy Birthday Grandma!

Phone Tips

I don't know if it's just because I'm really tired (I need to get to bed earlier) but this made a little bit of Crystal Light Natural Citrus Splash (ah, the stinging!) come out my nose:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32317163/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

My favorite is the captions.

Glasses-less

I have worn glasses for the passed 6 years. I didn't want to. My eye doctor took a topographical map of the surface of my eye and when he showed it to me he said "this is supposed to look a target with your pupil in the middle and the layers of the target are supposed to be the curve of your eye." Mine looked like a Monet. He said my contacts were changing the shape of my eye. I knew something was going on because I couldn't keep them in for longer than an hour or two. Oh well, I'm a glasses person. Tina Fey can pull it off, why can't I? But every once in a while I wonder what I look like without them. Here, my friends, is the answer:No glasses puts a serious damper on the Librarian Look. You can't even TELL that it's a Librarian Look. This look strikes fear in no one.

Maybe someday, with enough money and guts, I'll down enough valum to be able to get LASIK. Untill then I'll just have to live with the fact that guys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. Good thing I have Collin.

I HEART READING

So, I know there are other blogs out there that focus just on reading. There are even whole social networking sites set up around it such as Goodreads. But they all intimidate me so I decided to make my own little reading blog. Feel free to comment on any books you've read or to tell me about a book you'd think I'd like based on something I've already read.

my reading blog:
I HEART READING
(original, huh?)

Book Report Due Monday

I finished To Kill a Mockingbird last night for the second time. The first time I read it was about ten or so years ago. My then English teacher, Mrs. Schneider, has us read it painfully slow; picking apart every chapter with worksheets and reflections and group discussions. Because of how long it took to read back then I was expecting the book to be at least 700 pages long. Imagine my surprise when I finished it in 3 afternoons? It kind of makes me want to go back and reread a few other books also dissected by Mrs. Schneider such as Raisin in the Sun, Silas Marner, Count of Monte Cristo, Rebecca, and Huckleberry Finn.
Anyway, one thing my memory did not fail on was how much I loved it (that and the ham costume, I’ll never forget the ham costume). I love Scout. She is one of my all time favorite characters. I’d forgotten what happened to Tom Robinson in the end and the part about Mrs. Dubose and Jem reading to her. Or about how Dill wanted to marry Scout when they grew up. I wonder if they did. I know they are just characters, but I kind of want to know where Jem, Scout, and Dill were 20 years later. I’ll bet they were Civil Rights Activists.
What other books did English teachers make us read? I know there are more. Wuthering Heights just came to me…

Happy 25th!

My little sister Jenn (Jenny to me and everyone else who had the privilege of knowing her since she was a baby) turned 25 over the weekend. In her honor we (my mom, Jenn's son, Alex, and me) took her to the Olive Garden last night. Happy Birthday baby sister! (Although I don't see how it's possible that you're 25 because I swear I'm still only 21, 23 at the oldest...) That's her right there in a rare nonfrazzled moment. Alex must have been paying attention to the camera...

Strawberry Reservoir Forever

I've been getting teased a lot about how "adventurous" Collin and I have become in our travels. Before I start bragging about the latest fun filled vacation Collin and I took this summer, I want you to know this isn't normal. Last year we got out 4 times THE ENTIRE YEAR (and two of those were only because the Gibson's took pity on us and let us come to Bear Lake with them)! Don't believe me, go read my blog from a year ago. Before this year, the number of times Collin and I went out of state was a grand total of 4 and we went on maybe 2 camping trips every summer. This was just our year to see the world (DC is the world, right?)

So, with that out of my system, please enjoy this post about the latest fun filled vacation Collin and I took this summer:

Here we are in the trailer at Strawberry Reservoir. It was really windy so we couldn't go out on the boat much the first day. So we played Skip-Bo. Collin won once and I won once so we stopped there. We are competitive and that kept the peace.
The next day we were able to get out on the boat. We found out years ago that Marley and Oso are not seafaring dogs. They prefer being on dry ground. So we left them back at camp with Grandma and Grandpa and took Lucy. Note to self: Lucy is also not a seafaring dog. I could barely read with her pressed up against me whining.
Collin, the sexiest fisherman I know.
Rachel, the sexiest reader Collin knows. Strawberry isn't too far from Sundance so we headed over there with Collin's sister, her husband, and their two boys. Here we are riding on the ski lift.
We went on a little hike with these two. These boys are SO funny. The kept us, and our dogs, entertained all weekend.
Sundance has some really great scenery. Here we are, ruining it, by insisting on standing in front of it and having our picture taken.
I finished this book (AND LOVED IT!!!!)I read this book (And also loved it. How did I go so long without knowing about the Scarlet Pimpernel? I feel kind of cheated. Stupid English teachers...)And I read this book. Were it not for the references to my all time favorite books ever (the Anne of Green Gables series) I would have not like this book at all. But, alas, any fan of Anne already has one foot in my friendship door.