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Putting My Foot in It

It has been raining here. A lot.

I’d much rather it be cool and wet than hot and dry. But that’s just me.

Speaking of me… although I still haven’t had time to really go through all of the pictures I took this past weekend, I do have a funny story to share.

My friend, Carol, who I have known for 30+ years, spent the weekend with me at the WV place. While we were away, Hubby moved a bunch of the crap we need to get rid of from the basement to the garage.

The “crap” I am speaking of is stuff we’ve accumulated over the years. Old pictures, knick-knacks, pots and pans, etc. The kind of stuff you hate to throw away even though you know you don’t really want it anymore.

Well, Carol loves to rummage. She’s very good at giving old stuff a new life. So I asked her if she wanted to take a look to see if there was anything she wanted. Together, we started digging through the stuff.

That’s when we came across this one particular box.

“What’s in there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. So I pulled it out of the pile, opened the lid, and peered in.

“Oh, it’s just some tacky thing someone gave me for Christmas,” I reported.

“Uh, really?” she snickered.

“Yeah,” I said, handing her the box. “It’s tacky.”

She looked into the box and laughed.

“What?” I asked. I mean, I knew it was ugly, but I didn’t think it was all that funny.

“Um, I gave you this,” she said, laughing harder.

By then, we were both cracking up.

I have a feeling we’ll be laughing about that one for years…

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Wet and Relaxing

This past weekend was far less eventful than last weekend.

It was pretty wet, but very relaxing.

I took lots of pictures, which I still have to cull through. Everything was very green. The trees have really filled out over the past week.

For whatever reason, I like taking pictures of trees and stuff with water dripping off of them. I thought I’d share a couple for now.

I’ll have more to say about the weekend later…

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Parenting Failure

Occasionally, I am wracked by guilt for taking pictures when I probably should have been taking some other sort of action. Take last weekend as an example…

We were at the WV place with Joey, our adorable little grandson. I wanted to take Joey to see our neighbor, Jean, Buddy’s Mom. Just to prove that even I have brief periods of sanity, I realized it would be much safer to drive to Jean’s house than risk having Joey fall off the very steep ridge we’d have to traverse if walking.

So I loaded Joey and the girls into the truck, and we went to visit Jean.

While Joey and I were visiting, the dogs were off playing. We heard some barks and went to see what the dogs were up to. That’s when I saw this…

That’s my cute little girlie-girl’s butt sticking up out of the groundhog hole. The same one she’d explored a couple of weeks prior to no avail.

You can see that Buddy decided to join her down below. Keep in mind, I was standing atop an 8-foot creek bank with one very bashful toddler clinging to my hip as I clicked away.

If you look closely, you can see that Meg (rear-end visible at far left) joined the “hunt.”

Meg soon lost interest. So did we. And we walked back to the house to resume our visiting.

All was going well, when the dogs suddenly started barking. A lot. In voices that said, “We found something.”

So we walked back over to investigate.

“Oh, look,” Jean said. “They did find something.”

Yup. They’d actually routed out a groundhog. With that still-bashful toddler glued to my hip, I just HAD to get a picture.

“Buddy has been trying to catch that thing for years,” Jean reported. Leave it to my not-so-girlie-girl!

Having trouble seeing the groundhog?

Is that better? He probably weighed about 10-12 pounds. My Tinkerbelle only weighs 25 pounds.

Just when I thought to myself, “I wonder what they’ll do now,” my cute little Tinkerbelle picked the thing up to violently shake the life out of it. But she didn’t shake hard enough, apparently, because it clamped down on her ear.

I was faced with the option of plopping my cute, little, defenseless Joey down atop an 8-foot creek bank to rescue Belle or just screaming loudly to encourage Belle to extricate herself from what had become a pretty intense situation.

Look at the size of that thing clamped down on my baby girl’s ear!

Know what I did? I screamed. It released her.

I thought all was okay…

Then I noticed Belle was bleeding. I raced back to the truck, with Joey still clinging. I called the dogs and they, being the good little girls they are, came running. I loaded everyone in and drove as quickly as I could back to the house.

Quick aside… I so wish I’d gotten a picture of Jean finishing off the not-quite-dead groundhog with a very large stick, but I was panicking. My baby girl was bleeding.

Wounds on dog ears are like wounds on people heads. They bleed a lot.

I was totally freaking out. All I could think of was getting Belle home so Hubby and I could assess the damage. When I got to the house, I unloaded Joey and rushed inside saying, “Belle got bit by a groundhog!”

Apparently ignoring the panic in my voice, Hubby nonchalantly replied, “Oh. She did?”

Then he saw Belle who by then was covered on the front, head to both feet, in blood.

“Oh my GOD!” Hubby said, quickly changing his tune.

We got Belle cleaned up pretty quickly. The cut on her ear was only about 1/4″ long. It took a while to get the bleeding to stop, until we applied some pepper. It worked like a charm.

Here I am tending to my sweet little baby (aka Killer).

She’s fine, by the way. The vet said her ear is healing nicely. He gave her a rabies booster, just in case, and some antibiotics.

Here’s hoping this weekend is less eventful!

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Um… Happy May?

I have nothing specific to Blog about today. However, having visited my Blog to add the new header for May (isn’t it cool?), I had to post something.

I found this Japanese video on YouTube. But don’t worry, there are no subtitles or anything. In fact, there’s not even any talking, ’cause it’s all about a cat and a box.

Mildly entertaining, but better than nothing!

Apparently, there are a series of videos on YouTube about Maru (the cat). But I refuse to get sucked in today.

It’s a big day. My first “summer Friday.” That’s where my company allows employees to choose an alternate work schedule, which results in every other Friday off. Nice, eh?

I’m off to WV. With my girlfriend, Carol. Hubby’s staying home. The girls, Meg and Belle, are coming, too, of course. I’d feel way too guilty going to WV without them because they love it there so much.

Maybe Monday, I’ll have all sorts of cool stuff to Blog about. I doubt it, but one can only hope.

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Unresolved Issues

The battle for the birdhouse is still not over.

Although the Chickadees have continued to build, the Bluebirds have not given up.

The thing is, I have yet to see the Bluebirds actually enter the house. I think the hole is a tad too small.

But they keep trying. I guess that’s where the term “birdbrain” would fit.

If you wanted a house, a house you really liked, but the door was too small for you to enter comfortably, and you didn’t have a handy Hubby like me to enlarge it, would you want to live there?

I think not.

Will the Bluebirds will ever give up? Or will I finally break down and ask Hubby to make the hole bigger?

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On Being a Boy

One thing for sure about our grandson, Joey. He is all boy. Period.

It may sound cliche, but it’s a fact. Boys just do things differently than girls. (Pioneer Woman did a recent post on gender stereotypes you might enjoy viewing for yourself.)

Don’t believe me? Surprise, surprise, I have “a few” pictures to share as proof.

He really seemed to enjoying uprooting plants.

Walking in the gutter, which was of course full of leaves, instead of on the road was fun for him, too.

Oh look, another uprooted plant. He spent a few minutes examining the roots of this one.

Then he had to scamper into the woods—more off-roading!—to find a stick.

Here’s the “stick.”

Here he is pulling the tops off of weeds. He actually tasted this one for some reason. That was a pretty funny face!

He climbed on structures.

He climbed on hills.

He walked around the perimeter of the house looking for interesting stuff to get into.

He shoveled gravel. For hours, it seemed.

And he found G’s rocks.

He climbed on the woodpile.

And was quite proud of his accomplishment.

He found an old bolt, and a rock, and spent about an hour playing with the two.

Doing all sorts of stuff I can’t explain. But he was having fun.

The next day, he filled my flower pots with gravel, stones, sticks and such.

He was a good sport letting me take so many pictures.

Look how he is sitting on the very edge of the patio.

Oh the concentration! The pots were heavy, what with all the gravel he’d put into them.

This is one of my favorite shots. He rides in his car seat with his hands behind his head like that. I just held the camera up, pointed it into the backseat, and clicked. Figures, right?

I hope you enjoyed seeing the Joey pics as much as we enjoyed Joey’s company!