Sit, Chester, Sit!

It's been almost 2 weeks since we brought Chester home and he's been an absolute joy. He's already housetrained, fetches toys when we throw them and sits on command...What a good boy! He also sleeps in our room in his sherpa bed all night long.

Having a puppy is infinitely easier than having a kid.

I wasn't sure what to do on Monday morning when I awoke to thunder, lightening and rain pouring down. I checked the puppy book cover to cover and nowhere did it mention rain in the housetraining chapter. I think inclement weather is worth at least a couple of paragraphs...don't you? I suppose we're going to have to invest in a golf umbrella, however Chester didn't look like he was particularly interested in "doing his business" in the icy cold rain. As a matter of fact, he looked up at me like I was insane when I suggested he might like to go in the backyard without me.

I put papers down in the laundry room and he just played with them. Silly puppy. Fortunately the weather cleared before we had any major accidents. Here he is "sitting" in his favorite chair:

How Much is that Doggie in the Photo...

Ok...so...we got a dog. He's a yellow lab puppy, only 10 weeks old and we LOVE him!!! He is sooooooooooooo cute! Yes, we know, there are pitfalls to having a puppy. But watching him run uncoordinated with those big feet of his is worth it. This is the photo that was in the online ad. Many, many MANY more to come...

Chester is the yellow one, shown here with his chocolate brothers.

Tooty-fruity, oh Rudy!

We "babysat" my daughter's boyfriend's dog this weekend while they went out of town and now we miss him (the dog, not the boyfriend). So we're thinking about getting a dog of our own. The irony is we never had any animals around the house because my daughter is allergic to them. Anyway, here are some pics of Rudy, the yellow lab who's stolen our hearts.

TA DA!

Okay, I'm finally posting pictures of my new bath. I had planned to write about the process but the whole thing was such a disaster I couldn't bring myself to put it into words. Suffice it to say, it took one contractor to really screw it up and another great and saintly one to fix it. We are still waiting for the shower glass to be installed. Anyway, without any further ado:

Houston, We Have Paint

The End is Near?

That's been the promise now for the last several weeks on our bathroom remodel...I'll believe it when I see it.

The Madhatter's Teaparty

Last weekend I gave one of my best friend's daughters a wedding shower. I decided to make it an outdoor event and one of the suggested themes I found online was the teaparty from Alice in Wonderland.

It turned out to be really fun, but the best part was my hare-brained scheme to have my husband play the part of Agador Spartacus from the movie "The Birdcage". If you recall, Agador is the Guatamalan man-servant who falls down when he wears shoes. I figured if I was going to enjoy my outdoor teaparty I needed a waiter to fill up those tiny teacups. He also came in handy fishing the croquet ball out of the pool. Don't even ask what I had to promise to get him to do it...but isn't he cute!




The weather was perfect! Not too hot and not too windy.

We had rose-bouquet plates and napkins, pink iridescent tablecloths and genuine china teacups and saucers. My daughter made the Madhatter cake

Here's the bride-to-be in her wedding veil we made from feathers, netting and funny foam.

The winner of the Most Outrageously Mad Hat trophy


What would a Wonderland theme be without a game of croquet? We even had little pink flamingos on the course. The partygoers who "forgot" their hat were provided tiny tiaras to wear.

Another Bathroom Update

I'm going to spare you the long and boring story of dealing with contractors and subcontractors. Suffice it to say it's been my experience after three bathroom remodels that they must belong to some sort of Compulsive Liars Association and need to join E.A. (Excuses Anonymous). The one-week project as promised has turned into more like 4 weeks and counting...

Finally we got some tilework done. The closet also got tiled because when they pulled the toilet, the valve leaked and ruined the carpet in there. They also broke the commode so we're getting a new one.



The red stuff is called red guard and it's supposed to protect against water damage or mold or something like that...however right now it looks like a murder scene. I'm tempted to write redrum on the mirror.

Another "During" Pic

The remodel is coming along...slowly but surely. Right now the shower bench looks like a cardboard box. The small rectangle to the upper left is a niche...which is a fancy word for a place to put stuff like shampoo and conditioner. Maybe next week we'll finally get to the good stuff like tile and fixtures.

Long Time No Blog

I know, but I've been busy. With what, you ask? We've begun remodelling our master bathroom, we attended my cousin's son's wedding, we had out of town guests, we heated the pool for a swim party, we weathered a storm that was so bad it lifted a glassed top patio table and threw it into the pool, breaking the top into a zillion pieces...

Anyway, it wasn't that the bath was in bad shape or even out of date. The problem was the small shower with the nonadjustable shower head. The people who lived here before us must have been tall. At 5'3" the shower spray hit me directly in the face. After a year of that I had had enough. So we called the contractor and began the task of removing the extremely small shower that spit in my face and replacing it with a linen closet/hamper and removing the large garden tub which had become an extremely expensive laundry hamper and replacing it with a luxuriously large shower. See before and during pictures below:











The downside: lots of cement dust and climbing the stairs every morning to shower.
The upside: it's fun to pick out tile and paint.
The cliche: to make an omlette you have to break some eggs.