Dogster Pages

Fang and Errol have had Dogster pages ever since we adopted them over 3 years ago. I don't think we've ever updated their pages, but I was perusing them today and got a good laugh out of the old pictures and what we wrote about them. It's all still true. Feel free to check them out at:

Captain Fang the Fearsome and Errol, Admiral of the Red

Yes, those are their real names. We never registered them with AKC, but those are the names we wrote down on their registration forms. You can read how we picked their names on their Dogster pages. Be sure to leave them a bone if you visit!

Here are a couple of funny pictures we took this week. The first one shows Errol diligently cleaning Jeff's foot one morning. You know he's serious when he holds you down with his paw.


Here's Fang peering off the back deck. Where are his feet? No one knows...

New camera and video of Fang

We decided to pick up a new camera for our upcoming trip. We did it for a couple of reasons. Our old camera seems to be behaving a bit slowly lately. It takes forever to focus, and forever to write to the card, and forever to recover and be ready for the next picture. It's probably been that way forever, but it's about three years old now, and technology has improved significantly, so it's time for an upgrade. Jeff's also been feeling the need to play with lenses and settings lately. We decided not to spring for a digital SLR yet, but we did get a pretty nice new digital with great zoom features and much more speediness than our old camera. Bonus feature - the video taking qualities are markedly improved over our old camera. So, here's a nice new video of me playing "I'm gonna get you" with Fang. We play this every night when we get home from work. He picks up his favorite toy, which we have named "Orange Alien", because we really have no idea what it's supposed to be. Then he takes off running around the house while we chase him. Eventually he lets us catch him by flopping over on his back, at which time he gets a belly rub, and then we take Orange Alien away from him, toss it off in the distance and the cycle begins again. After a while he gets tired (and so do we) and it just turns into lots of belly rubbing and cuddling and no chasing. It's usually much more high paced than this video - it didn't seem like such a good idea to go running around the house while trying to tape. My apologies for the lens cap that occasionally swings in front of the picture. I need to figure out a better way to control that. I also had to knock down the video quality to about 10% so it was a reasonable size for uploading, so it doesn't look very good anymore. Oh well, it's still cute.

My sweetie

Jeff was really sweet to me yesterday. I was having a frustrating day at work, and I told him (in a needlessly snotty way) in the middle of the afternoon that I just didn't want to deal with figuring out what to make for dinner when I got home. I had a haircut after work, so I went to that, which helped relax me a bit, and then I went for home, where I discovered flowers, champagne, and dinner ready to go. What a great husband I'm blessed with!

Our new airplane

Today my company officially announced the airplane that I've been working on for the last two years. Here it is: The Citation Columbus. I think the name is kinda lame, but I'm proud of the rest of it. It should be a pretty nice ride when we finish it. I'll only work on it for a little while longer because it's being transitioned to what we call the "Project" group now. I work on the early conceptual design and structural layout of our airplanes. The little details are handled by Project groups. They're the ones who will design all the thousands of parts and get it through FAA certification over the next five or six years.

In other news, my punctured tire has been successfully repaired and is back on my car. Yay!

Roar

I'm feeling quite empowered today because I managed to change a flat tire on my car this morning all by myself. I left home as usual and got about halfway through the neighborhood when I heard a little light thumping. So, I stopped to check the tires, and sure enough, the left rear was pretty low. I decided it still had enough air to get back home, so I turned around and got the car back into our garage. I had to change out of my work clothes into something else that I could get dirty in, and then I proceeded to change the tire. It took a while, and there were a couple of lugs that I really had to jump on to get loose, but eventually I finished the job, got back into my work clothes, and headed back out. I also managed to visit a car repair shop all by myself (I hate them, so Jeff usually gets sent, or we go together) to drop off my bad tire for repair and to make sure I had my spare's lug nuts on tight. I did. :) Hopefully they can fix my flat - it has a screw stuck in it. If not, I guess we get to buy a couple of new tires. Bleh. Tires are not fun purchases. Well, maybe for boys they are, but not for me.

Now I just have to deal with all the guys at work who want to try and help me change the huge paper rolls on our big printers, a job I usually do anyway because they're all too lazy to lug the paper up from the shop into our office. Go away, boys, I can do it myself. I am empowered today.

A moderate deluge in the kitchen

Saturday was a bit of a disaster, in an overexaggerated sense of the word. We didn’t have any big plans for the day other than to watch the KU/Colorado basketball game. We started out with a leisurely biscuits and gravy breakfast, and then puttered around the house in the morning. I was quite convinced that the game was on at 7pm, and this was reinforced when my brother-in-law, Matthew, called around lunchtime to invite us to come over for dinner and watch the game at his house. We agreed to that, and decided to head over to the mall after lunch to look for some new pants for Jeff.

We took our sweet time at the mall, found some pants, spotted but couldn’t quite catch up with my mom’s pastor’s kids, and puttered back towards home by way of Barnes and Noble. We arrived home to a steady drip-drip-drip of water running down one of our pendant lights in the kitchen, with two nice wet spots in the drywall in the ceiling next to it. Uh oh.

Our attic access is located in our garage, about 14 feet above our concrete garage floor, which is always a bit of a nervewracking climb. I called Matthew to let him know that we had to go into emergency home repair mode instead of joining him for dinner, and Jeff started sizing the ladder to get up into the attic. Matthew let me know that the basketball game was already on, and was nearly over. D’oh!

I eventually got up into the attic with Jeff. The leak turned out to be from snow that had blown in through our roof vents on Thursday. Apparently the snow was blowing horizontally enough to get under the sides of the vents, because we had little piles of snow under two or three of them. Jeff dug through the insulation (we have the fluffy cotton blow in kind) and started collecting fluffy cotton snowballs in a bucket that I brought up. It took a while to check all the vents, but we eventually got all the snow picked up and the already melted snow mopped up with towels. By Sunday, the drywall in the ceiling was back to looking normal, so we’re thankful we didn’t have any visible damage. We’ll be going back up to the attic sometime soon to rig up some sort of moisture collection system so this doesn’t happen again.

As for that game... I keep a KU basketball game schedule at my desk at work, and after each game, I write a little W or L next to it depending on if we win or lose. Well, last Wednesday, we lost for the first time this season. I didn’t mark it with a little L because I was in denial… and when I glanced at the list last Friday to see when the next game was, I saw 7pm on ESPN-Plus, instead of 2:30 on ABC, because my L’s and W’s weren’t up to date. Hmmph. I have learned my lesson. Happily, we won Saturday, so my little L is bracketed by two big W’s, and it’s not so sad anymore.