Our friend, Jim, told us the funniest story yesterday.  He uses a cleaning service for his rental properties and one day he called them up and had them go to a house that had been vacated.  He gave them the address, told them the house was empty and the key was under the mat.  The usual procedure is, the scheduler tells Jim when the cleaners can go and one of the cleaners calls Jim to tell him roughly how long the job will take, once they get there.  When Jim received the call what he hears is that the job (which normally takes a couple of hours) is going to…

Stuart had made me a little picnic last Sunday, which was very sweet.  We sat on the child-sized bench having our snack (complete with roses he picked from our garden and a big note he wrote for me), when I looked over at the gazebo I remembered the time Buddy managed to get stuck under it.  Yes, stuck under the gazebo.  So, I told Stuart about yet another caper Buddy was involved in.  There’s a path leading to the gazebo and a little garden going around the remaining circumference (see pic below).  There are plants and rocks around the plants.  There must have been some critter Buddy was trying to get at…

Buddy is the dog we all thought would live “forever,” even the vet.  He seemed so indestructable.  He ate things that would perf a weaker dog’s bowels or at least give other dogs a barf or poop-a-thon worthy of Jerry Lewis.  He’s the dog who seemed to say, “Hey, how’s it going?” to us when we saw him at the Humane Society (whereas Trigger was the one who shouted and campaigned hard, “OOH!,  Ooh, pick me!  Pick me!”).  Things changed when I was about 12 weeks pregnant with my oldest son.  Buddy, who had a bad case of “I can’t heeear you!” the minute he was in the yard, wouldn’t consider…

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions.  Somehow, that feels a little false to me.  Most people start out the new year with all sorts of excitement and possibility and then mid-February things seem to fizzle, along with their enthusiasm.  It also feels like an odd time to be busting out with freshness and change–spring seems more logical to me or the beginning of the school year.  Those things say “fresh” and “new” to me, not the beginning of a calendar year.  So, try as I might, I don’t really come up with my “word” of the new year or things that I want to change or accomplish when everyone…