Sunday, January 20, 2013

Puppy Power!

Trevor and I are very excited to introduce the newest and furriest addition to our family, Roo!

Hello!
We adopted Roo from One Tail at a Time, a terrific no-kill rescue organization, and it's been eight days since she first came into our home.

Our first day with Roo: Saturday, January 12, 2013
You might notice that there's something a little...shaved about Roo. And a little missing, too. That's because she had surgery a few weeks ago to remove her back right leg. She was picked up by Chicago Animal Control a few days before Christmas, and she had a fractured leg when they found her. Animal Control set the fracture, but when One Tail at a Time rescued her (on Christmas Day!), they brought her to a vet who felt that the fracture was either more serious than originally assessed, or wasn't set correctly (we're not quite sure), and that Roo's little leg had to go.

Roo with the OTAT people, standing on her cast
Post surgery, sans leg

She spend her post-op in a foster home, which is where we first met her. Trevor had been eye-balling her ever since her pictures started showing up on the OTAT Facebook page (like them!), and once he saw her three-leggedness, he fell for her pretty hard. And once we met her in person, it was a done deal.

Jeff, one of the OTAT fellas, dropped her off last Saturday afternoon. We went shopping first, of course, to prepare. She couldn't come into a house without any toys, for god's sake. We're not heathens.

Toys! Treats!
And then we realized very, very quickly, that she's a bit of a lazy bones. She's even better at napping than I am, and I'm the Midwest Champion for 36 years running.

Cuddddddling.



Tucked In
Snuggling up to Cliff

Car napping

Dreaming of D. Becks (we were watching the United game this morning, so it was appropriate...sort of)

What you can't tell from the pictures, alone, though, is that Roo is a snore-er. She sounds like an old man with no nose. She saws more logs than a manic lumberjack.

She does have a good dose of puppy in her, though, so don't worry. In fact, on Monday, her first day alone while we went to work, she escaped from her canvas crate and did a bit of damage. Nothing serious, but this was what Trevor found when he came home from work at lunchtime.

She knocked over a mini flatfile that weighs a good forty pounds
Table and lamp knocked over, but neither one broken. She didn't even eat the chapstick that landed on the floor
She probably took a nap on the pillows, but didn't eat Wedgehead, which is good
She's not too crazy about being left alone. We borrowed a metal crate from our friend Sarah, and Trevor set up a webcam so we can spy on her at work (guess who got almost no work done this past week because she was watching her new puppy sleep? This girl!) and we've found that when she's not sleeping (which is most of the time), she's barking. Not a great combination. Our neighbor Sarah is very kind and patient, but we hope that Roo will knock this off soon so Sarah doesn't lose it on us. She'd be justified. I think Roo will get used to the situation in the next few days. It's only been a week, after all.

Here's what else she's been up to:

Being a blur
Showing off her fashionable new jacket
Waiting for treats (or heartworm pills, but they're treats to her)
Meeting Sadie
Giving Sadie kisses
Wondering if she's as cute as Sadie (this is a really, really, really tough call. impossible, even)
Sniffing Sadie to see if she's carrying any treats


She also got to meet Bosco and the girls, although it was a bit overwhelming. Peanut and Tequila were not thrilled to meet her, but we weren't surprised about that. Pepper played with her for about twenty minutes and then got tired of her. And Bosco barely noticed that there was a fourth dog in the house. He was a lot more interested in showing me and Trevor his cars.

We also started Roo in a training class, and we'll have the second meeting tonight. It's at Anything is Pawsible, which is the place we took Henry when he was a little guy. It was started by Rendy Schwartz, the wife of a former co-worker of mine, and she and all of the trainers are terrific.

Trevor, practicing a "settle" on Roo
Roo's classmates
I also started classes this week, and have a terrific group of students to meet with every day. We'll have a lot more about Roo and school (mostly Roo...) in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Taking Inventory

The other day in a fit of organization, I cleaned out my bag shelf (a very large shelf where I keep all of my handbags, purses, totes, and satchels) and got rid of a few things.

During the process of figuring out which bags I'd be keeping and which I'd be donating to Goodwill, I emptied them of all of the bits and bobs that get left behind when one switches bags for the day/night/weekend/season. Here is what I found:

Ephemera
  • One spray can of 45 SPF sunblock
  • Eight assorted lipsticks, glosses, and liners
  • Two bobby pins
  • One round-bottomed safety pin
  • One "book worm" lapel pin
  • Eleven writing instruments (two pencils [one mechanical] and nine pens of various colors)
  • One key fob
  • One bone-shaped paper-clip
  • One mini Tootsie Pop
  • One apple flavored Jolly Rancher
  • Two peppermint Lifesavers
  • Two sticks of (stale) Big Red
  • One stick of (even staler) Black Jack
  • One pack of Extra spearmint containing three sticks of gum
  • Three Band-Aids
  • One ten-ride Metra pass (all ten rides punched)
  • One ticket stub to Star Trek (May 2009)
  • One ticket stub to a Barcelona/Chivas soccer game (August 2008)
  • Two dollar bills
  • Three cards from art galleries (all with various artists' names written on the backs in shaky ball point as though I'd used my thigh as a writing surface [and I probably had])
  • One hand-crocheted change purse (made by Linda Prieto) and decorated with two buttons (made by Trevor Power), one of which is a pen & ink portrait of Stephen King (whose book 11-22-63 I'm currently reading and loving)
  • One postcard for Mefisto Theatre Company's 2003 production of "The Boys Next Door," starring a pre-Veep Timothy C. Simons
  • One box of matches from Fado's Irish pub on Grand Avenue
  • One button, origin unknown
And more more thing:

There's something different about me, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

  • One red clown nose
I have no recollection of where I got this. But I'm very excited about it and will almost certainly be using it come Halloween, 2013. Or maybe even for the first day of the semester on Monday. In fact, yes. I'll absolutely wear it on Monday.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I Left Something at the Salon

My hair!

Today I served as a hair model for my friend Audrey, who's a stylist for Art + Science. They'd had an instructor from Sassoon in Chicago come to the Halsted Street location this morning to teach a class on Sassoon techniques, and then the afternoon was spent putting those techniques into practice.

I got to the salon around 1 p.m. and left around 4:30, which sounds like a long time, but there were around eight stylists, all doing step-by-step cuts under the Sassoon instructor's guidance, so there was a lot of watching other hair cuts, listening to techniques, and then having eight stylists crowded around Audrey's station while they talked about my hair. It was, in all honesty, totally and absolutely fun. I had two cups of tea, time to flip through trashy gossip magazines and time to catch up with Aud, who I haven't seen in 1,000 years and who recently went on a two week walking trip/pilgrimage through Spain with her mom (my godmother), and I got a spectacularly technical and precise haircut for free! It does not get better than that.

For the past six months or so I've been "growing out" my hair, and I kind of intended to continue doing so through this semester. But I've been so bored with it that on Christmas morning I chopped off some bangs for myself, just to give it some shape. It's not terribly uncommon to want to cut five inch chunks out of your own hair first thing after looking at yourself in the morning mirror; but it's maybe a little rash to actually do it. Here's the old hair (picture from ten days ago):

Me and Julie at our girls' night dinner on Dec. 30

 And here's the new and absolutely improved hair:

It's gone! It's all gone!

It's not like I haven't gone short before; I've had short hair for years at a time in the not so distant past. But today's experience was so much fun, and I had so much taken off in one fell swoop (although that makes it sound violent and arbitrary, which is completely antithetical to the actual event) that I just had to write about it.

When Audrey and the instructor were first starting my cut, they decided that it would be a "B" style (I do not know what that means but I'm pretty sure it's remarkably like what you see pictured above), and then the instructor drew a little diagram on the mirror using a little head stencil:

The left is technique that will result in a bad pizza slice effect. Audrey did not give me a pizza slice head.
What you can't see from this diagram is that the stencil had a little face, too. It was super weird and fantastic; Aud and I agreed that we both really wanted one to use at home on our bathroom mirrors.

I also learned today, during the consultation/planning steps of the process, that I have a small head--finely shaped, they assured me, but small. I'm okay with that, but it makes me sure that I shouldn't ever shave my head or I might look like a little rounded pencil eraser about to fall out of its little metal holder. Yep. I just compared my head to a tiny rubber eraser.

When the afternoon was all said and done (I was the last model to finish), I was thrilled with my new hair and my reunion with Audrey. But we're going out to brunch on Sunday, because even after three hours, we still have more to chat about (and she reminded me that I never did a follow up post about our kitchen remodel, so shame on me, and you can all expect that soon).

Me and gorgeous Audrey

Monday, January 7, 2013

Happy New Year! (wait, it's January 7th. well, happy new year, anyway)

Greetings, fellow humans!

It's two weeks past Christmas and one week past New Year's Eve, and less than one week until I start a new semester. So, here are some things to wrap up and some things to look forward to!

First, when we saw you last we were only beginning our four days of magical Christmas romping. We'd gone to John and Fran Power's place for a Very Power Christmas, and we were gearing up for some Bork and Bosco time (and some Bosco Bork time. it's not as confusing as it sounds, really).

We hung out with the Borks for some pre-Christmas Sunday supper. Bo got some cool new toys:

Not pictured: the 72 piece blocks set that will stay at Grandma Bork's house and some new Matchbox cars from his auntie and uncle

I, too, got some cool new toys, courtesy of Paula and Greg (let's be clear: it was all Greg).

Racing grannies, an angry nunzilla (who is yelling at the grannies) and a cow about to shoot that ball out of his pie hole right at the nunzilla (Trevor has been shooting that cow at me for two weeks now. thanks, Greg. thanks ever so much.)


Greg also got me this ermahzing rubber chicken. Don't feel bad; I put that sign on him. It used to be on the little pink doll, but I thought the chicken made more sense in our household.
But the pièce de résistance is the sound that my new effigy makes. Here, take a listen.




So, after the gift exchanging, we said our goodnights...

Good night, Grandpa!

...and Trevor and I popped over to Sean and Angi's place for one last hang-out with Rae and the gang. We played Cards Against Humanity and laughed until our faces hurt.


Rae, Auntie Fran, Uncle Neilly, and Sadie (who is eating...something)

Christmas Eve morning was spent with the Madels in River Forest and we were so happy to get to see Doug and Jean, Becca and Jason and their families, but also Grandma, Grandpa, and Jim, who'd all driven down from Door County for the holiday. We did some brunching, some chatting, and a little bit of gifting.

Sadie got a cool new house with locks and keys from Grandma and Grandpa Madel

Gradma Madel tries on a new shawl while Angi, Sadie, and Sean stand by

Grandpa, Jean, and Destiny

Grandma checks out the owl jar from T. and me

Destiny asked me to not put this on the blog. So here it is. I love being an aunt.

After T. and I gave our stomachs a rest and our bodies a nap, we headed downtown to spend Christmas Eve eve with the Boscos, Borks, and Ericksons. We ate a lot,

Grandma! I can fit this entire pear slice in my mouth.
And now I can cut another piece! By myself! (um, no, you can't. put down that knife.)

talked a lot, and gifted a little more.


What?! MORE toys? Holy Christmas, Batman!

Uncle Jimmy is, as always, Santa Claus.

On Christmas morning, Trevor and I woke up and lounged around with coffee and the new books we'd exchanged (oh, what? you're surprised that we get each other books for Christmas?), and then wandered over to the Bosco's house to stuff ourselves on pizza, macaroni and cheese, and pie. I think there might have also been salad, but I don't know what kind of beanbag was paying attention to that.

This is what Bo did that morning:

Oh my goodness! Look at my OUTFIT! I'm SO CUTE!

So that was that. Almost immediately after Christmas, on Trevor's first official day of vacation that wasn't a national holiday, he got sick. So we hung out a lot inside, watching t.v. and movies, reading our many new books, and slowly weaning ourselves off of holiday food. It was hard since both Fran Power Sr. and Grandma Madel had sent us home with eight hundred thousand cookies.

We had a quiet New Year's Eve--just dinner out and then some movie watching--and then Trevor's cold germs finally caught up with me last Thursday. So I'm coughing like a...a person who has a chest cold (sorry, that's the best I could do) and starting to really rev up for my faculty workshop day on Thursday and the first day of the semester, which is next Monday.

We hope that everyone else had just as lovely, family filled, and as fattening a holiday season as we did. Happy New Year, to all!