Thursday, April 25, 2013

SIGNS OF SPRING

We've been waiting so long for spring here in New Jersey.  My favorite flowers are tulips, and I always plant a row of bulbs in my front yard.  Squirrels often dig them up and replant them elsewhere.  I guess they think they're going to eat them later but then forget about them.  So then random tulips will just pop up around my yard.





Like this one, pushing up boldly from underneath a hydrangea plant.  Instead of waiting for the squirrels to come along and behead this flower, which they do, I decided to cut it and bring it inside in a bud vase.

That's pronounced VAAAAZH.

Spring also brings spring cleaning, or at least its supposed to.  I was trying to clear out the living room the other day, and this was on my side table.





That is a squashed up roll, or rather, half a roll of toilet paper.  It came from one of my son's A-frames when he unpacked from the last campout.  You know I'm raising my boys right when they unpack their unused toilet paper and camping gear and leave it on a table in the living room.

Help.

Also, please notice the book:  "Tiffany's Table Manners", which is right next to the toilet paper.  I believe this is called irony.

The book is a great guide to manners with easy to understand cartoon drawings that I bought one day in a fit of desperation after watching my boys hunch over their plate, shake their hair over the food, serve themselves two biscuits at a time with one hand and show their chewed-up food when they laughed out loud.  Want to have dinner at my house?

Also, notice the book: "Keep Calm And Carry On."  I think it's obvious why I bought that book.  I really need to read it more often.




The toilet paper had clearly been at the bottom of their A-frames for quite some time.  I threw it away.

Getting back to spring ... I still have a lot more cleaning to do.  A LOT MORE.  But in the meantime, there's this ...



 Hooray!

Monday, April 8, 2013

BAXTER GOT A BAD HAIRCUT

Baxter needed a grooming.  He was so shaggy all over and we couldn't even get a comb through him.  One day I was petting him and felt something sharp.  Upon further investigation, it was a pricker ball.  A little teeny one.  How long had it been stuck in his fur?  Dunno.

I took him to the groomer, and asked them to cut him short, but not too short, and to leave his head alone, because we were trying to grow out the top to give him more of a poodle head.  They did just as I asked.


Now he looks like he has an enormous head.

And his body looks so small and skinny.  Check out the side view.

My husband says he looks like an Albino Wookie.  I say he looks like Kazoo, the outerspace alien from the old Flinstones show.



The kids said he looked like ET. 

In any case, his head is big for his body now.  He used to have more of a flat top,
like this.



Which we liked, but it reminded us too much of our old doggy, Oliver, which made us a little sad, so we wanted him to look a little poofier on top.  Plus, we live in Jersey.  We like big hair.

We tried to mush the hair down by putting him under the covers.


That kind of worked. 

When my hair isn't right, I get really crabby.  But Baxter doesn't worry about it. 

I love dogs.