Found this in my garden this morning...

the bloomin' thing...

One of Those Days

So today I took off from work to make jewelry. Lots and lots of jewelry.

At least that was the plan.

Instead, when I got up, I didn't feel so great so I laid around and played on the computer for a while. I am currently obsessed with this game. It's a great time waster. Too much so, most of the time... (shh, don't tell)

I finally got up off my fat lazy ass duff and got ready to go downstairs to my studio but then I remembered I needed to take out the garbage. So I did. Then I took care of the cats. Then I had a little lunch. Then I remembered I needed to print out the pirate picture of Zeke because they are all coming over tomorrow and I needed to get the pictures framed.

For some stupid reason I must have had my head up my ass the printer seemed to be having technical difficulties. Everything printed out pink. After some trial and error I got that fixed. Then I couldn't get it to re-size. Got it to re-size but then I couldn't get it to print at all. Then I got an error message that I was out of gray. Out of gray? I just put gray in the damn thing 2 months ago and I've hardly printed a thing! Called Secret Agent Man to see if that seemed normal. The consensus was no. Called tech support and the lovely, polite girl there said, actually, it is normal, since I tend to print "high" quality and on matte paper. Huh. Replaced the gray.
At that point I started thinking it was too quiet in the house so I went in search of my iPod. It finally made an appearance in the bottom of my purse. (I swear that thing is like Mary Poppins' carpet bag! One of these days I'm going to get to work and find both cats in there. And the toaster.) Got music playing and then the doorbell rang.
Great. I was in sweats, had not showered yet, and had some serious bed-head going on. Answered the door anyway and...
...awwww. S.A.M. sent me flowers! "Just 'cause" flowers. (The best kind!) They are beautiful. There's just one problem...


Buster loves flowers. Really loves flowers. Especially roses. He rubs and rubs and rubs on them, eats them, smells them, rolls on them. S.A.M. has almost stopped buying flowers for me because Buster frequently and often knocks them over. The last time I got a big bunch of flowers I woke up around 2 o'clock in the morning to something. Couldn't quite figure it out...and then I heard: "drip". "Drip." "Drip."
Buster had knocked over the vase and the water was all over everywhere! And of course, he was laying on the other side of the dining room with this "How'd-that-happen-I've-been-laying-all-the-way-over-here" look on his face. Fun to clean up in the middle of the night. (Not.)

A couple months ago I had a small bouquet that my mom brought me, and put them in a pretty little vase on the dining room table. Thought they'd be fine: no roses.
Wrong.
After Buster almost tipped them over for the fourth time I found a large candle holder I had (like this but without the top) and the vase and the flowers fit right inside. It looked a little funny, but not bad, and Buster couldn't knock it over.
I thought maybe I could do that with the roses. But the bouquet and vase were too large and heavy. While trying to fit it, I knocked the heck out of my knuckle. Didn't pay much attention because I quickly realized they weren't going to fit and was trying to wrestle it back out of the opening. Set the vase on the table, put the candles back in the lantern and went back downstairs to mess with the printer again. Wiped my wet hand on my sweatshirt while calling S.A.M. to thank him for the flowers and then realized that my hand wasn't wet. It was gushing bleeding gushing blood. Ran upstairs and rinsed it off while trying to talk to S.A.M. on speaker.
It looked like I had tried to do a knuckle-ectomy. I must have caught it on the glass of the lantern. I actually thought I was going to need stitches! I must have sounded like it was bad because S.A.M. came home from work to help but by the time he got home I had it all bandaged and was back downstairs fighting with the printer.

I proceeded to print on the wrong side of the paper twice, scale the picture down wrong once, crop the picture too short twice and then print it right -finally- at which point I was so done for the day!

I never did get any jewelry done.
But I did give Buster his own rose. He loves his rose. He even carried it upstairs and put it on his special bag. (Oh yah, he has a jones for plastic bags, too.) Crazy cat.

Yea Spring!

We had an awful winter here.
Secret Agent Man would disagree, but he's crazy. He loves snow. Deep snow. I don't know why, we don't ski. Or ice skate. Or luge. We don't even really get out in it at all, unless we have to. But he likes it. And he likes to shovel the driveway. (I know, the man is crazy!)

Anyway, we had more snow here than I care to ever have again. We had Record Snow. It was even in the news! At one point I think we had 4 ft of snow on the ground. We left on vacation before it started snowing in December and when we got back 5 days later we had 3 ft of the crap in the driveway. Our neighbors were beginning to think they needed to call the cops because our driveway still was not shoveled.(Seriously. We had messages on our answering machine and everything, because usually our driveway is the first one shoveled on the street. Did I mention that crazy guy S.A.M. loves to shovel the driveway?)

After we got home we got more snow! In the middle of all of that, the 911 center (where I work) lost power and our computers AND phones bit it, so we had to drive to our "backup" center. (Do you know not all 911 centers have backup? How crazy is that? What the heck do they do when stuff goes south, which with computers happens a LOT?!? "Thank you for calling 911. Please solve your emergency on your own since our phones are not working right now and we don't know when they will be working again for the foreseeable future. If you are fighting, stop it right now and go to your rooms! If you are bleeding, put a band aid on it and please try your call again." Whatever.) Our backup center is about a half hour north of our usual base of operations, but in 4 feet of snow is about an hour and a half away! And in the dark. In a blizzard! It was fun. (Anybody know the HTML for sarcasm?)

Mostly I got really tired of the gray. Everything was gray. The sky. The trees. The streets. The yard. This was my yard at one point:
This was my yard at another (towards the end of winter):
This is my yard now:

I would trade 4 feet of irises for 4 feet of snow any day!

p.s. Anyone want an iris? Seriously, they are 4 feet tall and taking over my yard!

More Shoes

Well, I had a custom job for a fellow Etsy seller, so I've been a little delayed posting something new. But here's another pair of awesome shoes I would love to have!