Puppy Class

Zoey had her first class and she aced the first lesson.  All she had to do was eat treats, and she could handle that even hiding under Jim’s legs.  They were having adoption day and there were I guess at least 20 dogs right in front of the door, it was like running a gauntlet.  Zoey’s ears were back and her tail down, so when we got to the training area we sat on the side away from the big (50 lbs maybe) dogs.  We sat in a corner where she had room to hide and she did.  Everytime we would get her sitting up there would be a commotion from the dogs or people stopping to look and she would be back to wanting in our laps. There were 6 or 7 other dogs, one was over a year old, another was 4 months like Zoey only he was a little weenie dog and the wind was blowing and blowing his ears back.  He was cute.  Zoey has toys bigger then him and she was still afraid of him.  This older couple was there I don’t think the dog was a pup but she was more scared than Zoey, she was trembling all over.  One of the dogs was a very tiny Yorkie which rode in a purse, and was dressed in party clothes.  A couple of the other dogs were just taking it all in.  The second lesson was a bit harder she had to look at our faces, while we held the treat up.  She didn’t ace that one, she did better for Jim than me.  Next week we are going to walk on a leash, should be fun. The instructor suggest that we bring them (our dogs) to the store other than just on class day.   I took a picture this morning of the same dog in the same carseat and hopefully daughter will post on here for me.  She has doubled her weight in 2 months.  oh last night she chewed Jim’s phone charging cord.

Book Club

It seems everyone has finished the book.  I just want to say thank you.  As I purchase my books as I sit on my exercise bike,  I will depend more on friends to keep me from staying in my box for reading material.  I will be inticed less by the cover art and more by the sample on my kindle and word of mouth for new authors.  My experience for bookclubs is they get me to read books that I wouldn’t have chosen on my own.  So keep the ideas rolling in.  Thank you daughter for the book you bought me this morning.

Announcement to the World

You can talk to me even if I’m not walking a dog.  I think I’m sane all the time, my family may disagree with sanity but they would say I’m safe to talk too.  Why are people more willing to approach and start a conversation when someone is walking a dog?  Once going thru the toll booth the toll taker wanted to know about our dog.  People have never spoken to me in a rest area on the interstate except when I had the dog on the leash.  Since we’ve been walking Zoey we are getting to know all of our new neighbors.

I just finished the book  Devil in the White City.  How come we never here about the things that came from the Chicago Worlds Fair?  We’re always hearing about the St. Louis Worlds Fair.  The book was really interesting and I went online to look at the pictures from the Fair, one of the buildings is still in use as a museum, some of the parks are still there.  I also looked for pictures of the Knoxville worlds Fair.  Has there been one since?  Where were they before Knoxville?

Picnic in the Park

Yesterday we had planned to take the daughter to lunch in Montevallo, proably to Joe’s the Italian place.  (If anyone is going to Brimingham and needs a place to eat check for directions.)  All week we had been trying to get a picture of Zoey to send so she could see how much she has grown.  I swear her muzzle got longer friday afternoon.  While we were getting dressed she sprawled out at the end of the bed and I took a picture and sent.  She called and wanted us to bring her, its already too warm for her to stay in the car for any length of time so we had to come up with another plan.  So we went on a picnic to Orr park, Tinglewood  in Montevallo it is great.  A pretty deep looking creek, not a river, and a lot of dead cedar trees that have been converted to works of Art (it truly deserves the capital).  Maybe someone will post the pictures, hint, hint.  One tree has a dragon craved on it, if it had been me I don’t think I could have resisted hunting for a branch to stick in his mouth for the flame.  There were owls, squirels, flowers and Indian, Easter Island Head and E. T.  Knots on the trees became open mouths, only the dragon had any paint, and there was only a faintest touch of green.  There were lots of families a lot with thier dogs. 

A very curious thing happen this lady told us Zoey was colorblind, and was guessing which of the people walking by would spook her, and was right.  Now I know dogs don’t see a full range of color, so I think she meant vision impaired.   Last night I noticed that as I went to touch her on one side she shied away but not the other.   How do you do a vision test on dogs?  She can’t point which way the legs are pointing.  She has an appointment for a shot next Saturday so I’ll ask.  She also starts puppy training next Saturday.  They had a lot of scooters in the park, I think Zoey could pull me.

The e-family is reading a book, comments sounded interesting.  So I whipped out my Kindle and purchased the book.  So if you haven’t finished and don’t want to know what I thought stop reading now.                 It was laugh out loud funny,  I loved it.  Everyone needs a trip where they visit the great balls of string along the way.  A few years ago we did ours in a car and hotels in Colorado.  We left after 0800 in the morning because we had to get bread at the framers market.  We stopped at Metroplis, Ill because of Superman, the Arch in St. Louis because it was there.    Kansas we got off the interstate to find the large painting of  Van Googh’s Sunflowers,  we also stoped at a Dairy Queen that’s a half mile above sea level they have a nine hole golf course, we thought Jim should have played a half a round of golf.  Some of the best bits were the spur of the minute choices.

And since I don’t know how to reply to comments I’ll do it here.  I think it adds texture, a more complete picture of people, to the relationships.  Because we’ve shared more info about oursleves, what have you been doing takes on a different meaning.   Nothing in a social setting generally means nothing that I think you would be interested in hearing about.  The better you know someone the less likely they are to answer with a “nothing”.  Because unlike the lady in the book very few people spend their days doing as little as possible.

E - Family

Tracey refered to an article about families keeping in touch, using the new technology.   Does this mean the few times a year we meet will we have more informative? more meaningful, more insightful coversations since we won’t have to cover all of the basics and get reaccquinted?  I know I like reading the blogs and knowing whats going on.  I talk to people on the phone and  we talk about other things or continue the coversation in an e-mail.  Then I get to write about whatever in my blog.  My sister told me about topix.com and that my hometown was on it, well the news is not so much there but there is a thread about remembering the town in the 60’s.  A lot of the stuff people remember was gone by the time we moved there.  It’s another way we connect with a community, this one is with people who live there still and people who no longer live there.  I just think how much easier Jim’s deployments would have been with instant communication, letters took about 2 weeks to Korea, there and back again.  If you ask a question by the time you got the answer it no longer mattered.  I had usually forgotten what the question was.  I was always mixing up the time and calling in the middle of the night, for our once a week call.  We  used Skype to call daughter in Germany last year, she had a camera so we could see her so we knew how she was.  For the family reunion, Tracey brought her laptop with a camera and we called Germany and she got to see everyone we even have a picture of the three of us, she’s just on the laptop.  I have friends that keep in touch with grandchildren on webcams,  I think its made it possible for daughter to keep in touch with highschool friends, people you would loose touch with.  I really like keeping in touch.

Meeting the neighbors

Now that Zoey has had her second set of shots and the rain has cleared away, we do daily walks.  Everybody we meet ask what kind of dog and most ask about Basil.   Mutt doesn’t seem to describe it very well, she looks like a great pryennes but she isn’t going to be that big.  With adults she will just sit at my feet, but with the little boys we met today she was scared and tryed to run for home then she was up against me as I squatted down to talk to the boys.  She needs more kids.  Its spring break so maybe I can meet some more of the kids.  Last time I was at the Beauty Shop they were talking about how much they paid for the gym, so I counted up how much I pay to have a dog, its about twice what they’re paying plus I have this huge yearly membership (Rabies etc.) to pay.  Some days its worth every penny. Today was one those great days for walking around the neighborhood, the reason we live in the south.  Hopefully tomorrow more of the same but it is March.

Old Movie Friends

An article in the paper today was about the secret movies we watch and there was a list.  So I got to thinking about what movies we always watch,  for funny is Down Periscope this one came out while we were in Germany, and we watched it the first time with a theater of military people, it was so funny we went back the next night, it was just as funny.  We all know all the lines but they are still funny all these years later.  One we used to watch but we don’t have on dvd is Undercover Blues.   Arsenic and Old Lace and Love Actually are two more favorites.  When we need to see sunshine we watch Bride and Prejudice or  Mama Mia.  Sports movies would be Bend it Like Beckham, or The Rookie, or a new favorite is Goal (Goal 2 should be out but they don’t have it at Movie Stop).  Another movie destined to be a favorite is Noises Off, we saw the play a couple of years ago and then we found the dvd, Its great!  We didn’t know it had been a movie (came out in the 90’s) it stars Carol Burnett and John Ritter, Michael Caine and several more people that I can’t remember at the moment.  Other favorites are the ones we stop and watch when we’re flipping thru the channels,  yesterday was  North to Alaska a good John Wayne movie, Everafter,  any Cary Grant or Katerine Hepburn movie.  We have an Italian movie called Bread and Tulips that I love, if I need to go to Venice I just pop in the movie.  Actually we have a lot movies and I would hate to give up any of them.  Movies like books take us to other places.  If I ever go nuts I want to go to the community where Lars and the Real Girl takes place.  Love Actually reminds us that love comes in alot of places and to every one.  Arsenic and Old Lace  that the crazy is not always obvious and then there is Cary Grant and he rolls his eyes. 

We like the new show Castle and who were the two other authors he was playing poker with?  James Patterson was one of them but there were 2 more.

Just Rain

It is raining for the second day, the yard is soggy.  Zoey still goes out and sits to watch the cars, her under coat is so thick the water just beads up on top  doesn’t work that well for the people.  We have this huge and I do mean huge umbrella, when I get it open outside the door I can just barely reach the door knob to close the door behind us.  This morning I left the front door standing open, Zoey was in a hurry.  

All I’ve done for three days is read receipes, I think I’ll go make cookies the question a new receipe or our old stand by of chocolate ones.  Or a cake, I think I’m hungry everything sounds good.  Reading recipes on the kindle is good but to do the cooking I think I will still want the paper version.  I haven’t checked the price of the hardback version of the cooks illustrated book, so I haven’t decided about buying it.  But I know I’m not going to buy the one of  French desserts, the recipes may be good but I don’t think its a very well designed cook book.  You need to be able to flip pages, reveiw the ingredients list and the directions all at the same time.  The cooks illustrated is well layed out for the kindle, things are underlined and when you click on them, you can go directly to that page, but going back to the orginal page is little more difficult.  You can go from chapter to chapter and subsets within chapters, there is a list of receipes in the back just like a hard copy cookbook.  The problems are the same as the puppy training book you can’t just refer back to a page by quickly flipping thru and check to make sure you remember whatever.  So does this mean the kindle is only going to be for pleasure and not study.  I’ll have to ask daughter since one of her text books was available and she used the kindle version.  She’ll have to download the cookbooks and see what she thinks.

Just a post

Last night I turned on the wireless of my kindle and my cookbook I’ve been waiting for downloaded.  I don’t think I really will use a cookbook on my kindle that often, because you should see the condition of my hardcover ones.  But this one was free, free, free.  And from the Cooks illustrated people, they don’t use pictures in their magazine so I don’t miss them on the kindle.  I just think a cookbook without pictures is a wasted opportunity.  So I started last night making notes so I can find receipes I might want to use.  I want to get back to that but first I have to throw things down the hallway for Zoey to chase.

Books

I just came back from walking the dog about 1/4 mile, where several times I had to explain I wasn’t on a skateboard and she didn’t need to pull so much.  My arm has had a workout this morning.  I really could have ridden around the block, but if I had done that some big loud truck or car would have passed and all bets would have been off.

This weekend the topic of books came up.  What we read, how we read, when and where and what we do with books we’ve read.  Last year when we went to Washington there were all these billboards for the sony e-book, how many you could carry with you and that you could be reading a steamy romance and no one would know.  On the bbc news website there was an article about people claiming to have read books they hadn’t and about people not wanting it known that they read Tom Clancy or Georgette Hyer books.  I love books by both of those autors.  One of the comments was a man wanted a book jacket for War and Peace to cover his Tom Clancy book.  I read whatever happens to catch my eye, I have a lot of books that have red doors on the cover.  I wonder what that saids about me.  By the way my house doesn’t have a red door, but maybe it should.  With my kindle the covers aren’t as important but I’m in love with samples.  (I had to delete a bunch this morning, some I had bought and some I didn’t)  I’ve started several classics lately but they are just too many words to tell the story and my daughter saids I can’t count reading the cliff notes as reading the book.  Yesterday we were talking  charactors in the books that bug us, one in Germany I wanted to jerk the people out by the throat and slap them right hard, and a charactor in another book that was just to whining after about 3 books just couldn’t take it anymore.  The books that are take offs of other books  the sci-fi Horatio Hornblower for example.  The books that remind of the places we have been.  A few years ago we went to Colorado and one of the audio books we took was a Louis L’Amour and it took place in the Durrango area and we were listening while we were there.  (just random chance)  I forgot about that we listen to alot of audio books on car trips.  For those books the person reading the book makes a big difference, even if we liked the book on paper.  as daughter would say  “ahem, Nancy Drew”   Ok off the soap box now.