random photo monday: kittendog's new spot

it took four months, but kittendog has finally discovered that LP's crib might be a great place to catch a nap. at least she'll keep the baby warm...

random photo monday: anicca plays shy

one of my best friends traveled all the way from ohio for our baby shower last month, and then she hid in the mountains of tissue paper created by our fast and furious unwrapping that day. she really is such a timid little thing...

random photo, er, video monday: behold the power of a pool

champagne thursday: toast #40

i have to say i'm incredibly impressed with my husband's ramp-building skills. i really didn't think he was going to end up with anything nearly this structurally sound, and i certainly didn't think the ramp itself would make the dogs this damn happy. kudos to you, my love.

random photo monday: feat of engineering

i just want to preface this photo by saying that when i told bryan we would have to build a little frame for the baby's changing pad to sit in on top of her dresser, he looked at me like i was completely out of my mind, and i'm pretty sure he told me we should consult a professional.

now, look at this:

we're adding something to our yard that i will post here in a week or so, and in preparation, bryan decided to build this ramp i like to call "serious overkill." he's doing a great job, but the fact that this project seems so reasonable to him while nailing three pieces of wood together to build a changing pad frame was mind boggling is absolutely hilarious to me.

champagne thursday: toast #39

after witnessing the barrage of people and gifts at our baby shower last weekend, i think it's official that this langley chick is a bit more popular than her parents...

champagne thursday: toast #37

yesterday, while hunting for furniture for a client, i found my perfect dining room table FINALLY. and then my lovely husband had it delivered a few hours later as a surprise, and i fell over, i was so happy. yes, i am the quintessential 50s housewife.

things i love wednesday: paying taxes for the first time

i spent the last part of the work day yesterday writing check after check after check to the state and federal government. i've never had to do this before, and it was a little terrifying. i still have one more to write, and i swear, i'm putting it off as long as possible to ward off the crying. even sallie mae doesn't get this much money from me at one time, and that bitch has been all up in my wallet for years.

things i love wednesday: having a non-self-cleaning oven

yesterday, even though i was ridiculously sick and hadn't slept more than 30 minutes at a time the night before, i cleaned our oven. i say this as though it were a huge undertaking because, quite frankly, it was. i hadn't realized the true beauty of self-cleaning ovens i'd owned in the past. after two hours of heating and scrubbing and possibly infecting the baby with the scent of oven cleaner for life, i vowed never to so much as buy a house that included a non-self-cleaning oven ever, ever again. (because it certainly couldn't have been so bad simply because we've owned the house for over three years and have never cleaned the damn thing.) before i showed the husband, he reminded me that he probably didn't know how bad it was before i cleaned it, so he might not be overly impressed. then i opened the oven door, and he fell over dead. we never knew the interior of the oven was blue with white speckles...

champagne thursday: toast #24

at the end of every month, the husband and i try to out-sneak each other to redo the marker board calendar on the fridge. doesn't sound very amusing, i'm sure, but we're bored, dammit. we make up some ridiculous name for the month, like septumbler or jew-lie. he won this month and wrote octubron, complete with umlauts and everything. last night, in a fit brought on by far too much wine, he drew this little picture after adding some numbers to bring the calendar into the month of november:

and that is why i love him.

champagne thursday: toast #15

the husband and i aren't going to let a little thing like not having a dining room keep us down. on impulse, we bought a shiny new gazebo and dining set this past weekend, and we finished setting everything up last night during a monsoon because it was much more pleasant than trying to do it in 100 degree heat. i think it turned out lovely...and the dogs are happy to get to be outside without being in the rain, which is really the only important thing anyway.

heads up

i'll be in tucson beginning sunday to once again take part in self-flagellation the bar exam process self-flagellation, which means i will likely be incommunicado, particularly since i will be using a crappy windows vista machine instead of my lovely macbook (do shout outs to apple garner me free schwag? because that would be fantastic).

in the meantime, stay entertained by reading truly great blogs, such as dooce, bossy and this mcdowell guy i know who apparently has so much time on his hands while waiting for baby that he continues to upgrade his already fabulously designed site.

how to spend several hundred dollars on a free cat

this weekend, we did a little splurging on cadence, basically only because a) i've never had a cat that actually liked things made for cats, rather than the boxes those things come in, and b) we're really tired of her waking us up at 3 in the morning to play. insert ridiculous cat condo here, and now life is beautiful:
please note: it did not come with the attached toys. we bought those things separately and staple-gunned them to the different levels = we can now flip the cat condo for way more than we spent on it and start our own side business in feline real estate.

new monsoon (but not the band)

in case you've never visited the desert, let's just take a look at what an incoming monsoon does to the sky.

this is the sky west of my house at about 6pm yesterday:and this is the sky east of my house at the same time:looks like the world is ending, no?

and this is what the world ending monsoon looked like about two minutes later:yeah, that would be a stock photo because ain't no freaking way i'm taking my ridiculously expensive camera out in a monsoon. even when the husband and i were standing in the far corner of our back porch, we were getting sprayed with rain to the point that i felt like we were on the bow of a ship.

the much anticipated GIANT TV

bask in the glory that is horatio in HD. and the husband isn't even back in town to enjoy the maiden voyage...p.s., see that sad little silver box in the bottom left corner? that's our old 26" tv. isn't he cute? oh, and the cardboard on the wall is marking the new tv's place in our home. it is not art, i promise.

nostalgic deja vu

so, husband is out of town for a funeral (sad), and a dog i love found a family and left the shelter where i volunteer, and i'm feeling kind of sentimental...again. also, my friend my high school was super stoked to see this particular photo when i was trying to fill her in on the last decade of my life, so here goes:

for serious, isn't she just a little cotton puff with a hot pink collar? p.s., that was a cat collar because she was too small for every dog collar in the store. she outgrew it in a few weeks, but damn did that make me swoon. 

that sheep was her first and most favorite toy. she carried it around like a baby and never, ever wanted to harm it, even though she soon started ripping other toys to shreds. maybe six months later, she apparently popped a crazy pill and finally gutted her most beloved sheep as well, and we later went through approximately 8,942 of the damn things at $4 a pop. i still have several of them in our own personal soft toy infirmary. my thimble-less thumbs likely will dictate that they remain there for perpetuity.

also, she did not ever want to leave her crate when we first taught her how to stay in it overnight. we'd get up in the morning, open it up and call her out, and she would look at us like there was a flaming moat of lava surrounding the crate and she could not possibly traverse that kind of fiery boundary. now she laughs at the puppies when we make them stay in the crates when we leave the house. while she stretches out on the tempurpedic. life is good in aikoville.

update

his hours of research finally paid off, and in just a few short days, we will be the proud owners of far too much technology for one living room wall. damn thing better last too, because i don't think my marriage can weather another excruciating study of the benefits of 120 hertz squeezed into 52 inches of liquid crystal display anytime soon.

p.s. um, best buy? bite me. amazon is way better than you could ever hope to be, so don't even worry about refusing to sell us your products.

nostalgia

after drinking far too many bottles glasses of wine last night, all i was looking forward to was coming home at noon and curling up in bed with the dogs studying for the bar exam. unfortunately, today is the day that i was smart enough to schedule not only a house cleaning courtesy of someone other than me, but also a paint touch-up on the exterior of our house. which equals 8000 people too many in and around the house for the dogs to maintain normal sanity levels. which equals why i am currently in bed behind my closed bedroom door to keep the dogs from tripping the housekeeper. and to keep malichai from eating her vacuum. oh yes, he tried. after whining more than a 6-year-old leaving disney world.

days like these make me nostalgic for the all-too-short time when malichai was so tiny, his legs didn't even work properly. which was when we took this picture:which was really just a bad reenactment of this picture:which makes me miss having puppies...but not enough to get another one. because five dogs would be crazy.

champagne thursday: toast #7

a couple of weeks ago, i read a post by dooce about the furminator. apparently, the husband and i had seen this thing at petco before, but we thought there was no way it would work quite like the advertising said it would. all i have to say is i'm totally going to believe all marketing campaigns for all products from here on out. this is the most amazing product i've ever used, and i'm not even kidding. it removed a mound of fur from teagan, and we have never been able to brush anything out of her. ridiculous.

observe the teagan pile (just look at how embarrassed she is to have me for a mother):
bronson is decidedly more excited about his recent hair loss:aiko is downright thrilled to be a bit lighter, especially since we just learned she's gained 10 lbs since she was last weighed:and malichai thinks we're all a bunch of silly bastards:

come on-a my house, my house

yesterday, a rather prominent person in our little town dropped by to invite me to a party. this would be fine except for the fact that i live with four rabid maniacs lovely dogs who like to terrorize greet everyone within a 50-yard radius of our house. the way it works is, someone comes to the door and unwittingly rings the doorbell. dogs have minor heart attacks trying to figure out who it is that has just come to see them and only them, and can you even believe that somebody came to see us? this is the best thing that's ever happened to us! let's see who it is! then i throw three of them out the back door, but i neglect to lock that door. i answer the front door with aiko reenacting a scene from cujo beside me, and i try to have a pleasant conversation with the nice lady that has hand delivered an invitation to a party. then, three dogs come busting through the back door, because did i mention that malichai knows how to open that door if it is unlocked? oh yes, he does. so three crazy little giant furbots burst through the front door, jump at the 4-foot-tall woman and run into the street, all the while giving said woman approximately 15 seconds to watch her life flash in front of her.

and the dogs wonder why we don't have people over more often.

this incident did have the positive effect of reminding me that i had this lovely new masthead all designed and ready to upload weeks ago, that i had been dying to put it up and couldn't wait for june, and that it is now june 4, and just where have i been for four days??