Hackers

Decisions, decisions...

I'm sitting here finishing up some work and trying to get laundry done before vacation. Chad is at Costco to get food for dinner and a few other small things. (In retrospect, this was probably a bad idea since I'm sure he'll come home with a bunch of stuff that we'll never be able to eat before we leave on Saturday. He has been there for over an hour.) Janice and Nick are at the mall looking for some swim trunks since Nick lost 25 pounds training for the fire department tests and can't fit into any of his old clothes.

Lucy, on the other hand, is perplexed. She cannot decide between chasing around a tennis ball or a squeaky ball. To be honest, she'd like to cart around both, but there's only room in her mouth for one.

Wouldn't it be great if all of life's decisions were that tame?

Say cheese

My new camera has arrived. (Thank you, Lucy, for destroying my old one. I never really liked it anyway.)

Here are a few snapshots from last night to provide a bit of perspective on a random night at our house and my fancy new photo-taking abilities. This was right after the Desperate Housewives season finale which Janice and I salivated over and Chad completely ignored.

1) Chad, all dressed up because he just got home from a work dinner (who the heck schedules Sunday night dinners!?!).

2) Janice debuting her funky/trendy/short(!) new 'do. (Plus the ten inches of hair that they lopped off in a ponytail.)

It's kind of weird that you send off ten inches of your hair to a random address. I'm not sure I'd want to work in the mailroom there.

3) Lucy watching all of us get ready for bed. She's not happy because she knows what happens next. (She gets in her crate and doesn't get to play with anyone for eight hours.)

Snip, snip...

Since Janice moved to DC, she has been growing out her hair. She had it all chopped off tonight and donated to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which creates free wigs for women undergoing cancer treatments.

The good news is that she went to our tried-and-true hairstylist Brennan. We love him. He cuts all the Tolley girls' hair. The last time I was in there, Brennan was already stressing out about this appointment of Janice's. He thought it would be traumatic for her. (I'm guessing he was right!)

Here is a before and after of the whacking. It's cute, isn't it?

I'm really hoping she's not freaking out!

Holy heat wave

I'm in Sonoma, CA for the next three days for work. Holy cow it is hot here. When Chad and I were here in the middle of August on vacation it was not this hot. I am not complaining because it's not like I'm here to relax, plus all of the evening events have been moved inside. But this is unreal!

Here is our current weather report:

And, contrary to popular belief, when it is this hot, it doesn't really "cool down" at night.

Three simple words

I'm coming to the quick conclusion that there is nothing I hate dealing with more than people who pretend that they know what they're talking about when they really have no idea.

If I ask you a question, and you don't know the answer, don't make up something that sounds good and might be accurate. This is inevitably going to lead me down the wrong road and create a lot more problems than it solved.

Just say, "I don't know" so I can ask someone else. How hard is that?

And for heaven's sake, if you do feed me a line of baloney and I call you on it, please just admit it and let's move on.

**Disclaimer: This posting was not provoked by any incident

in particular and is not about my husband.**

Two by two

We've had five inches of rain in the last 24 hours, maybe more. It seems to have let up for the moment, but I think we're going to get another wallop tonight. Streets are flooded, basements are filled (not ours, fortunately), and the water is running out of places to flow.

Of course, Lucy loves this. Keeping her dry has been a constant battle. Here she is immersing herself in a flooded ditch by a neighbor's fence.

Does anyone know where I could buy an Ark?

Pig ears

It is finally official: my dad is in the wrong line of work.

I've seen pig ears being sold in all the upscale pet food stores and on pet websites. Yes, they're real pig ears: smoked and vaccum-packed. The things sell for like $1.50 apiece (not a pair--a piece).

This afternoon we were in Harris Teeter (a grocery store out here) buying food for dinner and decided to buy a pig ear for good ole Lucy. She really likes rawhide bones but let's just say they affect her digestion. So we thought pig ears might be a good choice. We support those hog farmers however we can!

To say that Lucy loved it would be an understatement. It kept her occupied for 45 minutes and she gnawed on it until it was gone. I'm hoping that dad can talk to his butcher and smoke me up some pig ears when we come home this summer. Daniel's dog Otis might like them too!

Hallmark panic

I walked into Hallmark today to buy Mother's Day cards, apparently like the rest of Alexandria. It was hilarious. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the card section was three people deep. (And, yes, this means that our Mother's Day cards to our moms and grandmas will arrive super late. I hope they'll forgive us.)

Reminds me of the days I was working at Bath & Body Works, when dads and kids would come in looking for Mother's Day gifts, sometimes on Saturday, but often on Mother's Day itself. The kids would always pick out the most sickeningly sweet lotions, while the dads just wanted to buy the basket full of stuff and get out of there.

Eavesdropping

Overheard as Chad was putting Lucy in her crate last night for bed:

I know, Lucy, you don't really want to go in here, but Ellen says you have to. Don't take it personally. Sometimes she's just plain crazy. But we love her anyway.

I'm counting on you to be more sane than she is. Even though you're a girl, you don't have all of those weird hormones to make you nuts. Then there will be two of us.

Snacking at 6 a.m.

I was at the grocery store this morning at 6:30 buying donuts to celebrate that a colleague had her master's thesis accepted yesterday. Ahead of me in line was a woman buying Sunny Delight and a few other things. With her was a little boy, maybe two years old, in a stroller.

Whoa, I thought, she's really got herself together to be at the store with a kid at this hour of the morning. I had a hard enough time getting myself dressed!

I was pretty darned impressed until I saw her hand the cashier an open bag of BBQ potato chips to scan. When they were paid for, she handed the bag back to her child. Gee, what a nutritious breakfast.

I would wager that even my donuts were more healthy than that!

Snapshots

Don't expect to see any pictures of Lucy anytime soon. (Or Chad or me, for that matter.)

My good friend Sara, who works close to our house and checks on Lucy over lunch, tells me that today she got ahold of my camera and camera cord and absolutely went to town. This is partially my fault as I know she can reach the kitchen table but had a lapse in judgement this morning and didn't move it. Drat!

On the plus side, I really did hate that camera and I've wanted to buy a new one for awhile, even though it's less than a year old. On the downside, for starters, I'm frustrated that she did this. And I'm not really in the financial position to throw down a few hundred bucks for a new camera at the moment.

But I am taking suggestions on the best brands or models to buy, so please pass them along.

They kind of listened

Three years ago I spoke at a National Confectioners Association conference about consumer trends. One of the trends I talked about was the "retro" trend--Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony...shoot, even the Slo-Poke has made a comeback! But I did make one small request in case anyone was out there to hear it. I asked them to bring back the Tootsie Pop Drop, my favorite Halloween candy of all time.

They must have listened. Rachel found me a package of my very own Tootsie Pop Drops this weekend at a gas station on the way to our wine festival. Eureka!

I waited until today to open the package, barely able to contain my excitement. I am sad to say that they aren't as good as the original (though what is?). For starters, they aren't individually wrapped. I don't want to eat 24 pop drops at a time, people! And they are missing the best color of them all: pink, which I think was strawberry. But it is a step in the right direction.

Tootsie folks, if you're out there, you are very close to perfection. But, call me. There are still a few things that you don't have quite right.

Here we go again...

My history of losing things and then finding them is no secret. In fact, it's sometimes comical.

I have been looking for the Michael Clayton DVD we got from Netflix for, oh, about three weeks. After operating under the assumption that I would find it, I have come to the conclusion that I don't know where the stupid thing is and perhaps I even threw it away.

I have already written about how impressed I have been with Netflix--I love them. In marketing terms, one might say I'm a "brand advocate." At any rate, I figured this has certainly happened to people before, so I went to their website and figured out what to do if I lost a DVD. You can report it online and pay $20 (for them to replace it) and then they send you out another movie in your queue the same day. Easy enough. But I thought about it for five days in the hopes that I found the dumb movie.

This afternoon, I bit the bullet and admitted I lost it. I paid the $20, knowing full well that I would find it, but figured that was the price I'd pay for misplacing things. Besides, I've been paying to have three movies at a time when I've only had two at a time cause I can't find one!

Imagine my pleasant surprise: It turns out, their policy is, if you find the DVD within a year, return it for a full refund! Is that great service or what? Perhaps their CEO has an unfortunate habit of losing things, too.

The dog ate my homework

When I was a kid, I never used the excuse that the dog ate my homework. I mean, come on, like that actually happens.

Turns out, it does. This is a permit that I had filled out to send to the City of Alexandria.


Do you think they'll believe my excuse when I ask for a new one?

Blonde joke

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with that expensive double-pane energy efficient kind and today I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn't paid for them.

Hellloooo just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid.

So I told him just what his fast-talking sales guy had told ME last year, namely that in ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves! Helllooooo? It's been a year! (I told him.)

There was only silence at the other end of the line so I finally just hung up.... He never called back.

Guess I won that stupid argument. I bet he felt like an idiot!