Ok, ok, ok, so the weathermen have gotten back at me for my snarky blog post yesterday by working their hoodoo magic and making it snow buckets. So many buckets, in fact, that I can no longer find Doc’s water bucket outside because it’s buried in so much snow.

Apparently, a convergence convention happened last night and now we’re all paying the price. It’s been snowing steadily all day and it’s safe to say that, unless there’s a sudden heat wave, Wes and I will be staying in for awhile.

If I were a guessing woman, I would say that so far there are about 5-6 inches of snow on the ground. Outside, I can hear children shrieking and laughing with delight, and it makes me smile to see their parents pulling them around on sleds. Everything I can see is covered in the nice snow, the kind that’s soft, powdery, and makes muffled crunching noises when you walk on it.

Doc has gone absolutely bonkers for the snow. I tried to snap some pictures of him but he was having too much fun to stand still for his mother. We went outside just a few minutes ago and Doc stepped one paw in the snow, watched it promptly disappear, and then went tearing off across the yard so fast he barely even left tracks.

He then stopped, stuck his whole head down in the snow like an exceptionally waggly ostrich, and then yanked it back up again, showering us both with the cold stuff. He looked so pleased with himself, face covered in snow notwithstanding, that I couldn’t help but laugh. He may be the most whimsically silly dog in the world. I have no idea what he was trying to accomplish but it would appear that he’s satisfied with his efforts.

I’m a bit sad about the timing of this whole thing, though. What with staying home from work yesterday because of the non-existent snow, and then staying home today and tomorrow, the last week before my holiday break is woefully short. I had so many projects that are now just going to have to wait until next year!

Oh well. At least Wes and I are both safe, the puppy’s well-behaved enough that he’s a pleasure to hang out with all day, and our house is warm and cozy. We currently own no vehicles that are wrapped around trees, and neither of us is stuck sleeping at work because we can’t get home. All in all, it would appear that there’s not much to complain about.

The only cause for concern is running out of food. At some point this weekend I’m going to have to go grocery shopping. When that time comes, I suppose I can just rig up a sled and have Doc pull me to Safeway. He may have a bum leg, but the dog can cut through snow like nobody’s business.

This post will have to be kept short, because alas it is late, I am sleepy, and no one ever said in so many words that a blog post absolutely had to be 600+ words. The reason I’m so sleepy and blogging so late is that Wes and I just got home from celebrating our third anniversary with dinner at the Cheesecake Factory! See? The evidence is up there on the left *point point*

If this cheesecake weren’t perishable, and I were still single, it would run a serious race against Wes for my affections. I was about four forkfuls shy of taking this bad-boy home to meet my parents. It’s the Adam’s peanut butter ripple blah-blah-forty-word-long-name cheesecake and it was everything I was hoping it would be.

The frosting was peanut butter, it was packed full to bursting with all kinds of interesting tastes and textures. Unfortunately, I was so full from dinner that I only made it through about five bites before I had to throw in the napkin and request a box. You know food is either supremely excellent or hilariously awful, though, when I’m compelled to photograph it so I have proof that it existed before going straight to my bowl full of jelly.

The cold here has yet to abate, so Doc continues to spend an inordinate amount of time scrunched up in his crate. He managed to scoot it halfway across the room today (he was nearly to the other end of the room, which contains a bookcase, so I’m assuming he was scooting toward some new reading material) and I could swear he’s taking correspondance courses whilst encased in his plastic palace.

The reason you see my big, tough, 85lb. dog wearing a cheery red scarf is that, when I came home wearing said scarf, Doc went bananas and tried to eat it (he gets very excited when he discovers new things he can fit into his mouth). For some reason, this seemed to me to be a good reason to make him wear it and hence we have this picture. Two treats and one command later, we have an adorable picture of my dog wearing a scarf. You tell me: Was it worth it?

Whoa! Hello there! It’s been awhile, I know, for better or worse I’m not yet sure. I’ve had four days off in a row and I’m beginning to suspect that may have been a bad idea. I’ve grown so accustomed to cramming in as much work as humanly possible during the day that, when I have no work to do, I grow a tad bit…difficult.

Yesterday is probably the best example of this. Wes and I came home from church with nothing more on our agenda than to relax. Well, I’d already spent the previous three days doing exactly that and I was antsy.

I got it into my head to make an apple pie from scratch (don’t ask me why. Glutton for punishment, perhaps?) I went so far as to look up a recipe and create a shopping list for the ingredients before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor. I rationalized that it was folly to start making apple pie so late in the day, especially when our fridge was already full of desserts, and put the kibosh on everything.

This did nothing to help my poor husband, who had already gone to all the trouble of washing the puppy (even though it was my turn to wash him) and given me a pep talk about how I could totally make amazing apple pie.

When I told him I wasn’t making pie, he merely shook his head and poured himself some vodka and cranberry juice. Take it from me, this is not the first time he’s ever completely abandoned the idea of ever understanding exactly what goes on in my head most of the time.
Speaking of pie, I did make a custard pie on Wednesday. The pie-making process itself went off pretty smoothly. The crust and I got along fairly well (meaning that I neglected to throw anything) and I managed to get the filling all the way into the crust shell before getting frustrated.

You see, I rolled the crust out as well as can be expected using wax paper on a laminate counter (what I wouldn’t give for a large marble cutting board…) and transferred it without incident to the pie tin.

I spread it all out and stretched the crust all the way to the edges of the tin. Then I used a fork to make pretty little indentations on the crust, covered the edges in foil, and popped the whole thing into the oven for a quick second to bake the bottom of the crust before the filling could get to it.

When I pulled the pie tin out, the crust had pulled away from the edges (because I neglected to fold the edges over to prevent just such a thing). CURSES AND INVOCATIONS. Of course, this meant that the crust contracted toward the center of the pie tin and severely lessened the amount of custard filling I could use. Boo.

To add insult to injury, I think I must have then under-baked the pie or something, because even after letting the pie set on the counter for hours and then refrigerate overnight, when we served it the custard was too runny for me to stomach eating. Wes and my mom said it was good pie but I reserve the right to call their bluff on that because, no matter what, runny custard pie = eww.
Speaking of my mom, Wes and I had a terrific time with my family on Thanksgiving day. My step-father showed Wes how to properly carve a turkey and we were all very impressed with Wes’ mad meat-carving skills.

The reason his skills were so impressive is that this was quite the turkey to practice on. My mother bought the turkey from their neighbors (who grow turkeys I guess? I didn’t get the full story because there’s only so much I want to know about living in rural Washington) and was shocked to discover that this turkey weighed in at an astounding 39lbs.

39 pounds. As in, the weight of a six year old child. This turkey was mammoth. It was so big that my step-father had to weld together two roasting pans in order to accommodate its massiveness. They started roasting it at 11:30PM the night before Thanksgiving.

As you can see from the picture, this was a big bird. It’s so big that it makes my (incredibly strong and attractive) husband look small. Do not be fooled! This man is 6’3″ and weighs somewhere around 220lbs. He is not exactly what anyone would consider a lightweight, but this turkey is so behemoth that it makes him look diminutive. What a sham.

Of course, Wes couldn’t have any turkey making mockery of him so he ripped the turkey to little bits and we all feasted with glee. It was a very good day.
Doc didn’t think so, though. Even though we spent a ton of time with him the rest of the weekend, he’s not really a fan of holidays because he usually has to stay outside by himself for intolerable hours on end.

He consoled himself by chewing on his toys and pretending they were turkey bones.

We would love to take him with us, but his proclivity for eating large inedible objects and his injured hind leg make that an impossibility.

He does have one thing the rest of us don’t, however, and that is the ability to say he celebrated Thanksgiving with the squirrels who live in the tree above his kennel. I bet none of you can say you celebrated Thanksgiving with a bunch of furry rodents who can climb trees at high speeds.

This last weekend was the weekend before Halloween, aka “Pumpkin carving weekend.” Wes and I were all set to carve our pumpkins like we do every year but stopped just short of actually purchasing the pumpkins because we had a choice to make: we could either buy the pumpkins (at roughly $7 apiece) or we could buy Doc more things to destroy with his mouth.

As I’m sure you’ll recall, our poor puppy is afflicted with a torn ACL and a migratory kneecap so his life is pretty slothful right now. The most exercise he gets is when we walk him on a leash to the backyard to do his business or when he runs up or down the stairs to do…whatever he feels like.

The direct result of this drastically immobile lifestyle (hey! that almost rhymes!) is that he has a renewed need to destroy. All his pent-up energy is now being routed directly out of his mouth and this means that his toys are taking a beating. For example, his Nylabone. These are built for aggressive chewers out of nylon-plastic-stuff and we get the biggest one they make (it’s about 14 inches long and weighs at least three pounds.)

He chews it down to a two inch nubbin in about a month.

From what I’ve gathered from other dog owners, this is a virtually unheard-of rate for Nylabone destruction. I suppose, though, that when you deprive a year old Labrador puppy of his right to run around like a maniac he’s going to act out in other ways:

This week he managed to finish off his second gigantic Nylabone and we had to throw the nubbin away because he was starting to attempt to swallow it whole (I don’t even want to know what a three inch piece of nylon-plastic chewed to sharp little edges would do to his soft insides.) This left him with a measly three indoor toys (a spiky ball, a plastic dumbell, and a rubber chicken) and it hurt our hearts to see him without anything really satisfying to chew.

So, we weighed our options: we could buy two pumpkins that would last for a week and then rot or we could buy a new bone and toy for our dog that would keep him busy and happy for at least a month. We picked Doc, who is now the proud owner of a not-so-shiny-anymore gigantic Nylabone and a plastic doughnut that is made to look like the doughnuts that Homer Simpson eats.

He has taken to carrying them around with him throughout the house and is absolutely in love with his new prizes. So in love, in fact, that he wants to indelibly mark his joy into our hardwood floors by repeatedly dropping his three pound bone just to hear it crash.

His favorite thing to do with new bones is stand at the top of the stairs and drop them down the stairs so they make a huge clatter and then crash at the bottom when they meet the wood floor. He’s fascinated by gravity like that. All this to say, we didn’t buy pumpkins, ergo we didn’t carve pumpkins.

I do think we made the choice though. I’m inclined to think that Doc agrees.