Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

You say tomato, I say tomahto.

Shredder shouldn't be such a hard name to say, but in the little more than a week that Shredder has been a part of the family, I've called him Zac, Jake, George, Buddy, and Cheddar. Luckily, he responds to all of them if I use my "you're a sweet puppy" voice.

New Kid in Town

Before we left for vacation over Spring Break, which I'll get to eventually, I had to go to Wal Mart for some last-minute Easter things. You know, the usual candy, Easter dinner and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, I got the boys each a new shirt and shorts.

Anyway, as I was walking out to my car, I saw this dad and his 2 little girls with a crate full of puppies. There was something about them that drew me to them.

I put away my groceries and walked over.

In that crate (I wish I'd taken a picture--I do have an iPhone after all) were about 6 black lab puppies and one yellowish lab puppy.

They were jumping and yelping and climbing all over each other. Just when I was going to make pleasantries with the dad, the yellow one looked up at me, yawned, laid down, and fell asleep.

I told the dad that I would take that one if he would keep it for me until after we got home from vacation. Of course he said sure. He was looking to give away 7 lab puppies!

Monday evening, the 20th, Zac and I went to St. Francisville to pick up our puppy.

Meet Shredder...


I've absolutely NEVER been a crazy dog person, but this pup is the sweetest one ever. He's very laid back, has only had 2 accidents in the house, loves to go with us everywhere, can already play fetch, and hasn't found my shoes yet.

By the way, Jake had naming rights for this one. I'm sure that when he finds my shoes he will live up to his name.

Our House

As silly as it sounds, there are few things I like more than driving up to my house when the yard is freshly mowed and the flower beds are freshly weeded. It feels good when the outside of our house looks nice. Our house has real curb appeal with the day lilies, azalea bushes and iron gate across the driveway. The back yard is beautiful to me since we lined the beds with the landscaping bricks.




Easter is a strange time for our family. Since George has to get up before the crack on Easter morning to do the sunrise service, the Easter Bunny comes to our house after church. The several days leading up to Easter Sunday are full of George being exhausted getting the service ready, worrying if the kids will show up, worrying if anyone from the congregation will show up, if the sermon will be good enough. Of course, his worry always pays off. It's always good, the attendance grows, the youth who participate grow spiritually and mentally, and those who attend are always left with a meaningful bit of Easter.

This year and last year, in addition to getting the sunrise service ready, George has also had to lead the confirmation retreat for the 6th graders. Tradition has always placed it during spring break, which has been our family's "sacred" time. We give over half of the summer vacation, a week of Christmas break, every weekend, and various Friday nights to the youth group. Now our spring break is being encroached upon. I think next year George will reschedule this retreat so it doesn't take away our potential family vacation. Even if we don't do anything or go anywhere for SB, it is great to know that we have a solid week to be off work and school to just hang out together.

Oh brother. I didn't mean to bore you, internet, with my personal pity party. I tell you all of this on the eve of the boys and me going to pick up George from the retreat to head out to Texas for the last half of SB. Poor, poor, pitiful me. Hey, there's another blog title!

Anyway, here are some pix of Easter and Jake's class party at school.















Oh yeah. Jake found a 4-leafed clover in our yard.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

So now begins the evenings spent at the ballpark, the constant washing of uniforms, the rushing from home to ballpark, the ridiculously early or ridiculously late dinners, the way past bedtimes, and the most fun we usually have all year.


Both boys are on the Brewers. Awesome.

In other news...Dixie made it home. It turns out that she lives around the corner from us. Her owners are actually a nice couple who happened to be out of town for a funeral and left their idiot son to take care of her. She's an inside dog and he would come over and let her out during the day because he was obviously too lazy to come over a couple of times a day to take care of her. When George walked Dixie around the block and saw the lady outside and asked if this was her dog, she was elated. Her idiot son had told her that Dixie had been gone for 3 days and was probably dead. The lady was grateful for us taking care of her and was glad to have her back.

Here are some pictures of the boys during the Palm Sunday processional at church.

The Bitch is Back

Well, as far as song titles for my posts lately, I never expected to use that one!

Dixie came back to us last night. George and I were out on a last-minute date that I'll tell you about in a minute, when I got a phone call from Jake. I had to hang up on him because I couldn't understand him and I needed to walk out of the auditorium to call him back (on the babysitter's cell).

I called back. No answer.
I called Zac's phone. No answer.
I called the house. No answer.

Rinse. Repeat.
Rinse. Repeat.

One last try to babysitter. Finally a pick up. (It's a good thing too--I was about to go back in the auditorium to get George and head home!)

Rachel, the sitter, put Zac on the phone. He said they were in the front yard playing baseball when Dixie trotted up to them and started playing. He wanted to know what they should do. I told them to just take her inside and take care of her. By this time it was already almost 7:30 and I didn't want them walking the neighborhood looking for the owner...again. I also told him not to call me unless someone was bleeding from their ears.

So, she stayed the night with us last night and I'll take her home this afternoon when I get home from work.

I'm figuring the redneck who owns Dixie isn't as nice to her as we are and she made a fast escape to come back to the Life of Riley.

The other day when I found the owner, I was walking at the other end of our street asking people if they knew this dog. I saw some guys working on some cars at one house. They had a male black lab who was a little bigger than Dixie and also had a neon orange collar. Just as I was about to talk to them, these two guys pulled up in their pick up hollering that she was their dog. The one guy jumped out of the truck and ran over to her calling Dixie. She turned to him, and acknowledged him, but didn't react really until he got his lead out. This lead was HUGE. It was like a 1-inch diameter lassoo. He slipped it around her neck, she barked, I unhooked my leash, he shook hands WITH THE GUYS WORKING ON THE CAR...NOT THE PERSON WHO FOUND HIS DOG, and jumped in the truck with her. I told him how good she was and how much fun the boys had playing with her and that if I hadn't found him I was keeping her. He said, "Well, I paid too damn much money for this dog for her to go missing." Okay, jackass, put a microchip in her back or, at the very least, an ID tag!!!

Oh well, the world is so very full of jackasses.

Now on to our date...

One of the parents of a youth kid at church is the general manager of the Coca-Cola plant here in Baton Rouge. He had tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld last night and couldn't make it, so he passed the tickets on to us!!!!!!!!

The seats were great, although, in this particular theater there are no bad seats. We were very close, but didn't have to crane our necks up to watch and listen.

There was a warm-up comedian whose name I can't remember. I may have been able to tell you more about him, but this is when the kids were dealing with the dog and I was in the hallway of the auditorium. He did his bit for about 20 minutes and then Jerry came on.


The picture doesn't really reflect just how close we were to the stage. I'm not complaining, though. I took the picture WITH MY IPHONE!!! (WooHoo, I have an iPhone.)

He was hilarious! At one point I was laughing so hard I was crying. There was one stupid-head somewhere behind us who yelled out "Kramer" a couple of times to the point that Jerry had to stop and make a distinction about how Kramer, Elaine, George, and Newman, while interesting characters and personalities, are, actually, infact, fictional! That when you yell at Jerry on the TV, he doesn't respond, as opposed to tonight.

That shut him up.

He spoke for about an hour. He had another show at 9:30. It was really great.

From the concert, we went to one of our favorite places in Baton Rouge, the Kingfish Lounge in the Hilton Capitol House. We had a beverage and some appetizers (spring rolls and smoked salmon).

It was an excellent evening.

We packed in all that fun and were home by 10:00. I don't think it gets any better than that.

Pretty Visitors

The close-out to March has been terrific.

Jake's choir at church sang a couple of weeks ago. That's him on the back row, all the way 2nd from the left, in the red shirt.


Our town had a fair.




George went to Aspen with Bruce (again).
I got a haircut.
I forgot to record a deposit in my checkbook, so when my statement came in to balance, I had extra money!

And we had another visitor. Turns out her name is Dixie. Had I not found the owner, I was totally keeping this dog! She was VERRRRYYY sweet.


We got some new furniture for the bedroom and dining room. You'll have to come visit to see it.

And we have a luna moth on the front porch light. Luna moths are so beautiful, they almost don't look real.