Poor little pooch

Chloe had surgery today to remove a tumor on the back of her thigh. We are not sure if it is cancerous or not yet. We called the vet to see how the surgery went and they said she was doing okay. We had been worried that they make have to amputate her leg, but they didn't. She will come home tomorrow morning. I can't wait to get her back home where she belongs. It makes me so sad to think of her in a little cage alone, afraid and hurting. I'm taking off work the next 2 days to be a nurse for her. More updates to come.

Back again

I've been a very bad blogger as of late. I deserve a hunk of coal in my stocking, I know.

My new job continues to go well. I'm loving the area even more as I drive around working with customers in the hills and hollers of Monroe and Brown Counties. Its beautiful! Corey and I are thinking more seriously about buying some wooded land to build a cabin for hunting and generally getting away from it all. Ideally, it would have an old house on it that we could stay in while building the cabin and then tear it down when we don't need it anymore. I would LOVE our cabin to be strawbale built, but we're still just dreaming at this point.

We've gotten fully into the Holiday swing, as of the last week or so. I've pretty much finished making homemade Christmas cards and most of the gifts have been purchased. Corey made buckeyes and toffee and I made my Grandpa Rhoades famous fudge, but just like everyone else who's attemted to make it since he passed away, I couldn't get it to turn out right.



It has turned really cold over the last few days. Stinky has been hogging the heat registers. Today has been the first real snow (it snowed about an inch once before, but it fell and then melted while I was in a meeting for work, so I don't count that one since I didn't see it ;-) Ed and I are enjoying watching the snow flakes fall outside the window as I write this.





Happy Holidays Everyone!

Woohoo

Prudence must be getting worked in. I hit a new record today. Averaged 60 mpg on the way home from work. Yeah!

Oh deer!

“There are two things you don’t want to see being made - sausage and legislation.” - Otto von Bismarck

My husband, the sausage maker. This is what has become of Corey’s most recent deer (along with some pork, which Corey says you need, since deer is so lean). He made bratwurst and “Slim Jims”. I was proud of him. He did a really good job. Near as I could tell, without tasting them, which I will NOT do in a million years. I am still a vegetarian, after all. He ground the meat, seasoned it, stuffed it, smoked it, and finished it off in the oven. So, now I can say from experience, I’ve seen both legislation AND sausage being made…. and it wasn’t so bad.


Stuffing the casings.



Twisting into bratwurst.

Prudence has arrived

Corey surprised me and picked up my new Prius and parked it in our garage. I figured it wouldn't be in for a few more days. I named her "Prudence", which seemed appropriate. I love the smart key feature (you leave the key in your pocket and the car senses it, allowing you to open the doors and start the engine) and the hands free phone thing is pretty cool, too. It's amazing how quiet the car is... scary, almost. Its so cute, you almost forget that you are driving a partially 0 emission vehicle. Toyota says it generates 70% fewer smog forming emissions and uses at least a third less gas than an average comparable new vehicle. It's blue, but yet, it's so beautifully "green".

The invasion has begun

They started creeping in through the gap around the air conditioner upstairs. Then, I started seeing a few, parched little creatures laying belly up on the living room windowsill. Today I must have sucked hundreds up with the vacuume whilst cleaning the front porch.

Almost heart attack

If you know me in real life, you know that I tend to freak out about stuff. Well, last night was no exception. I realized that I had accidentally erased a bunch of important pictures off of my memory card. I was really bummed because I'd driven half way across the state to take these pictures as a favor to my mother-in-law. I was totally bummed out. Then, a very nice fellow Flickr member mentioned that there are some shareware programs that can retrieve erased pictures off memory cards (as long as you have not re-written over them with new photos). I was able to try one of the programs out for free to see if it could find my photos and voila! There they were! I did purchase the program and recovered all of my photos. The program I used was called "CardRaider" but there are plenty to choose from. So just so you know, all is not lost if you screw up your memory card.

I had a really fun weekend. My friend Kim spent a few nights and we had some serious scrapbooking time. We also checked out a neat new scrapbooking shop. Our other friend Susannah and her little boy Tucker came over for a day, too, and we had fun catching up. Susannah brought along a recipe for squash soup, which all agreed sounds gross, but it tasted great!

I only have two pics to share today, one of me and Kim taken with the onboard camera in my new computer (she will be so thrilled when she sees this) and another random shot of Ed jumping for a milk jug ring. He can get some serious air.

Note: pictures are not currently working (trying to resolve the problem).