i’ve been a busy little bee lately. i started my classes at nau last week. im doing their distance learning program so i’m still at my crappy little town and not at their main campus in flagstaff
my semester is split in half with three classes this half (aug-oct) and then two classes the next half (oct - dec). my classes this half are: a practicum, ed psych, and tech. in ed. classes are from 5-10pm on tuesdays and thursdays. bleh. but they say most dont last that long.

my practicum had a general meeting last monday. i need to spend 45hrs in a classroom, basically helping out and learning. i get evaluated by the teacher i’m with and i have to put together a lesson plan and execute it in the classroom and my practicum adviser/teacher will come in and evaluate me also. bleh. its scary to think about. i need to hand in a contract thats signed by me and the teacher ill be working with by this friday… i picked out the school i want to do my hours at, but nothing more than that. lol i called today and tried to schedule a meeting with the principal, but some stupid secretary who didnt know english just wrote down a note for the principal to call me back.. im figuring im not going to get a call back. -grumbles- so im sure ill have to email my practicum adviser/teacher and let her know my contract wont be in on time because ppl dont call back..

i also had technology in education on thursday.. it was pretty simple. there is no book; everythings online. its pretty much “read this, do this, email it to the prof, you can leave.” i’ve already done next thursday’s work, so ill be able to leave early.

today is my first day of psychology of elementary-aged children. i ordered my book like a week and a half ago, but it hasnt come in yet. so i’m worried that im going to be the only one showing up to class without a book. .. and that ill have to be there until 10 sharing a book with someone double bleh.

me and jim had a really good day yesterday. it was the first day in a long, long while that i got the giggles and couldnt stop laughing. we went out to home depot and picked up some things (a new wheelie for the sliding glass door that sticks, new ‘guts’ for our leaking toilet).

then we went over to petsmart to pick up some food for the doo-gas. i got to do my happy dance! they were just putting out their halloween stuff and they had TONS of halloween costumes in their size. usually they only have xxs sizes. so we picked up three costumes (rusty = ghost, walter = a devil, murphy = cow!). (anyone who really knows me knows i love cows. when we test-drove the element, the first thing i said was “its ugly” but then the second thing i said was “well, at least we could steal a small calf with this thing”.. yes the dealer really did a double take at me… arizona is also known for cotton, copper, and cows.. theres cows everwhere. yes. when they are close to fences by roads that are not very populated, i make jim pull over so we can stop and moo at the cows.)

after that we stopped at olive garden. they just opened up last week and werent as busy as we thought they would be, so we managed to get in pretty quickly. we fought over breadsticks, i made a breadstick and stuffed mushroom penis, and kicked each other under the table when the waitress came over and asked if we would want more breadsticks. (ok, it was more like me kicking him lol) and anyone whos ever been to olive garden knows its all about the breadsticks, so dont judge :p

when we came home i put the dogs in their costumes. they looked so adorable! walter is a little big for the devil costume, so it might have to go to rusty; hes the smallest of the three. we also fixed the toilet (yay! it doesnt leak anymore!) and we went for a swim in the pool. walter played pool ball.
all in all, it was a great day.

so my garden is coming up *beautifully.*  i have another pumpkin coming up and about 43 lil cucumber pants. i have about 7 lil tomato plants sprouting up as well.  my peppers are growing great and are now getting their second set of leaves in.  tomorrow me and roo plan on looking around the yard and trying to figure out where to put our next garden. yay!

i was listening to the new madonna song, 4minutes, and i absolutely hate it from the very beginning. in the version that i saw and the lyrics that i read to confirm (of course now that i go and look everything says differently, but it did say this two-three days ago) was timbaland singing something to the likes of “i’m outta time. i’ve only got 4 minutes.”  …..    ….  …..   ok…. yeah… umm… 4minutes is a unit of time.. so if you have 4minutes, you have time; you’re not out of it -grrr- i hate silly things like that.   (and i did refind those lyrics here).

for some reason, ive been waking up incredibly early. i forgot that i use to like to be a morning person. ive been getting up around 7 - 7.30am. a week ago i was going to bed at 5.30am. lol so i’m really proud of myself.

today, i’m absolutely loving my husband (just like everyday, but just a pinch more today).  we went out with my mom and went up to chandler.  we stopped at black angus and had an *excellent* lunch/dinner. money’s been a lil tight for my parents, so bunny paid.  i thought that was so nice of him.  then we had to go to costco and pick up a few things. the doggies (as always) made out like bandits. jimmy bought them some duck jerky and some honey biscuit cookies and my mom picked them up some chicken jerky (they love the jerkies) and a package of bones.  jimmy also got us this really great doggy training book that i cant wait to start reading tomorrow. its really detailed and has some great instructions in it.

after that we went over to walmart and picked up almost one of everything. we also stopped and showed my mom the bikes we were looking at last time and thinking about getting. they didnt have the one that i liked in the color that i liked (they had it in white and hot pink; a lil too girly for me). we kept looking and found two matching ones that we liked and were cheaper than the others. jimmy surprised me and got them for us. they’re both the old, 50s-type cruisers. hes is red and mine’s blue.  we had to struggle getting everything into the car, but we managed to do it.  after we got in and put away our groceries and things, me and jimmyroo went for a bike ride around the block. it was dark, so we didnt want to go too far and, really, we just wanted to test them out.  i haven’t ridden a bike in 4-5years.  i know its been even longer since jimmy did.  it was loads of fun. :)  jimmy wants us to get helmets.  i know they’re good, but i dont really want to.  so we will see.  tomorrow we’re gunna go for another ride around the neighborhood.  i’m sure its going to be great again
for some reason we’ve just been assaulted with mosquitoes lately. :(  some, i swear, are as big as the palm of my hand. i call them the prehistoric mosquitoes. i’m waiting for one of them to fly off with walter.  it just dawned on me the other day that they have to be coming from standing water, and most likely from someone’s nasty, uncared for pool. i dont know what to do. :(  we can call the city and complain, but they’ll come spray and with rooroo’s healthy, that worries me a lot. he’s just such a fragile little dog with his allergies that i worry a lot about him. i’m sure the extra poisons in the air wouldnt be good for him.
speaking of poisons.. i need to find some organic gardening pest-control stuff.

i am very happy.  jimmy’s coming home today and should be home in a few short hours. yay!

my garden is growing BEAUTIFULLY! my strawberries are blooming, the tomatoes are coming up, the peppers are growing in their second set of leaves.  i noticed yesterday that one of the pumpkins is coming up its looking like the other ones might be duds though. but the one that is coming up has these gorgeous big leaves.   i have something like 33 lil cucumber plants sprouting up from the ground. my sunflowers are also starting to come in nicely.. this weekend me and jimmaroo are gunna have to go out and look for a place to start a new garden, big garden. i really did plant too many things    my parents keep saying that its going to get too hot this summer for them and that a lot of them will die i hope not.  i’m hoping my peppers will be ok. they like the heat.. and hey, shouldnt sunflowers like the sun?

for some reason, murphy hasnt been eating :(  ive been having to point at his food dish and tell him to “go eat.”  i havent seen him eat voluntarily on his own in at least a week. last night, after some coaxing, murphy ate a whole plate of food like a starving little puppy. jim is wondering if maybe he’s sad because his daddy’s gone. i dont know whats wrong. :(  i’m worried about him.

i watched a show last night on ID (investigative discovery). it was a documentary of countries in south america.  i think they were in like hondorus when i caught it.. a woman translator/guide was showing the host around. they were at a garbage dump and 1,000 families (not people, but whole families)  were living off of the dump. trucks caring 4tons of garbage would arrive every 15-20mins.  a guy would climb into the back, on top of it all, and rake the garbage down to the ground where people and children would dig through it. they even found their food from the dump. the children were looking for cans and toys. one child became very excited when he has eighteen cents worth in cans. there was a woman there with two children. she looked very old and at first i thought she was the children’s grandmother; she was their mother. she walked up to the translator, a young woman in her late 20s to mid 30s, and asked her to take her two daughters.  the mother said she couldn’t support them and wanted them to have better.  i just started crying right along with the translator/guide woman.
i was reading CNN today and stumbled across a news video of a 70yo first-grader.  he was born in the 1930s and promised his mother he would learn to read.  so there he is now, an elderly man, sitting in chairs with 6yos around him and learning to read. the teacher recalled a time when the man  came up to her and asked her if she knew that in grocery stores they had signs above the aisles that say what is in them so you dont have to go up and down them all.   my heart just broke!

i’m so lucky to have been born here. i’m lucky that every night i have a soft bed with a gluttony of pillows and blankets to sleep on, a tubby dog who snuggles me and keeps me warm, clean disease-free food in my own tummy, and no fear of where my next meal will come from. anything i need, anything i want, i get.  today i’m feeling really lucky and really blessed.

so my walterdog decided to come into my room with me and take a nap.  he’s actually lying on my arm and shirt right now.. snoozing away.  i’ve been a little worried lately that he’s been sleeping too much.  he sleeps with me in the mornings and he naps and snoozes a good bit during the day. i’ve been concerned that he’s sleeping too much.  so off to google i went!

i found out that a dog will sleep 14hours a day, including sleeping, snoozing, and naps. what other new thing i learned about is that its positively horrible for you to let your dog sleep with you.  i was just baffled by this.  i always wanted a doggy to sleep with me. rowdy would lay for a while, but then got hot (he was a border collie with long hair) and want to go back outside where it was more cool.  murphy spent half of his first night outside. my parents wanted him to be an outside dog too..  but half a night of him howling and whimpering tore my heart and two and he went right to the bottom of the bed and onto some old beach towels.

my fear with murphyroo was that he might tinkle the bed. so my first thought was: do vets not want you sleeping with dogs out of fear of you sleeping in dog pee?  with murphy, he was only a few months old, still fit in the palm of my cupped hands, and wasn’t potty trained.  we kept a little clock by the bed to wake me up every 2-3hrs to take him out to pee. (i secretly miss those times and him trying to fall asleep, too tired to even stand, yet alone pee).

walterwoo was a few months older when we adopted him. he could go for longer hours, but still wasnt potty trained. (many of times i scrubbed the kitchen floor (always under the kitchen table; i swear i think he looked for maximum inconvenience to clean) and cursed that “damn little pisser!”). we were worried that he might use the bathroom in the bedroom (not the bed. we didnt think he’d do that), so his first night we laid him in the bed between us. that way if he got up and had to use the bathroom, one of us would feel him and wake up and let him out.  of course walter wasnt use to our sleeping schedule.. so for about the first week i had to physically sit and lay him on the bed, snuggle up to him, and hold him until he fell asleep.  this led to a dog that still to this day wants to lay between us and be held.

now they’re both grown up. even walter is no longer a puppy and i now affectionately call him my horse. murphy doesnt sleep with us anymore. i think its because there just isn’t that much room left on the bed.  instead he likes to go and hide under grandma’s bed (we’ve termed this area “murphy’s fort”). walter still sleeps with us though. you can’t keep him out of this bed.  due to settling, our door doesn’t shut and latch properly anymore. walter knows this. he will use his head and force the door open to come in and join us.  even when we’re not here, we’ll return home to our bedroom door open and a walter sprawled across the middle.

In the three years that we’ve been sleeping with dogs and have had them sleeping in our beds, nothing bad has happened.  so why are vets so Chicken Little about it? well, they say that the jumping up and down is bad for older dogs hips. yeah.. well, we have this covered too.  back when murphy was still a pup, we taught him to “come put the paws up.” he wasn’t big enough to jump up on our bed on his own, but he could put up his front paws. we would then lift up the butt and put him up.  rusty and murphy still do this with grandma’s bed. rusty has bad hips and doesn’t jump well. murphy has a big butt and always clips his knees and the butt starts to drag him back down and its just a sad funny scene. so they know if they put their paws up, someone will come along and pick up their butt for them.  yes.. walter does this too with our bed.. mind you our mattress is lower than his chin.  so what he does first is come in and lay his head down on the bed and give you big pleading eyes. this is his way of saying “could you please put my front paws up for me?” yes, we actually put his front paws up for the lazy bones. once you put up his front paws for him, he then (i swear) looks over his shoulder at you, wags his tail, and says “now the back paws please.” … these are dogs that dont have to worry about hip problems.

the next reason is “a dog might not react well when suddenly awakened and bite you.” ok.. who sleeps with their fighting dog?  a dog isn’t going to bite you if you wake him up! in my 20years of dog ownership, i’ve never had a dog just wake up and bite me. yet.. this is something jim is semi-worried about. walter gets very excited in his dreams. sometimes we can tell when he is having a bad dream. he will start growling and barking in his sleep. one of us will just go over to him, pet him softly, and very softly tell him “its ok,” “mommy/daddy’s here,” “its just a bad dream.”  he’ll slowly wake up, look at us, wag his tail, and then fall back asleep. jimmy’s commented before that he’s afraid that when i hug woo, he might wake up and think i’m something from his bad dream and in a sleepy haze bite me, so i’ve been trying to just keep it to a slow pet and a gentle voice. i think its the slow waking up effect that doesn’t have him aggressive. but i’m sure the idiot who goes up to a growling, sleeping dog, shakes him and goes “ooooga boooga booo!” is gunna get bit.. but really, isnt it the person’s own fault for being an idiot in the first place?

the next lame excue it gives is about kids. blah blah blah. we dont have kids and dont have to worry about it.. again, kids are little idiots. you need to teach them not to pull the dogs tail, etc. you cant blame a dog because you’re a bad parent who doesnt teach your child to respect animals.

the last reason given is the a doggie “will try to take over the bed as territory to guard. This can result in bites.”…    ….    …. ok, yeah. walter takes over the bed.  he sees nothing wrong with just being a blankie hog or even just sleeping on top of you. he will sometimes growl if i try and move him or if i try and steal a blanket back.. but heck.. i sometimes growl at him too when he tries and steals my spot by laying on me and waiting for me to move away when i get too hot.. he’s not growling for territory; he’s growling because i woke him up! jim does the same thing, but should i banish him to the floor or living room?

so as i’m reading through these articles and i stumble across a passage that reminds me of walter. i share it with jim on yahoo and this is what happens:

 jess: who does this sound like?
jess: When it’s going to be a problem:

When he’s taking over the pillow and there’s no room for your head. Seriously, if he’s slowly started to take over the prime soft spot in the bed, and you’re left grasping the very edges of the pillows while he stretches out in luxury, it’s time to demote him back to the foot of the bed, or off the bed altogether.

If he races you to the bed, settling himself first, before you get there. There’s no problem if he’s been snoozing in your bed and hops off as soon as you show up, but another altogether if you need to order him out of the way, or physically haul him off so you can lay down. If he’s challenging you for authority, you need to put a stop to it immediately, and make him work for everything he wants or needs, and reassert yourself as the leader
Jim: it sounds like you  :p

i’m really happy. its spring (which is summer-ish back home), the sun is shining, the pool is crystal clear, and life is good. our neighbor has planted some wildflowers/poppies in their yard and some have migrated into our yard.  they’re so pretty looking. its really a… (and i almost hate to say it).. a great time to be in arizona.

sunday me and jimmy took the boys to the dog park. it wasnt a great trip by my standards (had a few run-ins with some mexicans; a woman who was at a dog park and didnt like dogs. a group of older teens/young 20somethings who brought their 2-3m/o puppies and were letting their young kids awkwardly hold and hurt the puppies.), but the dogs still seemed to like it.  sunday was also the first day in the pool, albeit a quick trip in. woo was hot from the park and i was upset. he got in to cool off and i tossed on my ‘kini and jumped in after him.  yeah.. it still gets down to the high 30s / low 40s here at night. it was pretty damn cold and we both jumped out pretty quickly. it was really like ice water. we misplaced the thermometer for the pool, so i’m not exactly sure how cold it is.

yesterday, monday, me and jim kinda slept in and got a late start.  we stayed in until my mom came home from work and then the three of us went out and did some shopping at sams club and target. the dogs are really starting to love our costo / sam’s trips. it means they get brought home a bag of pigs ears and turkery/chicken jerky. you know, we spent a ton of money there, but i can barely remember what all we got now. we got some fucking *fantastic* shrimp. i was playfully asking jim last night if he could run back up there before work and grab me some more. next week we’re so going back and i’m going to stock up. mmmmshimp. yum. :D  i had to pick up a lot of little things from target that costco didnt have, like my shampoo and a body wash that had a smell i liked. we picked up the new juno soundtrack. we saw it a few weeks ago and both commented after the movie that we really liked their soundtrack. its really kickass.
oooh. and we also picked up season 1 of dexter. we didn’t get a chance to watch it last night, and probably wont get to tonight either; so hopefully tomorrow night we can start watching some of it. i really like the tv on dvd option. its great getting to just cuddle up on the couch together and watch a few episodes of a show.

still, me and jim are planning on going to walmart tonight after work. there were some things i couldnt get at either place yesterday. the walmart trip is always unavoidable *sighs*

since i started my ‘diet,’ i’ve lost like 10-15lbs. yaay!

we finished gears of war this past week. he has some wwii fighter game for the ps3 that he wants us to start playing next, but we only have one controller for it; we need to pick up another one, but it sucks to have to spend like $50 for it.  instead i talked him into starting super mario galaxy.  it took a while to get use to. you’re pretty much flying through space, landing on shit, and walking on it. at time you’re actually walking upside down on a ball-like shape and cant see whats coming at you or where you’re going. its tricky.

tonight/tomorrow is going to be busy, busy, busy! i have discussion board work to do for my classes tonight. one is kinda crappy. i need to interview a female family member about their pregnancy and labor. yeah. for me that pretty much leaves my mom. i dont wanna hear the gross stuff that i have to ask. bleck! tomorrow morning (at 9am! eeeep!) i have an appointment to meet with the adviser from NAU.  i received my letter (yesterday! YAAAAY!) that i’ve been accepted to NAU, but i need to go and apply to their school of education (their education department) now. so i wanna take with me a filled out application and the essay that they request for admission. i think i also need a letter of recommendation from a teacher. luckily i already have it.  so tonight i have a lot of work to do.  tomorrow, i’m going to go in like an hour early and do some of the things that i need to do at the college. i need to change my name, pick up a refund check, and i just wanna check in with the lady that processes the graduation stuff and be 110% sure that i will be graduating this may.  that means that ill need to be up at  6tomorrow to be there by 8.  double-bleck!  there are nights this past week that i didnt even go to bed until 4 or 5am.

for some reason, i’ve been loving and craving unsweetened ice tea. all i want is a nice cold unsweetened ice tea.

for some other reason, jim has been spoiling me rotten lately; not that i’m complaining.  :lol:  two weeks ago i was having trouble finding some jeans that i like in my size.  i found out that they’re pretty much discontinued.  luckily i found them online (and on sale!) and he bought me a few pairs of them. then last week he bought me a new pair of croc sandals. (i wore them out yesterday for the first time. i *love* them. they’re the best. croc shoes are amazingly comfortable).  two nights ago, we went out for a drive around town. when we came home, i noticed that someone had left an avon magazine by the door. i flipped through it and found a buncha things i liked. i went online and found a bunch more things i liked. well, jimny let me get them too. mostly some light, natural make-up and a few make-up brushes. we started talking last night about getting a magazines subscription. i’ve been looking today and am down to three choices: cosmo, readers digest, and fido friendly (a doggy travel magazine).

well, the day isnt getting any earlier and i have a shitload to do, so..

(i made this for my myspace blog since i havent posted in there for a while, but it ended up being so long that i decided to put it here as well. i have edited a bit of it to exclude things i’ve already talked about recently in this blog)

things are going pretty ok. i’m putting off crappy work that i dont really want to do. me and jim are both sick. its like the cold from hell. ive had it about the past two weeks. i’m starting to get better, but its hard to shake off. of course, i gave it to jim. he started coming down with it on friday/saturday. he just keeps getting slowly worse. i’m hoping he starts to get over it soon. we have a little mini-pharmacy going on here with different cold medicines and tissue boxes all over the place.

we went out this weekend and probably shouldn’t have. on sunday we stayed in and played video games. i got him addicted to Gears of War. we spent almost all day sunday playing. he had to climb up on the roof and fix a few slipping tiles. luckily a neighbor pointed them out the other day and we were able to fix it before any damage was done. in the evening we went for a drive, got some take out, and had a little picnic in the park. we haven’t done that in ages. yesterday, he had to go into work for a little while and then we went up to chandler and did some shopping. the usual stopping at petco to pick up treats (are doggies love the goodies at their treatbar), picked up some light bulbs at lowes, snuck into sam’s club and scoped it out (we have a costco membership, but think we might want to get a sam’s as well), had dinner at longhorn steak house (friggen *excellent* btw), then stopped at the theater and saw ‘jumper.’ of course when we came home, we played GOW. it was a good day, but jimmy was pretty bad last night; just lots of coughing. i felt bad for going out and not letting him just stay in and rest.
we got our state tax refund this weekend. jimmy wants to buy some bikes and go bike riding. we’re planning on putting our federal (a decent bit of money) aside and saving it as a down payment for a house. we’ve been trying to do a lot to get ready for buying a house (fixing credit, saving money, etc).

we’ve been talking off and on about our vacation this year. we want to do something more than just ‘go home.’ jimmy wants to go to cancun, but i’m leery. i would want to venture off the beaten path and thats how tourists in mexico wind up dead. personally, i would love to do a cruise up the pacific coast to alaska and see the northern lights. of course he countered with a whirlwind tour of the east coast: a few days home, a few days in d.c., a few days in nyc, a few days in philly, a few days in boston. i think we’ve kinda agreed on this (for now). he has to go up to plymouth, ma next month for training and says he’d really like to go and spend some extended time in boston. as a history buff, i would love to go to boston and see the historic sites (and graveyards!). i also love the idea of spending a few days in nyc. when we first met, he took me there as a surprise. neither one of us really didn’t know what to do and spent the weekend there wandering around and getting lost (and we did get to go ice skaing in central park and see the 9/11 site); it was loads of fun. of course, what i really want to do is go to the new york public library and see winnie the pooh and go to the museums there.. and of course you can’t go to d.c. and not at least spend some time museum hopping there.. but i’m not sure if my desire to museum and graveyard hop for vacation is really jimmy’s desire too. it just so happened that last night i noticed the ‘travel’ section in the paper. i think i’m going to have to google some new places tonight.
its going to be a busy spring. jimmy has lots of meetings now that he’s a supervisor and working on all kinds of committees. one of his friends from back home is going to vegas for a bachelor party and has asked jim if he’d want to go and meet up for the weekend. i’ve been encouraging him to. i know he needs to get out, hang out with the guys, oogle other women; he knows the rules: no touching, no fucking, no killing. oh, yeah, ‘no killing.’ i’ve seen the movies, i know what goes on in those parties… so things are going to be busy for him. i’m trying again to transition into NAU. i have an appointment wednesday after next to meet with their advisor. its basically about applying to NAU’s school of education. bleck. i still need to work on changing my name, getting my license, find a new dr, and of course the rest of the typical day-to-day shit that goes on.

i still have my learners permit. i got a lot of driving in this weekend. i’m doing pretty ok, but sometimes forget simple little things like speed limits, not making 90degree turns at 40mph, and not hitting other cars in parking lots. i do pretty ok. i get a little freaked at the speeds here. just going on some side roads, the speed limit is the highway speed limit back in pa. i almost had a panic attack last night coming home. was doing almost 70, pitch black and couldn’t see far (of course with just enough on-coming traffic to keep me from turning on my high beams for any extended period), and on the reservation where cows are known to sneak out of fences and wind up by/on the road. i’ve personally seen two cows on the side of the road at night on that road.. so, yeah, i got a bit freaked. and of course there is nothing scarier than the guy two cars back in his lexus that wants to do 90 so he decides to pass me and the guy behind me at the same time and, yes, of course i could see the lights of on coming traffic and my own immediate demise because of one fuck.. -grumbles- or the bitch from michigan who saw that her right-hand lane was ending, but almost rammed me into oncoming traffic to the left just to get in front of me. its not my driving that makes me nervous and paranoid as it is the fuckers from arizona driving.

-grumbles- but i digress..

i’m hoping to do a lot of dog-focused things next weekend. i want to go to the dog park. i wanted to go the last two weekends, but we haven’t been able to. as luck would have it, it has rained a day or two before our weekend, so we know it will be muddy there and jimmy doesnt like them playing in the mud. im hoping next weekend will be nice enough for us to take them again. they really like getting to run in a big area and socialize with other doggies. murphy needs groomed. badly. for some reason, his head smells like bacon grease; because of this, walter likes to lick him. when we came home last night i noticed my poor murph-a-roo looked like a wanna-be-trendy preteen with gel spiked hair going every which way on his head. i bathed them both a few weeks ago, but i hate doing it. they both hate taking baths and murphy really resents me for a few days after. so, they need groomed. when we were out yesterday i noticed that the petco we were at was going to have a local pet photographer in. it got the thought in my head that i really want to have some family portraits taken. we looked at the website for those people who were going to be there and i didnt really care for their style. so i wanna look around this week and try and find a good photographer who does pets and people. i think a great weekend would be park, grooming, and pictures. fingers crossed, we can get it done this weekend or next.

i love my dogs. they’re my children. there is nothing in this world better than puppy snores. when jimmy’s alarm started going off this morning, walter came in and laid with us. i had to scoot over and give him room and he snuggled in right between us. i woke up after jimmy got out of the shower and was rooting around in the closet for clothes. i hadn’t realized jim had even gotten up yet. i felt walter behind me and thought it was jim. four hours later, walter is still sleeping with me. i heard my father’s phone going off with a text message and went to go turn it off, he came out into the kitchen with me, i gave him a goodie, and he brought it right back to bed. yes. i think there is a green, heart-shaped biscuit hidden in my blankets right now; but i still love him.

i have a lot of little things that i want to do this week. we bought the previously-mentioned bookshelf from target and since its in a box, we need to put it together, but before i can do that i need to find a place for it. right now i just have five or six overflowing bags of books in the computer room. not that long ago, me and jim installed a new kitchen faucet. we had to get new shut-off valves and flex tubing things, but didn’t get the right type; we need to pick up something that has an extra hole in it for the dishwasher. right now our dishwasher has no access to water. i need to go to target or walmart and pick up a jewelry cleaner. jim has bought me some really nice jewelry over the years (my engagement and wedding ring, diamond stud earrings for my birthday) and i want to make sure that i always have them looking nice. i also want to pick up dexter. we’ve been buying and watching a lot of tv-on-dvd sets. while the strike has been going on, we’ve been watching heroes and jericho. i’ve heard great things about dexter and want to watch it. (its a showtime (i think?) show about a serial killer. its now on cbs, but i dont want to watch it edited). target (i think) has it on sale for like $20. i wanna get some new croc shoes, but what i want is sold out, so i need to look for some resellers. the weather is *excellent* here (despite the one rainy days before weekends that ruin doggy park plans). its been sunny, in the 60s/70s. its like a great spring day. i really want to look into turning part of our yard into a little vegetable garden.

before we got murphy, my parents didn’t really want us to get another dog. (i think a large part of it was it being too soon after rowdy’s passing, but i wanted a dog to try and help ease my own pain). we managed to talk them into it by sectioning off a part of the yard. its a U-shape. when we moved in, the back corner leg was sectioned off. while the majority of the yard was grass, this section had a railroad tie, that separated it. the end was sandy and had a prickly pear cactus. me and jim cut it down, cleaned it up, put up a fence, and created a big wooden box. our bedroom window looks off into this section. a perfect little place for a dog.. yeah. that was the plan. that never happened. roo spent half of his first night outside (on the patio no less) and then came right on in to the foot of our bed. so the penned off area is just this empty area that has some wood in it from the box (we broke it down). i think it would be a perfect place for a little vegetable garden. it gets full sun in the morning, shade in the afternoon and evening, and its seperate from the dogs by a fence. all it would take is some plastic sheeting, a few more railroad ties, a dozen or so bags of dirt, and some seeds. it would be pretty easy. its definitely perfect weather to start a garden.

i have a lot of crappy work to do this week for my class. so before i can do anything, i need to do my work… that i’ve been putting off.. for the past 4-5hours. last year i started an organization habit i plan on keeping for a while. i have an excel file that is set up in weekly blocks. i plan out my homework by it and keep track of what needs done, whats been done, whats late. in seperate tabs in excel i keep track of my grades in each class. since i’ve been sick, i have one assignment that is really late that i *need* to get in today. its almost a week late. last week i was just too sick to move and then the weekend came and i was feeling better and wanted to spend time with jim. i had planned on my calendar that two other assignments are due today and need to get done. plus i have a creative writing class that i need to write something for, have peer reviewed, and turned in by thursday. i know i wont have it done and reviewed by then. if i dont, my grade automatically goes down to a B. -sighs- i need to work.