Saturday

Today I was an errand-running machine!

• Bank to make a deposit
• Post office to mail off a couple of Ebay orders
• Franklin Covey to get a planner hole punch
• PetSmart for cat food
• Library to pick up a book that was on hold ("Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof," by Blaize Clement, which I spent the early evening reading)
• Beauty supply store for shampoo and conditioner (they're having an $11.95/liter sale)
• Lunch at Schlotzsky's (not an errand, but lunch out is a Saturday must)
• Frozen custard and strawberries at Sheridan's (ditto)
• Watch repair shop to get the battery replaced in my watch
• Blockbuster to rent "Knowing" and spend a coupon for a free previously-viewed DVD (I got "Nights in Rodanthe," a sappy film that I probably wouldn't buy, but free is free)
• Half Price Books to sell some old paperbacks and a stack of magazines

I think that's the last time I'm going to do the Half Price Books thing. I lugged a banker's box (the small size) with a layer of paperbacks, then filled with magazines. I came in right after a family with about twenty boxes of books, so I waited a half hour or more, then they paid me $5 for them. You never can tell--I don't know whether it depends on who's evaluating them, or what--and I'm always disappointed, of course, but I think that was probably the lowest offer I've ever gotten. I could have said no thanks, and carried them back out, but I didn't. Next time I'll take them to the library or a hospital or something.

I camped out at Schlotzkey's for awhile with my notebook, making notes for a couple of iPhone apps that I'm working on. My company, Propaganda3, partnered with Bazillion Pictures to make our first iPhone app, Swine Flute. You can get it at the App Store for $.99 here. We'll be submitting a second app, Venues, for approval probably next week, and we have several more in various stages of completion. Exciting stuff. (Roll over the pig to see a picture of the app screen.)

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The Dogs

We had five dogs in the office today--Dave's two, Jojo and Connor, Dano's Takoha, Cello's Sunny, and Shane's Clark. I love them all, they're all great dogs. Jojo, Connor and Takoha are there pretty much every day, but I don't get to see Clark very often.

He's huge, but a total softie. In the photo he's looking up through the spiral staircase, waiting for Shane to come back down.

And this is Sunny, completely bereft because Cello went to lunch.

Here are Connor and Jojo on a day last week. Dave's wife was coming to pick up the dogs, and he had gone to a meeting, so I took them out and sat and waited for her. They're waiting, too, obviously.

This is a picture of Takoha, and Dexter, who belongs to Cameron.

I love having the dogs at work, it just makes things so much more lively and interesting. Jojo hangs out in my office quite a bit.

Sometimes she just needs a break from the big guy.

And sometimes she just needs a tummy rub.

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The 4th

I don't normally have a lot of stuff scheduled for the weekends. Bob is usually working, and I usually do errands and all the stuff that I don't have time to do during the week. But sometimes it works out that I have a really busy weekend. The 4th of July fell on a Saturday, so I had Friday off to run errands. On Saturday there was a party out at John's house in the country; Bob was going to go out early in the morning and go fishing, but I didn't really want to spend the entire day out there. I had talked to one of my friends who was also going to be out there, and she offered to pick me up later in the day

She picked me up sometime in the middle of the afternoon and we drove out together so Bob and I wouldn't have two cars out there and have to drive home separately (which would mean I wouldn't have been able to sleep on the way home!). We got there in the late afternoon, sat around and talked, had a nice dinner--we'd all brought things, so it was kind of a pot luck, and the guys cooked brats and burgers on the grill.

Then we had fireworks, and went home.

As it happened, I had just finished up a website for the friend who drove me out to the party. She sells handcrafted items at several locations, and had decided she needed a website, so I built it, and it went live that weekend: kbellboutique.com

The next day, Sunday, was a family reunion in Sedalia, about an hour and a half away. I picked up my parents around noon and drove down, had a nice lunch and a good visit with relatives that I only see about once a year, and drove them back home in the late afternoon.

It doesn't sound like a lot, but it was a very full weekend for me!

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Wallpaper

This is sort of sickeningly sweet, but I was browsing through a scrapbooking site over the weekend and discovered the Shabby Princess blog, where you can download a free monthly wallpaper image that you can add your own photos to.

The wallpaper image is a transparent .png, so you open it up in Photoshop and slide your photos in a new layer underneath the openings, then save it to use as wallpaper. Pretty clever.

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Happy July!

How did it get to be July already? Frankly, it's felt like August around here, with temperatures over 100 degrees for most of last week. It's amazing how much difference ten degrees makes, though -- I think it's around 85 or 90 here today, but people were coming back from lunch saying how beautiful it was outside. The humidity is probably lower; the 100+ degree temperatures last week were made worse by the fact that it had been raining pretty much non-stop for the previous two or three weeks, so it was pretty steamy.

And of course, the air conditioner went out during that period. We spent one night in the basement and a couple of very stressful, tense days, fueled by hope, prayer, candles and portable fans, and the air conditioner got a bandaid and, knock wood and fingers crossed, continues to work.

Speaking of rain, we got so much rain that the roof at work leaked again, although fortunately not in my office this time. Bob got a promotion at work, which, yay Bob! but that's been very stressful, too, so it's been kind of a hard month all around. I think we're going to go out to John's on Saturday to cook out and shoot fireworks, then I have a family reunion on Sunday, so hopefully we'll get some relaxation in this weekend.

I've been listing my very extensive library of back issues of knitting magazines on Ebay, many of which are out of print, so if you like that kind of thing, check it out. I've relisted some of them a second time, so if they don't sell I'll probably take them to Half Price books and get a quarter for them (and then they'll sell them for $9.00 or something), so I'd really like to avoid doing that. They're all in beautiful shape, and I kind of hate to let them go, but really, if I haven't read them in 7 years (I have some from 2002), what are the odds that I'm going to read them now?

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Food

• I don't like big chunks of tuna in my tuna salad. Or tuna casserole, for that matter. In fact, if I could have tuna salad or tuna casserole without any actual tuna in it, that would be ideal.
• Same thing with chili--when I make it I break the ground beef up really small. Ground beef in general kind of grosses me out, except for a good hamburger maybe once or twice a year, if I don't think about it too hard.
• Hamburgers: extremely well done, cheese, ketchup, yellow mustard, sliced onion, lots of pickles.
• Hotdogs: Oscar Meyer cheese dogs, yellow mustard, sweet pickle relish.
• I like "fruit on the bottom" yogurt best. Yogurt without any actual pieces of fruit is weird. I'll eat it, but it's weird.
• Salad: lettuce, green onions if not too strong, fresh mushrooms, sliced, black olives, sliced, artichoke hearts. No tomatoes, no hard-boiled egg unless there is also bacon. Ranch dressing, always, preferably the homemade kind made with buttermilk. Bottled ranch dressing is uniformly awful, but especially low-fat or fat-free.
• Eggs: Over easy or hard boiled.
• Milk: 2%, but only for cereal or cooking, not to drink. I don't drink milk. Ick.
• Macaroni and cheese: The ultimate comfort food. Macaroni, American cheese, white sauce made with milk, flour and margarine. Baked. Stouffer's in a pinch, but it's not the same.
• Spaghetti: Thin spaghetti or spaghettini. Red sauce, never meat sauce. Sometimes green olives or mushrooms. Ragu - the other comfort food. All my comfort food seems to involve pasta . . .
• Dessert: chocolate. Or cheesecake. Better yet, chocolate cheesecake. Fruit pie: why bother?
• Ice cream: The chunkier, the better. Ben & Jerry's New York Superfudge Chunk, Chubby Hubby.
• I've given up Diet Coke, so I've been getting back into iced tea. Or lemonade. Or a combination of the two.
• Lunch every day for weeks: low carb, fat free bean burritos (homemade). Low carb tortilla, fat-free refried beans, a little low fat mozzarella, a little Pace picanté sauce. Not tired of them yet.

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