Chewie hasn’t been himself lately.  He’s been biting and chewing at his back end/tail area.  So much so, that he has torn out fur and been biting right on his skin.  The Hubby went out a few nights ago and got him some spray to calm the irritation and an “E-Collar”.

Now, you might be tempted to think an E Collar is somehow shaped in a similar manner as the letter E.  You’d be wrong.  It’s one of those horrible collars so animals can’t lick or otherwise get to a sore spot.  Of course, this makes it incredibly funny to watch.  At first, Chewie would only walk backwards.  Then, miraculously, he figured out how to move forward again.  But then he couldn’t sit down.  Once he figured that out, he still wasn’t sure if he could lay down.  Eventually he figured out he could lay down – just like he always had, only with this stupid piece of plastic in the way.  Although he realized there was no way he was getting under the bed with that stupid thing on.

So it just so happened that Pansy had a vet appointment today to get her rabies shot.   Since Chewie is a bad patient at the vet’s, I make The Hubby take him; thus, I am off the hook and only have to take one dog at a time.  The vet and the vet tech are both super nice, and start off by asking how Pansy is doing (although they forgot to ask how I was doing).  I said that she was fine, but Chewie was having some problems.  I told them about his itching and licking, and mentioned that I had just today seen a few fleas on Pansy, but not Chewie.

Apparently Chewie is having an allergic reaction to the fleas.  It’s not the flea bites that are irritating him, it’s the mere presence of the fleas and their saliva.  The vet used the analogy of a person being allergic to bee stings.  Gee, I can totally sympathize now, huh?

So Frontline was recommended.  I’ve purchased Frontline before and remembered it was horribly expensive at the vet’s.  So I told them I would buy it at a store and just paid for Pansy’s rabies shot.

Well, you can buy Frontline at the store — if you use their online store.  Most of the big pet care chains — cough, cough, PetSmart, Petco — either don’t carry it or only have it online.  I got some decent pricing at 1800PetMeds, but it’s Friday and it wouldn’t even ship until Monday – so it’d be mid week before there was any relief.  The pricing at Costco was great, but we’d have to renew our membership for $100 to buy the stuff at the cheap price.  We did manage to find it at the pet store at the mall – the same place we bought Chewie, actually.  So, $112 later we have one box of Frontline Plus for Dogs and one box of Frontline Plus for Cats.  I opted for the Plus version since it has more killing power.  And basically, you want as much killing power as you can get when dealing with fleas.  Plus it will keep those nasty ticks away.  I will order some (much) cheaper Frontline Plus online and not have to worry too much about the shipping times.  Hopefully I will just have to do it for the next 3 months and then, with a little luck and the onslaught of winter, the fleas will disappear instead of my money.

So as The Hubby and I were driving home from the mall, I looked at the package.  And I swear this is the truth – the packaging used the word “bitches”.  As in, this product is safe to use on pregnant, lactating and breeding bitches.  I mean, how often do you get to see that on a package?  So I look a little further.   The manufacturer of the product is Merial, a company based in Duluth, GA.  But — it’s manufactured in France.  Figures!  Only the French could get away with that wording on their packaging…

One of my most favorite movies is Dirty Dancing (1987).  When it came out on video (remember VHS?), I was working at a video rental store (remember when you went to small, locally owned video stores?  Yeah, I worked at one of those).  The biggest perk of the job (other than watching movies AT work) was getting advance copies of movies.  After all, the owner theorized, how could his employees recommend a movie if they hadn’t seen it?

So there I was, in college, working part time at the video store and The Fiancee (now starring as The Hubby) was on the West Coast on a temporary assignment.  So I had tons of time to watch movies.  I think I watched Dirty Dancing twice a day for a week.  I could quote it, scene by scene.  The only thing I couldn’t do is the dance moves.  “Look, spaghetti arms. This is my dance space. This is your dance space. I don’t go into yours, you don’t go into mine. You gotta hold the frame.”

Then:

Steel Dawn

Road House

Next of Kin

Ghost

Point Break

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar

Forever Lulu

11:14

And now Patrick Swayze is gone.  At age 57, pancreatic cancer won out.

All right, pop quiz. Airport, gunman with one hostage. He’s using her for cover; he’s almost to a plane. You’re a hundred feet away… Jack?

Wait, no, it’s not that pop quiz… it’s more of a water quiz, not a “pop” quiz…

Can you tell the difference between the single water bottle and the case of water bottles below?

Some obvious differences:

1) one vs. many: one bottle is less than a case of water

2) brand: the single bottle is Aquafina and the water in the case is Poland Springs

3) size: the Aquafina is actually abit larger than the Poland Spring bottles

The non-obvious difference:

4) price: $4.25 vs. $3.99.  Guess which one is which…. go on, I dare you.   Yup, the Aquafina bottle was $4.25 while the CASE of Poland Springs was $3.99.  The magic difference??  The place of purchase.   I bought the Aquafina at a movie theater.  And they wonder why movie attendance is down???

When we went to go see Inglorious Basterds, we went to the matinee show – so for the three of us is was about $20 for tickets.  Then we got some goodies… which we know will be about the same as the ticket price.   But I forgot to get The Hubby his water, so I had to go back and get it.  And heard the single pricing for the single bottle.  And about died.  I just paid more for one bottle than I paid for a case of THIRTY TWO bottles.   This totally justifies me sneaking in candy and just buying “fresh” (ha!) popcorn.

One of the hazards of my name – religious signs.  This was taken somewhere between CO and CT.

I wish I could say I was the genius, but it was the internet that gave me this little bit of genius.

Have you ever thought about freezing your cookie dough?  Me neither, until one of the wonderful baking websites I lurk on told me.  I was absolutely in love with the idea.

And it only took me 2 months to do it!

To be fair, I really didn’t do any baking in the last few months, so opportunity was limited.  But, for some reason, I made Peanut Butter Cinnamon Chocolate Chip cookies last night and Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal cookies tonight.  I really don’t like peanut butter; I’m not that fond of bananas; and oatmeal is in the “leave it” column.  But the combination of the three – yummy!!  For both batches, I made a double batch and just baked several dozen.  I used my Pampered Chef melon baller and made perfect cookies balls.  For the ones I didn’t bake, I put them on some paper plates and stuck them into the freezer for several hours.  Then, after they were all frozen, I popped them into an empty ice cream container.  The only downfall to that storage method – I can see The Hubby some member of my family actually expecting ice cream to be in an ice cream container.  I do have some in a freezer ziploc bag – so I will have to see which one works the best for us. Next week I will have to test how well the frozen balls bake and how the final product comes out.  Life’s tough, huh?

From our trip to Denver -

We went to the Whole Foods across the street from my mother in law’s house.  It was the first time I’d ever been in one. The Boy laughed, well, his ass off at this.  He saw the bottles on the top row at such an angle that all he saw was “ass”.  He couldn’t figure out how they bottled it!

We tend to celebrate birthdays in batches – summer birthdays and winter birthdays.  My mom, my niece and my nephew have their birthdays in August, so we generally celebrate summer birthdays in August at our place.   And this year was no exception.

So Saturday we had about 20 people over for dinner.  It happened that our church was having a take out lobster dinner that night, so I offered people the choice of burgers and dogs or buying the lobster dinner from our church.  It was split 50/50 – half did the lobster and half did the grilled stuff.  The Hubby grilled as I went and picked up the lobsters.  We had ice cream, ice cream cake, brownies and cookies for dessert.  Yum!

As it got dark, The Hubby pulled out the fireworks we had gotten in MO on our cross country drive.  He and The Boy, with occasional assistance from a cousin or two, set them off to lots of “ohhhh” and “ahhhh” from the crowd.  I have to admit, those were some pretty decent fireworks.  When The Hubby set off the first one, he didn’t think it was going to be very loud, so he didn’t bother taking the dogs in.  He should have.  Chewie went absolutely nuts.  I got them in the house and behind our bedroom door for the rest of the show.  But Chewie was so upset, he wouldn’t go out of the house for the rest of the night.  Pansy, however, was more than content to hang out by the fire pit and get attention from the little cousins.

My brother, his wife and three boys spent the night in a tent in our backyard, and my parents brought over their camper and parked in my driveway for the night.  Sunday morning we had fresh farm eggs, scrambled up by The Hubby, as well as sausage, hash browns, bagels and juice/coffee.  Everyone stayed until noontime and then it was time for my brother to head back to Boston.

Both The Hubby and I were dead tired, but we had promised to go to see Inglorious Basterds with friends in the afternoon, so away we went.  It was a pretty good movie – I’m not upset to have paid money to see it.  We had our friends come over for dinner after since we still had so much food left over from the party.

But, reality was setting in – by 9, I was totally ready for bed.  We snuggled up and watched True Blood and Hung, and I could barely keep my eyes open.  It was one of best nights of sleep I have had in a long time!

my new laptop showed up yesterday afternoon.  I had a pretty productive morning, work-wise.  I scanned and filed and then moved the pdfs to the old Lenovo hard drive.  By noon, I was pretty much done with everything I thought I would get done and was just basically waiting for the UPS man to show up.

And there is no more sure way to get the UPS man to show up than to be in the middle of some project that you can’t stop.  So I made some pizza dough around noon, and sure enough, about the time I needed to start kneading the dough, guess who shows up?  Yup, Mr. UPS Man.

So from about 1:30 to 5:30 I spent unpacking and setting up my new laptop.  It has a much wider screen than the old one, so I have tons of space to look at in Excel (awesome!).  And web pages look pretty cool too!  It has a different setup for speakers (there are two up top near the screen) and the mousepad is textured.  On the right side of the keyboard “IdeaPad” is light up in white.

So I got 95% of my programs installed yesterday.  I moved over files last night (work stuff, personal stuff, music, etc.).  This morning I buckled down and got my Firefox profile moved over (how I have missed my favorite sites!) and now am working on getting my email up to speed.

I have long term plans to check through my old Lenovo hard drives, make sure I have everything I want, and then wipe them clean to use as mass storage for pictures and video.

But for now, I am happy just to be able to use a computer at the breakfast bar while I bake cookies for church.

So, after calling Lenovo about my most recent computer failure, I escalated my call ticket to their Customer Relations department.  It was going to take 5 to 7 business days for them to respond to the call.

I got the call last Thursday, the 13th.  Steve was a nice guy, working at the corporate headquarters in NC.  He explained that they wanted to take a look at the machine, so he was authorizing a return to his location for “high level” technical assistance.  I explained how I purchased an extended warranty to have some one come to my home and fix the dang computer at a minimum of downtime on my work computer.  And even with those efforts, I ended up having to send it to Texas anyway.  And then it didn’t work and I had to send it back.  I told him that even though everyone I had dealt with on the phone and in person was perfectly wonderful, I pretty much thought this fell under the “three strikes and you’re out” rule.  I really liked my Lenovo (when it worked) and wasn’t interested in finding another computer, I just wanted one that WORKED.

So he offered me a new computer.

It turns out they don’t make my model anymore, so he had to customize the next most similar system to replace what I had.  He placed the order that day, and the notification email came back as an estimated ship date of Aug. 20, with a 2 day UPS shipping.  So I figured if I was really lucky, it would show up on Saturday the 22nd – but more than likely it would be Monday the 24th before I would see my brand new laptop.

I checked my email this morning and saw a notice from Lenovo.  My computer shipped on Monday the 17th.

That means Tomorrow …. I will be checking out and falling in love with my new, working laptop.
Awesome!

Epi Pen.

I can’t believe the weekend I had.

The awesomeness started on Friday when my computer died (again).  I also got head-butted by a runaway goat Friday night.  (There’s a great bruise growing on my leg right now).

Saturday The Hubby and I were going to tackle the mulch pile.  It’s been in the driveway for what seems forever.  So he started mowing, and I started weed pulling under the deck.  As I was sitting there, my left hand ran across something that pricked me.  I thought it might be some berry bush growing, but it turned out to be a bee.  He bounced off my wrist and glanced across my chin.  I ran out from under the deck and into the house, getting some ice cold water running on my wrist and holding a baggie of ice cubes to my chin.

I decided to get something liquid into my system as I hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink for a few hours.  I sat outside on the step, watching The Hubby mow and trying to take it easy.  I started to feel hot and generally just “not right”.  I went into the house, took off my shoes and socks (my feet were really hot all of the sudden) and laid down on the couch.  I started to feel itchy and it seemed like my eyelids were puffy.  I called The Hubby in and told him what happened.

He looked for some Benadryl, but couldn’t find any.  I was feeling worse and worse, so he decided to drive me to the pharmacy, pick up some Benadryl, and go to the walk in center.  He gets the liquid medicine, and the pharmacist told him to double the dose as it was children’s benadryl.  So I took a double dose.  Then I took a look at my arms – they were all red and white splotched – hives were breaking out every where.

We speed up the highway (just one exit away, thank goodness!) to the walk in clinic.  He parked on the side of the building, got me into the office and said – my wife is having an allergic reaction to a bee sting – can you see her right now?  Luckily for me, they were pretty slow and they rushed me right in.  We explained what happened, how long ago, what medicine I took, etc. and the doctor told us that since I took the liquid stuff, she wasn’t going to give me the shot.  The shot would have worked in 10 minutes; the liquid was going to take an hour.  Then she looked at the dosing and figured out I took too much.  The dose is 2 teaspoons, but the line on the cup is at 3 teaspoons.  So I took an extra 2 teaspoons of medicine – and she pretty much promised I’d be out for most of the day.

We stayed there for an hour or so – I was mostly out of it.  The hives and itchiness went away.  We got the prescription for the Epi Pen and steroids and went on our way.  After a stop at the pharmacy, we got home and The Hubby made me some lunch.  I ate about one scrambled egg and that was all I got down before I fell asleep around 12:30.  I slept until 4:30.

But The Hubby was determined to finish our project.  So he finished weeding and started up mulching.  He got most of it done before 4:30, with breaks to check in on me to make sure I was still breathing.  What a great guy!

So, now I have to practice how to use this darn Epi-pen.  And keep it with me all the time – one in the house and one in the purse.  And we now have tons of Benadryl in the house (and my purse).