Just a Few Things

No, we do not own a dog.  Our children would love it, but Darrel is resolute about that one. Cats and guinea pigs are as far as he'll go...and the guinea pigs were a stretch, even at that, because they have to live in our house.  But today we had a dog, much to the kids' delight, for about four hours.  I was just getting home from a meeting when I noticed "Tootsie", as the kids named her, sniffing around excitedly all over the neighbors' lawns with that nervous posture that dogs get when they have escaped and are in new territory.  I called her over and she actually came, so I grabbed her collar and put her in our back yard until I figured out what to do with her. I didn't know of anyone in the neighborhood with a chocolate lab.  So, I called Animal Control which isn't open on Sunday.  The kids saw no problem with keeping her overnight and set right to work figuring out if she would respond to commands.  She was quite good at "sit" and "stay" (for short periods of time).  She fetched sticks and chewed them up. She tore around the yard in a frenzy of excitement whenever the kids were out there.  They made a leash from a belt and took her out for walks.  (Sidenote:  Rachel, this reminded me of when we tried to take your dog, Rocky, for a walk with Brandon's bathrobe tie and he took off with it still on his collar--ha ha!).  If it wasn't for having to clean up after a dog and the slobbering and general messiness that attends them, I think Darrel might have been convinced to get the kids a dog purely for the entertainment value. They were occupied with that dog for the entire four hours she was here.  Then on one of the walks, the dog got away from Grace so Darrel had to go round her up and decided to call the police and see if there was any way to locate her owners TODAY instead of in the morning.  And there was.  And she ended up being a neighbor's dog after all.  (Clarence and Arlene have a chocolate lab should you ever find one running loose.  Her real name is Brandy.) 

The second inconvenience of the day is pictured below the dog.  For those of you who don't regularly study the innards of your freezer, this is a compressor so caked with ice that it no longer works properly. This, it turns out,  is a good thing to check when you wake up to a refrigerator full of only slightly cool food.  Check it right after you determine whether or not your power is on.  Darrel pulled everything out of the fridge and freezer while I was at my meeting and defrosted it.  He even wiped it all out!  After it was all done and seemed to be working again, I got the chore of putting everything back in so it wouldn't spoil and so I would have somewhere to prepare dinner.  By the time I did that and got dinner cooked it was about 8 p.m. and the kids had been warding off the hunger pains with frozen balls of cookie dough.

The remaining photos on here are of a sleepover at our house with four cousins to end the summer with a bang. Why just go down when you can go down in flames instead?  Zach was especially happy to pose for photos, saying, "The camera loves me!"  It's now 11:50 and I think the last child just fell asleep.  Should be a stellar day tomorrow!  Hey, as long as my fridge is working, everything's A-O.K.