Random thoughts

I don't know what's gotten into my dogs today, but Lord love a duck, they've been driving me insane! Toby rules the house with an iron larynx, I swear, and he loves to herd the other dogs around, literally. Sometimes the others don't want to be herded, which leads to a barking frenzy, the likes of which you've never heard. This has been going on all day for some reason. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, incessantly. I'm going mad, I tell you, MAD! I love my dogs to pieces, but today I'm wishing they were all cats!

I worked last weekend, we only have to work every 6th weekend, so that's not too bad, but when you work the weekend you have to work until the following Thursday - that's 7 days straight. I usually take a PTO day sometime during the week, but since I had the surgery I'm saving up my PTO again and that wasn't an option. I was so looking forward to being off tomorrow. You know how you get on Friday and you're just kind of anxious for the weekend to start? I've been like that all day. Until a coworker reminded me it was only Wednesday. Ugh! I'm so ready for the day off, you wouldn't believe it!

Steve and I are planning on going down to Harvard on Friday. I wanted to get started pretty early, but I have to go to the doctor at 9:30, so we won't be leaving until after that. I'm trying to figure out who's going to take care of the puppers. We didn't have a problem with mom and Bob coming over and letting them in and out, but since we got Toby, they're worried they can't express his bladder and he tends to growl and show off a lot more for others (mainly his teeth). He hasn't bitten anyone, although he's taken a couple swipes at me. He just has a nasty disposition - at least we have that in common! (That was a joke, family!) Anyway, I'm thinking he may be going with us. He can roam through the cemetery in his cart and we can find someplace in Hastings to eat where we don't have to get out of the car, so we won't have to leave him in a hot car. I think he might like it. I know he can make the trip, we got him in Des Moines and he traveled to Omaha just fine. I'm kind of anxious to look around and see what family I might have missed the last couple of times we were down there.

Steve caught my cold. Nasty thing. I hate summer colds and I'm glad I'm almost over it. Yuck.

It's only like 81 degrees today, beautiful! Not much humidity either, which makes the cooler temperatures all the better. I hear is sweltering in New York, I feel for ya, Melissa! You and Lucy stay cool!

PS - Ben ate my new headphones. Now I'm really glad I didn't buy those Bose headphones for way too much money. Darn dog. I don't know how he got these either, they were on my nightstand. He's one determined dachshund, that Ben.

For some reason I can't put a title on this post, wonder what's up with that?

The weekend went by relatively fast. It was my weekend to work. Sometimes it sure feels like that happens more often than every 6 weeks! I have a stupid head cold too. Where do you get a cold in the middle of summer? Stupid thing.

First thing Saturday I had a doctor call all up in arms because he couldn't get into the dictation system. I worked okay for me... Of course when I called him back to tell him it was working he was nowhere to be found. Thanks for the wake up call...

Miss, Mel, Amber, and AJ came over to help make mints on Saturday night. AJ got a jet ski so he's been having fun with that all weekend. I almost with my feet were healed so I could go out too, but I'd look like a whale on the thing, so I guess it's just as well. I think everything has come together for dad's birthday. I hope so anyway. I hate organizing these things. Well, that's not true, I like organizing them, I just get to a point where I want it to be done already.

It rained today. Finally. We woke up to the sound of thunder (isn't that a Bob Seger song?) It was great, although not nearly enough. I can't believe the number of fires going on throughout the country, it's amazing. I don't know how those firefighters can carry all that heavy gear around and walk up and down mountains, etc., in all the heat they've been having out west. Hopefully they'll have some rain in the not too distant future to help with fire concerns. That's scary.

Missy was going to Kansas to watch le bebe while Candace and Tony pack and get ready to move back home. Candace has an apartment that she rented not too far from her parents for the time that Tony's gone. I can't believe he's leaving for Cuba in less than 3 weeks already, it seemed like such a long time ago that he got his orders and now it's nearly time for him to leave.

Genealogy high

I decided to do some scanning of old photos out of my grandparents' photo albums today and I found my great-grandmother's obituary in the book. I'm such a dolt - it certainly wasn't hidden and I've probably read it a hundred times in my life but for some reason today I realized that her father's name was listed in it! Well duh... I hadn't known what it was before because that particular switch had never kicked in, but once I realized what it was I checked http://www.familysearch.org/ and hit pay dirt. I found his information and I also found information on his father and his mother's family dating back to 1602 in the Netherlands. Granted, I still have to verify the information, but at long last I found information on Great-grandma Erikson! Not only that, I found out that her father died when she was 6 and her mother remarried a man named Jesse Calame. In my grandfather's books there were several pictures labeled "Great-grandma Calame" and I couldn't ever figure out where the heck this person came from because I had never seen that name before in our family history. Ta da!


Of course when you find one answer when doing genealogy, you find 10 more questions, which was the case here, so now I have some family sleuthing to do, which I love!


Here's a picture of Great grandma and Great grandpa Erikson, probably from around the 1940s.

Happy Birthday Charlie Brown!

Today would have been Charlie's birthday. I still miss that little stinker. He was so funny and I know he would have been loving summertime, lying in the hostas!

Here's his blog in case you didn't get enough of it before!

More bizarre dreams

I had the most bizarre dreams this morning just before I woke up. For starters, I dreamed I was catholic, going to a Catholic school - with my daughter for a classmate. How odd is that? No, it gets odder. I dreamed for some reason she was going to be in a race with a priest and several other girls from the school! Yeah. Odd. AND, we lived in my mom and dad's old house. For awhile anyway. Then I woke up, thought, "What the heck was that about?" and fell back to sleep again. This time I dreamed we were at the race again, but LDS missionaries were there (thank goodness for some sanity in this bizarre dream) and they were telling Meg she would win the race because she had "The wings of angels on her feet". What?!?! (So much for sanity in the dream.) You think by now when I woke up I'd have the good sense to stay awake, but oh no.... I fall back to sleep again and dream Steve has come home and I tell him about my odd dreams, only to find out we're not in this house, the house we live in now, we live in some dinky little house in South Omaha and I have rosaries hung all over the place. I keep telling him I really have to wake up because I don't want to live in this house, we have a nice house when I'm really awake, it has 3 bedrooms and vaulted ceilings (the ceilings in my dream house were really, really low - he could barely stand up). Funny thing, that was the house we used to live in, not the house we live in now... Odd. I finally got up the next time I woke up, but I just have this icky dreamy feeling hanging on. Oh, what I wouldn't do to be rid of Ambien from my life. Maybe it was the combination of Ambien and the painkillers I'm still taking for my foot. Whatever it was, it was icky, icky, icky. My dogs were even in the dreams - all of them, even the ones that have well, passed on. Odd. Funny thing was, I was really glad to see the dogs! They were the best part of the dream!

Life in a bubble

That's what I feel like I've been living lately. It's so stinking hot and humid, I'm wilted. My foot isn't healing as fast as I thought it would and I'm tired of walking around on the side of my right foot. I probably should be wearing the surgical boot more, but I hate those things. I got my fill of those when I broke my leg and had to wear it for almost 4 months straight. Ugh. It's amazing how much you use your feet! For instance, try to get up without from your knees without putting a foot down. I'm "right-footed" so it was always my right foot I put down to push up with to stand. I'm not going to be doing that for awhile! Ouch.

Looks like things are falling into place for dad's birthday party. Mel got the invitations out and I went to Mangelson's (the one of a kind, kind of everything store) today and got some decorations and molds to make the mints. The Miss, Mel, and Amber are coming over on Saturday so we can get those done. I tried to find something that reminded me of dad when I was looking for molds, so I found a police badge, a motorcycle, a football (Go Big Red!) and a plain round mold with a "75" on top. I think that pretty much covers it. I was thinking maybe the badge was really too big for a mint and thought I might try making chocolate badges. then I thought about melting chocolate, pouring it into the mold, letting it set, unmolding and starting all over, and then thought better of it. Maybe if I had bought more than 1 mold of each, but I didn't, so forget the chocolate. I got some cake decorations, napkins, plates, etc. I hope he's surprised. Mel forgot to put on the invitation that it was a surprise, so hopefully in the next 2 weeks none of the hundred people we invited will let him in on it. Yeah, right. Oh well, I'm sure he'll have fun either way.

Tony and Candace got married today. At least I think they did. Last I heard they were getting married at 4 o'clock at the courthouse, but I haven't heard anything either way. They decided to get married by a judge and then have a big wedding next year when he gets home from Cuba. I could think of about a million ways they could use the money, other than on a big wedding, but hey, anything for a party, right? I think Candace got an apartment not to far from her parents, so she and le bebe will be out on their own while Tony is gone. It makes me kind of sad to think of all the things he's going to miss while he's gone.

I guess that's about it. Not much to say when you don't go out of the house for a week!