Wednesday in Crazyville

Pictures to be taken.  Work to be done.

And I am goofing off on here.

However, I am much pleased with the changes I made to the background. Especially my title photo. This is one of the things I struggle with about Blogger, I can never get my pictures to look right. Part of it is this computer, it's not like any other PC I have ever owned, and does not have the easiest photo editing software in it (I guess since it was advertised as being able to thwart the zombie apocolypse by being able to be dropped and still work, it had more important functions to serve, we'll see.  I know other people can and do . . . I always look half shot out of a cannon. Oh, well, not now!

I have a nice picture with a centered subject.

When it's December and this is still up, you'll know why.


Not much happening here. Oh, remember how I was mourning my bare flowerbed the other day? The grammas (somehow my mom and MIL are now officially this when they are together) came out on Monday to purty up the joint. I could have cried. They are both avid gardeners with lovely flowers, and it probably pained them to see bare dirt with dead tulip stems.

Look at what they did:

 The front of the house. Those little spots of red just add something

This is the planter of no return. I planted calla lilies in there two years ago. I have not seen them since. These will do better.

 Our landing. I bought the planting on the right. My MIL did the one on the left. She even bought us a tomato. We had thought about planting it in the yard, but there is a rabbit in the front yard, and, since Beazer has decided he is a dog of peace, a groundhog has moved into the backyard to join the squirrel commune. They have to be pretty smart to climb the steps.

Speaking of Master Beazer, we had a few nice moments yesterday out on the back porch together yesterday. He loves to sunbathe, more now than ever before, and I caught a glimpse of him out the kitchen window, sitting on the hill, enjoying life. When I stepped out to take a picture of him, he came up on the porch to sit with me.

 He looks so handsome in this picture, doesn't he?

Kinda offsets the moments like this:

Life is hard when you have floppy lips and freckles. No one gives you any respect. No one.

One of the things this time with him has started to show me is that, at 12, every day with him is a gift. He is starting to slow down, and I hate to acknowledge that he won't be here forever. He is just the definition of a good dog. We've been going back and forth about what kind of a dog or dogs we'll get when he is not with us. I've been torn because I do love my small dogs, but I've become so invested in pit bulls and trying to get people to understand that one bad one doesn't a breed represent, anymore than any other bad dog isn't a fair example of their breed, that it feels like I am abandoning them to not have one. Last night I went online to look at the local rescues, to see how many were actually out there for adoption; within 100 miles of my zip code, there are approximately 20,000 pit bulls of every color, sex, age and build available for adoption. I also have the twins, and, seriously, I don't know if there are 20,000 Schipperkes in the US, let alone in rescue. And so that decided me, with so many dogs in need of homes with people who understand the particular quirks of the breed, Left-brain and I are the kind of people who need to be actively owning them. We have yet to work out the logistics and we will not get another dog til Beazer isn't here (it felt like cheating on him to look at the website, but he did tell us if we found a cute female, he was open to a girlfriend, LOL), and they will have to go through training, but it feels like the best option for all involved.

Before I go, this was my progress through May on the Itty Bitty Kitty Quilt project. June is finished, but, being a little behind, I don't have pictures.

I did find an erron in the chart, though. On the right hand side, the border. The running stitch line has been left off this chart, and the cross stitched border does not match up with that from the March chart. It reverts back correctly by the time September rolls around, so you have to just keep following the pattern from March and pretend that part doesn't exist for June. Maybe this was caught after my chart was printed, but it really isn't a difficult fix to do.