Our dog is a what?!

Last week, I took Dudley in for his fourth puppy shot.  From the minute we stepped in the door, it was "Oooohhhhh!" and "Aaaahhhhh!" and all the staff had to take turns holding him and giving him love.  The nurse took him to be weighed and found he had graduated to the Big Boy scales!  He weighed a whopping 21.7 pounds, a far cry from his first weigh-in at eight weeks.  No wonder I'm huffing and puffing carrying him up and down the stairs.  I won't be able to do that much longer. . .

In the exam room, I had the doctor check his ears because we've been having to clean them out a lot more than usual and I could tell they were bothering him because he'd shake his head and paw at them.  Sure enough, he had himself a little yeast infection in his ears and the doctor prescribed some medicine to clear it up.  She also informed me that more than likely, the infection means he's allergic to grain.  Oh no!

After some discussion, she encouraged me to wean him off the food we've been giving him and onto a grain-free product.  She also said we should refrain from feeding him meat, but instead give him a handful of blueberries, a spoonful of canned pumpkin or a few green beans.  What?!  I never heard of such a thing!  She assured me he'd get plenty of protein from the food and it would actually be better nutrition for him.

I was a little skeptical about the blueberry thing.  I never heard of a dog liking fruits and vegetables, but the vet left the room and came back with a handful of fresh blueberries and wouldn't you know Dudley just gobbled them up like there was no tomorrow!  Sheesh!

Our Tubby always ate steak and chuck roast on his food every day, and once a week we'd be cooking it for him and cutting it up into little chunks to sprinkle on his food.  We totally anticipated doing the same thing for Dudley when he got a little older, but now we're faced with the fact that OUR DOG IS A VEGETARIAN!  Oy vay!

When Hubby found out the diagnosis, his face dropped and his whole body just sagged toward the floor.  He looked utterly and totally defeated.  He couldn't believe his rough and tumble, burly bulldog was a sissy la-la health nut!  Not that all vegetarians are sissy la-la's or health nuts.  I know it's a lifestyle choice and I don't mean to offend, but it was a like a slap in the face to my life-long, journeyman butcher of a husband to have to accept the fact that his dog can't eat meat!  He was just shocked beyond belief.

The next few days, we slowly weaned him off the old food and onto the new, and we've been incorporating carrots and sweet potatoes and blueberries as occasional treats.  Dudley seems to be happy as ever and fat as a little butterball, so I guess it's going to be okay.  And his ears are clearing up too, so that's a good thing.

See Daddy, Dudley doesn't have to be a meat-eater to be manly!  Look at Popeye.  He was strong with big muscles and all I ever saw him eat was spinach!

Mrs. Meyer's Meltdown

I went a little overboard yesterday while shopping at Target.  Hubby, if you're reading this, click away and don't even ask me how much I spent.  I won't tell you the truth anyway.

This past weekend, I was reading through my latest issue of Country Living magazine and came across an ad for Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day products.  I had seen these in stores before, and my bosses' wife uses their dish soap.  I hadn't realized how many scents their products come in, and I didn't know they were created by a sweet white-haired Iowa homemaker and mother of nine!

I decided to try them out and loaded up my cart with everything Lemon Verbena!  Who knew there would be so many products to choose from?  Not only do they make dish soap, but they make glass cleaner, countertop sprays, all-purpose cleaners, hand soaps, laundry detergents, dryer sheets and candles.  The list goes on and on!  What I couldn't find on the shelf at Target, I found online at the Mrs. Meyer's website.  Oh boy!

Not only do the products smell divine, they don't have any harsh chemicals in them and are made with all-natural ingredients and essential oils.  I might even actually learn to enjoy housework if I get to smell Lemon Verbena while doing it!  Did you hear that Honey?  Me, enjoying housework!  That alone might be worth the money I spent!

Lucky Me

I've got to be the luckiest girl around!  Today I had lunch with my two most favorite, handsomest men!  Hubby called from the driveway at my office and said, "Come on down!  Let's go to lunch!"  I went downstairs and hopped in the jeep and there were my two sweet boys, Hubby and Dudley, with a big bag of smelling-good food.

We drove to an old abandoned school and picnicked on the lawn under a big shade tree.  As Hubby laid out the food, Dudley sniffed the containers, doing his best to get a quick nibble of this and that before we shooed him away.  No "people food" for Dudley.  When he figured out he wasn't going to get the better of us, he mosied off on his own to explore, watered the grass, played with fallen oak leaves and then ran back to our blanket, ears flopping away.  He's so cute.

What a wonderful surprise and welcomed break to my stressful day.  Thank you sweet Hubby, for being so thoughtful and for surrounding me with love.  I am so blessed.

Oink! Oink!

There's nothing quite like the yummy smell of bacon frying in the morning!  Some days when I'm on my way into work, I'll drive past the Country Boy Restaurant, or Halfway Market, and I can smell the bacon cooking even with my car windows rolled up.  It makes my tummy start to growl and the rest of the way into work, I'm wishing I had gotten up earlier so I could have eaten breakfast before I rushed out the door.

My office is in the upstairs portion of my elder boss' house, so most mornings I sit at my computer as more tantalizing aromas drift up the stairs from the kitchen down below, where my boss' wife is cooking breakfast.  It's pure torture, especially when I'm dieting, which is just about every other day of the year!  And it's not just breakfast smells, some days she's baking pies or cookies, or has a roast and potatoes in the crock pot and the torture lasts all day long.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think a nose could give the eyes a run for their money in that department!

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of. . .

You guessed it!  Pickled Peppers!  We have been loaded down with peppers this year.  Not only did Hubby plant a bunch in the back yard, as usual, but we have sweet friends and neighbors who have been sharing the bounty from their yards and gardens as well.  So many peppers we don't know what to do with them all.  Hubby has been making jars and jars of salsa from his hot peppers, and we've been freezing them for later batches too.  He eats salsa on just about everything but dessert!

When my sweet friend Susan brought me a whole box of banana peppers, I didn't know what in the world to do with them all.  She kept telling me some were sweet and some were hot, but I didn't know which was which.  I got a recipe for pickling them, and stood at the kitchen sink washing and slicing them for about two hours!  When I got done, my hands were on fire!  I never thought banana peppers could be that hot, but they sure were!  Next time I'll have to wear gloves.

Surprisingly, the recipe for pickling them was very easy.  You just take 2 cups of white vinegar, 2/3 cup of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of mustard seeds and 1/2 teaspoon of celery seeds and put it all on the stove in a pot to boil.  You fill your sterilized jars with the pepper rings and fill the jars with the boiling vinegar mixture to within half an inch of the top of the jar, put the lids on tight and water bath them for about 15 minutes and Voila!  You're done!  I doubled the recipe and it made two pints, so altogether I made about six pint jars with a box of peppers.  After two weeks or so, they should be ready to enjoy.  We love them on hot dogs and sandwiches.  Yum!

Catfish Calamity

About 9:00 Sunday evening, Hubby and I decided to try and plan a fishing trip for the next day.  Nothing like last-minute planning!  We called our dear friend Pudd and asked him if he knew of any good fishing spots and he told us of a couple that weren't too far away.  We talked him into going with us, so off we went to Walmart in search of fishing licenses and some tack.  We got home and started getting everything together, loaded up the truck, made sandwiches and snacks to take along and finally fell into bed about midnight, dreaming of all the monster fish we were going to catch the next day.  Oh boy!

5:30 rolled around way too fast, and it was still dark outside when we got up and headed out the door to pick up Pudd.  Auntie Sue-Sue (Pudd's wife) agreed to babysit Dudley for us, so we dropped him off and headed out for Laurel Hill Lake, a 325 acre lake about fifty miles from our house.  We saw lots of deer and turkey as we drove along the Natchez Trace and it rained softly most of the way.

When we got to the lake, we were amazed at how big and beautiful it was.  It reminded us of a spot we fished in Oregon, minus the pine trees and smell of juniper in the air.  It was a gorgeous place.  We stopped at the bait shack and picked up chicken livers, minnows and worms and headed off to find the perfect spot along the bank.  Pudd caught the first fish on a bobber, a bright colored sunfish (or as we call them back home, bluegill) about the size of his hand. 

Hubby set me up to fish for catfish and loaded my hook with a big glob of bloody chicken liver.  Gross!  I cast it out and plopped down in my chair to wait for the bite.  Soon enough, my pole was bending and I was excitedly reeling in my first catfish!  Oh boy!  I squealed with delight and the noise echoed across the lake!

The weather was perfect for fishing.  It was nice and cool as the clouds kept the sun at bay and we had a light drizzle every so often to keep the temperatures down.  There was the perfect breeze and the lake was calm.  There weren't many people there, which was surprising for a holiday weekend, but we did see a few boats around the edge of the lake and up near the dam.  It was peaceful and quiet.

That is, until I hooked another monster!  Pretty soon, my pole nearly jerked right out of my hands and I jumped up and gave it a good yank to set the hook.  It was bent almost in half as I cranked the reel as best I could.  I was screaming and yelling and Hubby was standing next to me while Pudd shouted out for me to slow down and hang on!  I just knew I had a record-breaking fish on the end of that line and I was determined to pull it in.

I had the line a little closer to the bank when all of a sudden SNAP! went my line and ZING! it came flying back towards me and THWACK! there it came and CONKED! poor Hubby right in the eye with a loud THUD!  He doubled over clutching his hand to his eye and I just knew I'd yanked his eyeball out with my hook!  I think we all held our breath as we waited for Hubby to straighten back up and when he did, he had blood coming down the side of his face and I just knew that big old globby chicken liver had flown out of the water and hit him right in the eye!

I surveyed the damage, the monster fish long forgotten, and Hubby checked my line to see what in the world happened to my hook.  The line had been snapped and the hook and bait were nowhere to be found.  The blood coming down Hubby's face wasn't from the liver at all, but from him!  The sinker on my line, which was about an inch long and made of solid lead, had popped him right in the eye on his brow bone and there was a big gash with blood oozing out.  Poor sweetie!  I felt awful!

In all the commotion with me and my monster fish (which was probably a turtle, we later agreed), poor Hubby had left his pole unattended and it was bending like crazy toward the water as he had a fish on the end of his pole too!  I screamed and pointed toward his pole and Pudd ran over to set the hook for him and reel it in.  Pretty soon that pole was bent nearly in half and THWOP! it broke right in two!  Poor Hubby!  This was not turning out to be a very good day.  Pudd felt awful that he'd broken Sid's fishing pole, but all was well and Hubby was able to fix it right back up and continue fishing.

We laughed and told stories, had a nice lunch, mosied around the edge of the lake to try a few more spots and ended up catching a total of four fish altogether.  It was a fun day, despite the mishaps and hopefully Hubby won't be deterred from taking me again real soon.  Next time, we'll bring his helmet and a first-aid kit though, just in case!

The Bulldog and the Bloodhound

Dudley got his first official girlfriend this weekend and he's smitten!  Our neighbor's dog Scarlett got loose and decided to wander around the neighborhood in search of new surroundings.  I guess she got bored down there at the end of the road with no one to play with but goats, pigs and chickens.  She found her way into our yard and when Dudley caught sight of her through the screen door, he went wild!

He actually heard her coming before he even saw her, as Scarlett wears a goat bell around her neck and you can hear it clang-clang-clanging a mile away.  She lumbered into the yard on those long legs of hers, ears flopping this way and that, and she climbed up onto our porch.  When Dudley caught sight of that humongous, gorgeous red-head with those droopy brown eyes, he nearly busted out the screen door!  His tail was wagging so fast he couldn't even walk straight. 

We let him out for a closer look and that was the beginning of what I'm sure is to be a great love affair.  They hit if off right away and chased each other all around the porch and yard.  It wasn't long before Dudley was huffing and puffing with exhaustion and we had to pull him away and bring him inside before he keeled over with a heart attack. 

The minute we set him down inside, he collapsed on his side, his fat little belly heaving as he tried to catch his breath.  He was barking and growling and flailing his legs as his body betrayed him from being able to continue his play with his new love.  Soon he was fast asleep and snoring loudly, probably dreaming of his sweet Scarlett.  What an unusual pair they made!