Delightful holiday

I hope all of your holidays were memorable. Ours began a little melancholy: when the UPS guy rang the bell with our last Christmas package Thursday, no barking. And every time I dropped food on the floor, I automatically called, "Roswell!" That may become a family joke.

Still, Christmas day was wonderful. The boys were delighted with the gifts, Derick loved his sherry-cask aged scotch and his remote control R2-D2 the best, and I got two of these. I returned one and got supplies to go with it, along with some of the luscious new Basic Grey, Origins. Working with it makes me feel like I am in a spa.

We couldn't go sledding Christmas day because we were in the middle of a big three-day storm of soaking wet snow. "Soaking wet" means "heavier than a bowling ball with each shovelful," and the fact that we had to shovel three times made it infinitely more difficult. It was a big snow, though, evidenced by our being on the national news. Since most of that news is located on the East Coast, the stories were precious: "Midwest Gets Big Snow" for a few paragraphs, then a connection to what would happen on the East Coast. (Insert eye roll.)

Because of the frequent wet snow, we went sledding the day after Christmas, along with a healthy number of families from town. We go here for the free sledding (not the pay inner tube hill), and the sledding hill is HUGE, with many bumps. Not that any of us cared:

Speaking of bumps, here's the final injury checklist:

• three clocked heads
• two pulled-back fingernails
• one strained neck
• one sprained wrist
• two sore backs

As I mentally tallied that list, I got an idea for a layout: my favorite photos of each of us, plus the list under the title, "Extreme Sledding." Either that or "Going Downhill."

* Note: I finished the Jessica Sprague class Good-to-Great Workflow. I practiced on these photos in this post. I think they turned out very nice, considering it was cloudy and (of course) snowing at the time.

Tough decision

Roswell did not have a good weekend. She has not come out of her kennel; I have to give her water and food in there, and she doesn't always drink. Today she hasn't stopped shaking, her nose is cracked from dehydration, and she has multiple sores around her body, including a bloody nose. So it was with great difficulty that we decided to put her down tonight. We plan on burying her cremated remains under her favorite tree in the backyard.

Intellectually, I know that it is the best decision, but emotionally it was really hard to make the call. Was it too soon? Will she have better days ahead? The doggie dermatologist told me today she thought it was the best decision; there's no hope it will get better, and that thought helps. A little.

The image at the top is a card I bought yesterday. It made me smile, so I thought I'd share it. It's a Compendium card that I got at a local store called The Woods. I'm grateful for words and images that encapsulate so perfectly how I feel.

Cold corner in my heart

The cold corner I wrote about last week disappeared this weekend--it got downright warm, about 20 degrees! The cold corner returned this morning, as evidenced by the temp on the evening news:


Yes, it says -0 degrees. That's cold. The weather is supposed to warm back up into the twenties, which is nice, because the cold corner, though gone from the door, has settled in my heart.

Roswell is dying.

None of the medications have helped stop her chewing her feet apart. She's getting more gimpy and doesn't like getting up. Last weekend, we finally got an answer from the doggie dermatologist (yes, there are such things):

Liver disease. She has about 2-4 months left tops.

The doctor prescribed some pain meds, and we're going back for another blood test this weekend (last week's blood sugar was so low, it made the vet think it may have been a mistake; either that or her liver is much worse, which I'm sorely hoping is not true). The past few days I've been reminiscing and crying. Unfortunately, raising a dog means not just committing yourself to its life but also to its death, and it appears that time is soon approaching for Roswell.

I have a few ways I want to remember her, one of which is putting together a memory mini-album of all the things around the house that remind me of Roswell. Thank you, Alexandra, for the gift; when you gave it to me in October, you never knew how much it would help me deal with the sorrow right now.

Here's some layouts I have done about her recently and older layouts:




The last layout had been published in the final issue of Simple Scrapbooks. Unfortunately, I never got the layout back. I still wish I would get some apology or recompense from CK, but truth be told, a layout is a thing. The memory is still there, so I will remake this one layout. I don't have all the supplies, unfortunately, but I will make do.

Tough

This is kind of a hard time right now. Not just the constant correcting of papers, which I've been doing until I can no longer read, but a few other pressures too. For one, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and underwent surgery last Friday. (They seemed to have excised all the tumor, and they are doing more tests to be sure.)

My dog, an 11 year old American Staffordshire Terrier, is dying. Since last summer, she's been chewing her feet apart, and month after month of medication works for a while but then stops, making her sad and making us talk about when we will need to put her down.


These two issues are difficult enough, but it all compounded yesterday: my boys came home with three behavior reports from school yesterday. I have two boys. You can do the math. And to top it off, Derick is away on vacat--oops, working in Vegas with the software company he works for.

But I scrap, and so I used my hobby to persevere.

Write Click Scrapbook challenged us Monday to count our blessings, so I did that. I'll turn it in to a layout soon. And on Stacy Julian's color blog, she suggested a muted color palette with just one photo, one accent, and one word. I used an expression instead of a word, but otherwise followed the challenge to create this:


I felt a lot better after I made it.

Busy day

I knew today would be busy, so I decided to fortify myself for breakfast.

Today was the last day of the summer Rowan would have daytime tae kwon do--the last chance for me to plan scrapbook pages and read for 1 hour, interrupted only by having to strap on Rowan's sparring gear and have to deflect Dominic begging for water, potty break, and candy. In the afternoon Dominic had his third-to-last OT appointment--the "play doctor"--and I had the joy of traveling home during rush hour. Yikes. And later tonight I get to go to Simonsen's and be pampered with a hair cut.

The first appointment of the day was the one I worried about. Roswell, our American Staffordshire Terrier, was going to the vet to see if her UTI was better, and also to check out her limp again. She started limping after she came back from the kennel she goes to during vacation. Oddly, she doesn't limp all the time, only after she first gets up out of her bed, and in the evening her leg twitches pretty seriously. Recently it looked to me like her paws were bloody, either from her chewing on them (she does have a few worry spots) or from an injury.Good news, though: the UTI is better, and the diagnosis for her leg was predictable: Old Age. She doesn't need pain meds yet, but she's getting old and is starting to feel it--she is 10, after all. So the vet said to stop her chewing on her itches, we can give her two Benadryl two times a day. This gave me pause--the meds for the UTI said to open dog's mouth and put pills in back of throat. Roswell is a very nice dog, but she most certainly would not let me do that; she would, however, eat anything I wrapped in cheese. Happily. I asked the vet if it would be OK to keep giving pills that way, and she said yes. So Roswell looks miserable, but she has a happy tummy.

PS - The cookies yesterday that I sent to work with Derick were well appreciated. This was the container he brought back, not quite empty, as you can see. I'll post the recipe when I figure out how to create a PDF.