This is my favorite photo of my Grandma, and the one that I will always remember her by: In my mind’s eye, Grandma Fern was always this person: smiling on the porch steps, standing in the warm dappled sunlight of a Michigan summer.  She was the grandmother who was always happy to see you, who would give you hugs and kisses and send homemade fudge at Christmastime.  She would patiently play cards with pre-teen adolescents as if it were the one thing she wanted to do most in the world.  She let us eat sugar cereals and always, always, sent cards on…

This is what the dog got for Christmas. It’s 250 Vitamin K pills. Because she helped herself to a tasty treat that was supposed to be locked up in the garage, where she couldn’t get to it. So what else did Chloe get for Christmas? She got to vomit and go on a car ride to the emergency vet. Oh, and of course the $300 worth of pills. Merry Christmas dog, it looks like that’s about all you’re getting for Christmas. Except maybe a lump of activated charcoal in your stocking. Oh, yeah, and this is the same dog that…

So this past weekend, my husband and I went on a date. Like, dinner and a movie and some quality time together. It was super. The only weird part is that the movie theater is in the mall, but it’s not one of the mall anchors. It’s, like, smack dab in the center of the mall. So you have to walk through the mall to get to your movie. In our case, we parked by the Wal-Mart and walked in to the mall. Also, does anyone else think it’s weird that the mall has a Wal-Mart? Anyway, as we were…

The husband and I went to lunch with our boss last week. The restaurant had those TVs that are mounted to the ceiling, and at one point my husband and my boss were distracted by a NASCAR-type race. Only instead of NASCAR cars racing around the track, it looked more like matchbox cars with trays mounted to the top of them. We watched them for a bit, as they took a series of continual left turns, until I decided to ask a question. “There aren’t actually people in those cars, are there?” I could tell immediately from the look on…

Our office, like many across the country, has a group football pool. And doesn’t it always seem like it’s someone’s random friend that seems to win? It’s not the dude who lives and breathes football and can recite every team’s stats by memory. No, its that dude’s roommate’s girlfriend’s best friend from college, who knows nothing about football, and just put her $5 into the pool on a “whim.” The win comes out for the week and everyone’s like, “Katie? Who’s Katie? Does she even work here? Didn’t she win last week?!” I, also, know nothing about football. And yet,…

It’s not that there’s nothing exciting happening. It’s just that most of my life right now consists of : get up, go to work, go home, go to bed. So I give you just about all I have right now – a pretty picture from last weekend. Here is the Salton Sea at sunset, from 9,500 feet: And here’s another one, from a different trip, of the Pacific Ocean near the Ramona airport:

Whenever there is a spider in the house (or scorpion, or just about any living creature except ants), I am not the one who kills it. I rescue it and set it free in the great outdoors. I just can’t bring myself to kill it. There was a tiny spider crawling across our kitchen yesterday. Chris was barefoot, and since I was wearing shoes, he asked me to step on it. ME: No. CHRIS: Why not? ME: I can’t kill it! CHRIS: But why not? ME: Because it’s just hanging out minding it’s own business. It doesn’t deserve to die…

Yesterday afternoon there was a giant power outage. It affected people from Yuma, AZ all the way to San Diego, and as far south as Baja Mexico and as far north as Orange County, CA. This means there was no electricity. Also if you had Sprint or AT&T cell phones you had no bars. However, if you had Verizon, like I did, people were still calling you about work stuff. You would think the advantage of a blackout would be that you get to leave work early. I was not so lucky because my work has generator backup and my…

Sleepy and Mrs. Sleepy get their revenge for Prank of the Century. We came home to the stone tortoise at the bottom of our pool. He was wearing a work shirt with the name of Sleepy’s business printed on it, as a little souvenir.

So, we recently moved from Rental House A to Rental House B in San Diego, because House B was a bit nicer and also had a fence for the dog and our lease was up at the old place. Anyway, some of the last items we moved from House A to House B were the cleaning supplies, because we needed them to clean up after all our stuff was moved out. So here we are, one of our first nights in the new house, and the dishes were dirty and I wanted to wash the dishes. We had no dishwasher…