Dog Undone

This is Rufus, on the floor and Toby, on the couch. These are our babies. Rufus was a gift from one of my dear sons. He came to us as a tiny fur ball complete with sweet puppy breath and a love for our Daughter in Law, that borders on stalker love. He is a mix of Rottweiler and Sharpai so he has a lot of loose skin. At around eighty pounds he still feels he can climb onto her lap like an eight pound puppy. It makes me smile to see his front half on her lap and his back half still standing on the floor. He is a faithful watchdog and spends his days guarding our front yard from meter readers, UPS drivers and joggers. Unfortunately he has a criminal past having done a two week stint on dog pound lock-up for having bit our great-grandson. In the dogs defense, he creeped up on a sleeping Rufus and licked him on his nose. Rufus took a good nip out of him This solidified in all our minds what the term, "Let sleeping dogs lie" is all about. After being sprung from doggie prison he was put on life time probation and is no longer allowed to be around children. If the grand-kids are outside he is in the house and if they are in the house he is outside. He does not suffer as his dog yard is a 30 X 30 chain link fenced yard with two big cottonwood trees, a dirt section for digging, a cement patio and a twin bed complete with blanket for day time snoozes. He also gets to romp in the big back yard whenever no kid activities are planned for the day. He has a perfect view of the front yard and the road in front of our house. During inclement weather he can use the doggie door and come into our bedroom and sleep the day away on our bed. We toss old quilts over our bedspread to catch doggie dirt. In spite of his criminal past he is living a really good dog life.

Toby, our pound puppie, is the soul of kindness. We have no idea about his past or why someone would have lost or abandoned him and not made an effort to find him as he was certainly was able to be found. If he could talk, it would be the story I would want to hear. His favorite thing in life is to get a dog cookie. He also loves to clean the kitchen floor of any crumbs, sort of a canine Roomba. While he doesn't have much to say he understands everything we say. He is now nine years old, a lot gray around the face and tends to spend his days sleeping in the sun. Toby is given to moments of doggie depression and when he has such a day he walks very slowly with his head down and will not eat. He whimpers if you touch him and looks as pathetic as a dog can. The first time he had one of these spells I was convinced he was sick and doomed to doggie heaven before the night was over. But the next day he was his tail wagging, cookie eating self. We have been through many of these moments with him over the years and while it still makes me stop and pray for him I no longer panic. The depressed days come about once a quarter and we can find no explanation for him. He is just a dog undone.

It is amazing how much love and companionship these dogs bring to our lives. I don't mind the dog hair everywhere or the fact that our bedroom smells slightly like a dog kennel. Rufus and Toby give us something this world is short on--love that asks nothing in return.

It Snowed On The Day You Were Born

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY
SWEET DAUGHTER

I just cannot believe it has been 48 years
since that snowy day
when you came into my life.
Not only were you a baby but so was I.
It was an amazing journey as we grew up together.

I am so proud of you my sweet daughter.
You have managed to overcome some
hard times in your life and you turned
out to be a wonderful daughter,
wife, mother and grandmother.

So I just wanted to take this moment to send you
Birthday Wishes.


Now if I could just get you to call more often.

Cookbooks and Recipes

I am a recipe keeper. I built a special box that I decorated with paint, hearts and my name where I keep the recipes I cut out of magazines, tear out of newspapers, steal from friends or find in my large pile of cookbooks.

I go through them often adding new ones and tossing others that I wonder what I saw in them in the first place. The funny thing is I don't try all that many of them in relation to the amount I have squirreled away. I am not sure why this is. I don't feel guilty about it.

When I do try a recipe I almost always say well that was alright but not a keeper. And I toss it out. When I do run across a keeper it usually ends up being a recipe I keep in my head from that point on.

I really love recipes and it is why I own so many cookbooks and tend to read them as others read novels. My favorite is Susan Branch. Her cookbooks are a delight even if you never cook. The more writing in a cookbook the more I like it. Mix history and food together and I will buy your book.

I think you can learn to cook from reading recipes. You get a feel for what foods go together. You begin to see patterns in how people cook and assemble dishes. Especially in baking you will see that the recipes vary little in procedure and ingredients.

I love to cook because I love to eat. I love to collect recipes because they are insights into how other women feed and take care of their families. My very first cookbook by Betty Crocker, in which I have read every single word and now it is like the Velveteen Rabbit almost loved to pieces and held together with duct tape was given to me by my parents in 1961. It has an inscription "Add a little love to your cooking".

Thank you Mom and Dad for making cooking such a pleasure for me and for everything you taught me. Recipes are a magical part of my life.

For Graphic Garden

It All Comes Out In The Wash

I have during my life hated housework--a lot. But I have always loved doing the laundry. I am sure there are some deep seated desires to scrub all the dirt off of this world one shirt at a time. I used to have a front loading washer and dryer combo and hope that maybe someday I will have one again, in one of those fabulous designer colors. I used to love watching the clothes tumble in and out of the soapy water. It was like they were dancing. I am very big on sorting. Everything must be properly sorted by color and type of clothing. When I was younger I did not make such distinctions. When I had enough clothes for a load, into the washer they went, darks and whites together. I think it was a metaphor for my life back then, everything was jumbled together, there was no order and very little worked well. But now after Jesus walked into my life, there is lots of order and everything works well together and most of it makes a lot a sense to me. I carefully shop for the cleaning potions I will add to the hot water (I refuse to wash in cold) and I am a sucker for anything with vanilla or lavender in it. I try new colorful bottles of cleaning products often and have little loyalty to a certain soap. I recently became the proud owner of a bona fide outdoor clothes line. I cannot begin to count the ways this has made laundry even better. There is the fresh air and exercise of hanging the clothes outside, the connection with all of the women in my family who came before me and stood just like me hanging clothes neatly and with order. I like to hang like things next to each other by family member. Another bonus is that so few air dried clothes need ironing and they smell so good. While the towels are a little scratchy (loofah like) they are so much more absorbent. Also there is a quiet outside at the clothes line that I had never noticed before in my back yard. I didn't know my world could be so quiet and I didn't realize what a peaceful occupation it is to stand in that quiet folding laundry as it comes off the line which is yet another reward. No longer do I have to say, "I am sure your underwear is in the dryer". And then there is ironing. I know many younger women do not like ironing and some do not even own an iron but I find ironing very soul satisfying. There is something about pressing out all the wrinkles that makes me believe that perhaps in time I can do the very same thing in my life and if I slather enough cream on my face maybe I can even keep those wrinkles at bay. There is no one in this world who does not appreciate a pile of sweet smelling, perfectly folded laundry lovingly placed in closets and drawers. Ah yes, laundry is a wonderful thing. I am connected to every woman who beat her clothes on a rock, or pushed them back and forth across a board, or squeezed all the water out of them between two rollers. I am connected to them and hopefully there will be a time when the women who will follow me will remember that Gramma always clipped the socks in pairs on the line and they will do that too. Yes, I love laundry.

Small Treasures

This is a very small Mary Engelbreit wall thingy. It is certainly not something I think about everyday but my great grand baby is napping in the back hallway right now and keeps removing it from the wall and sleeping with it.

It caused me to think about home decorating or in my case re-decorating which I have been knee deep in for the last eight month.

I often wander around my home looking for a place to put a small treasure that holds a place in my heart. I wander from room to room looking at all the collected treasures of a long lifetime.

What little spot could I find that would be just right for this special piece?

While searching I come across so many treasures of my heart, each lovingly placed in a special spot. Many ended up where they are because of their color or function.

Oh, I see you are a little blue goodie and must live in the Scrapbook room with all the other blue things I love. Or I see you are a one of a kind porcelain dish and they hang on the front room wall and you must join them. Piece by piece each one finds its spot.

Some of them move several times before parking in the perfect place. Some move by the season to a prominent place and then back to a less visited spot when the weather changes and it is time for a new season to make a debut.

I thought this kind of nesting was something that only I did until I entered the world of blogs. All of a sudden I am reading about other women who do the very same thing I do. Women building a cottage of roses or one by the sea or nestled in the woods. Women who look for the perfect spot for a pink glass dish or who will spend a month painting a shelf to hold specially loved treasures of the heart.

I used to feel guilty about being a collector but it is in my genes. My first treasure hunts were with my Dad when I was very young and those are the things I now love the most.

I prayed and asked God if it was alright to have this treasure cluttered home and in return, He asked me if I loved any of them more than Him? Of course I don't, they are things, You are my Lord. Had I ever neglected to pay a debt to buy a treasure? No, I know what comes first. Would I give a treasure to someone else if they wanted it? I have done that many times watching much loved items head for a new home.

Well, God said. . . Daughter, then enjoy what you have and know that each one is a blessing from Me. So little treasure here is your special spot on this wall. You can watch a family live out their lives from here and know you are loved, not the most loved, because that belongs to only One. But never the less you are loved.

Our Bedroom

I think this is the third post about my home in a row because I moved two old posts of my dining room and a bathroom over from an old blog last week that I wanted to get rid of. I hope you all won't get tired of "home" photos.

This year we had the idea to take down wallpaper that had been on our walls for over twenty years and sort of re-decorate most of the rooms in our home. This is the first room we tackled and it is the only room that is completely finished.

First photo is the bed wall. The theme is a fishing cabin for my sweet hubby but with some softness for me. The room is green and rust. We hung green checked curtains across the wall behind the bed. We are using two antique wash stands as night tables.

Hubby's night stand complete with dance hall girl
(a gift from my Dad to him)
and a childhood piggy bank.

My night stand with photos of my little sweeties and old hand stitched towels and oil lamp.

The crazy colored afghan in the corner was made by an ancient aunt and covers an old chair.

Two shots of the bed wall.
And hubby's beloved trout painting.

The old barn wood wall
and
antique cabinet
with oil lamps and fishing memorabilia.

Hubby built a TV cabinet for a
new little flat screen TV.My most loved wash basin that
belonged to my great grandmother.

This is the dog door that leads out to a large shady fenced dog yard so our puppies can come and leave as they want.

This is the wood floor we put in which was not as "easy peasy" as the salesman led us to believe.

Above the closet we continued
the wood paneling.

These are little trout closet door pulls
that I found on the Internet.

My jewelry cabinet which is funny because I am not a jewelry kind of girl but I have stashed other treasures in here too.

Well that is our new bedroom.

With the soft green walls and
all the wood it is very relaxing.

We both love how it turned out.
I hope you enjoyed seeing it.

Green Bathroom

I unfortunately have a few defunct blogs and want to see them disappear and with Blogger it takes a long time to get there. But if I move this one last home tour over to my new blog then one can go. You may have already viewed this. This room is on my wish list for a little update including a new sink and some beadboard, but don't tell my hubby!

A quick tour of the "Green Bath". It is so hard to take good pictures in a small room and our bathrooms only come in small. Below is the sink and mirror. This room has a Victorian flavor to it. Most of the photos can be clicked into bigger pictures, too bad I can't click the whole room!

Wallpaper is green, red and cream and I stayed with white accents.

Over the you know what storage. I have one of these in both my baths and I love how much stuff they can hold. It is made out of wicker.

Top of shelf has part of my collection of old bottle obtained during trips out into the desert. All you have to do is dig and there they are! Next shelf down has some old packages of medicine.

Small baskets hold all my beauty potions and I seem to need more each year.

Sink area with oak cabinet and grand daughter deterrent. Small rag rug is one of many in my collection, I have a thing about rag rugs and have way more than any one woman should.

This wooden picture of a young girl bathing belonged to the former owner of the house. Her hubby bought it for her and she never liked it. She took it to a church rummage sale and I loved it and bought it. It now hangs exactly where it did before I bought the house.

White towels, how I love them. Always make me feel like I am in a hotel. I add seasonal finger towels on top.

This is a small green hand made cabinet. I added the white and red accents. My sweet hubby put in the marble floor tile.

Now... did you guess right? This is a Solutube. Both my bathrooms are windowless and a few years ago I found these little marvels. They flood the room with sunshine and rainbows. I can even see the trees making sun shadows in them. I love them!

I hope you liked my little home tour. This is one of my favorite rooms for how it is decorated.