So far this week

I've been...

...knitting a pretty project for a swap:
 

...snagging some blooms from our next-door neighbor's gardenia bush (What! The house is vacant and for sale, and nobody else is appreciating these pretty and fragrant blooms!):

(Oooooooooooooh, you don't even know. These two blooms are in a little ceramic cup I spun in college, and let's just say, they're making my little perch in the corner of the sofa a whole lot better.)


...enjoying a number of thunderstorms that have rumbled their way through Moultrie and totally made my front porch ferns - and their recovering-from-bird-baby-poop leaves - really, really happy.

...and lovin' my little Puppa who naps so sweet and cute.  After the thunderstorm calms itself down a bit, that is.

(Everybody now, "Aaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!")


More of your Moultrie Jones goings on to be shared later this week!

Love that musk

A few weeks after Carlton and I had bought our house and moved in, I was at the grocery store after work to buy a few things for dinner one night.  I happened to bump into the guy who sold the house to us, Ted, and we chatted for a few minutes while I helped him find a specialty ingredient listed on his wife's "Honey Do" shopping list. As we talked, he invited Carlton and me to hang out with his wife and himself along with a group of their friends who get together once or twice a week.  Of course, I totally jumped on the opportunity to get to know some people who were our age in Moultrie!  Ted and his wife were recent UGA grads, and their group of friends were all newlyweds... the perfect group for Carlton and me to get in with!

So, a few weeks passed and plans were made for Ted and his wife Erin to pick Carlton and me up from the house and drive over to Tifton for dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse.  Ted, 28 was (and is!) a loud, sarcastic, animated character-of-a-guy who's easy to get along with right off the bat, and his wife Erin, 23, was so easy-going and sweet that we knew we'd stick around with this group.  We met the other couples: Cam & Erin (yep, a second Erin) were a freshly newlywed couple of two (or was it 6?) weeks, and Eric & Stella were also newlyweds of a few months.

After dinner that night, it became a regular weekly ordeal for each couple to host a dinner night and swap out cooking/entertaining responsibilities.  I soaked up the friendship and garage-door-style friends we had made... no knocking, no front door doorbell business... just bust through the carport door right into the kitchen, throw the beers in the fridge, and get to talkin' and laughin'!

The first time we had dinner at Eric and Stella's house was a big surprise to me.  I had heard tall tales, rumors, and other stories of a dog named Magnus, but other than that, Carlton and I knew nothing about him.  Honestly, I was expecting something like a Miniature Schnauzer or a Chocolate Lab or a Jack Russel Terrier.  But Eric and Stella had actually aptly named their dog.  Magnus's name fit him perfectly... he was a gigantic American Boxer and before I was even in the house he was running towards ME!!!  "Stand still and don't make eye contact! Don't run away, he'll chase you down and eat your guts! Hide your fingers, they're merely sweet morsels for this monster!" I told myself in instant stereotypical panic and fear of the beastly animal who was now fearlessly... sniffing my crotch and "wagging" his little inch-long nub of a tail???

Wait. I'm still alive?  I still have a face?  He's not eating me?  I still have my ears... my stud earrings didn't sparkle in the light and attract any quick-snapping jowly jaws of death?  And my ponytail is still intact... he hasn't yanked my hair off my scalp?  He's "wagging" that little nub and not snarling at me? These dogs aren't savage killing beasts?  I let him sniff the back of my hand.  He pushed his forehead into me and practically forced me to pet him.  Magnus was... kind?  Loving?  Sweet?  Craving love and affection from everyone around him?  Okay, I can live with a happy-go-lucky snub-nose dog!  And ever since then, Magnus and I have been the best of friends when Carlton and I visit.  (I ganked these pictures of Magnus from Stella's Facebook photo albums, so they may be a little distorted.  But ain't he cuuuuuuute?!??)

I even speak for him when Eric and Stella aren't paying attention.  For some reason he sounds a bit like Disney's character Goofy, only with a little more of a congested-sinuses undertone, and no "hyuk, hyuk, hyuk" after every sentence spoken.  He's actually quite the pouty whiner.

Well, nights with friends are always good ones.  But nights at Eric and Stella's are especially great for one of us... and it's not a person... it's a dog.  Of course, Magnus loves all the extra attention with all the extra willing-to-scratch fingers around.  But the truly happy dog in this situation is Vespa.

Vespa and Magnus have never met.  But, oh, would Vespa love to get to know Magnus!  I've tried and tried describing to Stella and Eric Vespa's elation, her exhilaration, her extreme-to-the-max love of Magnus's... musk.  When we come home from their house, it's usually around 11:00 or so on a Sunday evening and Carlton will quickly jump into the shower and get ready for bed.  And Vespa takes that opportunity to sniff and sniff and sniffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff until she just can't even breathe anymore!  Vespa is head-over-heals crazy about Magnus's musk.  She just can't get enough!  She'll actually sniff in for so long that she doesn't breathe out until she's almost choking or something!  But the whole time, Vespa's tail is just a-waggin'.

Below is a video of Vespa sniffing away at Carlton's crocks and athletic shorts that he wore to Eric and Stella's house on this particular Sunday night.  She can't even take the time to acknowledge me calling her name over and over again.  Please ignore all of her hanger chew toys and my overly-countrified accent... sometimes it's hard to hold on to that Hillbilly Georgia accent when you're around a bunch of Redneck twang!

Happiness

I'm back. Well, at least I think I am. For now, at least! I was away from blogworld for more than just a little while. But even though I wasn't physically typing anything, I was taking pictures. Pictures of happy things like the coming of Spring time...

...and a perfectly perfect trip to see my very best friend along with some other very old and very wonderful friends. And by very old, I mean the friends-of-13-years kind of friends. It was a really great evening.

Ooo! And while I was there, I had my very first Yarn Shop shopping experience. I'll write about that in detail later.

Then Carlton and I spent Easter weekend with our families. Vespa is always happy to see her Sissy and rassle a whole bunch.

We celebrated the hatching of two whole separate families of bird babies (and mourned the sickness of two very undeserving ferns as well as the tragic loss of little Crouton, R.I.P.).

I went as Sisterly Supporter and photographer to see the Bride's wedding dress (squeeeee!) and to see the wedding/reception venue.

So, while I was loading these happy pictures off my camera and into my Picasa album tonight, I was also browsing through the blogs posted today by bloggers I follow.

In keeping with the theme of happy pictures, Pioneer Woman is currently hosting her next Photography Assignment. This round's theme? Happiness. I've participated in her assignments before and must boast that I have felt quite adequate with my submitted photos. Either way, it's always fun whether you participate and win (totally not me), participate and not win (totally me), or simply click over to her Flickr page to see what everyone else is looking at through a camera lens (obsessively me). If you like cooking and trying out new recipes, reading funny stories about calf nuts and bassett hounds, taking pictures and getting great/free photography advice and tutorials, wearing cute-and-comfy clothes and getting great/free fashion advise, and if you really like the over-all breezy personality of her current Photography Assignment, I can promise you that you'll fall in love with the Pioneer Woman. Quite frankly, in her own words, she'll "make your skirt fly up!"

The very short life of a little bird baby named "Crouton"

First, a background story:

About two months ago I bought a couple of nice, big, healthy, fluffy ferns and hung them on the two corners of our front porch. They're a great addition to the facade of the house, and they definitely make it look inviting and homey.
About a month-and-a-half ago, just as birds started chirping happily as temperatures rose for Springtime's arrival, a momma and poppa bird decided one of the ferns would be transformed into a home and a nest was hastily--yet, might I add, neatly (I was impressed with her tidy weaving technique and liked her minimalist decorating style)--constructed within the leaves of the fern. Then the very next day there were five eggs tucked right there in the center, so incredibly neat and cute and itty-bitty. And by itty-bitty I mean smaller around the middle than a dime. Tiny little things: white with little black speckles, like cracked black pepper. Before too long the eggs hatched and we were proud landlords to a family of seven.

Then the bird babies grew, ate, grew some more, ate some more, and eventually flew away... leaving my beautiful, fluffy fern a total limpy, dried-up poopfest with a sickly hole on one side where momma had entered and exited enough to break all the fern branches off. Boo, birds! Once the babies were gone I waited a whole day to be sure the new-to-flying birds wouldn't return to the nest before I grabbed some plastic knitting needles and dug that rotten poopy nest out of the plant, watered it like crazy, and began nursing it back to its happy, fluffy fern self. We're still on the road to recovery.

And now for the story of little Crouton....
About one week of peaceful fern doctoring took place before I discovered a new momma and a new poppa building a new nest... in the only happy, healthy, fluffy fern on the front porch that I had left! Ooooh, I was so mad! Please, birds, find this fern unsuitable and move a long! Alas, Momma and Poppa Finch deemed the fern sturdy and well-camouflaged... plus, it's in the best school district of the county and I think that was the selling point for Momma.
Repeat the whole build-nest-lay-eggs ordeal. But add an extra egg. This fern was definitely gonna be pooped to death by the time birdy rearing was over in a few weeks! I watched for a few days and slowly but surely the eggs hatched. Two hatched, then three more hatched... but the last egg didn't hatch for another two whole days. On the day it did hatch, I peeked into the fern to check on it (because I'm nosy like that and I was concerned!) and I noticed the egg had been pushed out of the nest and into the leaves of the fern. As I pulled the egg out of the leaves, I realized it was only half of an eggshell attached to the tiny bottom of the last-to-hatch baby bird.
"He must have fallen out of the nest as he pushed his way out of the shell," I thought to myself. I carefully put him back into the nest.

The next day I peeked into the fern and discovered that the baby bird was in the same exact spot again! Not in the nest, but under the leaves of the fern right next to the nest. Even though his other siblings were already growing (and he was still just as tiny), I decided to put him back into the nest and give it one last try. "He must get a bug every now and then even if he is half the size of his fatty siblings!"
Welp, the next morning came along and I peeked in only to find... you guessed it... little bird baby in the fern leaves again. Poor little guy. He must have been deemed a "failure to thrive" hatchling since he hatched two whole days after all the others. He was too little to stand against the siblings when Momma came by to feed them. He just got kicked to the curb.
I just couldn't stomach the thought of these birds growing and flying away, and me digging out the nest with plastic needles only to find this tiny bird baby skeleton underneath. That would just be too much. So, my heart sank and by 9:00AM yesterday morning I had brought him inside.

I put a few knitted swatches (yes, hahaha, of course Trisha had knitting swatches just lying around) into an empty box that our last bank checks had been mailed in, set it up underneath a lamp, found a medicine dropper and some fruit juice and started nursing the pitiful little booger.
He settled in under the lamp and went up and down in chirping and eating quality. Sometimes his tummy would be empty but he wouldn't eat. Other times his belly would be full and he would chirp and eat like crazy. He bobbled his head around like a dummy, and I thought to myself, "well, maybe his mom really did know best after all."
But he ate, pooped, chirped, and slept.
Carlton and I found it incredibly funny that Vespa was so still when we let her look at him, although she constantly swallowed and licked her chops, and vibrated with tense excitement. We decided that the bird should be named "Crouton" because Vespa would totally love to crunch on his toasty little body.

He made it through the night, which neither Carlton nor I expected. Vespa woke up and needed to go out at about 4:30AM, and once we came back in I checked on him, fed him a few drops of juice, and left him to sleep some more. He was quite feisty.
This morning he was acting kinda dumb again. Flopping around, breathing sporadically, and overall just looking kinda floppy. But this afternoon I checked on him and fed him a few times. He was back to his spry, chirpy self again. So weird. But at 5:30... you guessed it... his head was floppy and he wouldn't eat.
And then when I checked on him at 7:00, not only was he not responsive at all, but he wasn't even pink anymore. He was just there, laying sorta sideways, and not breathing anymore. Crouton had died.
Of course I'm kinda sad, I was the one who rescued him from The Great Fern Entanglement. Carlton's kinda sad because, well, it was a tiny baby animal who just couldn't make it, and that's just plain sad.

But Vespa... oh, Vespa. She's just totally devastated. Inconsolable. When she came into the room to look for little Crouton, she didn't believe me when I explained the situation in terms she understands (usually pertaining to food), "All gone, Vespa. Da baby is alllllll gone." She ripped the check book box to shreds, turned all the knitted swatches over and over and over again, and whimpered for little Crouton. Which just makes the whole thing a even a bit more sad.

R.I.P. Crouton, May 10 - May 13

Let's all take a moment of silence.

Greenthumb update

Just a happy little update on how the daffodils are coming along!

Vespa's mud bath

Every now and then, Vespa enjoys a good meal of worm and bug in the great outdoors. Sometimes, she's a lucky pup and happens upon a worm or slug that has found its way to the middle of the driveway at an inopportune time... when the concrete decides to dry. It is then that the earthworm or slug will eventually wither and wilt and dry and become tough. Chewy. A premium, all-natural pup chewie. And Vespa just loves them. And I love them because they're small enough to be chewed and swallowed in one piece without being a terrifying choking hazard.

It was one beautiful, sunny day last week when I decided to open the sliding glass back doors and allow Vespa to explore her turf "on her own" for a while. I was scrubbing a sink load of dishes and pots and pans and cookie sheets at the sink and could watch her through the window, just in case she decided to chase after any pesky roaming neighborhood cats.

After about 30 minutes of freedom, I decided to grab the camera and see what I found Vespa up to on her outdoor explorations. Mostly, she'll be treeing a squirrel or sniffing at pinecones and sticks. But on this day Vespa was into something much more interesting! She had discovered a bug that was flopping around in a muddy puddle right in the middle of the back yard. And, what do we do when we discover a bug? We roll around on it. We rub all over it. We especially get it around our neck and behind our ears... you know... so we can savor it, and save a little of it for later. It dries especially well when suspended behind a loose-fitting collar, in case anyone was curious.

Here she is, sniffing the air and assessing the situation before delving into the muddy puddle of grossness:

Oh, she was caught rolling in the mud and she knew it was gonna get her into biiiiiiiiig trouble. She immediately started her Trail-of-Tears-Death-Row-walk-of-shame up to the back deck for immediate scolding and stern talking-to. But wait a sec. Squirrel? Oh, yeah. Trouble.

Reporting for punishment with mud on the feet. Yuk!

It was so incredibly hilarious how she thought she was in trouble for rubbing on the bug in the mud. I usually freak out and yell in a freakishly loud and high-pitched voice because the thought of rolling on bugs to catch them on her neck just grosses me out! But this time I was just hysterical with laughter because she wouldn't look at me. At all. She completely avoided eye contact at all costs!

Tail down, ears back, eyes turned away: the only way to take on verbal abuse/punishment from Momma.

Squirrel??!!??? Oh yeah, I'm in trouble. Better stay here.

She still didn't make eye contact here! She just looked right past me and up into the sky. Which made me even more hysterical with laughter because of these squinty little eyes! How cuuuuuuute!!!

After a few minutes of consoling and petting on Vespa, she came around to realize that she actually wasn't in trouble. We decided to lie out on the back deck for about 10 minutes in the warm sun like turtles before calling it an afternoon and heading inside for a cleansing bath.

Playing catch up

Since I've fallen far behind in any way of updating this blog, and since I'm emptying many valuable (and many useless) pictures from my camera's memory card, I decided to load some of them here. This is what we've been up to since... uh, about December:

It was juuuuust dark enough so that I got to look at this beautiful courthouse every day when I left work from Thanksgiving until New Year's Day.

We got to decorate our first home for Christmas with a real tree, cranberry garland, plenty of colorful ornaments from friends and family, and the illuminated star topper we've had since our first Christmas as husband and wife. My favorite Christmas decoration was this pair of sweet papier mache gold leaf reindeer I purchased for $15 total at Michael's.

We treated our niece Katie Anne with a box full of dress-up playtime clothes. No matter its blurriness and color off-ness and light problems, this is my absolute favorite picture of Katie Anne. She's blurry because she's twirling. Her little foot is turned sideways like she's about to tip over, and the chef's hat is about to swallow her whole! She looks soooo happy, and that's why I love it!

I sewed my first-ever purse from a pattern. It's pieces of fabric sewn together and then quilted. And I did it all on my very own! It is Vespa's weekender tote and we fill it with her food and water and toys (and my knitting projects) for the road when we drive up to Cartersville for weekends with family.

I joined my first-ever knitting swap. It was a scarf swap, and the girl I was knitting for loves the color blue. She also lives in Portugal!!!! My knitting work has gone international now.  :)

In addition to the Barcalounger we purchased for Carlton, I've been slowly-but-surely settling into our home. I've bought little somethings here and there for hanging on the wall and accessorizing and furnishing the house. Our TV is now up off the floor, as are all the electronics associated with it! Like, up on a TV stand! And we've got some artwork and mirrors and sconces (like this one above) hanging on the walls. Slowly but surely, we're making it prettier.

I got my fingernails dirty the weekend of Valentine's Day. I planted about a million daffodil bulbs from Papa, and about a thousand bulbs from Vicki. Here's hoping I don't disappoint anyone!

Two weeks later, that's what we saw!

And as of this morning, we're rockin' these cute little bubbles of something colorful at the very tips of many of the pointy, leafy plants! (I'll keep you filled in as we make more progress!)

We have dinner parties here at the house on a regular basis! About once a month (or every six weeks or so, depending on whose turn it is) a group of 6-10 folks show up and I get to feed them. This was our latest gathering, a smaller group. We capped off the night with a game of poker and a homemade cheesecake topped with fresh whipped cream. Cool fact: The tall, blurry guy sitting next to Carlton (and his wife in red next to him) used to own our house!

I was reeeeeeeeeeally sick about a week ago. I vomited so violently that I burst all sorts of tiny little blood vessels around my eyes and all over my face. Looked like Carlton had beaten me after a couple of days! Feeling much better, thanks for your well wishes everyone!

And finally, our house is VERY ready for Spring to arrive. I hung these big, full ferns just a few days ago and they're loving it up there in the breeze. All we need for the front of the house now is a UGA flag for that flag holder. Oh, and to actually attach our 2-1-3 house numbers underneath the porch light. Oh, and of course, to plant the rest of those potted plants Vicki brought us!!!  :)

Make memories

I had written a very touching pretty-much-novel that related to this link, but I somehow hit a combination of two keys on this ill-forsaken laptop and deleted the entire thing. I just don't have it in me to repeat what I had already written, and I'd prefer to knit tonight instead of cry big, fat tears. So, please read the beautiful blog entry at this link and do one more thing for me: if you've still got her, be sure to make as many memories with, about, and of your grandmother as you can... because there can never be enough memories of a grandmother and her grandbabies.


Aaaaaaaaain't!

Out with the old, in with the... old?

When we moved into our sweet little green house with its wet yard and antique air-leaking sliding glass back doors and half-a-kitchen worth of cabinetry (love ya housey, I'm just stating the facts here), one of the projects we put near the top of our list was sort of a minor facelift for the interior.

While it was perfectly fine with us that every single doorknob in the house didn't match, and while it didn't bother us that all the doorknobs were brass (the light fixtures or kitchen hardware are that oil-rubbed bronze or brushed steel, but a doorknob is a doorknob), it really did bother us that the knobs were original to the house, which was built in 1986, and many of them were badly corroded. The brass had corroded off some of the doorknobs, and that made them look rather gross. And what made it even worse for me was that the nastiest-looking one was on the hallway bathroom door, the bathroom that everybody uses when they visit, and we use on a daily basis. Yuk! "Welcome to my home. Please, make yourself comfortable. Enjoy yourself. And, please, caress our disgusting doorknob. But before you do, be sure to wash up and dry your hands on the monogrammed hand towels! Then touch the nasty doorknob."

So, Carlton and I went to Lowe's and to Home Depot. We priced out the number of doorknobs that were in the house, putting into thought the number of closet doors (no locks), as well as bathroom and bedroom doors (locks, please!). It was outrageous how much money it was going to cost us just to replace this hardware... I tried to suppress the amount from my memory, but I think it was going to be about $400! Just for doorknobs. I would rather have more kitchen cabinets for that, thankyouverymuch!

Then I remembered all of the great spray paints that are out there on the market. My parents recently spray painted all of the kitchen cabinet hardware in a house they own and rent out. My sister-in-law Katie spray painted some plastic outdoor play equipment for our niece Katie Anne this past summer. And they make some really nice spray paints these days! I even used one type of spray paint with sand in it to spray onto the side of a to-scale model house I constructed in my college design classes. It was a really realistic brick effect!

The spray paint we found was perfect for what we were looking for. All we needed to do was take off the hardware, line it all up, and spray away. And, at about $3.00 for a can of primer ("highly recommended") and $6.50 for a can of the finishing "hand-hammered bronze" effect (yup, it's even slightly textured!), how could we not give this a shot? $9.50 in a test run sure does beat $400 of replacing doorknobs, so why wouldn't we at least try it first? And, if the paint chips or peels or rubs off, all we're out is a few bucks, and at least we tried it out!

So, here's what we did. It was really quick and really easy. We started at about 4:00 in the afternoon. First, we found a good, flat space in the back yard (not hard to find around these parts!), laid out a heavy painting canvas, and laid out all of our doorknobs. Next, we sprayed them with primer. Let that dry, flipped them, sprayed the other side with primer. Let that dry, sprayed them with the first coat of the good stuff. Let that dry, flipped them, sprayed the other side with the good stuff. After that last round dried we brought them in because it was getting dark.

After the doorknobs dried and set overnight, we checked them out in fresh daylight the next morning. Of course, there were a couple of thin paint places here and there, so we touched them up with a little spritz and let them dry some more.

Installed, the doorknobs look brand new!!! If you weren't told that they didn't all match and that they were actually old grody corroded doorknobs from the 80's, you would never know they weren't brand spankin' new!

The rest of our snow

So, while our snow down here in Moultrie didn't last long, it was a really exciting event. While I know they're not weathermen, the girls I work with at the quilt shop claimed that it hasn't snowed down here in 15 years! Sadly, some time around 9:30 or 10:00 pm the snow started melting from the yards, rooftops, and even our back deck  But here's what we saw later on that night:

Here is Carlton at about 7:00 showing off the size of these massive "snowflakes" that were falling all around us! (Shhh, I didn't tell him, but there was also one stuck to the back of his head like Katie's terrifying crazy eye!)

And this is our back deck at about 7:00, right after the back of Carlton's head thawed out (don't look too hard, Vicki, but I think as of the time this picture was taken I have officially killed the precious rosemary tree) :

 And, finally, at 8:00 pm through the glass door:

Ditto!

Hey y'all, it's snowing way down here, too! All day it's been dripping and drizzling rain, but about 30 minutes ago the snowy/rainy mix started. And now we're pretty much reduced to gigantic, fat, icy snowflakes. I know, it's craziness!

Kids in the house that backs up to ours have been screaming and yelling and celebrating for the past 30 minutes which prompted me to look outside and see what the big fuss was all about. Well, as of 5:30, this is what the excitement is all for:

Here's the view from our front door:

...and from the back:

...and from under the kitchen table, obviously the only safe place from snow in all of the house: