Checking in

I just finished writing the last blog entry, which I had started almost a week ago.

Between a major milestone hitting today, eating better, cooking more, and walking the dog on longer walks, I’ve been too tired to blog this month. Yet, as Seppo’s blog entries will attest, we’ve been up to a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t mind recording for myself to look back on. Well, at least one of us did.

Singing. Seppo says my singing is better than it used to be. I told him that to me, I sound the same as I did before, i.e. a fun mix of flat and sharp and loud and quavery, but he says he can hear the difference. At least Mobi doesn’t grumble and lumber out of the room anymore. People say that all the time, but he really used to.

Work. I don’t remember if I mentioned it, but I have a fancy assed title at work now. I kinda love that the next one up sounds like a made up one. In other news, I am pretty tired from the milestone, but I still have a little wee bit left to do.

Dog. He’s learning a new game, “Where’s the treat?” It involves the following commands:

• Sit.
• What’s this? (This indicates to him that he should pay attention and sniff the treat I am holding in my hand.)
• Stay. (I walk away from him and hide the treat while he is in “stay”.)
• Ok, where’s the treat?

You’d think that being a dog, he’d naturally use his sense of smell to find stuff like treats and his favorite toys. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. When we play hide-and-seek (not too different from this game but with one crucial difference that I think you can figure out on your own), he doesn’t try to figure out where you might be by sniffing you out. No, he simply goes from room to room to try to find you.

With this new game, he actually makes loud sniffing noises while trying to find the treat. In fact, he is getting much better at using his nose for something other than poking his squeaky toys, which is his primary way of making them squeak. You’d think he’d use his mouth like every other dog on the planet, but that’s another topic. Anyway, he seems to be able to zone in on the general area very quickly now. It’s neat! At the beginning, we’d literally walk five feet away from him and throw the treat down on the carpet in plain sight. He’d sniff around and walk in circles trying to find it, requiring up to a minute and plenty of human aid to find it. Now I can put it in a different room under a pillow and he can still find it.

House. Seppo has been really proactive about getting the roofers out here. They were here this morning to evaluate the current state of the rood and will start work soon. Yay! We are also going to get estimates on other repairs to the house. Seppo cleaned up most of our room the other weekend, prompting me to clean out my closet in its entirety and reorganize. I made up one and a half more bags of clothes to donate.

Gardening. I have some ideas of what I want to plant in the coming year, but it requires that I make a raised bed of some sort. Hmm.

Cooking. We have been trying all sorts of new things in the kitchen this month. I bought stuff to bake bread in our bread machine (inherited from a friend who moved away to NYC) and have baked the first loaf on Sunday. Fun! I wish it had a little window on it like my mom’s. It would make staring at the breadmaker more fun. Right now, I end up just staring at the white plastic, wondering what’s going on in there.