Happy Father's Day!!

Happy Father's Day to everyone who is a father and especially to my Dad who's the best one in the world. Sorry to everyone else, but I got him!! Here is NOT the Father's Day gift I got him, it's a gift basket that my mom made for someone who is getting married and wanted a present for her maid of honor. It has Lavender, Tangerine Lavender and Passionfruit-Rose soaps, Lavender body powder, Tangerine Lavender body lotion, watermelon lip balm, a pouf and a soap dish.  Mom always forgets to take pictures of her gift baskets, but I reminded her this time. She cropped me out of the picture, as I was sniffing it--boy it smelled purty!

So today I am going to cuddle up to my Dad and sit on his lap or drape myself across his shoulders, and I will follow him everywhere and make tiger-faces at the other dogs who try to come near him. Hmm. Sounds like every other day. And we will cook burgers on the grill, cause that's what Dad likes on Father's Day. Well, really he likes brisket on the grill but we had that a couple weeks ago so we'll have burgers today instead! 

Well I didn't do much on Saturday. I hung out in the yard and then in the afternoon when it started to rain I hung out in Bandit's crate. He was kind enough to lay on the porch floor and let me have the crate. I was hoping Mom would start the hose sprayer for me but she said no, go out in the rain and play instead. Not the same!! And later she and Dad were watching The Negotiator with Samuel Jackson and I didn't want to watch it. I don't mean that Samuel Jackson was at our house, I mean he was in the movie. English is hard. Anyway in the beginning of the movie he is a hostage negotiator who goes into an apartment where a man is holding his daughter hostage and he has a shotgun. And Samuel Jackson tricks him and one of the things he says is how much he likes dogs. The man has a big dog, a pit bull/rottweiler dog. But later after he catches the man he says he doesn't like dogs. Well then, I don't like him either. So I don't watch that movie but Mom and Dad like it. 

And then later Mom made some soap; she made Spearmint-Lime salt bars. This time they are green, not pale orange. They smell nice! Last time she made them she was making two batches of different soaps and had her colors set out. She grabbed the wrong color so the Spearmint Lime came out pale orange instead of green. FOCUS!! And she also made lemongrass hemp oil soap. Someone asked her what lemongrass smells like. She said it's kind of like a slurpy lemon with a hint of vanilla. It is an essential oil and it is a deep yellow color so she doesn't color the soap unless she is putting some swirls or frosting on it. I can't be around when she is making lemongrass soap, it's very very strong smelling. It is sometimes used in combination with other essential oils to make insect repellent. (I copied that sentence from somewhere else. )Er, do you think it might be a dog repellent too if I don't like to be around it? Maybe later she will let me use her camera and I will take some pictures and post them for you to see.

Today she has to make Grapefruit Salt Bars and Sandalwood-patchouli Salt Bars. But first she has to melt the oils for it and she hates doing that. I sure hope she feeds us breakfast first!  

We have a new rain barrel. Mom and Dad picked it up yesterday at the recycling center. It is so we can save rainwater and use it to water the garden if it decides to stop raining this summer. but before we can use it Dad has to re-arrange the gutter thing that the water runs down. And that could take a while.

I know a secret....there is a bird's nest in our yard, over near our grapevine. I was with Mom when she found it.  She said don't tell anyone or the birds might not come back if they are scared and then the eggs won't hatch. So don't tell anyone. She was going to clip out this monster vine that tries to invade our yard every year. Some of it has grown up into the grapevine so she said she would clip it so it would die, then she could pull it out easier. But when she was over there, she noticed a small nest that had been woven right into the vine and the grapevine. It's only about 3 feet off the ground. It has 5 white eggs with brown speckles.  That's kind of close to the ground for when those babies hatch and start squacking for food. Maybe Bandit will guard the nest from the weasel that lives in the wood pile. Bandit loves baby animals. Yes, we have a weasel in our wood pile. He goes back and forth between the wood pile and the old dog kennel house. There is space underneath there for him to hide. Mom says he is an "urman", no wait, I think you spell it "ermine" but you say it "urman". English is dumb. Anyway, he is brown with white feet and in the winter he turns almost all white. She says there have been ermines in the yard since before I was born, and it's a good thing because they eat mice and stuff. I've smelled something over there so I guess she is right. Bailey says there is something there but he's never seen it. Anyway, I don't know what kind of bird it is yet. Maybe a wren or sparrow. I hope it comes back soon so the eggs don't get cold!

Well, maybe I'll catch up with you later, I am really kind of tired right now. It's only 8:30 or so i the morning but I was up early with Mom. So I think I'll go back to bed for awhile. Love, Me.

When will it stop snowing?

Hey Everybody! Did it snow yesterday where you live? At my house we had rain, then snow, then more rain. The whole back yard has water in it because there is no place for it to go. My feet do not like going in water! And Mom says it is supposed to snow again in a couple days. When will Spring be here? I prefer mud season to snow season!
I broke my own rule and posted two pictures for you to look at. One is an action shot of me helping to clean the house. I didn't even have to be asked, I just picked up the roll of papertowels and went right to work. Okay, well, actually I shredded the papertowels and Mom picked them up, but it's the thought that counts. (and that way if Winston had to pee on anything, the shreds were right there to help clean it up!!). Mom made some soap on Sunday and finally took a picture of it. It is called Sweet Orange and Patchouli. MMMM, it smells nice. She is running out of Patchouli. That is some kind of stuff that she puts in soap and all. It comes from a plant that grows the best in Indonesia, and she says the crop has been very poor after that big wave came and ruined everything and washed all those people away. So Patchouli is expensive (over $100 a pound) and hard to get. Well, hard to get the good smelling stuff. She said there's some stuff from China that is real stinky. It's probably made from lead or something. You know how I feel about China. Maybe I will get to go there someday. Mom knows lots of people that have been there and they say how beautiful it is. But I would go talk to the people so they would stop eating dogs and killing their baby girls and sending us poisoned toys and using up all our earth's resources and stuff. And now back to our regular programming.

So Mom is home sick today. She hopes she is getting a cold and not the flu. And so she's grumpy. I tried to help by waking her up last night to make sure she was ok. But she got mad and put me in Winston's crate for a while. I was just taking her temperature. With my tongue. On her forehead. A lot. So today she brought some cans out to the garage and she didn't even know that she locked me in there! Well, she says she didn't know. I barked and barked and she could hear me but she didn't know where I was. It was cold and kind of scary. If Winston or Bear was locked in the garage they would have rummaged through all the trash before they called for help. But I am not like that. I just wanted to be out of there! Finally she figured it out and rescued me. And she was sorry and gave me a cookie so I guess it's ok, except my throat is kind of sore. So I was wondering what we will do today since Mom is home. Probably not too much. Maybe make some soap? She was thinking that she is running out of the Lemongrass and the Chamomile, and a lady ordered some the other day so more is needed.And I am going to help her to make some labels for her soap also. But I don't think she really wants to do much. I might try to make her some chicken soup later. It doesn't look too hard. You take a chicken and put it in water and boil it for a while. And add some other stuff, whatever is in the fridge that might work. You know, it would be easier to just eat the chicken---after it's cooked but before it is soup. I will try this and if it works out I will give some to Mom and my brothers. I will update you on this, and maybe I will post a recipe for you. Right now I need a drink of water because my throat is still sore.

Hey did you see the eclipse last night? Faboo, wasn't it? I was sure to wake mom up in the middle of the night so we could all go out and see. There was an eerie red glow in the sky, and when the moon came back it was bright like the daytime!! Mom was very impressed, but at 4:30 a.m. she was not too happy that I had woken her up to see it. 4:30 is when she had to get up this morning to go to work!!

Here is a nice picture of some soap that she made over the weekend. The yellow and white one is called Lemon Sugar, it looks kind of like a lemon meringue pie, doesn't it? I hear they are pretty tasty but have never had one. The top reminds me of whipped cream. I LOVE whipped cream...Mom sometimes squirts some out for me and I lick it up. Oh don't worry, I never touch the tip of the can, I wouldn't want to get sick from all the human germs or anything. The blue one is called Clean Blue Tonic. It smells nice and clean. She made some other soap, I think it's called Citrus something, but I only like to post one picture now at a time. I'm just funny like that.
So, Mom locked me out of the bedroom yesterday. I think I mentioned that. I ended up snoozing and thinking on the sofa in the living room. It's not very inspirational. We were all kind of grumpy yesterday...Bailey too, because he likes to lay in his round bed in the bedroom and snooze during the day. (actually he really prefers to lay behind the woodstove but it's not on fire because a piece broke on it. I think Mom said it might be done for the season.) So I was grumpy, he was grumpy and Bandit was grumpy. ONE OF US (and I'm not saying who), knocked over a plant in the kitchen and got dirt all over the floor. But Aunt Lisa helped us out by picking up all the dirt, so nobody got in trouble! Mom wouldn't have been too happy if she had seen that! (I'm thinking it was a payback thing, but I don't want to say!!).

So last night I floated my new idea to Mom and Dad. I'm thinking of going Vegan. A Vegan, remember, is someone who doesn't use animal products. I think it's a very important statement to make. But Dad was being difficult about it. He wanted to know if I planned to get rid of my fur coat, since Vegans don't do fur. Well, I hadn't thought of that. I don't see how I can do that, really, I was kind of born that way. Do you think Vegans will be hostile to me because of the fur thing? And then Mom was being difficult, when she said, OK Casey, boiled vegetables for you I guess. And then she reminded me that there are animal products in my dog food. HUH?? Oh yeah, the label does say Chicken. But, (gulp), I'm a dog and I think I'm supposed to eat meat. I was just thinking no EXTRA meat, and no leather coats or shoes or honey or eggs or silk...I guess I have to re-think my position. Although then Mom did tell me about a vegetarian dog she once knew. I guess that a long time ago, when Mom was just out of college, she worked in VISTA, some kind of program where people don't get paid very much to help people who don't get paid very much. She said they got $45 a week in pay. She also said that $45 a week was what her father used to get paid for being an electrician working for the federal government way back in the last century before she was born. Mom said that this was to represent "poverty level" so that they could work better with the people they were supposed to be helping. BUT, they got really good health insurance, which usually poor people don't have. ANYHOO, to save costs she shared an apartment with 3 other people, who all worked for VISTA. They rented an apartment in a building and next door to them was a hippy family. Hippies were people who lived in the last century who didn't always agree with what other people did,and they tried to change things to make them better, and they dressed differently and had long hair and liked to listen to music and stuff like that. They sound like nice people, don't you think? Anyway, these people were vegetarians and they had a big German Shepard named Xanthus (you say it ZZanthus) and he was vegetarian too. The family said that they had gotten him as a puppy and he had never had meat. He did get to eat milk and eggs though, but no beef or chicken or fish. They made his dogfood special. He was a nice dog and used to come visit my Mom and her friends all the time. One of her room-mates was kind of a jerk named Howie and he used to think it was really funny to give Xanthus hot dogs, because Xanthus would always throw up right afterwards. Maybe that would happen to me if I stopped eating meat, too, I wonder? Well, I am definitely going to give this some more thought. And I just also realized that the whipped cream in the cans comes from cows...I'm not sure I can give that up. Maybe I'll just try giving it up for Lent. I don't know what or who Lent is, or if Lent gets to keep the whipped cream, but it sounds like a short-term thing and maybe I could just try it and see. So I'll get back to you on the Vegan/vegetarian thing. I really need my pillow back in the daytime, I do better thinking on that than on the sofa. I will post more thoughts later.

Moon-Garden

Hi again, it's just me. Here's a nice picture of some soap that Mom made a few weeks ago or so. It's called Moon-Garden. She was pretty happy with how it came out. She said it's supposed to smell like a night-blooming garden. Hmm. Just smells like human soap to me, but I am a dog so what do I know, right?
I posted the picture to kind of apologize for waking her up last night. I was really thirsty and I needed a drink of water. But she couldn't go back to sleep after that so she was kind of grumpy this morning. And she locked me out of the bedroom today when she left for work, something about....maybe if I didn't sleep so well I would sleep better at night'. I will be sure to wake her up later tonight, like maybe 3 or 4 am.

There is going to be a lunar eclipse tonight. That's the other reason I posted the "moon-garden' soap (a little theme, there). I think it's supposed to start around 10:30 or so. The moon might be red or something like that tonight. I hope the sky is clear, I would like to see it! If I get to stay up and watch it I will be sure to describe it for you if you decided to go to bed early. Later, dudes. (and dudettes