The World's Laziest Corgi

We have a Corgi.  His name?  Speed Bump.

There's a reason for this.

Speed Bump is the world's laziest Corgi.  Part of the reason for this is that when we got him, he weighed between 70 and 80 pounds, so his joints are somewhat older than the rest of him.  However, he's still a Very. Lazy. Dog.

Wut?

 In fact, let me prove to you how lazy he is. An anecdote: I've seen him sit up on his hind legs precisely twice. I've *never* seen him jump. The first time he sat up - and the only time he's sat up on his hind legs without supporting his front legs - was when I offered him a bit of fat from a steak.  I've since offered him bits of fat, and he will not repeat the trick.  Thus, he doesn't get the treat.  Since his entire motivation for living is to eat, this is interesting to me.  The other time he sat up, he was straining to get at our baby chicks.  He didn't repeat that trick, either.

Anyway, since he won't repeat the sit-up-for-food thing, and since we've moved into a house with a staircase that he won't even attempt to climb, I was curious to see if I could motivate him with a little treat.

Cheezy poofs... OK, OK, cheese balls from Sam's Club

I set some cheese balls on our stairs.  I walked around the back of our couch and sat down.  The dog stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up.  Then he walked around the couch and stared at me as only a dog can.  You can almost hear them think when they do that.

"Mom?  Mom?"

"Yeah, Bumpa?" (I call him all sorts of things.)

"There's... there's food on the stairs.  And... and... and I should get to eat it.  Because otherwise the cats will eat it, and if they eat it, they'll urp.  And you don't like it when I try to eat the cat urp."

"Bump, darling, if you want the cheese balls, go get them yourself."

Finally, he huffed a big doggie sigh and went to make sure that the cats hadn't yet eaten the snacks.  They hadn't.  So he came back to where I was sitting.  It took me a while to realize that there was no way he was even going to think about trying to climb the stairs if I was in the room.  So I went to my room and shut the door... except for a tiny, tiny crack.

And I brought my camera.

First, he lay on the floor like the lump that he normally is.  When I wasn't holding the camera up, he couldn't see me, so he'd act normal.  He came to the bedroom door and tried to nose it open.  That didn't work, so he went and sat in front of the staircase.  He'd look at the bedroom door, then look at the treats.  Door.  Treats.

Door.

Treats.

Until finally....

AHA!  He ate one treat.  I closed the door quickly after I snapped this shot, counted to 10, and quietly opened it again.  Bump's front paws were still on the bottom step, and he was staring at the other treats, presumably trying to use his massive brain skills to make the other cheese balls move in his direction.  It didn't work, so he wandered over to the carpet and went to sleep.

He walked away from cheese balls.  I've seen him climb stairs, because he had to do it at the old house to get in the back door.  But no... not here.  World's Laziest Corgi.

Showing Love

M2 has been hung up lately with the idea that nobody in her school class loves her. It's not true. I've been there and watched her classmates interact with her, and her teachers assure me that it's the same way when I'm not there. The girl is loved. But she doesn't believe it. So the other day, in a desperate attempt to get her to see through the fog in her brain, I told her that people show love in different ways. I tried to cover all the different love languages. I told her that love can be playing with her, which is what she wants and thinks she isn't getting, but love can also be hiding in things like helping someone out, sitting next to a person, and yes, even pestering!

I don't know how much of it she bought, but I'd like to think a little of it sank in. We're on Spring Break for the next two weeks, so we'll see how excited (or not) she is to see her friends again when the time comes.

I also told her that love can be making things for people, which is something she enjoys doing. M1 enjoys this, too. One of his assignments recently turned into a little more, and our family has reaped the benefits.

Grandma, you haven't seen this.

The assignment was to create a greeting card for someone. The idea was to write a small poem, illustrate it, and send it to someone. Since we haven't delivered the original card yet, I can show it to you:


Keep that poem in mind. It's going to come into play again very shortly.

Two days after he wrote this card, he had a rough night. He couldn't fall asleep. I heard him puttering around in his room, but he wasn't coming out, so I let him be. When I was getting dressed in my bedroom the following morning, I heard a rustle at the door. I opened it and looked down to find...

That's us scaring Daddy. It's somewhat of a tradition to try to scare the pants off of Oz when he "rests his eyes."

That afternoon Oz got a card that had "Together we make a big moo" in the middle with a picture of them saying MOO together. I can't find it for a photo, but by this time, we were all giggling from the random cards. (M2 didn't get left out. She has a Valentine's Day mailbox she brought home from school, and M1 delivers little notes to her all the time. The most recent one said, "I love you M2. XOXOXOXO")

So clearly, this poem was getting some wear.

Oz took it and ran with it. He created cards for each kid that afternoon. The top one is M1's, and the bottom is M2's. For the record, M2 thought his handwriting was horrible ("Your 'n' is an 'm', Daddy!") but thought his drawing was simply mind-blowing ("I didn't know you could make that!"). The front of each card says, "I love my [child's name]. He/she loves me, too."


Showing love. It's got a funny way of showing itself in ways you'd never expect. If I can teach M2 this, we'll be good to go.

Prank Love...

October. It's over now, but it brought lots of good times. Helicopters, earthquakes, parties... and, of course, my friend Beth's birthday.

I'll leave it to you to work out how old she turned.

You should also probably know that Beth is pretty much allergic to earth. Here's a rough rundown of her allergies:

Blue dye of any sort (she once gave me blue dishwasher detergent because the residue was making her break out into hives)
Strawberries
Nightshades of any sort, including tomatoes
Gobs of medications (it's a seriously scary list)
Grasses
Trees
Basically anything outdoors...

And...

Most importantly for this blog post...

Mushrooms and ALL tree nuts.

She's also lactose-intolerant, but really, that just makes for Fun With Gas. It won't actually kill her.

Yet.

Anywho, so she had a birthday, and we hadn't properly pranked her yet. She made the mistake of going out of town again, though, so my friends Christy, Sonia, and I put our pointy little heads together and came up with a plan.

First came the peanut- and mushroom-shaped cupcakes. These we delivered to Beth's mom, who is always happy to help us out in our little schemes.

Then we met up at Beth's house and placed small ceramic mushrooms all over her yard. Please ignore Sonia's costume. She was headed to a costume party that night and was meant to be a vampire slayer. In her words, though, "I'm supposed to be a vampire slayer but I look like Lady Gaga."

Hon, you're still hot.

Then we hung our personalized banner on the bushes so that EVERYONE would know it was her birthday.

That's love right there.

Finally, we had the piece de resistance.

We named him Skippy. And since Christy and I were going to a wine "tasting" party ourselves that night, we decided Skippy should come along for the ride.

Wigs are standard fare at our wine parties. Usually the Bubba Teeth get broken out, too, but this year they didn't make it out. A tutu did, though.

Never mind.

Let me now share with you some of the more G-rated moments that Skippy experienced that night.

Some of the party took place outdoors. I dig the blanket.

Christy was rather possessive of her little goober.

She even let him ride on the swing in the back yard!

She was a very proud mama.

By the end of the night, Skippy had survived but was a little worse for wear, having fallen out of a chair once or twice. We put his hung-over self on Beth's porch for her to find. He's a good little mascot.

Happy Birthday, Beth! We love ya!

Roaches, with Love

This is my friend Nan's house. She just closed on it last week. It's a darling little place.

Did you like the additions on the floor?

Did I mention it was her birthday a couple of weeks ago?

Traditions run deeeeeep around here, and we couldn't let it pass without totally pranking up her new place. Thankfully, she's living with her sister temporarily, and her sister has no problems letting us hooligans into the house so we can create much havoc.


So we roached her. One of my Cohorts in Crime thunk up and created that cake.

We also decided to be nice and get her some actual stuff for her house. Other than roaches.

We put them EVERYWHERE. She'll probably never find all of them. When we left, the cats were hard at work hiding a few under the couch.

We had to throw a few near every drain in the house,

which meant all sinks, tubs, and even the dishwasher.

Figured a few in the fridge (and crisper!) couldn't hurt as well.

I just hope she found these before nuking something. I'm not quite sure these would survive the same nuclear holocaust as their live cousins.

I do love my friends. And it's a good thing they love me, too. :)

It's a good thing we're friends...

Before we get started here, I should provide a little bit of background.

I have a big mouth.

It should really stay shut more often... but I just can't help myself.

So when I said, almost two years ago, that I thought I was a difficult person to prank, that would have been one of those moments where I should have kept my mouth shut.

Because my friends pranked me.

It was pretty benign... a simple string of expired, semi-dried-out Peeps hung over a car on my birthday. But I promised revenge. There are four of us involved, and as time has gone on, the pranks have gotten... well... special. We only do this at birthdays, so we do know when - roughly - to expect it, but we do go for the conniving and somewhat evil.

My friend B's birthday was last week. She made the mistake of going out of town. I may have hunted down her mother's phone number, because I knew who would be pet-sitting while B and her family were out of town.

She doesn't really enjoy road trips anyway.

I really doubt she'll ever go out of town again.

We were at least polite enough to warn her what she should expect when she stepped inside.


Things like cupcakes rolled in excessive amounts of $4 sprinkles. We do this because B adores sprinkles. See the can of Betty Crocker frosting in the background? Yeah... that's because B is also allergic to Earth. The only brand of cake mix/frosting that she can eat without risk of anaphylactic shock from nut exposure is Betty Crocker. My friend C, the one doing the decorating here, does not use canned frosting.

The fact that she did this... that's love.

After the cupcakes got stuck in the fridge, we got down to business.
M2 and our friend S's daughter were a little appalled at the whole idea of grown-up shenanigans at first, but they quickly got into the spirit of things. M1 really loved it all. I am probably a bad influence on my children.

There's my friend S. She's a darling and really doesn't have an evil bone in her body. C and B and I drag her into this. We like to play mental games with her. She might not be evil, but the rest of us are!!!

There's the kitchen post-bubble wrap.

And the den...

We seriously bubble-wrapped most of the house. Since B is allergic to most of Earth, we constantly tease her about needing to be a bubble person. We do what we can to help.
We did leave her a note... and a card... and sprinkles galore...

After we did that... well... we may have descended very close to the realm of vandalism.




That's a fake penguin. B has two of them that usually sit in her front yard. They are now named Bubbles and Sprinkles, and we made sure they were appropriately dressed for the occasion.

Now... just so you know... C's birthday is next. And it's a big one.

She should be afraid.

Very, very afraid.

Thoroughly ducked

I have to say that before today, I was a duck virgin. Never been ducked. I really imagine most people haven't. I'm kinda special that way.

The thing is, though, that I have WONDERFUL friends. We love each other in our own very weird way, and one of the ways we show this love is to prank each other on our birthdays. We've had a lot of fun with this. My birthday last year was kind of the start of it all - I went out to dinner with these girls, and while we were in the restaurant, the car was "Peeped" with a whole string of Peeps... from my peeps. It was great. So I knew my turn was coming again, and I knew that I had to take my daughter to gymnastics this morning.

And I knew that when I got home, there would be SOMETHING.

Reeeallly wasn't expecting this.



These ducks in the pictures are really only the tip of the iceberg. Supposedly, there are precisely 105 ducks in my yard. "Yard" is also a relative term. There are some hanging in the branches of the tree... sitting by my front door... stuck on the fence out by the road (I'm sure there are many amused drivers out there today)... they're everywhere. Stuck in the handle of my screen door were two duck Pez dispensers that I will actually share with my children. And on the table on the front porch sat THIS darling:

My friend C has really outdone herself this time. Those ducks? White chocolate. The eggs? Chocolate Easter eggs. The green is coconut, the walkway is more Pez, and the lake is blue icing. I have been TOLD the cake is devil's food.

Did I mention it's raining today? My ducks are getting their feet wet, but in true duck fashion, they're mostly just letting the water roll right off of their backs. Some of them are turning into puddleducks.

I can't wait till my husband gets home. If I had to guess, his reaction will be something along the lines of, "Duck me!"

Thank you, ladies, for making me feel so loved!