Finally Friday!

Happy Friday!

It's going to be a long weekend at our house, but anywhere is better than work for a couple of days, right?

Junior's Rally competition is Saturday and Sunday.  Practice has been limited these past few weeks, so it's a bit like taking a test without studying.  You know you won't do as well as if you had studied, but if you can just pass it you'll be happy :).

We will move to our first Level 2 trials, which means OFF LEASH courses. I had a nervous stomach pang just writing that sentence. It's a big move in this world of dog stuff.  I vow to keep a good attitude about it as it's happening, though - even if we don't qualify, it will be good experience for any "next time" we might decide to try.

My only other goal for the weekend is to have Crystal get to watch us in the ring. Poor Crystal hasn't been able to watch a single trial, because Junior spends his whole time trying to find her in the crowd if she's there.  He doesn't get distracted if she's not in the venue, so she has to leave.  This time we're going to find a way for her to watch, even if that means setting up a video camera or dressing her up as a potted plant.

Remind me of all this pep-talk when I come back on Monday and complain about how tired I am!

But today I'm thinking of more relaxed times and showing the rest of my completed Finger Lakes vacation pages. It was fun to relive vacation for a few days this week!  I am not done with the week's pages, but this is the end of my work so far.  I used my October Counterfeit Kit for these pages, too.



Our rental house is a bed and breakfast during the off season, so there was a lot of furniture on the porch. That made it a great hangout spot for reading, spontaneous wine and nosh plates and the occasional nap.

Everything came from my kit except the title letters.

I decided to journal right on the pictures on this page. I just wanted to put all the pictures of the house on this two page layout so I could tell that story all at once.  And I am in love with MME Enamel Dots. Such a simple little embellishment, but the pack I purchased worked perfectly with the colors in my kit papers this month.  I went through the whole pack.

Since I posted all these vacation pages out of order, I loaded them all into Flickr here. If you'd like to see them in order, that's the place to do it.  I will keep adding pages until I'm done with the whole week's stories.

Have a great weekend!

More Dogs

When I was trying to title this post, I was reminded of this video. It has nothing to do with anything except that it makes me laugh:

And I need to laugh, because what else is there to do when bad things happen?

This weekend I watched our dog, Junior - the star of so many of my pages - have a seizure.  It was scary, and the treatment news from our emergency vet was sort of a shock.  We were there once before, about 6 months ago, for what I thought might have been a seizure (we thought maybe he had just fallen off the bed and was scared or injured, but now I'm sure that was a seizure, too). 

We talked to our usual vet (who was Junior's foster mom and who has been fantastic as a vet!) over the weekend and will do more with her this week.  But walking out the door to come to work this morning was hard. I'm worried that this seizure activity may have happened when we weren't home, too, and we've never known it.  I've been with him pretty much every minute for the past 3 weeks and to have this happen right as I'm coming back to work is really unsettling.

So while we wait, I'm just thinking about my puppy......and that made me think of posting these pages about him.....

I was at my LSS for a crop last month, and all the Christmas paper was on clearance.  I picked up several sheets for no particular reason, and it sat on my table while I tried to get to work on some pages for my Counterfeit Kit.  But my eye kept getting drawn to the new stuff, and first one piece moved to my project, then another, then a sticker, and finally I decided not to fight it, and I just moved my kit aside and starting playing with the new stuff :).  So here I used all Christmas papers (mostly B-sides) in a completely non-Christmas layout.

Our next competition is in two weeks. We have not been training over the past few weeks, so I'm just hoping we can qualify a few runs and have a good time.  Really, what else matters but some quality time with that cute face?

By the way, if you're interested, we are doing Rally. If you're looking for some bonding time and obedience training with your dog, it's a great way to do it!