It never ends...

There is just always something going on around here... a little puppy showed up on our porch a little over a week ago. She appears to be a Brittany Spaniel - an absolute little sweetheart. The poor thing had several puncture wounds, and a huge nasty gash on it's left side just in front of her hip. You could see all the way into her stomach cavity through it. We've been giving her oral antibiotics, as well as dousing the wound with liquid antibiotics from the neighbor. It's almost completely healed up, and she's doing wonderfully! The first couple of days she didn't do much more than just lay around - she definitely didn't get up and walk around much.... You'd never know she had such bad injuries, though. She gets up and runs around, plays tug of war, and chases everything that moves!

Brittani and Zachary are at church camp this week... I'm sure they're both having loads of fun! Hopefully they'll remember to stay out of the lake, and pay attention to the food. During the high school summer camp, several kids cut their feet on metal shards that were in the lake, and apparently the girl in charge of cooking wasn't fully adept at handling cooking for large crowds. The pancakes "tasted funky" and weren't fully cooked, and the burger was raw inside after taking one bite. Victoria's too polite to take food back, so she ate around the edges of the pancake, and ate the burger bun, so that she didn't just go hungry. Vicki always said they were exercising outside in the heat without water to drink, which is REALLY a bad thing.

We're supposed to drive up to Fairfield this weekend, and trade out a bicycle to someone. It's going to be a nice road trip for the two of us. We'll throw in an audio book, get up there early and have breakfast, meet up with Andrew's buddy, and then head home after that. I'm trying to remember where the German restaurant that the parents of one his friends owns. I'd love the opportunity to have lunch there. The people still own their house in Germany, and rented out one of the apartments that they've turned it into when we took our trip back in 2006. It was SUCH a blast! I'd love to have another trip like that one. We had so much fun!

It's our 20th anniversary this year, and I'm hunting for ideas of a frugal trip for the two of us. I'm totally open to ideas... we've discussed going on a cruise, or seeing if the January flights overseas are still cheap. At one point (January 2007) it was less than $250 round trip to Italy - so we could feasibly spend a few days there, rent a car & a room, and come out for around $1000 to $1200, if the airfare can still be found cheap.

I'm going to start the kids back on school work this coming Monday. I think I'm tired of summer. Hurrying into the school year won't bring the cool weather here any sooner, but it means that when the weather DOES get pleasant, we can take a week or two off and go have fun. That's something we don't take the time to do very often as a family.  We did discuss running out to the lake and dunking everyone into the water for an hour or so... the dogs might not like us bailing out, but they'll get over it. Especially the little miss Crystal (the Brittany Spaniel). She REALLY won't like being left alone.

Time for me to start thinking about supper... I'll be back a different day!