30 second update- It's Friday- Yay!!!

Here is a pic of the hummingbird sitting on her nest. She's pretty well camouflaged on top of the pine cone. If you didn't know she was there, a casual glance at the tree wouldn't notice a thing. Tom took this picture using a stepstool. The taller stepladder is in the storage closet; and I'm sort of tempted to get it, except it's probably buried under all sorts of junk. Hopefully we will be able to see the babies as they grow up and stretch the nest to its limits- I'm just crossing my fingers that they don't fall prey to one of the many stray cats we have around our apartment complex.

Tom is still home (yay! again), and probably will be till sometime next week- he went into the office today for the first time this week and found out that his immediate supervisor Mark, who was the experienced installer/project manager for the company, quit. So, starting next week, it's just Tom and Marcos (Marcos got hired about a week after Tom was). No more comp time for a while, probably... the director of operations is going to work out a game plan for keeping up on the work; it'll be an interesting few months for him!

Right now I should be packing, not blogging- tomorrow I am going to the Resort Suites of Scottsdale for a 9 am to 9 pm scrapbooking crop, and I don't have a thing packed or planned yet! It should be a fun day; I will get a 6 foot table to myself (for all the crap I'll need to take, due to my lack of plannint- LOL!), lunch and snacks are provided, make and take activities, goodies, etc. etc. I did get 100+ pictures developed after Christmas, and also have a couple other projects in mind, including my Easter cards (using embossing paste- spackle-like stuff that you use to fill in the brass stencil to make it dimensional- stay tuned for the results!)

Sedona is exhausted after playing "laser tag" for the last hour plus... she loves the laser pointer, and will fixate on it as it sits on the breakfast bar till we get it down and play with her. she likes to go in circles to chase it; her highest number of revolutions so far is 13 in a row... most of the time she either gets dizzy or whacks her head on the footstool before then! (yes, I feel bad for her, but she's the one who wants to do it!)

Sunday Tom and I are having a combination Valentine'sDay/Anniversary brunch here... http://www.wyndham.com/hotels/PHXBU/main.wnt We had their champagne brunch once before, and it was wonderful!!! We will miss the opening coverage of the Daytona 500, but will be spending the rest of the day in front of the TV.

It's been chilly and windy here the last couple days- today's high in the Valley was only 63 degrees, more than 5 degrees below normal! A far cry from the Thunder Snow storm Mom described in her latest e-mail, and the deep freeze across the eastern part of the country, I know- I hope you all are keeping warm, and have dug yourselves out!

Hummingbird Hijinks

(fyi, Tom is home for a few days, collecting some much needed comp-time... that's why he's here, in this story, instead of in some other city!)

To set the scene: Monday afternoon, I just got home from work, and we're relaxing on the patio in the afternoon sunshine. In late afternoon, the hummingbirds start feeding more aggresively, to store up for the evenings which still do get cool (in the 40s-low 50s). The patio faces west, so Tom had his chair near the patio wall, facing in towards the apartment; this meant he was pretty much underneath the hummingbird feeder. They don't mind us, so they were still zipping back and forth, even with us out there. I was under the shade, so I was facing him, reading the remnants of the Sunday paper. He had just lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair when a female hummingbird zoomed in towards the feeder.

Tom says, "Hello there, little hummingbird- you're not going to poop on me, are you?" (hummingbird poop is a discussion we've had in the past- what does it look like, and how much of it is there? after all, they're pretty small birds!) Just as he completed his sentence, it did poop on him!!! She let loose, and the poop landed right on his cheek- I watched it happen! He sat there, stunned, while I burst out laughing... It was just so perfectly timed! The perfect angle, wind conditions, everything! I couldn't stop laughing, but I did manage to get him a soapy washcloth and a towel... he didn't know what to say, except "what are the odds of that happening?" Maybe we should have bought a lottery ticket after that.

We did, however, find out that hummingbird poop is a clear liquid with a pretty watery consistency... :-)

Today, Tom had another (better) hummingbird experience- he was outside the front door, shaking dog hair out of the rug, and noticed a female hummingbird hovering around, eyeing him carefully. He stopped shaking the rug, so she calmed down, and flew to a nearby pine tree, where she landed on her nest!!! He showed it to me when I got home from work- it's amazing! It's light grayish green, and is built on one of the lowest branches, nestled between a pine cone and the tree branch (kind of a precarious perch, in my opinion- I hope the pine cone doesn't fall anytime soon!). It was pretty windy today, but she was settled in for the ride. Hopefully we'll be able to get at least a couple pictures of it that will look like more than a greenish blob- if so, I will definitely post them!

yay no dog poopies to clean up!

Today when I got home from work, Sedona's crate was poop-free!! I'm not holding my breath, but I think her digestive system might be getting back to normal. I did do a lot of reading last evening about diarrhea and possible causes, and stress is probably it. (I highly doubt she picked up any of the strange parasites or other weird things that could cause diarrhea...) She's pretty high-strung most of the time, and I would venture to say she also suffers from a bit of separation anxiety, possibly due to the breed of dog she is- like the breeder told us, Shelties always want to be where "their people" are. Sedona follows that pattern- she's underfoot or right next to us most of the time. (Not that there's a lot of other places to be in our apartment- lol!) She also gets really frantic and overexcited when we come home from being away... we have to keep it really low-key, or she'll piddle all over without knowing it. I'm going to feed her a "bland diet" dinner of cooked hamburger and rice tonight, just to help things along, and hopefully the "poop-free crate" trend will continue! This pic is just a nice pose from a few weeks ago- her coat has really filled out, although since she's female I don't think she'll ever get the really full, shaggy coat that is typical of the male dogs. (it does blow in the breeze really nice when she runs, though- and her tail is like a flag waving when she's really paying attention to something- it reminds me of a whitetail deer!)

Another thing I did a little more reading about was crate training- since she's now in her crate all day long, a couple sites suggested all day and at night is sometimes too much for a dog to handle. Last night, to help alleviate this, I let her stay with me on the bed- she was pretty settled, for the most part (this is probably because we played ball and tag for over an hour!)... she slept next to me till about 1 am, when she started getting restless- I took her outside to pee, then put her in the crate for the rest of the night. We probably won't let her sleep with us all the time, and it's not like I got the best sleep in the world, but once in a while is okay with me.

Thanks, Jackie, for the comment about Doggie Day Care- we do want to find something like this for her, although we'll probably only be able to take her there occasionally for a "play date" instead of every day.

I got my first paycheck from Kelly Services today! They spelled my last name wrong, though- hopefully the bank will still let me cash (oops- I meant deposit! LOL!) it!!

long time, no blog!

also known as: life as usual- never enough time...

So, today marks the midpoint of my second week back in the working world. It's been okay so far, except for a couple things...

I do not like getting up at 4:45 am!!! I was very used to waking up at 8:30 am, when it's already light outside! But, starting work at 6:30 am does have it's advantages- by the time my lunch break is over (noon), the workday is already more than half done! And, leaving work at 3:00 means I avoid the worst of rush hour, and am home by 3:30 pm.

The other negative to working is worse, in my opinion- Sedona has been having some digestive issues (stress, or something else, I don't know what yet), and today is the second day in a row that I have come home to a mess in her crate because she had an accident... I know she can't help it, but it's still gross! Yesterday, she had every stuffed toy in her crate, and they all had to be washed. She also got into it, so she had to be washed too- Today, she managed to keep a couple of toys clean, and herself too, thank goodness, but I still had to wash the towel and a couple toys again. I just wish I knew why it was happening! She seemed okay last week when I started working, but since the weekend, her bowels just haven't been working correctly (I don't want to give you too much information, but lets just say it's really runny, and leave it at that!). Maybe it is stress- after all, since we've had her, one or both of us has been home with her, so she's never been left all day, every day, till last week. Hopefully it will clear itself up soon!!!

The job itself is okay- it involves testing the accuracy of an instrument (called a compounder) that hospital pharmacies use to dispense and mix solutions. My testing involves measuring and weighing out 50 bottles of sterile water (by hand) to a certain weight, setting up the instrument with solutions of Potassium Chloride (KCl), running the compounder to dispense KCl into the bottles, then measuring the amount of KCl in each bottle. Then, the results are typed into a spreadsheet that calculates the amount of KCl dispensed into each bottle. This determines if the machine is dispensing the proper amount, within a prescribed tolerance. It's not hard, but it is very time consuming to get all the materials set up. (Completing testing on two machines a day is the norm.) And then, of course, there's the paperwork! The place is small, and a bit crowded, but seeing what goes into actually repairing and maintaining the IV pumps and compounders is kind of interesting (not that I know what the techs are doing- electrical stuff was the part of physics class that I absolutely hated).

Tom is in San Francisco this week; (fyi, last week he was in Philadelphia, but it was a very busy trip). Earlier today he called me while he was taking a late lunch; he was describing to me the scene at the Golden Gate Bridge... he said it was beautiful, but he wished it was about 30 degrees warmer (it was probably in the mid 60s... LOL!) And, he forgot his camera at their job site! Fortunately, his partner had a camera, so he will have some pictures to remember it by. They thought it would be a pretty easy installation, but unfortunately the electrical contractors hadn't completed all the work they needed, so they'll be delayed a little- he may not get back till Saturday.

Our TV went to the Great TV Repair Place in the Sky... (well, Walt's TV Repair, anyway- LOL!) And, it's not coming back- they can't get the part they need to fix it, because rear-projection TVs of that type are being phased out of production. Luckily, Best Buy honored the extended warranty, and we got full purchase price credit towards a new TV, which Tom picked up Monday (he had a comp day from work). I had no idea about the comp day, or about the TV decision being finalized- when I got home from work, there was a huge box in the living room, and Tom was putting all the video components onto the new TV stand. It's new technology (Liquid Crystal on Silicon ? I think), that combines LCD display with something called DRP (? I think), which involves a chip with thousands of tiny mirrors that makes the picture... it all has to do with how good the picture looks, and boy, it looks really good! Supposedly the technology of the TV is better than the current technology for filming movies or TV shows, so it's ahead of it's time. (This hopefully means it won't be obsolete in 2 or 3 years like the old one! We got the extended warranty on this TV, too, just in case!) It's also bigger than the old one (it's a 60 inch diagonal), so in our tiny living room, it's like sitting down front at the movies. When we get a house, hopefully we will have a bigger family room, and it will fit in just fine.

I'm headed for an all-day scrapbooking crop on Saturday, Feb 18th that will be held at a resort in Scottsdale- 9 am to 9 pm, including my own 6 foot table to work on, lunch, snacks, projects, prizes, etc. etc. Now, I just have to get some pages planned out, so I don't have to take all my supplies with me! (but, like Jude said when I told her about it, yes, I probably will take it all with me... just in case!)

well, now I'm off to surf the net for info on dogs and stress and diarrhea... lucky me!