Friday dog-blog

Here's Roxy, sleeping with her toy on her nose.

I'd blog the cat, but she went outside and refuses to come back in. She's mad because Roxy waltzed into the bedroom where she was sleeping. Worse, poor kitty was subjected to a giant brown Roxy-nose sniffing her tummy. Bad scene all around.



What Roxy's really doing in this picture is waiting for someone to try to steal the toy away so that somebody will have to chase somebody else. Her preference, of course, is that when it all settles out, she'll be the one being chased. I'll be the one running after her.

The kitchen is a wrap

Here's what we started with:





And this, along with an empty savings account and a few more gray hairs, is what we have now:




Yeah. It was worth it.

It's a new year

and let's hope it's a better one than the last. Here are ten of my fondest wishes:

1. Newspapers recover. Twenty-four-hour news outlets fail.

2. It rains in California. It stops raining in Iowa.

3. California calls for a constitutional convention and produces a new constitution which requires a two-thirds majority to amend the constitution and a 50%+1 majority to pass a budget and to raise taxes. Lowering taxes requires a 60% majority. Heh.

4. The Supreme Court decides that money does not, in fact, constitute political speech and caps corporate political spending.

5. The FCC decides that nudity is not scary, that the word 'fuck' will not harm future generations, and that freedom of speech is not threatened by banning ads which contain demonstrable falsehoods.

6. The FDA bans commercials touting prescription drugs.

7. Genetically modified foods are found to taste awful. Monsanto gives up its GMA programs and devotes itself to promoting organic gardening.

8. No Child Left Behind is amended to require a.) national testing standards and b.) an increase in funding for all schools which fail to meet yearly progress goals.

9. Roman Polanski goes to prison.

10. Health care reform becomes law, and includes caps on profits by insurance companies and for-profit health-care providers.

On to the new year

and good riddance to the old. I have no idea why 2009 was so awful - it just was. The partisanship from the right which crippled Congress; the hatred and racism spewed over the airwaves by the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh; the idiocy from the left when it became clear that President Obama was only a very smart man and not the magic liberal fairy-godfather they thought they'd elected; and the continuing pressures of recession, high unemployment, and climate change all combined to make everybody in the world crabby, intolerant, and out of sorts.

On the bright side are these: George W. Bush is no longer president. We are not dealing with the worldwide economic depression that seemed inevitable a little more than a year ago. Our troops are leaving Iraq; and although Afghanistan is ramping up, there's a time line in place for our involvement there to end as well. Guantanamo is slowly being shut down. We are finally taking climate change seriously. Our government is re-establishing diplomatic ties around the world. Health care reform bills were passed in both the House and the Senate, and need only to be reconciled for at least some of the horrible inequities in our health care system to be addressed.

So let's ring in the New Year with hope in our hearts and a renewed will to work to make our world the secure and happy place it can still be.

Why I haven't blogged in a long, long time

I don't really know. Words fail me.

Here are some other things I haven't been doing:

- Exercising. Really. Not at all. As a result, things that were sagging a bit before now appear to be melting into puddles around my ass and thighs.

- Unpacking the last of my kitchen things and storing them in the new cupboards. They don't look like they'll fit and I don't want to deal with the overflow.

- Gardening. The tomato vines are drooping in my garden like lost souls.

- Removing spots from my carpet. Including two dog-puke stains and three coffee spills. I avert my eyes.

- Writing books. Again, words fail me.

- Feeling Christmas-y. Though I did decorate, and I've been listening to Christmas music almost exclusively, the anticipation and the wonder elude me.

- Watching the news. I can't bear it - all the yammering from talking heads, the spin from so-called journalists, the chasing after stupid stories while the real stuff happens in the shadows. (Really, who - other than his wife - cares if Tiger Woods is a hound-dog instead of a Disney hero? Let's have a comprehensive story on the use of filibusters by the minority in Congress. Contrast and compare with the previous Congress. And if your story shows objectively that one party is more hypocritical and obstructive than the other, don't add some irrelevant nonsense to water your conclusion down.)

So. There you have it. I'm not blogging because I'm in a really, really bad mood.

Thanksgiving in the Kitchen

We got this far:





Everything was in place for Thanksgiving, except the tiled backsplash and the range hood. We'd been waiting to take delivery of the accent tile which arrived yesterday. Still on order are three bronze decorative tiles to go above the range, and a panel for the side of the island. Once those come in and are duly installed, we'll really, truly be finished. Our contractor was fabulous!

Update

We're really close, but there was a sad glitch yesterday. First, the good stuff that's finished:





With the cabinets in and the first appliances installed, it was time for granite. And that's when it happened:





Yes. The granite broke. That was yesterday. Today the granite guy is back with a new slab and as I type, he's installing again. This time no one can bear to watch. We're hiding in the rec room, waiting for the all-clear.

Tomorrow (knock wood) the plumber hooks up the sink and dishwasher. Sometime in the next few days, when the tile arrives, my husband will install the tile and then the range hood will go in. It's unlikely that those two things will happen before Thanksgiving, but as long as I have an oven and a sink, I'll be thankful enough.