I Accidentally Ran Six Miles

My mom, my sisters Rachael, Francie, Lori and myself have made a bet with each other that could end up costing me a hundred bucks. Whoever looses the most weight in percentage by the 4th of July gets a hundred bucks from each of us. Adam must have a lot of faith in me, he keeps asking me what I'm going to do with all that money. Apparently he doesn't know me that well; granted we've only been married less than a year (I don't diet/exercise very consistently). Thankfully though, my lack of direction forced me to run longer than anticipated. I've lived here almost a year and I got lost less than 6 miles from my house. I knew the general direction that home was, but I couldn't find a street that would take me there. Every time I ran down a street, it dead ended or looped around. For you big athletes, six miles might not seem like a lot, but it is when you've only jogged up to 3 miles at a time, a couple of times a week, for only a few weeks in the past couple of years.
Along with my lack of directions, I'm math challenged. I had to try the numbers several ways and then confirm with Adam the correct way to calculate weight loss percentage. Here's what we came up with: [1-(new wt/old wt.)].
I'm not sure what my chances are, but now I'm curious, so I'm done here for now so that I can spend some time with Excel to figure that out. Hope everyone is doing good, because that is ultimately the goal; the money just makes it easier to get there.
Here's how I'm keeping track of everything: www.sparkpeople.com
If you check it out, make sure you block them in your email address, they like to send frequent reminders.

His Big Feet are Accident Prone

Usually when you are looking at puppies, you check their feet size to know how big they are going to get. Too bad we didn't know ahead of time that Walter's big feet meant lots of injuries as well as size. We would have benefited from pet insurance if we would had only known. Rememer this picture?

One hurt foot from an ice skate this winter.

Yesterday while he was playing outside at work during break time, a couple of guys were throwing a football back and forth. Walter thought it was great so he chased it back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth for about 9 min. solid. Well I noticed once we got back inside he was licking his feet really fast. I thought that was strange, so I checked the bottom of his foot...you won't believe this unless you've heard of it; he riped off the pad of his foot! It was so shocking to me. I checked his other feet and sure enough the back one was the same way. The other two had tears but were not completely riped open. I had to wrap his monsters up really good so that hopefully they won't get infected ($$$). He was in soo much pain this morning when we got to work I had to lift him out of the car and set him on the ground...he's 80 pounds, that was not easy! It seemed to be gettin worse this evening. When I went to change his bandages he ran in the basement and hid from me so that I wouldn't touch his feet. He hurt so bad he pee'd a little on me by accident when I touched his back leg. I was able to get his foot wrapped back up with a lot of antibiotic ointment and ace bandages before we had to leave for awhile. When we got home he was walking on his foot again, so I think the ointment might have helped. He went to be early all by himself though (upstairs). There was a customer at work today who asked if our dog was really old. He's barely 2 years old and still very puppy like. I hope he gets better soon!

He always sleeps behing this brown couch when he is injured, must be comforting to him, like a great big brown dog protecting him.

The Cutest Big Mouth I Ever Saw!

Multi Tasking at Work

On Friday Walter and I had an extra cubical mate: Leah. My sister-in-law had to leave early for the women's retreat, so she dropped Leah off at the office with David. She was just so cute that I had to let her sit with me. I let David feed her and change diapers, but handled the naps and playing myself. She and Walter got along really good until Leah got tired. I cradled her while I typed one handed on the computer, and she literally closed her eyes in seconds. She is the easiest baby I have ever known! When Kristen was only a month old I lived with Rachael and Derrick to help out during the day while they were at work, I used to have to rock Kristen for EVER to get that girl to sleep. I even had to use the vacuum occasionally to get her to sleep - she like that for some reason. We once ran the vacuum for 3 hours while she slept like an angel. I guarantee she would have woken up the moment we turned it off. So trying to get Leah to sleep while getting something done at work was hardly challenging. One of the guys at work thought Leah looked like the cutest little paper weight sitting in that pink chair! I have to agree she makes a good office accessory. She made everyone really happy, I'm totally fine with that!

Anthony is getting so big, he's very cute. As you can see he has a happy chair like Leah. I really think someone should make a chair for adults that makes you feel the way theirs makes them feel. I'm not refering to the lazy-boy chair, that doesn't count because that's really just good for being lazy. You'll notice in the first picture Lori is pulling on poor Tony's head, she's not hurting him, don't worry, she's only looking for his neck.

I have been having fun with my pottery stuff this week. Thanks to my friend Dawn from church who loaned me this really cool mold, I have been busy pouring all week. Before I got into pottery I had little to no knowledge of the process. I had to learn it all by reading a book. I think it's pretty interesting so I'll try to fill you guys in throughout my Teapots for Rachael's Work project; pro-bono of course.

Two Weekends Ago in a Nut Shell

I have been so busy lately that I haven't had much time to blog. I've barely even spent much time reading other blogs. So here's what we've been up to lately...
A few Saturdays ago we met up with Joe and Nilsa, Adam's cousin and his wife who just got back from spending 3 months in Arizona. They conveniently missed the 3 coldest months of Michigan. We went hiking and surprisingly, sorta had a good time. Joe and Adam were drill sargeants and made us walk fast, but on the way back I took the lead. I figured the faster I walked, the faster it would be over. Sunday we went to breakfast with Sarah, David and Leah at the hotel you see across the lake from our house. We also played ROck BAnd with Joe and Nilsa which was pretty fun...um.. Joe's not the best singer, but it was very entertaining and that's what we were hoping for. Last weekend we went to the other side of the state, and all this week I have been busy pouring slip to make some tea pots for Rachael. I'm going to post the cute pictures of Anthony from this weekend tomorrow hopefully, along with some phase 1 photots of the tea pots.

I spent the later afternoon and early evening in my driveway.

Thursday was a terribly long day. I could barely stay awake at work, so I had planned on going to bed early. Early for me is 7pm because I have to be at work by 6:30 every morning. Adam doesn't like it when I go to bed that early, but he had plans to go golfing with his friends. When I got home, I realized I had no keys to the house. Anyone who knows me at all knows that every window in my house is locked and breaking in is not going to happen unless your a professional. Adam's phone I knew was dead on the kitchen counter, my MIL was MIA, my FIL's phone was off, David's phone at least rang, but no answer of coarse, Adam's friend that he was with..Gary, his phone range too, but again no answer. No one answered at the In laws house either. So guess where I spent my evening?

After about an hour of napping in the front seat of my car in my driveway, I was woken up by annoying solicitors and Walter trying to jump through the back window of the car. (Don't forget we take Walter to work with us so I had him with me). So him and I went to McDonald's, I got an ice cream cone, Walter got a $1 dollar double cheeseburger. Then we drove to the pet store, I had to go in and buy a leash first, and then we spent about a half hour walking around the pet store, with no intentions to buy anything, but rather to kill time. I put Walt back in the car, walked into Old Navy for a few minutes and then decided Adam had to be home soon, so we headed home. When we got home, still no sign of Adam, so we took another nap. Finally, I let Walter out of the car and just sat there with the door open while Walter slept in the neighbors front yard. It was about that time that I remembered having half a muffin left from work in my cup holder. Eating always makes time go by faster, right?! Here's what was left of my muffin....

Please take note of the slobber, crumbs, and lack of muffin wrapper and muffin itself. Wonder who could have eaten that? Seems Walter ate my muffin to kill time while I was in Old Navy for all of 15 min. Adam finally got home around 9pm. You won't believe this, Adam had no keys either, so we had to drive over to his parents house, who thankfully were home by now. I didn't get to bed until after 10pm. I sat in the driveway long enough to get really mad and then also long enough to get over it. By the time I finally got into the house, I just had nothing to say... I went straight to bed. I plan on making a dozen sets of keys, maybe I will give one to everyone that knows me.