Friday Favorites...Summertime

It has been a busy week, what with all the end-of-school-year festivities, ceremonies and shenanigans I had to attend. And then Devin's baseball practices started up while Dracen's season was finishing up so it was baseball overload there for a few days. 

The fact that I don't have to get up at that ridiculous dark thirty hour for over three.whole.months thrills me more than it probably should. I swear I think I get more excited about that than the kids do. But somehow I  forgot to turn my weekday alarm off last night when I went to bed and was all kinds of confused and disoriented when that thing went off at its normal just-before-the-butt-crack-of-dawn hour this morning but the satisfaction I got from laughing in that iPhone's face when I turned it off and rolled back over was just about worth it. (I have issues. Clearly.)

I'm still sitting here in my pajamas in the sunroom (after 10:00 a.m.) sipping coffee out of my Wonder Woman mug with the gorilla-glued handle and feeling no shame in my game whatsoever about it.

Devin had two friends over last night who all promptly disappeared into the bonus room and aside from the time they came down scavenging for food before we went to bed last night, I haven't heard hide nor hair from any of them and Dracen is still hard at sleep as well. I think I see a summer chore list in their near future but today I'm giving them a free first-day-of-summer-vacation pass...

Fun in the Sun

I've always loved this summer pic of Dracen taken at 

the beach in 2007. He still does that curling of the lip thing.

Fancy Firepit

I've been wanting to build a firepit in the

backyard for awhile now and hope to bring that plan

to fruition this summer. I am practically drooling over this one...

source

Serenity

I have no idea where this is, but I'd love to

spend about a week in that hammock doing nothing

but reading and napping. 

 source

Beaded Thong Sandals

I'm seriously crushing on these.

Garnet Hill

Patriotic Trifle

How cute is this?

Perfect for Memorial Day or the 4th.

betty crocker

Great advice

This cracked me up.

source

Swimming Hole

This just made me smile.

source

Turquoise Bohemian Bracelet

Love this for summer.

etsy

  My little friend

I don't know what is up with the chipmunks this year

but they are everywhere around here.

This one was kind enough to pose for me the other morning.

Summertime

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Wiener Wednesday...2013 North Carolina Wiener Roast

The Darlings were raring to go when we woke them up for the  wiener roast Saturday morning. This was our fourth straight year attending and I swear they acted as if they knew exactly what was going down. Poor Lucky had no clue what he was in for but he was excited simply because they were excited.

It is held at the Castle McCulloch in Jamestown which is about an hour and forty-five minute drive for us. I thought we'd made a huge mistake by taking Lucky along in the beginning because as soon as we got out of the car and he saw the other Dachsies and friends getting out of the car next to us, he was beside himself with excitement and immediately began showing his arse in a big way. This prompted the Darlings to then show their little arses as well, and so the three of them proceeded to have an all-out barking match with the stranger dogs.

None of them are aggressive but were all beyond ready to get to the entrance and into the event asap and had no patience whatsoever for our attempts to put a harness on Lucky. I may have uttered a couple (or several) four letter words under my breath but this was clearly some sort of Rubik's cube trick harness that would not, for the love of all that is holy, stay on right. So we finally gave in, put the leash on his collar, held our breath that he wouldn't come out of it and made our way (very ungracefully) toward the gate. 

I, of course, had to find a bathroom right away (because I have determined that my bladder is roughly the size of a pea) and when I came out Lucky was sporting a new fire hydrant harness that Charlie informed me we needed to pay the nice lady for. And since Brisco's was looking a little dingy, he thought he had to have a new one too.

I have concluded that taking them to this event is pretty much the dog world equivalent of taking toddlers to Disney World. 

They all settled down once we were in and wasted no time introducing themselves. In other words, there was a whole lot of butt-sniffing going on and Mr. Happy-go-lucky Lucky got way more than his fair share of flashing teeth and nips at the nose but  he remained a gentleman, never once complaining or nipping back.

I made the discovery, about 15 minutes after our arrival, that I had gone off and left my SD card for the camera in my computer. I was all kinds of unhappy about that but what are you gonna do?

iPhone to the rescue.

Let the butt-sniffin' begin...

Charlene (Li'l Bit) is a bit more shy than the boys and therefore, requested demanded to be toted around all day. 

Dracen kept disappearing into the castle to check on his bids at the silent auction while the rest of us waited around outside. He likes to be sneaky independent. 

 (Dracen "accidentally" allowed Brisco (Big Boy) to take a dip in that murky water shortly after we arrived. 

So much for that clean new harness)

Dracen ended up winning the bid on this all-things-Dachshund basket which he proudly presented to me as a Mother's Day gift...(Aww)

The wiener races are always held at the end of the day, after they're all exhausted and ready to go home. I entered both of them this time and here they are (tuckered out) just minutes before the races began...

I had entered Brisco two of the previous three years and both times he refused to run. This year I went ahead and entered him one more time and decided to give Charlene her shot at it this year too. They were in separate weight classes, miniature and tweenie.

Charlene was up first. 

Dracen got in place with her at the start line and I headed around to the finish line to catch her. Here's how she did...

Bless her sweet little wiener heart.

I pretty much expected Brisco's to go much the way it went the other years but he surprised me this year. I won't go so far as to say he ran it to win it but he did quick trot it all the way to the finish line this time. I was so proud of my boy.

(And I have made numerous attempts at uploading his race video but the stars are not lining up right and I have now reached my limit with the patience thing so it's just not going to happen.)

Instead here's a shot of the look he gave me afterward...

I took that as a please-can-we-go-home-now-I'm-worn-slap-out kind of look so we packed everybody up and headed toward home... 

Where they all three slept for approximately 19 hours.

Lost and Found

Somehow we always manage to make it to school on time but Dracen was late this morning because we.could.not.find.his.shoes.ANYWHERE. I found it extremely difficult to remain calm. Big fail there this time, although I didn't completely lose my mind. We never did find his tennis shoes. He ended up wearing his Vans that I found in my closet because he was in there after church yesterday (when he was supposed to be changing and getting ready to go visit his momaws) wrapping my scarves around his neck and clomping around in my high heels. 

He and Devin had gone to hit some baseballs with Popaw Bob yesterday evening, after we got in from visiting my mom, and came in about 10 minutes before his bedtime, limping because Devin had hit a hard line drive right smack into the back of his calf muscle. So in that 10 minutes before he went to bed, he somehow managed to lose his shoes since he had been wearing them last night. 

I came home after dropping them off this morning, searched the house from top to bottom again and then called to make sure he had not left them in Popaw's truck although he assured me he had not and that someone must have surely stolen them from wherever he left them in the house. Grrr. They were indeed not in the truck so I hung up the phone in the kitchen and immediately spotted them peeking out from under the kitchen island, behind a Diet Dr. Pepper carton. Y'all. These shoes are BRIGHT RED. 

I have never been more ready for school to be out. 

In other news, we had to put Max the (female) guinea pig down Friday afternoon. The boys had gotten them for their birthdays the year they turned 10 and 6, so almost four years ago. (I wrote about the loss of Junebug in February of last year) Max had lost a good bit of her hair over the past several months but always seemed to feel fine until very recently. Turns out she had a pretty good-sized mass inside and there was nothing the vet could do for her so we made the choice to put her to rest. I think I took it harder than either of the boys though we were all feeling a little blue.

The Wiener Roast on Saturday was the perfect thing to lift our spirits. I will save the details of that for Wiener Wednesday although I was unable to document it with photos like I'd hoped, seeing as how I went off and left the SD card in my computer.(that was a fun discovery) The few shots I was able to get with my iPhone will have to do. Charlie did manage to get a video of the races which we entered both the Darlings in this time. I will tell you how they each did on Wednesday...

Unless I lose my mind before then.

And since I remembered to put the card back in the camera yesterday, I was able to capture this (which may now just possibly be one of my all-time favorite photos in the history of ever) of Dracen and Lola, the tamest little chicken this side of the Mississippi. 

More on the chickens later.

p.s. 
They don't live at our house.