Well, it seems like our visitor may be staying around. She showed up yesterday morning and has faithfully stayed around since. She's terribly starved for human companionship -- plus she really likes the puppy chow. Yes, we still have a huge container of puppy chow left from Minnie (she either ran away or someone took her 2 years ago). I've got two questions for you: 1) Should we keep her? She's really sweet! She's still a puppy, though -- has chewed up two of our newspapers so far. 2) IF we keep her what should we name her? I'm drawing blanks on a name! What do you think? Any suggestions would be welcome!

UPDATE!! UPDATE!! UPDATE!! We've named her SASCHA! She has a bed in the garage and loves it. I took her to the vet this afternoon. He says she's a lab mix -- not sure what the "mix" is, but he says she's a well-mannered and sweet-tempered dog. Says we could have looked a long time and not found as good a dog as this. She weighs 39 lbs and is probably 9-10 months old. They scanned her for a chip -- zilch. So it looks like she's ours! Oh! One more thing -- she smiles! Yes! When I first approached her she kind of bared her teeth (no growling though) and let me pet her. She did the same thing to the vet and he immediately said, "Oh! She smiles!" He said it's rare but some dogs do smile. It may scare some people, but the dog really is smiling.

I know it's hard to believe that you've actually found my name in white! I have pictures! On August 1 Julia and her boys arrived for a 10-day stay with us. Then on August 8th Jonathan, Amy and kids arrived. Jonathan could only stay a 1-1/2 days because he had to leave for a business trip, but Amy and the kids were able to stay 5 days. So the King-Huntley cousins were able to spend a few days together. I took advantage of having all six grandkids here and had their pictures taken. I've been telling people that it was like herding fleas, but we have lots of great pictures. You can tell me now what cute kids they are . . . :-)!! We had loads of fun while they were here and I was in my element cooking up a storm. I even managed to try a few new recipes on them.

We are doing well. David stays busy with church, work and his blog. I'm still working for the school district. I just changed jobs (for the last time I hope!) -- I am now the school district's travel clerk, making travel arrangements for employees who are traveling on district business. I'm really enjoying it and am looking forward to retirement in a few short years. I'm still cross-stitching and cooking.

Enjoy the pictures!

I can't believe that I'm even attempting this! We've had so much fun with our family over Thanksgiving and Christmas that I wanted to share some of the pictures we took. All 13 of us were together at our house at Thanksgiving. David, Joanna, Jeremy, Holly and I enjoyed Christmas in Ft. Worth with Jonathan, Amy and their kids. We've also enjoyed a couple of "good" snows in between. David always says that the only reason I love the snow is that I don't have to shovel it. So true! Hope you enjoy the slide show! Hope your holidays were fun and you have a Happy New Year!

Well, I wasn't going to do this, but Joanna said that I just HAVE to write a new post. This one should make you feel much better.

Last night we had about 30 people over for food and a singing. We had yummy food and after getting way too stuffed to sing, we all crammed into our living room. (That many people in one room singing hymns is beautiful, isn't it? We must do that more often!) I know, I know . . . get to the point of the story, right? Anyway, it started getting rather warm, so we opened the windows, but that only helped for the people sitting near them. So after a bit, David asked one of the men to turn the ceiling fan on high (it had been on low up to this point). Now, you must understand that quite often during the summer I would turn the ceiling fan to high with no problems. A couple of weeks ago David switched the direction of the fan for winter. Since that time it had not been turned to high. Well, what do you guess happened? Yep, you got it. Tons and tons of dust "clumps" flew out in all directions and very slowly drifted through the air all over the room. Lovely! Very embarrassing. I know that none of you have ever experienced anything like that! But I can pretty much guess that most of the ladies at our house last night are going to be cleaning their ceiling fans this week! Cleaning day in the Wichita area! At least I don't need to clean that fan! Ha! Joanna told me that I shouldn't feel bad since I just made everyone else feel very good about their own housecleaning!

I'm really going against my pleo principles, but felt I just had to give everyone an update. The last couple of days have been really interesting. Thursday started off great. It was "snack day" at work. Now, you all know that any day called "snack day" has to be a real treat in my book! I love breakfast, so I decided to take biscuits and sausage gravy. I got up early enough to make a couple dozen biscuits -- oh, so golden and fluffy. I also made a large pan of sausage gravy. It looked so yummy -- the perfect consistency! I poured it into my crockpot . . . almost a full crockpot of gravy! Loaded everything into my car and headed off for work. Before I left I almost propped my purse against the crockpot just to make sure it wouldn't tump over. But I never have to make sudden stops or turns, so why should that day be any different? Hmmm . . . it was different. Yep, you guessed it. Over half of the contents of the crockpot ended up in the floorboard of my car. Have you ever had to scoop up very warm gravy with paper towels? Not pleasant!

Okay, let's move on to Friday. David had a "guy" function to attend Friday night so Joanna and I tried to come up with fun, relaxing plans for the evening. We decided to go to Best Buy and buy a movie (or two??) then stop by Malasia Cafe and get vegetable fried rice and chicken lomain to go. We were going to take it home and eat dinner while we watched our new movie. As we were on our way, (Joanna was driving by the way!) we were behind a car at a red light with a car behind us. So there are three cars in the turn lane at the red light when a fourth car comes up behind all of us and apparently can't stop. Joanna is looking in her rear view mirror and starts making all kinds of noises as she sees the car behind us get hit, which pushes it into the rear of our car which pushes us into the rear of the car in front of us, thus, we were the filling for a car sandwich! Just the way we wanted to begin our Friday night! After an hour of filling out forms we go on to get our movies and food. (Fortunately, no one was hurt in all of that!) We got home and fixed our plates, and I put the movie in the dvd player. The dvd didn't seat well in the player, made all kinds of awful noises before we could get it out. I now have to go buy a new dvd! It is scratched beyond hope. I guess that was the perfect (?) ending to a couple of very eventful days!