Tag: dogs

Under Penalty


I’m sure whoever ripped this off the dog bed and left it on the living room floor fully intended to be “the consumer” but was interrupted by a squirrel or something equally catastrophic. Odds are, one of these two little angels is the guilty party.

Today my house seems like a grandmother’s house. I mean that in good ways. The air is redolent with the scents of baking and of collard greens and zipper cream peas simmering on the stove. Outside, the sun shines gently on the morning glories climbing the fence. There’s a new flower on the gerber daisy, and the impatiens, delighted by the milder weather, have begun to bloom again. I just need some little ones to play dress-up with the dogs and a bit of sewing to do, and I might as well be 135.

Speaking of sewing, Project Runway has finished its regular season and only has the Fashion Week competition left. This means I should be working on a final collection, and I am…

Clueless.

Wishing for inspiration.

Not soliciting inspiration. I can’t create to other people’s specifications in doll fashion any more than in writing or painting. It has to be something that catches my fancy from within.

So I’m waiting…and wishing…

Waiting…waiting…

I was out shopping with Tim on Saturday (you can read about that and other things related to this post on his blog here), and I impulsively spent money I don’t have on furniture I hadn’t planned to buy. But it was ANTIQUE. And a good deal! And I even bargained, which is something I don’t do. I bought a reupholstered chair and love seat that the seller estimates are about a hundred years old–that’s even older than my house (eightyish) and ME (ageless). But I bought them just before Ja-vi Custom-made and Antique Furniture closed for the day, and they aren’t open on Sunday or Monday, so I had to wait until today for them! In Aries Instant Gratification Days, that’s two hundred years.

So Tom said he’d go into work late this morning; then my sister-wife Kathy arrived with her truck at nine, and off they went. Except the shop didn’t open until ELEVEN. If only I could read their web site, I would have known I had to wait another twenty Aries years.

But finally the furniture is here. After Kathy and Tom left, I arranged everything about a dozen ways, because even though the new pieces have their own kind of largeness, they’re smaller than what I took out and better suited to my living room. Finally, I was satisfied, and made a couple of dog-related decisions.


1. I would put my mother’s blanket chest under the window behind the love seat so the dogs can jump on the chest and watch Rex TV (the street) without being on the new furniture and potentially scratching the wood with their toenails.
2. I would put easily-washed quilts on the furniture so that when the dogs jump on it–and they will, blanket chest notwithstanding–I have a shot at keeping dog hair and stink off of it.

I had reckoned without Margot’s burrowing instincts. I went into the living room earlier to show Tim the arrangement, and the quilt on the love seat was already in a big pile. I smoothed it back in place and took a photo of Guinness there.

And here’s Margot in the nest she made on the chair.

Looking forward to Tim’s dogs building forts out of the quilts later today.

A very green Thursday

After six years of use including countless dog naps and even serving as a dog playground–I’m looking at you, Pixie and Sugar–the quilt on our bed is in need of a bit of mending. It’s one of those projects I won’t get around to quickly enough to keep the threadbare places from proving irresistible to at least a couple of Compound canines who are into the, shall we say, fiber arts. So while Tim and I were out and about on Thursday, he spied a REALLY good deal on a quilt and shams that I liked, and presto!

Guinness and Margot think it’ll be okay once it gets some dog stink on it.

And a certain Miss Penny already bit it, so it’s officially part of The Compound now.

Tim was also helpful in directing Tom to exactly the rain barrel we wanted. It was at Whole Foods and was no more costly than the ones that weren’t quite right at Home Depot. Made by Epoch Solutions, it’s been repurposed and reconditioned from a container once used for olives. It has all the features we were looking for and is larger than even I’d hoped at 55 gallons. We’ve already begun putting our gray water in it, and it’s poised to begin collecting rain water from our roof when it rains again. And it WILL RAIN AGAIN. Dammit.