Exceedingly Mundane

I took a bunch of photos on Saturday, so I thought I’d post a few more 🙂

The shrub roses in our backyard are starting to bloom, and they look so pretty. Both of these are yellow, but for some odd reason, the last two years, one of them blooms red for a while, then switches to yellow blooms. But they were both yellow when we bought and planted them!

My mother-in-law gave us some irises several years ago, but we haven’t taken care of them like we should have. I think they’re supposed to be divided every couple of years in the fall, which we have never done. Also, I think with flowers like this, you’re supposed to have part of the root bulb exposed, which we never do. Very few of them bloomed last year, and so far this year, only one single flower has bloomed. It is pretty though!

Tim and Beau resting outside on a beautiful April day:

I saw this meme last week, and again today, at Vader’s Mom‘s blog. Since I’m always taking photos of Beau, I thought I might play along this week.

I took tons of photos of Beau today, outside playing. I had a hard time narrowing it down, but decided to post one of him with Tim’s hat on; I thought it was cute 🙂

Who needs a cat around when you have a dog that will kill the rats he hunts down in your backyard? That would be Beau, my mighty hunter!

We have a big ditch behind our house, behind the fence, and there is a lake in our subdivision, behind the houses that are across the street from us. I’ve always said, we live in the critter/crawl path. The snakes and rats and horrible things slither and crawl from one place to the next. I’ve blogged in the past about the possums and raccoons that we’ve had in our yard. I even mentioned before that Tim had opened up our gas grill one spring evening, only to find that rats had been nesting in the grill over the winter. Ugh. It gives me the heebie-jeebies! We live in the suburbs, for goodness sakes, not the country. We’re not supposed to have this many gross things around.

BUT – I have a mighty hunter now! Beau has been stalking squirrels by day, and rats by night. The squirrels are just too fast for him, and see him coming. He hasn’t gotten one yet, but he has not given up. He is relentless in his watching from the back door – he does it for hours every day. He had not gotten a rat either. Tim had shot one out of the big tree in the backyard with a pellet gun a few weeks ago, but this is the first one that Beau actually stalked down and killed himself. He was so proud of himself, Tim said! It was late one night, a couple of nights ago, and Tim “saved” the rat for me to see. Ugh! I took a picture though, so if you really want to see a big, dead rat, then click on the extended page for a picture.

Beau is the Mighty Hunter!

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Hello out there! Long time, no blog 🙂 I don’t seem to be able to think of anything to blog about. Not a whole lot going on around here. We’ve had a lot of company, my sister and then my niece, here visiting. Tim and I had a busy, but fun weekend. We were really bad and ate out all weekend. We also went to see the movie “Vantage Point” and that was good. We watched a couple of movies from Netflix too. A newer one, “Dan in Real Life” and a classic, “The Maltese Falcon”. I’m not cooking a lot this week, so I didn’t post a menu. I didn’t particularly like the topic on today’s Ten on Tuesday (10 places you’d take a tourist to see in your home town). I don’t live in a touristy kind of place 🙂

So, instead, I thought I’d post a few pictures that we’ve taken lately. Tim actually came and got the camera one day a week or two ago. He saw one of our two woodpeckers up in the tree and got some good pictures of him. Here’s the red-bellied woodpecker in our tree:

More pictures on the extended page…
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Good day today so far. Our church is doing a series on “Desperate Households”, about families and couples and parents being “desperate” for God. It’s been such a great series and we have thoroughly enjoyed it. I almost hate that it’s going to end in a couple of weeks, right before Easter. It’s made us want to get up and get to early church as soon as we can every week. 🙂 We had a quick lunch, and then after watching some golf on TV, Tim decided to go head to the driving range to hit some balls. Beau and I are hanging out at home. I’m doing laundry and catching up on reading newspapers and going through piles of mail. It’s a beautiful day here, all sunshiney and just a little cool (58º right now). It’s supposed to hit 70 degrees tomorrow before it starts raining again.

I obviously just transferred a bunch of photos and decided to play catch-up on here. Here’s a couple from today:

Beau taking a nap – look at the two toys curled up in his feet, so cute!

And yeah, the doorbell just rang and guess what finally came!

In the last few months, Beau has started doing something that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. He’s such a good dog, even though he barks a lot and digs countless holes in our backyard. Other than that, he’s as good as they come in the dog world. He can be very high-spirited, like a puppy, and he loves to play rough. But, he has his softer side, too. He can be very lovey-dovey and will sometimes just sit and let me pet him and “love on him” for long stretches of time.

I think he’s also protective of me. When Tim is gone and it’s just us, he turns into an uber-guard dog. He will bark at some unheard sound or unseen sight. I think it’s his way of protecting me.

Why he has started doing this, I’m not quite sure, but I love it to pieces:

Beau often comes right up behind me in the evening, when I’m washing dishes after supper. He lays right behind me, and usually presses up against my leg, and stays that way the entire time I stand at the kitchen sink. I don’t know if it’s his way of protecting me, or just being with me. He knows he’s not going to get table scraps, so he’s not begging. He doesn’t do it every single night, but he does do it most of the time. I just love it. It really makes washing the dishes after supper very enjoyable! 😀

Well, for once, the weatherman got it right! Yesterday, they said we’d have some rain last night (Friday night), with a chance that the precipitation would turn to flurries this morning. So, when I woke up, I went and looked out the back door and sure enough, we were getting flurries! We got just a little bit of accumulation, on places like our patio table and the grill:

And on the top of Tim’s truck:

I tried to take some photos of it actually snowing, but most of them didn’t come out. I did like this one of a cardinal on our fence, because you can sort of see the snow flurries flying around:

You know, of course, that no blog post of mine is complete without a photo of Beau. After all, this was Beau’s first snow! At least that we know of. I know it has never snowed or even flurried in his lifetime here. We have no reason to think he lived out of state before we adopted him, so in all likelihood, this was his first snow. I know he was very intrigued by it. The first time we went out, he stayed out about 10 seconds, then ran back inside! He did get more adventurous later on and had to check things out:

My favorite picture from this morning is, oddly enough, not one that I took! Tim took some from the kitchen, as Beau and I sat at the back door, watching it snow. We stayed that way a long time, me and my Beau baby. He was very patient with me and stayed by my side for at least 20 minutes, just watching it snow and enjoying the peace and quiet and beauty of it:

It snowed off and on for an hour or two, but a couple hours later, it had pretty much all melted and turned to slush. It was pretty while it lasted though!

You choose the caption:

A) “If I close my eyes, maybe she’ll take that camera out of my face”.

B) “If I can’t see her, doesn’t that mean she’s not really here?”

C) “Isn’t this like the hundredth photo she’s taken of me this week?!”

Today’s photo for the day, Beau really likes Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash!

I’m not feeling inspired to come up with some kind of a blog post today, so I thought I’d post a photo of Beau. I took this one a couple of weeks ago and thought it was so cute. Well, I think most every photo of my puppy is cute, but you get the idea 🙂 He likes to roll on his back and pull up his two front paws – this is his sign that he wants his belly rubbed! He does this a lot when Tim or I walk by him in the kitchen. You know, I’m posting this photo here, but I really need to be posting photos over at my Project365 blog. I was about 10 days behind, then posted 5 days worth of photos, but now I’m about a week behind again. Sigh. Maybe I’ll catch up soon!

I am staying pretty busy with catching up on things around here. Any spare time I have, I’m working on rebuilding my iTunes library. I blogged about my disaster here -but basically I deleted my entire iTunes library and am slowly trying to reload all of my music. I had a backup I had made months and months ago (ahem, like 9 or 10 months ago), which was woefully out of date. I’ve probably spent 8 hours so far trying to rebuild my music and playlists, and I still have a ways to go. A long ways 🙁

On the Christmas front, we’re partially decorated, but that’s it. I haven’t bought the first present. I don’t even have any ideas for anyone in our family. I don’t know where to start and I’m slowly starting to panic. I haven’t done Christmas cards and we haven’t done the outdoor decorating. Just my tree and Snow Village are up. I’ll probably post some photos in early December over at my Project365 blog.

Hope you all have a great day!

I post about our dog Beau constantly over at my Project365 blog, but I haven’t posted much about him here. I just couldn’t resist today, though.

Beau loves to hunt for squirrels and lizards in our back yard. He stands or lays by the back door for hours at a time. We certainly haven’t discouraged it over the last (almost) year that we’ve had him. We’ve probably even fostered it and encouraged this behavior in him. He’s been known to stalk a squirrel for a while, but he never catches those. The lizards, on the other hand, are fair game. I’ve personally witnessed him maiming and even killing the poor things.

Beau must have spotted a lizard on the deck today. They often run along our deck railing, and if you open the back door, they will either scurry off, hide between the deck planks, or jump over to the tree that is right off the deck. Apparently one jumped into the tree, or Beau thought he did, because he spent 15 or 20 minutes jumping up and down on the ground, trying to get to a certain branch.

He jumped up from the deck a few times:

Then, he got smart and remembered he could jump up on the glider. I didn’t get a photo of that, because I stopped to GASP when I saw what he did a split second after jumping up in the glider. Something he’s never ever done before, and really scared me a little! But, my big Lab boy WANTED his lizard!

No, he didn’t get the lizard, and no, he thankfully did NOT break a leg getting down. I threw my camera down right after taking the last photo. I could see his legs starting to quiver and he looked a little worried about jumping down. I was afraid he was going to be a big dummy and jump down to the ground. About the time I opened the back door, he realized he could jump back down the same way he came up, via the glider, so he was fine. He still wanted to hunt for that lizard for a long time after that though 🙂

P.S. I had already posted a photo for today over at my Project365 blog, but I just can’t resist posting the last one over there too 🙂

I haven’t posted very many pictures of our dog Beau on this blog in a long time. Mostly, this year, I’ve been using them as my photo of the day over at my Project365 blog. The other day, my sweet blogging buddy Lynne left me a comment that she missed seeing Beau, and would I please post more photos of him? Aww, so sweet! Goodness knows, he’s my furry child and I love and adore him. I take a lot of photos of him, although I hadn’t really lately. But after Lynne left me that comment, I decided to take a bunch. And I have for the last couple of days. I just posted 6 or 8 over at my Project365 blog (you can check them out here and here).

I’ll also put a few more on the extended page… I just couldn’t decide which ones to pick. We think Beau is a great dog, and getting better every day. Tim has been working with him, and he’s more disciplined than ever. He’s doing well on the leash, and in the last 9 days, Tim has been working with him to bring the newspaper in from the driveway every morning. After the first day, he had it. He now goes out every morning on Tim’s command and brings the newspaper inside and drops it at his feet 🙂 Beau is also learning more and more words, and does this cute thing with his head, cocking it to the side, when he’s really listening to you. We’ve also been working really hard at putting more weight on Beau. When we rescued him last fall, he only weighed about 45 pounds. The vet said she wanted him up at least 5 or 10 more pounds in the next few months. When we boarded him in May, I think he lost all of the weight he had gained, over stress of being at the kennel so long. So, I instigated a new plan. I’ve taught Beau that if he finishes all the food in his bowl when he eats, he gets a treat. He tries to pull a fast one on me and comes to get me after he eats, and if his bowl is not empty, I tell him “You Know the Rules”. He will then eat it all, if he wants his treat. Between the new food and the treats, he is starting to put on weight and look a lot healthier. In fact, Tim told me the other day, pretty soon, we are going to have to watch what we give him and cut back on the treats! He thinks he’s going to be too fat in another year or so 🙂

Photos over on my Project365 blog and some on the extended page. Click more…
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I haven’t been posting a lot here lately about my flowers and things growing in the yard. Nor have I been posting all of the cute pictures I take of our dog Beau. I’ve been posting those over at my Project365 photo blog for a while now. In fact, that blog is often more of a chronicle of what’s going on with our daily lives and the things growing in our yard, and where we go and what we do, more than this blog.

I thought it was time to post some pictures of Beau over here though. Of course, he’s had quite a few posted on the other blog (you can click here, here or a ton of them here to check some of them out).

You see – we had a very important event occur in the Exceedingly Mundane world yesterday. We took Beau to the lake in our subdivision for his first swim. When we rescued Beau last October, we felt it was getting a little chilly to let him go play in the lake in our subdivision. And even though it’s been warm here for a bit, we wanted to make sure the water had warmed up enough. Plus, we had an extra reason yesterday. Tim was out back hitting golf balls and then he heard “whoosh” and realized Beau had gone and jumped in the ditch behind our house. He’s starting to do that a lot, unfortunately. Which means we have to give him a bath afterwards, since he comes back in at dark and snuggles up on his bed. Anyway, he was already wet and dirty, so we took him to the lake.

Tim is not sure that he had ever been swimming before. He was very hesitant at first, and Tim said he “had to get his confidence up”. But, he is a dog after all, and swimming is fairly inborn. He took to it in no time! Tim threw his ball out and he swam out to get it over and over, and he just looked the happiest we’ve seen him look in a long time! Maybe ever – Tim and I think this might be his most favorite thing he’s done since we’ve had him 🙂 Beau had a blast, so we’re going to try to take him more often. He had to get another bath, at dark, of course, but he was so happy, he didn’t even mind!

I took a couple of MPEG movies, but I haven’t figured out how to edit them down and post them here. So, I’m going to post a boatload of pictures instead Click on the extended link to see them all.

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Just a couple of random pictures… I think the folks that peruse my Project365 blog are probably already getting tired of seeing pictures of birds and of my boy Beau 😀

We might have had robins here before, but I honestly don’t remember seeing them. I think they must be here some over the winter, or on their way home. I just noticed them a few weeks ago, since late January, and now I’m seeing them everywhere. I really don’t remember seeing them all over the place last winter or the winter before. They’re really pretty though, their orange breast is very colorful!

One of Beau, resting. He’s really supposed to stay in the kitchen and breakfast room, on the tile floor. He’s not supposed to come “over” in the living room, where the carpet is. But, he cheats whenever he can and inches across (he has his blanket in the doorway, since he cheats a lot!). He wanted over so bad the other day that he was willing to put his head onto my metal magazine rack and rest. Ouch, I bet that hurt! He looks pretty comfy though 😀

I just posted my photo for today over on my Project365 blog – my favorite picture I took of Beau today. It was really pretty here today, and we had Beau out on the deck for a while, to brush him off good and have a little play time. Then, Tim and I headed out for a while and left Beau outside to enjoy the warm weather and the sunshine. He did really good today, he didn’t dig any holes while we were gone! YEAH, that’s progress folks, real progress 😀

I had several pictures I thought were cute, but then again, I’m really biased when it comes to our dog. I’ll post the others on the extended page, but the cutest one is over on my Project365 blog. Check em out if you like cute dogs, LOL!
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