Introducing Ivy!

Mark and I are now proud dog owners! After many weeks of fencing the backyard and finding “one more thing” that needed to be done, we finally went out to the Animal Protection Society of Durham last Saturday and met our dog. They had us fill out the adoption paperwork then, but had to keep her for 3-5 days after that so their vet could spay her and give her a final check-up. On Wednesday, I got the call that we could come pick her up! Mark and I both ended up taking the rest of the afternoon off to introduce her to her new people and house.

Ivy looking attentive

While at the shelter, her name was Abigail, but as you can see, we have decided to change it to Ivy. She is 7 months old, 35.5 lbs, and a Rottweiler/Retriever mix. Her coloring is very standard Rottie, but her fur is much more Retriever-like in texture, making her very soft and fluffy. The current theory now is that she won’t end up as big as a Rottie, and indeed she doesn’t have much of that characteristic bear-like broadchestedness, so I think she’ll have more of the build of a Retriever in addition to the hair. Judging by her paws, though, she still has quite a ways to grow.

Ivy is a very sweet girl, and so far is much more interested in people than she is in any of her toys. On the day we brought her home, she was very wide-eyed and a little bit nervous about taking in everything. She roamed around the living room, dining room, and kitchen for hours, always returning to us if we weren’t walking with her. She was not keen on stairs of any kind at first, but she was quick to conquer the ones to the deck off the kitchen, since they are the ones that lead to her fenced-in yard. On her very first trip into said fenced-in yard, she pointed out to Mark the main weakness of his and my father’s fencing efforts: she can fit through the gap under the back gate. Fortunately, she was on the leash at the time, so she couldn’t get far.

We the took her for a walk around the block. She is extremely wary of storm drains and prefers to give them very wide berth, but other than that, she did very well. We met a bunch of kids out playing, and they all came over to sit in the middle of the street and pet her. They asked us all about what kind of dog she was, how old she was, her name, and she loved the attention. She was very well-behaved.

Then we went home, fed her some dinner, and carried her down the stairs (which were still too intimidating) to see how she would react to the TV in The Cave. We introduced her to her big cushy dog bed in that room, and she acclimated to it and the noises of the TV so well that she was soon asleep, stretched out as far across the dog bed as she could get. Five hours of non-stop excitement and sniffing had taken their toll.

Ivy, looking cute

The next day, though, we had to go to work as normal again, so she had to spend the day in her crate. (We’re not to let her stay outside for 5 days after her spaying operation.) I came home at lunch to let her out, only to discover when I walked in the door that she had done so herself. Our dog is a genius Houdini! I still don’t know for sure how she defeated a crate door with two latches, but she did. Surprisingly, the damage wasn’t too bad: one potted plant knocked over, a yoga mat unrolled but surprisingly unchewed, an empty paper bag torn up, and two accidents. Given my second-grade memories of the first day we left our family’s Australian Terrier alone penned in the kitchen, this was a pleasant breeze to clean up! Sadly for Ivy, I had to put her back in the crate after lunch so I could return to the office. She didn’t manage to escape a second time.

Stay tuned for more pictures and adventures, which I’m sure will be coming soon!

Planting Progress – July 2009

When last I updated about making some planting progress in our front yard, I had just put in all the annuals in the large pots next to our front steps. I thought they looked pretty good. Please do go look back at that old picture for comparison, because in the intervening two months the plants have all morphed into MONSTER PLANTS. As in, you can no longer see the pots, there is so much plant growth going on. And these are big pots! Behold.

All three pots together, from the same angle as the May shot

From a fancier angle

There has been other major progress made as well. Down in the open swath of what used to be grass along the street, my mom and I planted a ton of stuff. Still not all the stuff called for in the planting plan, but at least 3/4 of the space has stuff in it now. We planted:

• red salvia
• two butterfly bushes, one reddish purple, one bluish purple
• two types of bee balm
• two types of daylilies
• balloon flowers
• several short pink coneflowers
• several tall orangey coneflowers
• the Flying Dragon bush

So far, even though I didn’t get around to doing all this stuff until exactly when it decided it wasn’t going to rain every day anymore, I think only one plant (maybe two) has died, although I am kind of hoping it was just tired and will decide to come back next year after all. And I suspect I may have lost one of my coneflowers to a wandering dog, because it was pulled out of the ground right next to its hole, but I put it back in, so maybe it, too, will come back.

Right now, it doesn’t look that impressive because all the plants are spaced out to allow them to spread, the daylilies have all finished blooming now, and the coneflowers are a bit tattered from all the transplanting and such. I’m told that it should look very nice next year, and awesome the year after that. But as a teaser, here’s a close-up of one of the balloon flowers opened up.

Balloon Flower

Training Braid Tutorial

I was putting together this braiding picture tutorial for another site, but I decided to post it here, too, since Molly asked me a question about ideas for doing her hair recently.

I decided to call the first one of these the “Training Braid” for two reasons. 1) It’s how I taught myself to braid my hair behind my back. 2) It how I frequently wear my hair when at karate. It holds up well to lots of movement, and even if you can’t take the time to redo your hair after exercising, it still looks good.

My competing choice for the name was the “Cheater French Braid” because it mimics the look of a French braid without taking nearly that long.

For the record, here is my hair to start with, combed and detangled.

Then I draw back the hair from approximately ear to ear and pull it up to the top center. I end up with about 1/3 of my hair in this small ponytail.

Having 1/3 of the hair up instead of closer to 1/2 is important, because the next step is to divide the rest of the hair in half, one to each side. The hardest part of learning how to braid my hair behind my back was figuring out how to divide it into thirds and hold it all. Having the center third held in a ponytail already was a bit like giving myself an extra hand.

Then, braid! I always end up starting with the right side over the center first, then left, and so on, but it doesn’t matter. Once I braid so far down behind my head that I can’t reach any further, I draw it all over my left shoulder and continue to the end.

I recently came up with a variation of this, which mimics the look of dual French braids in the front. This is a good thing, because while I have finally figured out how to do double French braids now, the last time I did it, I almost lost all the feeling in my arms before I was done. It took me about half an hour. I generally don’t repeat hair styles that take more than 5 minutes, 10 at the most.

Volunteer Rose

The volunteer rose

One more post about plants around our house.  Although one of the first things we did upon moving in was kill all the grass and weeds in the little swath along the street, we were very careful to leave the volunteer rose bush/vine growing right on the verge between the tree area and the useless grass. Here it is completely bloomed out. I am extremely pleased with it, in large part because I’ve never had to do anything to it at all. Hooray for plants that take care of themselves!

(And yes, the plan is to put in lots of other plants in that front swath, which is why we killed all the grass, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet. Feel free to follow the rose’s example and volunteer to help us with that.)

Planting Progress – May 2009

At my friend Hilary’s request, here are some pictures of all the progress I finally managed to make in the front of our house two weekends ago. One of the less nice things about our house is the way the driveway comes all the way up to the front of the house, so any plants I might have wanted to soften all that concrete would have be in planters. Now that we’ve lived in our house for almost a full year, I finally got around to actually finding some that I liked!

All three pots together

(Please excuse all the tree crud on the ground around the pots; we’ve been getting a lot of rain and our pine trees are going a bit crazy right now.)

Now here are the glamor shots of each pot individually. They all have purple in them somewhere, since our front door is purple, but each pot also has it’s own secondary color scheme. From left to right as they sit on the ground, they are yellow, pink, and a sort of salmon-pinky-orange. (clicky for bigger images)

The yellow pot

The pink pot

The orange-y pot

The orange-y one is my favorite, and it sits closest to the door because the purple petunias overhanging the front of the pot are almost the same color as the door. I have no clue what the name of the neat salmon-colored flute-y flowers are in the back, but they are awesome, and I generally just love how the colors all came out in that pot. I like the other ones, too, of course, but that one is still my favorite.

I’ve been torn about whether I should post this or not, because it seems like they look better every day, as more of the plants bloom and everything grows just a bit more, but I’m going with these pictures now. Enjoy.

The Memphis Wedding

Only about a week late, but I’ve finally gotten all the pictures off my camera from my cousin Rebekah’s wedding in Memphis two weekends ago. I’ve only been to Memphis twice before, once before I was really old enough to have very clear memories (I’m told we visited Mud Island, and it was very hot), and again at the end of our family trip across the country, and all I remember from that is Kay & Craig’s house. (For non-family people, Kay is my mom’s older sister, Craig is her husband, and they are the parents of the bride in this case.)

This time around, I got to see a lot of downtown Memphis, since the hotel we were staying in was two blocks off of Beale St. and directly across from the baseball stadium. That area gets very colorful in the evenings, at least on weekends. It seems to be the done thing to get dressed up in your best clubbing clothes/prom wear and parade along the sidewalks, and then later take rides in horse-drawn carriages each decorated in a highly individualized Christmas light scheme. The carriages are around during the day, too, but they’re not as spectacular when you can’t see all the lights. None of this has anything to do with the wedding, by the way; I’m mostly just recording it for posterity.

Rebekah’s wedding was lovely. It was held in a very nice church with a rather grand and airy sanctuary. I’m told this is the one that she regularly attends, due to its exceptional social action mission. In fact, it was due to the homeless meal program held there in the afternoons that we drove over to her parents’ church for the reception afterward. All of my pictures are from the reception, and from the post-reception gathering at Kay & Craig’s house for the family.

Rebekah and Andy cut the cake

Important things to note about this picture: Kay made Rebekah’s dress, and even though you can’t see much of it in this picture, take my word for it that it is beautiful. Also the arbor they are standing under got put together and set up by my brother and various of the other guys who were around Friday morning, and then it was decorated by my female cousins. Laura in particular claims responsibility for the huge bow.

Me and Mark waiting outside for the bride and groom's exit

Laura, the tulle bow artist

Me and Zack, looking stylish

My parents!

My mom’s corsage is for being the wedding coordinator, switching roles with Kay, who acted as coordinator at my wedding.

The other Rebecca, wearing her son's quickly discarded tie

I wasn’t fast enough to catch a picture of Rebekah and Andy leaving, but she changed into a very cute 1940s-inspired skirt suit, and he changed into a regular suit. (Mark’s question: “Why in the world would he bother to change out of his tux only to change into a suit?” He considers dress clothes to be torture instruments.) The rest of us thought it was a classy touch.

After we cleaned everything up from the reception, we took everything over to Kay & Craig’s house and had a more casual dinner.

Zack and H. playing checkers

Craig and his dog Lil

Temari: Bellflower

Continuing in my spring flower temari theme, the next pattern I decided to do out of Barb’s book was “Bellflower.” Her original design called for a lighter blue background, but I had some brighter, darker blue already, so I used that, and I think it turned out quite nicely. I also recall that the original pattern called for fewer lines of one of the shades of blue in the petals, but I was in the zone and inadvertently did equal amounts for each gradation, and then I decided it looked good anyway, so I left it rather than rip it out.

I also added the green center. The circular part is done with spiderweb stitching, and then when it still looked a bit empty, I added the short straight stitches between each of the guidelines.

Face of the Bellflower ball

Obi of the Bellflower ball

The obi of this ball got a nice cross-hatching over the regular obi wrapping. I like this look, so as you’ll see in some of the other balls I’ll be posting soon, I end up using it a lot for simple division balls (ie, balls divided into just two faces, usually with the same design on each face.)

Where do all these books come from?

Jennie recently blogged about where she finds recommendations and inspiration to read various books. In the spirit of turning her original post into a sort-of meme, I’ll start my list the same way she did hers.

Here are the books I read so far this month and why I picked them up:

On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen, by David Weber – If you keep up with my “Reading” page, you’ll see that I put a note by them saying that I read them through the Baen Free Library. I heard about the Free Library on the Goodreads Sci-fi/Fantasy book club. When I found myself with some of the copious downtime that tends to occur when my job enters a period of largely waiting for replies to emails I sent to China, I decided to check it out. I’d heard about the Honor Harrington series and thought it sounded interesting, so just my luck the first two books were there to be read online! I liked them both, but unfortunately the covers of the books in that series are so awful, I’d be embarrassed to read them in public.

Bedlam Boyz, by Ellen Guon – Also from the Baen Free Library. I picked this one while browsing the options because I saw that it was in a series co-written by Mercedes Lackey, and I’ll generally give her stuff a chance. It turned out to be pretty good urban fantasy, although I’m not sure I’m going to bother to track down the rest of the series.

Murder is Binding and Bookmarked for Death, by Lorna Barrett – Yes, Amazon’s suggestions of other things I might be interested in do occasionally work for me. This series is about a woman who owns an independent mystery bookstore in a town known for its street of specialty bookstores. This premise was more or less guaranteed to work for me, even though the main character’s sister is extremely annoying. I can’t wait for there to be more of them!

Death’s Half Acre, by Margaret Maron – I got this one off the library’s new book shelf. My mother and I got started on the Deborah Knott series because Maron is a local author and the books are set in NC, but I have since read all of her books, in this series and others. I’m guaranteed to pick up anything by her.

Brothers of Cain, by Miriam Grace Monfredo – I got into rereading this series last year, and then my closest library branch closed for an 18-month renovation project. I really wanted to read the last two books in the series, and was prepared to go buy them just to make it happen, only to discover that all of her books have suddenly gone out of print. Argh! But I finally got to a library again and found this one. Now I just need the last one. If you can find the Seneca Falls mystery series in your library, read it.

Dead Witch Walking, by Kim Harrison – I confess, I was bored in the bookstore and desperate for something new. I believe this was one of the books Amazon suggested I might like as a “vampire romance,” so I was extremely skeptical, but happily it has less romance elements in it than most of the straight up genre fiction I read, and it was pretty entertaining urban fantasy/alternate reality.

No Phule Like an Old Phule and Phule’s Errand, by Robert Asprin, with Peter J. Heck – The theme for next month’s sci-fi selection on the Goodreads book club is spoof. Someone mistakenly suggested Robert Asprin’s Myth series, which is fantasy, so I countered with the first volume of this series, Phule’s Company, since it’s actually legitimately sci-fi. (This is an annoyingly common occurence in the book club suggestion threads.) While in the bookstore, I saw that there were two new ones that I hadn’t read yet, so I got them in anticipation. Of course, my suggestion didn’t win, but I read them anyway.

The Patriot Witch, by CC Finlay – I found the free PDF version of this on the author’s website, via a link from Jeremy. The premise sounded interesting, so I figured I’d check it out. It turns out to be quite good, the story of witches living in the colonies at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. This one combines my enjoyment of historical fiction with my enjoyment of fantasy in a very smooth way. It doesn’t even really have to edge very far into alternative history, since Finlay works his witches into the fabric of our own history very subtley. Incidentally, the print version was released today! Even better, the other two books in what looks to be a trilogy will be released in May and then June, so we won’t have to wait a year to find out what happens next.

So there you go. I’m well on my way to beating 100 books read this year, if I maintain my current pace, so I’ll be on the lookout for more interesting stuff.

Temari: Trillium

Spring has been coming in fits and starts here, so back at the beginning of March, I was rather longing to see some flowers, so I cracked open my copy of my temari teacher’s book and starting doing some flower-themed patterns. This one is called “Trillium,” and I was very pleased with how it turned out.

Face of the Trillium ball

Obi of the Trillium ball

Because I am a backwards sort of person in how I’ve learned to embroider these balls, I actually find the trefoil stitching on this ball to be fun and easy, whereas the straight stitches around the edges for extra effect were more difficult because I basically just had to eyeball where each stitch ended off in relation to the others. It was good practice, and it turned out pretty, so yay!

What I’ve been doing

Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to abandon the blog for nearly a whole month. I’m still around. What I’ve been doing:

• Enjoying spring. The redbuds are almost entirely gone and the cherry blossoms are definitely gone, but the dogwoods and azaleas are all out now, so I need to take some more pictures for you. Oh, and the wisteria this year! It’s bordering on the ridiculous.
• Reading. (Of course.) The one thing I have been updating regularly on the blog is my reading list. Compared to last year, my reading volume in January was particularly pathetic, so I’ve got to keep going if I’m going to beat 100 books in 2009.
• Entertaining. My bestest college roommate, Ann, accompanied by Abbey (one of Ann’s flatmates during her semester in London) and Abbey’s adorable daughter, came to visit for a long weekend. We had a lot of fun discovering the wonder that is climbing stairs over and over, and finding out how amazingly communicative one can be with a vocabulary of just “hi” and “uh-oh.”
• Stitching temari. I’ve been on kind of a temari roll lately, and in the past month and a bit, I’ve done 7.5 new ones. Pictures to come.
• Karate. My women’s-only class students all passed their belt test at the end of last month, so now I’m starting on teaching them new stuff for the next test. (It’s amazing how fast time goes when you only have class once a week.) I’m also going to my own classes, and now Mark has started taking the new jiu jitsu class on Fridays, during which time I lift weights (a hateful activity that is unfortunately good for me.) Fortunately, the jiu jitsu class is fun to watch, so I may say more about that later.

So, internet, what have you been up to?