Mocking the Dog Never Gets Old

Flame's favorite sleeping place. Ding dong, the bitch is dead!

Day in the Life

As Flame dearly loves squirrels (preferably in the form of kabobs), we got her a stuffed, squeaky squirrel for Christmas. Guess where I found it this morning?

Christmas for change? Yes please!

Ak and I exchanged presents yesterday (because we suck at that whole patience thing), and I have to give a shout-out to my husband for giving me a pretty awesome gift. He gave me a hand-made pursue from Global Reach, a company that exists solely to liberate men, women and children from sexual slavery and other types of bondage and abuse.

The stats on this are pretty staggering:

• 12.3 million people in forced labor and sexual servitude
• 800,000 victims trafficked across borders, and half are minors
• 2 million children exploited in global sex trade

If you have any to buy for that it's into hippie stuff, check out the site and shop for a good cause!

My New Favorite Web Site

Absolutely brilliant.

Bird is the Word

Some pics from the Becks' Thanksgiving feast!

As part of our CSA, we got a whole chicken, and it's been hanging out in our freezer for several months. So, we decided to enjoy that free-range, organic, dandelion-and-rainbow-fed chicken for Thanksgiving.

Flame was very helpful in guarding him/her and making sure it didn't run away.


Hey wait, it ran away!


Straight into the rotisserie! Drat, foiled again.


Tasting the veggies and making the obligatory Friends "Umm!" face.


Our Thanksgiving table: rotisserie chicken, candied brandied sweet potatoes, garlic ginger green beans and a bottle of Chianti. (Don't judge, we were out of chardonnay.) Needless to say, it was delicious and we were quite pleased with our culinary skills. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Drum Roll Please...

Here you go kids -- pics of the great kitchen renovation!

Before:

And after:

You may have noticed that we did not end up going with black and white tile. I have several very grown-up reasons for this, so let's just call the idea tabled for now.

I have to give a shout-out to Empire for being all-around awesome throughout this whole process. I know, you want to hate them because their commercials suck, but I thought they were pretty fabulous. So if you're in the market for new floors, I say check 'em out.

The horror (or the cuteness)

So we went dog walking today, but it was kind of chilly! So what do we do? We put our poor, defenseless puppy in a coat (because she doesn't have very long fur, you see...)

What's that look like? Glad you asked:

While that alone probably makes us horrible people, the real pain came when we were (quite obviously, in our opinions) silently judged by little 8 year old girls as we went around the neighborhood.

In other news, Thanksgiving is nearly upon us. While that means a lot of things to a lot of people, it primarily means candied yams, pumpkin and pecan pies, and delicious macaroni and cheese to me. Anyone else out there dreaming of food while the day creeps up on us?

-- Ak out