The Little Min Pin that Could

What a crazy week we have had around the Wilkison house!  Last Thursday, I took our dog to the kennel so that we could go to Missouri.  On Friday, she had a seizure while she was there.  I was supposed to pick her up on Monday and the vet was going to talk to me about the seizure then because he knew it would ruin my weekend if he called me in Missouri.  Well, Brady came home for the weekend and he went to pick Baby up a day earlier than planned.  Upon bringing her home, he discovered that something was terribly wrong with her.  She couldn't walk, and she wasn't interested in eating.  She was disoriented and confused.  He called me to let me know about it right before we boarded the plane to come home.

For a long time, I have been worried because Baby is quite elderly.  I thought we had a few more years with her, though, because she is so spunky.  When we got home at almost midnight on Sunday evening, Brady came out to meet us in the garage.  He wanted to warn me about what I was going to see, and to let me know that Baby was probably going to die.  He was right about her condition.  As soon as I saw her, I could tell she was not her normal, feisty self.  She wouldn't move from her bed at all and didn't seem to care when I came home.  Brady told me that she wouldn't even leave the bed to go to the bathroom and he had given her a bath to clean up the mess. When she did walk, she did it in a Popeye manner, with her legs twisted inward.  I went to bed, and I thought that she probably wouldn't be there when I woke up in the morning.  She was still alive in the morning, but just barely hanging on. 

I hugged her before I left and told her how much I loved her.  Randy was home, and he agreed that he would call the vet.  The vet told Randy that it was only a matter of time until Baby passed away.  As hard as it was to say, I told Randy at lunch that I thought he should have her put to sleep that afternoon.  She was so ill and weak, that it wasn't fair to make her live.  He reluctantly agreed that he would take her if that was what I really thought was best.

After I left, Brady dug her a grave in the backyard by the aspen trees.  Then, he and Randy took her to the vet's office.  No one was up at the front desk, so they had to sit and wait.  All of a sudden, Baby perked up and wanted to get down and walk around and smell people.  The guys decided that this, along with the fact that no one was at the front desk, was a sign from God to leave!  When I got home, Randy and I decided to wait it out another day and see if she continued to refuse to eat and drink.  We hugged her and gave her lots of love that night, as we thought she would probably die the next day.

The next morning, after Randy left for work at 5:30, I came back into the house.  Baby was standing up by her food dish, looking at me as if to say, "Well, where's my breakfast?"  So, I put a scoop into her dish.  To my complete shock, she ate some of it and drank water!  Since then, she has improved every day and now you would never know that she faced the executioner on Monday. 

I know that Baby's time will come--and probably sooner rather than later.  But, I am so glad that the Great Governor in the sky gave her a stay of execution.  Until she dies, I will appreciate every extra day that I have been given with her and I will look out the window at the little grave under the tree and thank God that it is empty for now.

Zig Ziglar--Save Me Please!

I think all of this change in my life is getting to me.  I have been feeling pretty overwhelmed lately, and wish that I could just live out the rest of my life on an island, sipping iced tea and reading novels.  But, things are never simple.  I am not trying to be a Negative Nelly, but I feel so  out of control.  I want immediate solutions to all of my issues, and I want everyone to be happy all of the time and never have any troubles.  Especially my three babies.  When they were little, I was in control of everything they experienced.  I realize that part of letting them go is to allow them to make their own decisions in life, and ultimately, recover from their own mistakes.  But, I hate to see them hurting when they do, and I want to fix it.   Everyone around me just needs to realize that life would work out so much better if they would do it my way! ( Ha-we all know that's not true). I so desperately want to be in control of life--theirs and mine--and I am really not in control of anything--except, perhaps, my attitude!

Admittedly, my attitude has been awful lately.  Part of it is because I am in a new place in my life, and I feel like I am finding myself all over again.  Some of this experience has been wonderful.  Randy and I are having a great time together, and we still have a lot in common.  My house is rarely messy any more--gotta love that!  The grocery bill has been drastically reduced due to a lack of teenage boys in my house.  These things are all great.

I need to get back to being Pollyanna   I miss that part of myself.  But, I feel that life is trying so very hard to drag me down mentally.  I have to fight with everything I have to get rid of this horrible disease that is pervading my brain!  So, in an effort to improve my attitude, I rediscovered a favorite speaker/author of mine--Zig Ziglar!  Now, you may ask yourself, just who is this strangely named man?  He is a Christian motivational speaker who talks a great deal about how important it is to have a positive attitude.  People often notice my extreme optimism(usually--not right now), and I attribute this optimism to Mr. Ziglar and trying to do as he has instructed me.

Yesterday, I downloaded a book of his onto my Kindle.  I am reading it, and making note cards to look at several times a day.  I want my good attitude back, and I will fight for it!  Life is too short to be a Debbie Downer.  All of this time that I spend worrying and being upset about my lack of control is wasted time that can never  be regained.

Here are my lovely children, just a few years ago... Aren't they gorgeous?!?

Update on the Fridge

Well, as you know, it has been several weeks, and my refrigerator still smells like I have hidden a dead squirrel in it somewhere!  I searched on the Internet for solutions to my problem, and am going to try keeping coffee grounds in the fridge to fix it.  The stench is so strong that neither baking soda nor vinegar could get rid of it.  I hope I will not have to finish out the rest of my teaching career with a stinky fridge.

Another series of events has also recently caused me to feel dire discomfort.  I have always been accident prone.  I constantly discover bruises on my body for reasons I don't remember, run into desks, hit my funny bone and stub my toes.  However, things appear to have gotten worse lately.  The craziest things happen to me.  Perhaps it is because I am oftentimes in a dream world and do not pay attention to what is going on around me...

Last weekend's unfortunate events started as we were having a drink with the other football parents on Friday night after we arrived in Rapid City.  One of the fathers from Oregon brought some special wine made at his friend's vineyard for us to sample.  I really enjoyed it until I knocked my cup over and drenched my clothing with the special drink.  Luckily, it was white wine, so my clothes weren't permanently stained burgundy.  Everyone saw it and  teased me about wasting good alcohol.   The adventure continued with breakfast the next morning.  I carefully made my waffle, following the posted directions with a deliberateness formerly unbeknownst to me.  However, when the time came to put my perfectly cooked waffle onto my plate so that I might enjoy it, I struggled with the difficult task of removing the waffle from the maker.  As I flipped the waffle out of the machine and onto my plate, it slipped, and fell towards the ground.  I tried to catch it, but ended up with one piece of waffle in my hand and the rest of it stuck to the side of the garbage can.  Of course, several people witnessed this event, much to my embarrassment.  The next day, I went to Menard's with Randy and Brady.  As I entered the store, I pushed on the turnstile with my hip to make it move out of my way.  It didn't budge however, and I yelped in pain.  Randy worriedly asked me if I was okay, and I said yes.  After several minutes, the pain went away and I forgot about the incident until I noticed that my hip was really hurting this morning.  I looked at it to see if something was wrong, and discovered a large and dark bruise.  The last straw was when we went to Wendy's on Sunday night.  I went to pick up my drink and take a sip of it.  My hand bumped the cup, knocked it over, and proceeded to fill my lap up with Diet Coke.  Once again, several folks witnessed my accident and I had to walk to the front of the store with drenched pants to request a rag to clean up my mess.  The next evening, I barely escaped dumping the amazing homemade pizza I had just created onto the ground.  I caught it, but burned my hand in the process.

Since then, I have kept a low profile.  I figure that I need to lay low until I have recovered my coordination and ability to pay attention to what I am doing.  Sadly, this may mean that I have to sit on the couch for the rest of my life or cover my body with bubble wrap before I can leave the house again.

Not a Nice Surprise

I have to go back to work tomorrow.  Surprisingly, I am looking forward to it!  So, yesterday, I decided to go and work on my classroom for awhile.  We teachers have to pack everything up for the summer so that the custodians can uberclean our classrooms.  It takes me hours to putter around, getting everything "just so" in my room after unpacking all of my teacher treasures.

Just as I was getting ready to leave, I decided to plug in my refrigerator so that it would be ready to keep my drinks and snacks nice and cool for me to enjoy.  I opened up the door to the fridge to see if there was anything that needed wiped out after sitting unplugged all summer.  Of course, OCD person that I am, I had wiped it out before I left for the summer, but things do have a way of growing anyhow!  Well, something had gone awry inside of my fridge since the end of May when I had last perused its inner contents.  It was filled with mold--disgusting, stinky, possibly toxic mold!  How could this have happened?  I was so careful to take everything out of the refrigerator and wipe it down with Lysol disinfecting wipes.  What had I missed?  A quick examination of the mold trail led to the culprit.  Ice cream.  Left in the freezer all summer long.  This was not my ice cream, mind you.  It belonged to two of the girls in Advanced American Studies who had asked me to keep it safe for them until the end of the school day and then had forgotten to retrieve it.  It had been there, in the freezer, waiting for them to remember it, since April.  Obviously, I too had forgotten its existence or I most certainly would have eaten it.  It was Ben and Jerry's, after all! 

Now, no one in their right mind would eat that ice cream.  Unlike the Burger King sandwich from my college days which had sat on a shelf in a boy's dorm room for a year unscathed by mold, Ben and Jerry's had created a lot of mold.

After I left my classroom in dismay, I felt my throat getting sore and a headache coming on.  What if I had breathed in some awful toxins that would soon have me starring on an episode of Mystery Diagnosis?  I envisioned myself lying in the hospital, in an isolation room, with loved ones only able to visit me after they had donned a mask and gloves.  If I do become incredibly ill at some time in the future, will you all please remember this incident and tell the doctors that I am most certainly dying due to breathing in toxic ice cream spores?

So, today, I return to my classroom, armed with all sorts of germ, mold and bacteria murdering substances.  I am not going to wear a mask.  Instead, I will quickly open the door to the fridge and start spraying the unwelcome inhabitants of my refrigerator with the lemon scented Lysol cleaner that I purchased last night.  After it has committed germ genocide, I will use paper towels to wipe them away and I will throw them away in a hallway trashcan so that I don't ever have to look at their disgustingness again.  They weren't even a pretty color.

On the Amazing Qualities of Vinegar

In my college days, I worked at Dial-A-Maid.  I learned to scrub toilets with tooth brushes and to vacuum my way out of a room so as not to leave footprints.  I could get the toughest cigarette smoke and mildew off of any surface out there.   I thought that I had learned all of the sneaky little tips to save time on cleaning that I would ever need to know.  Boy was I mistaken!  Now, don't get me wrong: I still believe that Murphy's Oil Soap is one of the best products that a clean freak can own.  But, the recent discovery of a common household staple turned into cleaning dynamo has changed my life!

Did you know that vinegar is one of the most useful items in your house?  Not only is it tasty drizzled  on salads and added to recipes, it is an amazing cleaning product! 

Laramie is notorious for its hard water.  I spend a great deal of my cleaning efforts trying to get hard water deposits off of glass shower doors and the lovely fixtures that adorn our bathrooms.  Last year, I read about how I could put a baggy full of vinegar over the shower head and attach it with a rubber band.  Leave it on for several hours, and VOILA, no more clogged holes!  Along the same lines, I have always cleaned my windows, my Bunn coffee maker and the tray underneath the automatic water dispenser on my fridge with vinegar.

But the past few weeks has brought my love of vinegar to new heights.  First, I discovered vinegar's wonderful ability to make my bath towels softer and fresher smelling by just adding one cup of it to my wash load.  This is especially helpful if you have children who forget to hang up their towels, thereby making them "smelly".  I also used vinegar to deodorize my carpet.  But, the ultimate use that I have found for vinegar is to make the most amazing shower cleaner ever!  Take one cup of vinegar and heat it in the microwave until it is hot but not boiling.  In a spray bottle, put one cup of Dawn detergent(just the plain jane kind--nothing fancy).  Add your cup of hot vinegar to the bottle and, after you have put the lid on the bottle, shake it to mix the two ingredients.  Now you have the best shower cleaner I have ever used!  Spray it on the shower and, depending upon your amount of grime, leave it for awhile(one lady said that she left it over night because the shower was so gucky).  I only left it for a couple of hours.  Then, take your wet sponge and wipe down the shower.  Rinse, and prepare to be amazed at the beauty of your incredibly cleanly and sparkling shower! 

I hope that my tip will help you to not waste valuable time and money on cleaning products that just don't work worth a damn.  Believe me, if it exists I have tried it!

Pig Wrastlin!

This summer has been an adventurous summer of firsts for me.  In July, I went to my first demolition derby and had quite the enjoyable time.  I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching the cars smash into each other.  My particular favorites were the compact cars.  There was a Datsun 210 just like the one I had in high school.  It did pretty well but didn't win. 

The crowd was almost as fun to watch as the derby.  I had no idea that such an eclectic group of citizens lived in my town!  There was everything from cowboys, to hippies, to rednecks and preppy college professor types.  (Not sure where I fit into this equation...)

Now, in about thirty minutes, I am off to the county fair to watch the Pig Wrestling.  My son, who is a former pig wrestler himself, has told me how difficult of a task this is. Not only is the pig mad as hell, it is slippery and quite fast.  Needless to say, he and his brother didn't win the competition.  I still regret the fact that I had to miss that spectacle.  However, I am sure that I will have a great time watching young folks try to catch greased-up piggies. 

Who knows what wildness might be in my future?  We are taking Brady up to school in Rapid on Monday.  Maybe I will pay a visit to Sturgis and see a completely different type of Hog!

The Kitchen Monster

Well, sadly, I have not graduated from the kitchen yet with my organizing.  I try to organize things, but before I know it, they are a mess again.

For example, I have tried three times this summer to organize underneath my kitchen sink.  If you looked right now, you would have no idea that this is true and you would call me a liar for saying that I had.  It looks horrible under there and I can't find anything! Part of this problem stems from the fact that I don't finish up the old cleaning products before I start using the new ones I purchased to replace them.  But, I can't throw a little bit of cleaner away, because that would be "wasting it".  They all sit under there, waiting for the day when I might decide to use them or to even combine two bottles of products to make one.

Then, there's the refrigerator.  Earlier this summer, I cleaned out the condiments and we had twelve different types of mustard!  In addition, we have more kinds of hot sauce than any family could ever use up.  One entire shelf and all of the door space are taken up by condiments.  This leaves little room for anything else in the the fridge.  A month ago, I reattempted to tackle the refrigerator and its overabundance of condiments.  A lady on Pinterest suggested that I organize my fridge into "zones" and have different areas for things such as bins with sandwich supplies, a cleaned and ready to eat fresh veggie section, a place for drinks, and a place for leftovers.  I faithfully did this.  However, within a few days, the leftovers had taken over the sandwich area, and the whole thing was a deplorable mess again.  What is the solution to this problem?  I don't know!  Maybe stop cooking and just go out to eat all the time, then there will not be any leftovers to contend with.  Oh wait, I forgot about my other promise to myself to stop going out to eat so often and to cook healthy meals!

The pantry shares a similar fate as the refrigerator.  It is jam packed with food, just waiting for someone to use it up.I don't think that I can send the items to a third world country to be enjoyed by starving children.  Shipping said food to Africa would be prohibitively expensive, and there are certainly strict regulations which must be followed to get food across international borders. Anyhow, it would all be rotten by the time they received it.

I am no quitter, though, I'll have you know.  As I sign off for today, I head to the under sink cabinet once more, to try and get it under control.  If you don't hear from me for awhile, you can probably bet that I was crushed by falling cleaning products and am waiting for someone to come home and rescue me.

To New Beginnings...

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.--Bertolt Brecht

On a serious note, I think that the reason I try to make everything so perfect and "Martha Stewarty" in my life is because I like to be in control.  But, we can only control our own reactions to situations and not the situations themselves.  I don't deal well with change, and the good Lord likes to shake things up in my life to let me know who is ultimately in control.  No matter how orderly I try to keep my life, the unexpected is going to happen.  Change is a part of life.

The next week will be full of changes.  First of all, Brady goes off to college one week from Monday--which means Randy and I will be on our own again for the first time in 24 years.  What a bittersweet moment!  I will miss my kiddos so much, but it will be fun to be with Randy and go where we want to go when we want to go there, eat what we want when we want to, and do all the things we always said we would do when our kids were grown. 

Not only is my last child leaving, but two of my closest friends are moving away.  I'm happy for both of them and the wonderful new opportunities that they have in their lives, but I'll miss seeing them any old time I want to.

On top of all that, as I mentioned the other day, my best good dog friend is getting to be quite old and decrepit.  I know that eventually I will have to say good-bye to her.  She's been a good dog and a faithful friend to me--and I will miss her!

So, you may ask yourself, what is the point of this rambling?  I think maybe it is time to close my eyes and jump off the high dive.  I need to take some chances, have some adventures, meet some new people, and learn some new things.  This isn't the end of my life, for Pete's sake!  It's a wonderful new beginning.  Rather than being morose and sad, I need to look to the future with anticipation.  God has not led me wrong so far--I don't know why he would start to now.

The Overachievers of the World

I am not the only overachiever in my family.  I am married to someone who is much more of a perfectionist than I am, and who makes everything he does turn out to be the most amazing project you have ever seen.  In addition, my husband is the kind of person who can just read about how to do something or watch a video on it and will know how to do it perfectly afterwards. 

Well, today held all sorts of new adventures for the two of us.  Randy and I have been planning for quite a while now to put some tile in our garage to keep the dirt down in the house.  Today was the day that we decided to undertake this task.  At first, we were just going to tile the step going out to the garage.  Then, we decided we should do some beyond the step.  Next, we decided we should at least go underneath where the freezer is.  Lastly, just as we were getting ready to start, Brady came out to the garage and said how cool it would look if we did a pattern with large and small tiles.  So now, I think that I can safely say that we have the fanciest tiled garage for miles around! 

Now that we are finished with our tiling extravaganza, I am going to take some advice from William Morris, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."  My goal is to purge my house of all the extraneous crap that we have held onto for no particular reason at all and to do it before I go back to work!  I will report to you and let you know how it goes.  Time to get my organizing book back out and start working on it a bit at a time.  Wish me luck!

Hippie Project?

As many of you already know, I crochet and knit in my spare time and to relieve stress.  While exploring the Internet the other day and looking at upcycling ideas on Pinterest, I found "tee-shirt" yarn.  A lovely Hawaiian lady gave explicit instructions on how to create this yarn and it looked pretty easy to me.  I decided to give it a try.

Well, it wasn't quite as easy as she made it look.  After several tries of cutting up tee-shirts and getting a bunch of little strips instead of one long string of yarn, I decided to examine her tutorial once more.  I found out what I was doing wrong(cutting straight across instead of in a diagonal) and proceeded to make several balls of tee-shirt yarn. 

Now the question was, where to get tee-shirts to cut up? I knew that Randy and the kids would not appreciate me stealing their tee-shirts to make my yarn, and I had already gone through my tee-shirts to make the first few balls.  Luckily for me, I love to go shopping at our consignment store here in town, and they often have free stuff outside of the store(can you say "crap that no one would even buy for a low, low price but Andrea will snatch up because it's free?")  One day as I drove by, there was a giant garbage bag of tee-shirts out in the free stuff!  I brought them home, washed them up, and proceeded to make yarn to my heart's content. 

So far, I have been crocheting baskets out of this yarn.  It will work well for bags too I think, because it is nice and heavy.  My family has been teasing me something terrible about my new yarn.  I have been reminded that ladies in the 1800's made rugs out of old clothes, and that recycling tee-shirts is probably something that makes me a hippie.  The hippie comment got me thinking.  There are tons of hippies in Laramie, why not sell them my tee-shirt baskets and bags?  So, this is my future plan.  I have only completed one basket so far and am working on a second.  When I get it done, I will put a picture of it on here for you to see.

By the way, after an hour of work with the shop-vac, I got all of the baking soda out of the carpet!  Victory is mine!

Pet Puzzler

I have dreams of being like Martha Stewart.  Every summer, I make great plans to organize my house and to keep it immaculate throughout the school year.  This summer, I downloaded a book on organizing your house in 28 days, I have worked on coming up with a cleaning system and I have planned out family meals a month in advance.  I took a healthy eating class and learned about the benefits of planning out meals and shopping once a week for foods.  All of these things sound great, don't they?  Let me tell you the rest of the story...

I get carried away with trying to do too many things at once.  I have all of these projects going around the house, and I never complete any of them.  For example, I organized the kitchen but I never made it to any of the other rooms.  I print off a cleaning schedule for myself and hang it on the fridge where I can refer to it.  Then, I never do the things on the list!  Lastly, I hate going to the grocery on Sunday because it is so crowded.  So, if I don't make a concerted effort to go on another day and do my shopping, we don't have the supplies to cook the amazing meals I have planned out.  As a result, we end up going out to eat.

Yesterday is a fine example of me getting overzealous with one of my projects.  I found a recipe online to clean up pet stains from my carpet.  As Baby, my min pin, is 13 years old, she is getting pretty senile and just goes where ever she gets the urge to go.  If I am not paying attention, I have a heck of a mess!  The recipe is as follows:  first, mix a bottle of half vinegar, half warm water.  Spray it on the stain to neutralize the smell.  After you have gotten the carpet fairly wet, scrub it with a brush to get the mixture all over the stained spot.  Next, when the area is dry or almost dry, sprinkle a handful of baking soda around on the spot.  After you have sprinkled the baking soda, mix 1/2 c. hydrogen peroxide with 2 tsp. dish soap.  Put this on top of the baking soda, and use your brush to scrub this into the carpet.  Once it is completely dry, vacuum up the baking soda with either a shop vac or your vacuum cleaner.  A professional carpet cleaner online told me in his video that this was the best technique to use.

I tried to carefully follow the directions, and it went pretty well.  The carpet smells amazing, and it is not stained any more.  So far so good-- EXCEPT, I went a little overboard with the baking soda and now I am having a struggle getting it all out!  My advice to you would be, if you try this technique, don't totally plaster your carpet with baking soda or you will have to spend the rest of your life vacuuming it up!

Introduction

Welcome to my Blog!  I am a forty something woman, who  wears all sorts of hats in my life.  First of all, I have been married to the same man for 24 years, and I am the mother of three college-aged children.  I've taught high school English for the past 18 years.  I also love to travel around the country watching my two boys play college football.  I crochet and knit, read, and cross country ski.  As a result of being so busy, I am constantly looking for ways to make life easier and less stressful.  I want to share the tips I find with you, my readers!  I will also share about the crochet and knitting that I do, the books that I read, and anything else that I think might be of interest.