Vacation wrap up

Well the end of my vacation this week turned out to be very nice, as was the beginning. so all in all I'll call it a success.

Sarah came down to St. Louis this weekend and we had a great time taking in some sights, relaxing by the community pool and just getting some time to have true girl talk with no interruptions or short time frames. It was wonderful! :-) Somehow I managed to not take any pictures this weekend except those of our beautifully manicured toes. Odd - I know, but I've never had a picture painted on my toes before so I was a bit excited. (See photos below - pic #1 is Sarah and #2 is me.) But I promise we did more than that, including the Anheuser-Busch Brewery tour and visiting 2 out of 3 of the Man vs Food challenge stops. And while it was primarily a girls' weekend, we did let Ryan join us for some of the activities. I was really glad Ryan and Sarah were finally able to spend a little more time together and get to know one another better.

In other news, the before-mentioned house problem seems to be resolving, though we still have a kink or two to work out. Ryan and I spent most of the afternoon today window shopping for home repair items and getting ideas for furniture and decorating. We're both getting really excited and can't believe that our close date is less than 2 weeks away.

Tuesday seems to have fully recovered from her stomach issues earlier this week and is back to her normal self. And Irie is still irie. I found her a new sweatshirt that I love at one of the stores we were at today so she had to try it on for us tonight.

And tomorrow I go back to work. But never fear - I still have more than a full week of vacation that needs to be used by the end of June!

Is it over yet?

Today has been... well, interesting.

It started out well enough. I'd been spending the last few days up at Grandma Deetz's (pictures to follow) and today I drove back to St. Louis. I'm on vacation this week and wanted to get home today so that I'd have tomorrow to run some errands, do some packing, switch summer and winter clothes, etc before Sarah comes down for the weekend on Friday.

However, apparently there was a different plan in play for me. The drive was calm enough. I got home around 6pm and walked in to a wonderful world of chaos. Tuesday apparently has not been feeling well and when Ryan got home tonight (about 15 minutes before me) he discovered that she had had diarrhea in her crate. He got her (and her crate) into the backyard to be hosed down, but she got fragrant footprints throughout the house on her way out. So while Ryan worked on the crate and dog, I worked on thoroughly cleaning the floors. After her bath, she threw up all over the bathroom, so we had the fun task of cleaning that up as well. I think so far we've gone through about 5 towels to clean up the messes. She seems desperately thirsty but every time she drinks, she seems to throw it up. We started giving her a few ice cubes every hour or so and she's doing ok with that (so far.) She and Ryan are in bed now, so hopefully it will be a restful night and the worst is behind us.

In addition to this fun, I also came home to a very strange new house issue. I won't go into the details on this public forum, but it definitely threw us for a bit of a loop. So far everything is still OK, but we'll be keeping a close eye on the situation. Perhaps once everything is solidified, I can fill you all in. Until then, just keep your fingers crossed! :-)

At any rate, I don't think tomorrow will be as productive of a day as I had hoped, but I'm sure I'll make due. And perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised. After all, I certainly didn't expect any of the happenings from today!

Quick updates

I know I haven't updated lately so wanted to post a few quick tidbits.

1) Everything with the house is moving along on schedule. We've changed our closing date to June 12th, the inspection is done and we've reached agreement on who's fixing what. The next step is the appraisal. So far we haven't hit any major issues, but we're still a bit wary, I think.

2) Tuesday is still healing - we hope nicely. She has proved to be nearly impossible to keep down. We can't wait to get approval to start taking her on longer than 10 minute walks and getting her back to the dog park. She doesn't seem to be in any pain and has no qualms about running, jumping, wrestling, etc. I'm very concerned that when we take her in to get follow-up x-rays next week we're going to learn that she hasn't healed well. Irie (other than her obsession with eating the trunk of the tree out back and rolling in smelly stuff) is doing great.

3) Ryan and I spent this past weekend finally enjoying some of what St. Louis has to offer. Even though we've been here several months now, we just haven't felt like we've really had the chance to do fun St. Louis stuff. This weekend we checked out a local piano bar, the Botanical Gardens with Carl, Kathleen and Lily, a neighborhood restaurant with a great patio and the zoo. It was a very nice (and relaxing) weekend. All of our upcoming weekends are booked until we close on the house so it was really great to be able to just kick back this weekend.