Creepy clouds

It's been raining here a lot lately, and a few days ago, I snapped some pictures of the weird looking sky. It was around dusk.





Those are all taken with me facing the south. They get some crazy weather down there.

No longer a stay-at-home-wife

A part of me is a little sad, I admit. It definitely wasn't torture to be unemployed. However, I'm excited to start at a new place, and have a little more money to pad our checking account and/or save for our Chicago house.

I accepted a position at the first hospital I interviewed at, and I'll basically be doing the same thing that I did at both hospitals in IL. It's a 10-15 minute drive from our house, close to Paulie's daycare, and I'll be able to work with patient populations I need more experience with, specifically military personnel and their families, and kids/adolescents with reactive attachment disorder. I'm looking forward to learning (and adding more to my resume).

I'm going in to fill out the mounds of paperwork today, as well as do my background check and employee health evaluation. Orientation starts on the 18th!

Weekend in Vegas!

For those of you that don't know, Todd and I are going to Vegas at the end of the month. We're staying at Mandalay Bay, and we're super excited since we usually don't have the opportunity to stay at such a nice place. We got a great deal through a travel agent Todd's parents know. Poor Paulie has to be boarded, but we're sure he'll have fun with his friends. I also just booked us tickets to Zumanity, and thanks to one of my lovely interweb friends, we got great seats at half off. Thanks to my bargain hunting ways, we are able to pretend we're rich for a weekend. Which brings me to my favorite thing about Vegas--food.

Now we're just trying to decide where to make dinner reservations for Friday and Saturday nights. It's so hard to choose. We (meaning me) have narrowed it down to:

FIX
Sushisamba
Emeril's
Shanghai Lilly
Stratta

Check them out if you have a chance, and tell me your top picks. =)

The hiatus is over...

I haven't blogged about Paulie in awhile because it was becoming borderline ridiculous. However, I feel a safe amount of time has passed, so here are some updates.

Paulie is doing so much better than he was before we went to Chicago. He has calmed down a lot, and is not nearly as bitey as he was before. He still plays very hard, but it is a ton easier to calm him down now than it was before. We have employed a few simple Cesar Milan techniques, and they are working wonders. We are starting a beginning obedience class on 8/11, and the instructor uses hand signals for every verbal command he teaches, yay for that! I figure that we'll get the basics there, and then teach him fun signs (dance, kisses, dead dog, etc) as time goes on. Paulie has also gained a whopping 3 lbs since we got him, so he is 12 lbs now, and the vet says he won't get much bigger. He will be 9 months old on 8/8. All in all, he is shaping up to be a sweet and spunky little dog.

Now, of course, pictures:

Duuuuuuude!

Happy pup.

Stop mauling me with your camera.

Fine, I just won't look at you.

Making sweet love to his kong at the park.

Dozing in a patch of sun.

His name is Bobo

My Friday night was interesting, to say the absolute least. It started out normal enough--Todd and I grilled shrimp and chicken kebabs (marinated and assembled by moi), and they were fantastic. We were sitting around having some cocktails when his commander and some other Lts. stopped over, so I went over to the commander's house to hang out with his wife, Lisa. Another neighbor came over too, and we were just sitting in the kitchen when the guys came back and parked themselves in the garage.

At around 11:30, my geriatric self said goodbye to everyone, told Todd to stay, and started the very short walk back to our house (they live on the corner of our block). I wasn't really paying attention, but did notice that my kitchen light was on. I silently wondered whether Paulie was sleeping, or if he'd be barking his head off when I got in the door. Then I noticed that our garbage can was knocked over. I thought that was strange, but it gets pretty windy out here, so whatev. That's when I saw it. The black bear. In.my.front.yard. Holy effing christ.




I sort of froze for a minute, because this isn't something I'm used to. I'm from the city of Chicago for pete's sake. My idea of wildlife is squirrels. They sometimes have no tails or one eye, but I attribute that to city toxins and inbreeding. Anyway. I then turned around and booked it back to the neighbors. I really wanted to yell, but it was late and I didn't want to get hauled in by the high and mighty MP's (military police). Todd see's me running back and is like, what the heck, so then I started yelling about the bear. Of course, everyone hears me and runs out of the house, gets into a car, and drives the 50 feet to our house to see the bear. It was still there, chilling in the rocks in front of our house:



Yes, that is actually our house. Lisa grabbed her camera and got these pictures while Todd was calling the MP's. Their reaction to a bear blocking our front door was, "Oh yeah, we've been getting a lot of calls like this. We'll try to send a car out. We're pretty busy tonight." Excuse me? You'll try to send a car out? Maybe we should have told them it was being hostile or something. (And it turns out, that's what we were ultimately advised to do by the biggest.douchebag.ever later in the night.) The MP's eventually came, and it turns out some MP provost guy (the douche) lives just up the street from us, and pretty much thought he was the ruler of the earth. He gave me attitude, treated Todd like a child, and all around made everyone want to punch him. He basically told us we were lucky we didn't live in "the ghetto" part of post where the lower enlisted live (his words, not mine), because they get 5-6 domestic violence calls a night and always get reports of gunshots in the neighborhood. Like I said before: douche.bag.

So far, we've had no more bear sightings this weekend. However, this is the second time our garbage can has been knocked over, and I don't think it will be the last. Things like this make me crave the sights and smells of my Chicago.