dog days

It's raining over here in Los Angeles.  What is it about rain that makes one feel melancholy and desire to hunker down and cozy up with familiar things?

Our doggies, two senior citizen adoptees ... George and Gracie, are their undercover "witness protection plan" names (real names have been changed to protect the innocent) hahhahahha ... keep wanting to go outside in the rain. 

Which wouldn't be anything except for having to dry them off a bit but, Gracie turns out to have some "quirks".  One of them being she chews on herself ... all the time. She has done it so much in her lifetime that she wore down her front teeth, from chewing on herself. Vet thinks it's doggie OCD.

This week she chewed on one of her hind legs and gave herself this angry sore and she has to wear a bandage, so it can heal - which, getting back to our rainy weather, isn't so great. I have to put her bandaged foot in a plastic bag to keep the bandage dry when she wants to go out and then I have to watch her ... well, I have to watch her anyway as she's removed the bandage before and started chewing on the leg. WAH!

And then, since neither one is used to me hovering over them, they won't go to the bathroom. ARGH! This has been repeated a gazillion times today.

The husband is picking up a collar (the cone of shame, if you love UP too) after work today - I was going to go get one and then we realized that if I leave her alone, she'll remove her bandage and chew her leg.

sniffle sniffle woe is me!

In between bouts of chewing, she also likes to root around and eat things in the yard that she shouldn't. 

George on the other hand, is the most well behaved of doggie citizens. His one failing being he has a bad case of halitosis, really the most stinky breath bwahahhahha.


Besides being up and down and in and out with the dogs today, I decided to make a recipe my mom always made when I was growing up.  Ridiculously simple and feels like home on this cold and melancholy wet day. I don't imagine it's actually any good to anyone else but it tastes heavenly to me since it's laced with memories.

 

Faux ground beef for this veggie girl, onion, tomatoes (& some brown sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes) and beans. And I'm going to serve it over polenta.  nom nom nom.

Two days ago we received our first holiday card - from our dear neighbor's daughter (he passed away in 2010) - bright and early every year, just like her wonderful daddy. I put it on the table with my darling ornament I bought from Elizabeth, at Creative Breathing.

And then I was going through boxes yesterday, deciding largely to just get rid of things. Enough is enough. Time to seriously winnow down the remainder of things. One box had some Christmas things in it, bits of cuteness and old holiday photos of us. So I put them on the table too.

Holiday hodge podge merry making has commenced LOL!
Let the hoopla begin!

Happy weekend!