Three Dog Life

After an absolutely hellish trip to Ithaca (courtesy of Delta) that took almost 15 hours (it would have taken me only 10 hours to drive there), I got to spend some time getting to know my nieces, Iris & Mae.  Here are a few pictures.  The last one is a little hard to see, but it is supposed to be of their painted toenails.  Since they are identical twins, the books apparently tell you to paint their toenails different colors to help tell them apart.  Iris has purple toes and Mae has pink. 

Flavor tripping.  Miracle fruit. Ever heard of them?  Me neither.  But apparently if you eat miracle fruit it changes the way your palate perceives sour or unpleasant flavors for about an hour, allowing you to "flavor trip".  Lemons taste like candy, cheap tequilla tastes like the top shelf brands. Vegtables - well your kids will love them so long as they are flavor tripping.  The downside is that apparently each miracle fruit berry costs about $2.  Interesting article about it in the New York Times

Four months ago I went out and bought a ton of yarn to make two baby blankets for my sister.  Yes two, as she had to make things harder by having twins!  Undeterred by the prospect of double the effort, I thought "my god it's only January, I've got till early July when she's due, how hard can it be?"  This coming from the person who has never knitted a blanket before, and has only knitted four things in her entire life.  Well four months later, I'm proud to say that I finished the first blanket!  Of course Lynn is scheduled for a c-section on June 19th, so the second one will probably be done about the time the poor kid is 5!  While the pictures don't really do it justice, as you can't see the colors very well, they do serve well to hide the not so few errors I made along the way!

Baby Blanket

Drying blanket

I've now made it through 2 boot camps and while I've gained a pound, I've definitely made progress.  In 10 weeks (two 4 week boot camps with a week off after each) I've accomplished the following:

Okay so I survived the first boot camp - 5 days a week at 5:30 a.m.  By the end of the 4 weeks, my formerly broken foot was aching and so I called my physical therapist about it, who said "you're doing what????  Your foot can't take 5 days a week - try 3 days a week." So I signed up again but only for 3 days a week.  It's actually proved to be harder than the 5 days - in part because I no longer have a job (I was recently downsized) and in part because I wasn't doing it every day.  Hence the motivation was somewhat lacking.

This weekend we got a "new to us" tv and entertainment center, courtesy of our friends Jen and Chad.  They bought a flat screen and generously offered us their old tv (and entertainment center since their new tv wouldn't fit into it and their old tv wouldn't fit into our entertainment center.  The tv we were watching was circa 1993 and the picture was fading fast. The "new" tv is so much better in a bunch of ways - especially size!

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