Pippi is 6 and we get a break in the weather

Miss Princess Pippi celebrated her 6th birthday and 2nd Gotcha day this weekend. She is quite the foodie so cake seemed fitting for her birthday treat. :)

Here she is checking out the goods while the boys wait patiently for us to cut the cake.

Her meal for the evening on Saturday (which was her actual birthday) and on Sunday.

She lets us know that it is lip smacking good.

And our treat for the evening. Yum, yes it was!!

With all the attention on Pippi for most of the day, Maggie found herself feeling quite jealous.
She is the queen, we must not forget!

The weather this weekend was fabulous for some outdoor fun. Cueball kicks things off by giving the moose a good shake.

Then takes the moose for a romp around the yard.

He tires of this toy and moves onto the pink unstuffed dog. Its head is the only part that remains stuffed.

Pippi gets a turn once Cueball tires out. It did not take long. ;-)

She is a bucking bronco!

After a few minutes of playing with this toy, she loses interest and decides to stalk Maggie. She is a nut. She stands still with her head cocked low like they can't see her.

She starts to make her move closing in on her target.

Then at just the right moment she pounces and gives a loud playful growly bark. Goofy girl!

She has the most personality out of our four and has brought so many laughs to our lives and added so much joy! Happy Birthday and Gotcha Day Pippers, we love you sooooooo much!!!!!!!! :)



Lastly, the jealous queen wants you to know that she is mommy's heart and always will be!

Justa catchin rays and crazy cars around town

Our sweet girl, Maggie Mae, catching some rays of sunshine during her afternoon nap yesterday.

Just look how content she is. Puts a smile on our face.

On another note, a few months ago on two separate trips to the grocery store we saw some weird vehicles. I will leave it to you to fill in the blanks on this one.

Not sure how many groceries this person thought they could squeeze in this car.

We have some exciting greyhound activities coming up, so stay tuned. :)

Fluffing our nest

Booyah says GO STEELERS!!! Wahoo!!!

The hubby is a big Steelers fan so that is who we will be rooting for today.


I mentioned in my recent posts that we have been doing quite a bit of work around the house. This post will mainly be about the before and after with little commentary. We will be back to our greyhound outings and activities soon.

It is a great time of year for us to being getting all of this done as it is still really cold here. I am looking forward to spring and summer, it can't get here fast enough!

Anywho, we started our painting projects with the master bedroom. Below is the before (mint green).

And the after (Sand). The pups couch is not pictured, but is still there. :)

In an effort to keep them out of trouble while we painted the living room, they became "jailed" for the day. We took them out multiple times throughout the day when we were on our breaks. They were not quite sure what this was all about but were glad to be out when we were done. We painted this hallway, the foyer and the hallway upstairs last August at the same time we were installing our composite deck and staining the front porch. We are DIYers. :) It is my favorite paint color (Rivera beach) and is what we based our other room paint colors around.

Living room before (Mustard yellow).

Living room after (Soft Camel).

And our last chore, the kitchen. We debated and debated over painting this room. It is a lot of cutting in and by far one of the hardest rooms, besides the utility room; which I tackled painting a year and a half ago; to paint. We wanted to try a new technique to redo our cabinets, but we used polyurethane last Sunday to touch them up a bit and they looked better, so we opted to use our day off on Friday to paint instead. Good thing we did because we received a call for our first showing Friday afternoon for early Saturday morning. We got the painting done and the house ready for the showing. Needless to say, after all that hard work, I have been a couch potato since Saturday afternoon. =) We will save the cabinet project for another day or maybe our new house. :)

Has anyone used the Rustoleum product for kitchen cabinets? This is what we were going to do. We would love your feedback if you have.

Kitchen before (Bright yellow). View 1.

View 2.

Kitchen after (Antique). View 2.

Kitchen after. View 1.

It was a lot hard work, but we are very happy with the results and hope this will help to sell. Will keep you posted.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Low Key

Things have been pretty quite and low key for us. Temps outside have remained rather cool so we are hibernating. I planned to post videos of the pups opening their presents on Christmas but the slow internet connection is unfortunately not allowing me to do so. :( They were rather cute about tearing up the wrapping paper though.
Our cat, Misty, has found a new favorite sleeping spot. As you can see below, the hounds don't mind. She has become quite loving. Her personality has changed over the last six months. In September just before we went on our beach vacation she had a blood clot form. She was not able to use her back legs and was dragging herself around with her front legs. It was awful. We had no idea what had happened. She was walking around fine all day and then all of a sudden she started crawling. It was scary. We rushed her to the vet. The vet was able to give her an injection of Heparin to help move the clot and luckily it worked, but she did have loss of use of her back legs for a few days. It was very sad to watch her going through that. :( She has since made a full recovery with movement in her legs. Upon that vet visit, she was diagnosed with Cardiomyopathy and Hyperthyroidism and is currently on daily medication. The meds so far seem to be helping her maintain a good quality of life. Two months after starting the meds, she had follow up visit and blood work which looked good and indicated that she is on the correct dose of medication. She will go back in April for another check up. Fingers are crossed that the medication continues to help. :)

Booyah likes to ball his blankets up and then lay on them. He is a goofy boy.

Cueball prefers to lay on our bed and use a pillow for a head rest.

Maggie was having good dreams. Content and happy.

We will be putting our house on the market next weekend. We are hoping to move closer in to the Richmond area. We have been living out in the country for the last ten years. It has been good, but it is time for a change. We did not have any luck last year with selling. We went on the market in Feb. and took the house of the market in Nov. We had several people who wanted to buy our home, but they had houses to sell and that did not happen. We also had a young couple (jokingly known as "our friends") who submitted three offers to buy our home. Unfortunately, they were all low ball offers and it was a no deal for us. We did counter offer and gave them our bottom line price also. They wanted it all, but did not want to or could not afford to pay the price.

We still feel we have a lot to offer though. We have a 3+ garage with partially finished attic for storage, large storage shed, 6.49 acres of land, a 1988 square foot cap cod (built in 2000 and open concept), refinished deck, large patio, fenced rear yard, etc. The process of selling can be frustrating. We have a good real estate agent, we learned a lot last year through the experience and are hoping for better results this year.

In the meantime, we refinanced to take advantage of the low interest rates and reduced the years on the mortgage. Through the refinance we now have a recent appraisal which indicated that our asking price was reasonable (it was a sigh of relief to know I was not crazy and our price was a good price). The appraised value was $7, 000 above our asking and $11, 000 above assessed value. Although we wanted to move very badly, we were not willing to give it all away, and I am glad we did not. It is a new year and I am staying positive! This will be the year we sell! I will keep the readers of this blog updated on our progress.

Hope everyone is having a great 2011 so far!