Return of the cone

Summer is here; the boys are out of school for the next two months. We started our vacation Friday morning by dropping off Cal at the local pet hospital. A few weeks ago he ruptured his "doggy ACL" and needed it surgically repaired. I was still reeling from the hit to my credit card balance and admittedly did not think about his recovery until after the procedure. It's tough! We brought him home late Saturday night, coned, still a bit drugged, and stressed from more than a day caged in the clinic. It took me about a half-day to realize he won't go to the bathroom (quickly) with his cone on, so we are probably going to have to take it on and off for a week or more until he gets his stitches out. And then for most of the next 4-8 weeks I'm supposed to carry him around to keep him off both legs so he doesn't harm his recovery. Another thing I want to avoid (and I'm told it is common with these injuries) is rupturing the doggy ACL on the other leg, or make it more likely to happen in the future. I'm really going to need a vacation from my vacation this year.

Enough already

OK, this is my last Seattle post. I think! I’m nearly out of post-worthy images on my iPhone 3 camera roll and I think you, my faithful one or two readers, are tired of my Adobe Photoshop Express iPhone app image processing that I've used and abused this week. (I do have to give a shout-out to the Effects > Vignette Blur tool – a combination of its “Vibrant” color tweaking-effect and the classic vignette. I love how it makes the colors deeper and really pop! The vignette gets old fast, but I like it here in the photo of the pig tracks, steps from the pig statue at Pike Place Market.)
I’m considering a new theme for next week – maybe some foodie posts?

Pig at the market

This is a pretty well-known statue that sits at one of the entrances to Seattle landmark Pike Place Market. I know there's a story behind this, but I'm at bit busy at the moment to look it up. Just got back from the boys' elementary school's annual May Day show. Pre-schoolers sang and danced to "Alligators All Around." So cute!

More from the fish market

I'm not much of a seafood eater, but family members that picked up fresh fish and shellfish at the market said it was yummy. We also had rainbow trout but we didn't get it from the market. My nephew (with the help of my uncle) left a fishing line on the dock and he caught a small lake-stocked trout. For the record, seeing a four-year old with the catch he waited fairly patiently for is a lot of fun.

More tulips

Flower vendors at Pike Place Market were selling tulips - and lots of them! They're at the end of the blooming season in the Pacific Northwest and stall after stall had buckets of tulips for sale. I didn't know it until this weekend, but the Pacific Northwest has a similar climate to Holland, therefore tulips thrive in the region this time of year.

At the Pike Place fish market

Holly girl

Holly is my uncle's sweet, loving, and faithful Golden Retriever. She makes the perfect lake dog, safe in and around the water, and always present whether you're in the boats, on the deck, or on the docks. She doesn't need a leash and never wanders.
What a difference from our two beagle mixes who roam at will and we have to keep near-constant tabs on. Twice in the last six weeks one of Robbie's school mates has knocked on our door with our dogs in tow, saying they were on the loose around the neighborhood.
Comparing Holly to our dogs makes me think of the time when we took our dogs to training and dog obedience courses in Maryland. The instructor had a mature, well-behaved, and unleashed Golden by his side to demonstrate training techniques. I cried foul. Come on, a Golden is known to be the perfect, obedient breed. How hard was that to train?

Leaving on a jet plane

Spent the past 4+ days in a mostly sunny Seattle. Only on Saturday night did it start raining and lucky for us, that was hours after we spent a really nice (read: warm, bright, and clear) afternoon walking around Pike Place Market, taste-testing local vendors at the Cheese Festival, and having a fabulous lunch at the Steelhead Diner. Flew home to HNL early today and now settling back in to the local humidity. Here's a shot of a restored plane that hangs just beside the Hawaiian Airlines check-in counter at Sea-Tac. The rest of the week I hope to post more shots of the quick trip from my phone's camera roll.

Pacific Northwest tulips

Happy Mother's Day

It became very clear this week that Robbie is not very good at keeping secrets about what he makes at school. He said one afternoon that he "made a ribbon for me." I didn't know what he was talking about until he came home with this on Friday. A lovely addition to my wall of art, using paper plates - my favorite elementary school craft medium!
Robbie comes home with a lot of not-quite-finished items. Note the white border on the top. He's a very thorough guy and he takes a long time to finish things, especially where solid coloring and painting is involved. I think his classmates finish their items faster and his teacher tells them all frequently to wrap up what they're doing before Robbie has completed his piece.