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The good and the bad

I must start by saying that our dog is totally amazing. The best behaved pup in the universe. I just can’t say enough good about her. She’s picked up on so much we’ve been teaching her so fast… I’m just totally stunned. She’s great on a leash, she sticks by us, she knows we’re the pack leaders. She’s mild tempered, she’s fantastic with strangers, she’s great with other dogs. She happily snoozes by my side while I work. She’s just as cute as can be.

But the house training.

Overall, since we’re home all the time, she does great. But tonight. …oh tonight.

Let’s just do this the quick way.

  • She shat in the house
  • She rolled in it
  • I ran her outside after inadvertently bare handing a handful of shit on her back
  • Found that it was raining outside, but decided to hold my ground in the name of training
  • Wiped dog shit on my pants
  • Got very wet, and got her very wet… went inside after a short staring contest
  • Kept the dog as still as possible while I cleaned remaining dog shit off the floor
  • Bathed the dog (her first bath) as quietly as I could since the baby is asleep
  • Got very wet again, this time with stinky dog shit water splashed by a very nervous pup
  • Toweled the dog dry as best I could
  • Excited pup (clearly happy to be alive after the bath) ran around like a bat out of hell waking wife and baby
  • Wet dog smell permeates the entire house
  • Finally get pup calmed down and chewing a bone while I throw shitty clothes in the washer
  • Wash hands 4 times with two different kinds of soap

And now I’m sitting in my office, mostly dry pup asleep at my side. Doors are closed and windows are wide open. Hoping to keep the wet dog smell in here (and out these windows).

Everyone in the Jessen house is happy tonight.

** Edit – Photographic evidence **
Sleeping pup

Posted in Our Life.

By Rustin
March 4, 2009

1 comment

Come on Nanna!

I’m so excited that I’m posting from my phone. I just couldn’t wait to share a picture of our new family member.

Meet Nanna.

She’s a German Shepherd/Lab mix. So she’ll fetch a frisbee and bite the ass of anyone who pissed us off.

Welcome home Nanna!

Posted in Our Life.

By Rustin
March 1, 2009

1 comment

and the heart of a stranger breaks

clusterfook.com

How do you tell your child that you are dying? That you will no longer be there to put them to bed? No longer be there to cuddle them when they’re sad or restless? That they will no longer hear your voice or see your smile or feel your touch? How do you tell them you will not be around for pee wee baseball? Not be there for their first day of school, first kiss, first love? No mother-son dance at their wedding? No Christmas gifts from grandma? How do you tell your child that the universe ripped you away from them for some unknown reason?

How do you say goodbye? This is how.

Posted in Our Life.

By Janey
February 24, 2009

No comments

Victrola

SB XLIIISorry for the radio silence on my end… I was a little tied up helping put on a little show down in Tampa.

It was a fun time as usual, but entirely too long to be away from Janey & Gavin. Missed them terribly. I was quite happy to hear Janey met a cool new friend to help pass the time.

I’ll write more about my Florida adventures later, which will include descriptions of the crazy flu I contracted on the way back home. Not sure when I’ll get to that… don’t hold your breath.

Nope, not going to write about all that today, because I have something WAY cooler to write about: Victrola!

My whole young life, my dad has been an avid listener of talk radio. Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, there was always an radio on AM blasting the news of the day or opinion of whoever was at the mic. Incidentally, this habit has been passed to his son. While I did complain as a young lad, I’ve been a talk radio listener since high school.

Surprisingly, weekends (at least in my memory) were wonderful for talk radio. Instead of news and politics, we heard gardening shows, Car Talk, and if we were lucky enough to be listening Sunday evening, old time radio dramas. I have great memories of hanging with my dad in the garage while he changed the oil on his fleet of vehicles, the AM radio blasting so loud you could have heard it down the block. And it’s that radio in the garage that’ll connect our story for today.

The radio that has lived in my dads garage for the entirety of my 27 years on this planet was housed in an old wood cabinet. It had two record players set on pullout tracks. It’s always looked old. It looked old when I was tiny and used to pull at the record player arm until it broke off. What’d I know. It was a radio, and I wanted to play with it.

img_0137 Fast-forward now to yesterday when Janey & I were visiting my parent’s house. My dad asked if we’d like to take that old radio cabinet home with us. It looked to be perfect size for a changing table for our little poop machine. He made sure to let us know that the radio still works perfectly, it’s just been sitting in the garage forever, so the cabinet looked pretty crappy.

As we cleaned up the cabinet to get it loaded, I just got so damned excited. It’s an old (I don’t know how old) Victrola cabinet with 2 built in turntables and one 12″ speaker behind a fabric panel. The inside of the cabinet is pristine save a bit of dust, the outside was pretty hashed. It was really just as I remembered it with a few more sub-freezing winters under it’s belt. The veneer would just crumble to the touch. But it’s built like a tank and I was sure I could give it a second life.

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We got it back to my little workshop, and I went to town on it. At first scraping by hand, being very gentle… and later borrowing a vibratory sander from my brother in law to work out some real rough spots.

In the end, I got the whole thing stripped revealing a cabinet made of beautiful solid wood. My next job is to get this sucker stained and she’ll look like a million bucks.

Here’s a few more photos of work as it was happening.

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I’m so excited to shine her up and let her come join us in the house!

Posted in Our Life.

By Rustin
February 8, 2009

3 comments

And 2009 goes on and on…

So now that I have your attention…

Let’s begin here—> THIS HAPPY COUPLE IS NOT DIVORCING.

Are you kidding? Over ice cream? Rustin is stuck with me and I do mean STUCK. At this point I’m stubborn and I’ve put too much effort and time into our relationship–6 years!– and everything else that goes into the merging of assets–does furniture count?–and merging of families–well just the one family, so no merging really–and also not to mention the squeezing of the child out of my poor body, yea he’s pretty much gotta deal with me. FOREVER. muahahahaha. Ain’t he lucky??

WITHTHATSAID…

Let’s go here—> ashley.

Ok so. No crazy lesbian ANYTHING. I only wanted to share my enthusiasm for ‘coming out of the closet’–if you will–in the ‘making friends’ department.

I got so desperate about making friends here that I went to a friend-match website… oh goodness, here I go again. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. But seriously, it’s hard to meet people–let alone awesome people–when a) you don’t work outside the home b) don’t have school to attend and c) hate small talk. So, yea. Kind of a problem.

The real story is we did meet online several weeks ago–no friends meetup website, we did it on our own thank you– via a friendly thing called twitter. It goes a little beyond that, but that’s where I’ll start for now. I realize I have a bit of explaining to do, and it may be a little difficult to make sense of everything, but I’ll do my best. We did make human contact. And while we did play games whilst the husband and child were away/sleeping, ‘the games’ consisted of just one: Mario Kart on the Wii. And the lingerie? A ‘five for fifteen’ underwear sale at Target. Nothing fancy. And the cooking? Papa John’s.

So yea. Just a friend. Who’s a girl. And nothing more or less than that.

And meeting a virtual person… it turned out well I say. Seeing as though I’m still alive and well and not dead. And oh yea, there’s the ‘she’s awesome’ part of it too.

And we’ll end here—> That’s all, and peace be with you.

Posted in Our Life.

By Janey
February 7, 2009

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