The weather the last few days has been unbelievably gorgeous. Other than the wind tunnel we had to put up with on Tuesday. Which was the day after the pool cleaners cleaned the pool at the project house. Yeah, that was cool. Not.

This morning, the John Deere dealer came to our house to pay a service call on Mike’s riding lawn mower. LG saw the deer logo on the truck and said, “reindeer!”

While Mike was dealing with that, Marlene and I went for our Thursday morning walk with the two year olds in their strollers. Right as we got to the end of our street, a dog from across the street decided to start following us. I am really really nervous when it comes to dogs I don’t know (having been bitten when I was a kid) and even moreso with my child in a stroller at doggy face level. It wasn’t growling or acting aggressive in any way, but I was still nervous (and so was Marlene). It followed us for awhile and I kept yelling “GO HOME!” over my shoulder without stopping or gesturing, and finally it did. Marlene was telling me a really cool story about an Animal Planet show, but I have to admit I was a bit distracted because I was dwelling on the stupid dog for awhile. I did finally relax and forget about it though, and when we got back it was nowhere to be seen. Whew.
Then Marlene and Mike rehearsed a song for Good Friday, and I showed her my $16 of loot that I scored at Hancock Fabrics going out of business sale yesterday. You can get a lot of stuff for $16 when everything is 50% - 70% off the lowest ticketed price, even if you do have to buy a minimum of two yards of fabric in each cut.
I finished cleaning off my quilt table and got some quilting done, and finally LG was hungry and wanted “jelly sammich!” which translates to peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Well, actually she wanted “fruit snacks”, but I managed to convince her she would rather have a sandwich.
I looked up from what I was doing and realized she had eaten everything but the crust of her sandwich. She gets that from me, I guess, since I’ve never been much of a crust eater.

But then, after she had played with the bread and her Little People zoo animals for awhile, she ate the crust, too. She gets that from her dad.

It was so gorgeous outside, I couldn’t resist going out onto the back porch for a few minutes.

LG is getting entirely too curious. Yikes! (Yes her shoes are on the wrong feet. “I put shoes on self!”)

And finally, while LG was taking her nap, UPS delivered not one, but two packages! Wow, we never have that much excitement around here. One package was an envelope of paperwork from the insurance company.
The other was this box…

And here is what was inside (a thank you gift from the mortgage company that is working with us on the project house)…

I thought my story was over, but I just had to go coax Melody into the house because she was much too interested in the neighbors’ dog. (Not the neighbors that have the horses. The neighbors that think that it’s cool to play their stupid stereos at full blast with the doors of their cars open in their back yard where all I can hear is the thumping of the bass, which is one of the things we moved to get away from. GRRR!)

Anyway, there were two little kids out there. One a little girl who informed me that Max “loves the girls” and that he was “in love” with Melody. The other an even littler boy who decided that throwing rocks at his dog was the way to get him to behave. I told him not to do that. He said, “But he’s bad.” I told him that wasn’t the way we treated other living creatures. Would he want someone to throw rocks at him if he was bad? At least I got him to stop throwing rocks, but it makes me wonder. How did he learn to react to “bad behavior” with violence? I don’t really think I want to know the answer to that question.