cuddling in the cold

We hit a bit of a milestone last night: Spike cuddled up with Adia on the dog bed in the livingroom. 

He’s been much perkier since his haircut, his appetite has been huge, and he seems more interested in being near Adia. (hold that thought - he just went bezerk because she was trying to play…)

She’s sometimes too much for him.

Speaking of too much, we’ve been taking her into the field and playing ‘deek the lion’ which entails Carm standing in the middle, roaring and making grabs for her while she runs around like a maniac, deeking in and out trying not to get swatted. She loves the game and it shows how a pack of ridgebacks could easily keep a lion in place. I get dizzy watching her run circles around us. The game always ends with a catch and a cuddle.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned before that Adia is a big apple lover. She picks the ground fall and eats a few a day. Today I saw her picking one from the tree! Maybe I’m starving her!

We are 6 days away from leaving on our trip and I’m starting to freak out. Oh, everything is well in hand… I have a manageable list of tasks and a packing list for clothes… it’s just leaving for 25 days has me stressed, plus it seems that anxiety is lurking this time of year, no matter what is going on. I know Pat will have everything in hand, but then again Adia is a handful at times. If she doesn’t get her zoomie time she ricochets around the house, sending furniture flying and Spike into a tizzy. After she’s tired out she’s a good pup.

Packing… I need a special app that lets me put together clothes to create outfits which I can then add to the packing list. This for a woman who’s main wardrobe is leggings, jeans and t-shirts! Carm? I unpack the suitcase from our last trip (we keep a lot of our cruise clothes stored in the suitcase), lay his stuff on the table, then put it all back again. Well, it’s not as easy as putting it back. We cross-pack and put as much as we can into our carry-ons. That way if there is any lost luggage we won’t have to go crazy to get clothed. Paranoid perhaps?

We’ve had a few nice days and a few crappy ones… the weather forecast for the week coming up is crappy with extreme rain warnings. I haven’t checked the forecast for Rome lately, but I will have a good raincoat with me, but gosh! I want to sit at sidewalk cafes and watch the world go by. We have ‘before it opens’ tickets for the Vatican. We’ve been before so will skip the museum and instead will see the Sistine Chapel ceiling again, and this time hopefully get into St. Peter’s Basilica to see the Pieta statue. On another day we have mid-day tickets for Villa Borgese, which is an amazing museum with a plethora of statues and other marvels.

It’s been almost a week since I last posted, and for the life of me I can’t remember what we’ve done. I remember one trip to the city to drop off a pile of dog stuff at my mom’s for Kirsten when she arrives (in less than a month!). I think we went to Costco too. Carm played his last game of golf yesterday and then helped Trudie & Leo with splitting some wood. We changed the tires on the car. Jo Ellen and Don were here with little Romy. We picked up a giant pumpkin and I make 2 giant pots of soup - one creamy curry, the other with brussels sprouts, onions, and gosh, I wish I had written it all down cause it was a do-over. We have 5 more bags of chopped pumpkin in the freeze. I think we had supper at Trudie & Leos again. We finalized the trailer and got the slides in. Oh, we got our hair cut and flu shots. My hair looks like it was chopped with a machete...

October's poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter. 

~Nova Schubert Bair