Twitterfied

I enjoy Twitter. It helps me keep track of a number of friends of mine, both in real life and my cyber friends. I get a lot of NASCAR news updates from a lot of writers I follow, as well as several drivers and crew members (I won't deny that a bunch of us were squeeing like 14 year old fangirls when Michael Waltrip actually tweeted back to our friend Jen, but that's another matter entirely).

Penny has her own Twitter account, and she routinely tweets and sends pictures commenting on life as a dachshund puppy. Turns out she's not alone. There's several other dachshunds on Twitter who are also very communicative and a number of other dogs who are following her. Penny actually has tweet conversations with a couple of dachshunds on a regular basis. They don't like thunder, vacuum cleaners, or baths either.

What irritates me about Twitter is the inevitable appearance of spammers. No, I don't smoke cigars. No, I don't want to buy steaks. Thank you, but I'm not really in debt over my head, and even if I were, I don't think I'd need your help to get out.

I've been trying to figure out if there's a pattern to what I post that might make me more appealing to these dweebs, but for the life of me I can't.

And no, frankly I don't want to see your sexxxxxxy pictures, either. Neither does Penny.

I'm wondering if any of these porn spammers know they're really following a 20 week old dachshund puppy??

Help a pooch?

Back to Normal, whatever that is...

Well, it's been about three weeks since my last post. I can now tell you that I'm no longer contracting at the audit client. In the process, I've discovered that there are people in the world that you can't trust who will stab you in the back. I've eliminated them from my life and I'm working through some anger right now. Even though I no longer have that contract that was a base of my business, I know that everything will be fine -- even before the contract ended my phone was ringing with other clients who needed additional work... God's way of taking care of me. I have no concerns, because I've turned them over to Him and I'll just let Him handle it from there.

At any rate, it was an ugly, exhausting process. I've just been bone tired and really not excited about doing much of anything to be honest. I'm looking to the future to get back to normal -- whatever passes for normal in anybody's life these days. :)

My comings and goings have been somewhat hampered by the fact that I'm now in an air cast to try to calm down the case of plantar fasciitis that I have. The night splint wasn't working, so I'm hobbling around in this to try to heal the ligament where it's tearing and get the bones realigned properly. We're hoping that the inconvenience of the cast will keep me from having go to through the inconvenience of surgery on my foot.

Penny continues to grow and thrive. She'll be 20 weeks old this week, and she's a charmer! We're starting to see some adult teeth coming in even though those ultra-sharp puppy canines are still there. She's been in Puppy Kindergarten for three weeks now. We're making progress with socialization, but she doesn't like big groups of dogs and prefers one on one interaction. I completely understand! A couple of the more rowdy dogs graduated from kindergarten this week, so I'm hoping that it'll be a bit quieter for her in the coming weeks. We learned the hard was to take "people food" like chicken or cheese or roast beef last week as treats when Penny completely ignored our perfectly acceptable dog treats and mooched off other puppy parents. How embarassing! This week she got her own cooked hamburger.

We had our annual ornament exchange weekend:
In the picture are most of the group with yours truly front and center in the Ravelry t-shirt. :) Linda and Laura elected to be photographers and weren't in the group shot. The red tote bags on the table were made by DF Vicky for each of us to put our ornament kits in. Judy and Ann graciously helped me finish my kits in time for the exchange; with having Penny in the house, my stitching time was limited, so my fiber totals for each ornament were admittedly estimated this year. I'm hoping that I overestimated so that nobody will run out of anything. At any rate, it was a great weekend and I got to visit extra with Judy, Ann, and Teresa who spent the night at my house during their visit. It's always a treat to be able to spend time with my out of town buds. :)

Not much else going on. I'm still working on the Garter Toes socks that I showed you in the last post. I'm almost finished with the first one. I started stitching a relatively simple piece, "The Branch" by Bent Creek, but I haven't made a lot of progress to show. And I took out an ornament kit that I've put exactly 12 stitches in so far. Maybe I'll have pictures next time.

Have a good week everyone! Take time to do something nice for yourself.

Catching Up

A belated happy 4th of July to everyone in the US! I hope you took some time to ponder the freedoms we enjoy and to thank the people in our military who keep those freedoms safe for us.

It's been a stressful couple of weeks here. I've been involved in an internal audit at my big client. There's some internal politics going on, and I hate stuff like that. At any rate, the internal auditors from corporate came in and went through stuff with a fine toothed comb... problem is, the main auditor is accustomed to auditing government contracts and procedures in a large company, not what is essentially a small retail business. Top it off with the fact that, to put it politely, she's "confused"... can't keep bank accounts straight, keeps asking for duplicates of documents she already has... and I'm seriously questioning her competence. Unfortunately, I think someone's job is on the line here. I'm not denying that there's record keeping issues, because there were, and I had cautioned about them numerous times. But those have been compounded by the auditor's incompetence. I think something ugly's going to happen within the next couple of weeks, and to be frank, my trust level for everyone there is currently at zero. I'm currently deciding if I can continue to contract for them. It's a difficult decision, because they're my biggest client, but I'm not sure I can keep working in that environment. Sad, because I've been with them for ten years now.

In the middle of all that, we've been trying to keep up with training Penny. She'll be 17 weeks old this week, and she's going through all the predictable puppy stuff. Teething is a big issue, as is housetraining. She's finished her puppy shots so she's free to mingle with other dogs. Tomorrow night she has her first session with a trainer here at the house, and then this coming Saturday she's scheduled to start Puppy Kindergarten. Good news with her is that she's now walking on a leash, thanks to Kim at Dr. Weaver's office (I had a small meltdown there when we went for her last shots about all the problems we've been having with her. Our frustration level is high.). That means she's been able to get outside, and she loves it. Keeping in the great dachshund tradition though, she completely ignores the geese and ducks who frequent our front yard.Here we are in a quiet moment on a Sunday afternoon. I'm in mid-summer allergy attack.

For the 4th, we went to Rome for Penny's first overnight visit to Mom's. It went ok.... we had a couple of potty accidents, and we had one unfortunate incident where Mom and Penny were playing and Penny got a little overzealous and nipped. On the bright side, Penny did find a chipmunk hole and actually started digging at it! We may have a little earthdog here after all. :)

In the middle of all this, we had Vacation Bible School at our church, and once again I was the Snack Lady. Attendance was down slightly this year due to the fact that we had to postpone our school to accomodate a teacher (who ultimately couldn't attend due to a death in the family) and we were competing against several other churches in the area. But we managed to attract over 50 kids. Snacks were uneventful for the most part. I'll admit one day was particularly lame (although I like Twizzlers), and two four year olds rebelled. They informed me they didn't want the snack, and they knew I had other stuff because they'd seen it. Couldn't argue with that, because it was right out in the open. So I relied on the old "well, this is what we have for today and if you don't want it, you're welcome to sit quietly at the table and have some water" which is what they ultimately did when they realized they weren't going to get their way. As I told one of the teachers, it must be a shock to find out you're not really that special when you've been told all your life that you were...

In a vivid demonstration of "keep me away from the internet when my stress level is high", Amazon politely offered to ship me a Kindle 2 via ovenight shipping and I accepted. I must say that I love it so far! I've downloaded two books I wanted (haven't updated the reading on the side of the blog yet), but I can see where the downloads can quickly become addictive (and expensive).

Knitting and stitching, you ask?? Well, I do try to sneak some in around the puppy. No real pictures tho. I'm frantically working on ornaments for the annual exchange. It's time to start making the kits so I've got to order stuff (Drema at Needlecraft Corner, are you listening?? :)) As for knitting, my DF Sara from Ravelry sent me some wonderful Mirasol Hacho merino wool that screamed to be a pair of socks. I obliged them and started knitting during the Sprint Cup race this past Saturday night.The color is much bluer than it appears in the picture. Beautiful stuff and so soft!

That catches you up with us. Hope all of you are having a good summer. Take some time to be good to yourselves.