This is what our dog does. Just goes ape for a giant inflatable ball from Target.  He doesn’t really enjoy the play, more  the killing of the ball.

I know it’s not the 4th yet, but there’s too much energy and patriotism is this photo, it had to be posted 2 days early. (that and we’re getting outta dodge this weekend)

… about keeping up with this site. We do care but we’ve been to busy with work, taking photos, loving on friends and mourning the loss of Billy Mays.

(photo collage of our new house , taken with my new love, 110 film.

As with many moves we’ve had over the years, you want to get your new home DIALED IN before you really get comfortable. With our new place, the place we bought, this is no exception and there seems to be an even bigger TO DO list than normal. For the big stuff, we called in the master, mr. fix-it, a.k.a. egghead.com : Paul (dad) Manley. He came down last week, taking a few days of vacation from his 9 to 5 to help jump-start our fixin’ -up.

He arrived with his Porsche 911, filled with all sorts of tools and electrician equipment… and a lawnmower. If you know anything about a Porsche, there isn’t a ton of in room there – but somehow he fit it onto the passenger seat. (putting that Ohio State engineering degree to use)

Over the next few days we put did some electrical work by putting in a celling fan/light and outlet on our back porch, new microwave over the stove along with some under-the-cabinet lighting. He also built us a gate for our front porch so when we open the front door, Brutus won’t dart into the street. It was a very productive weekend.

With all of my dad’s help, we never got anything unpacked. I guess that’s what this weekend is for.

We bought a house. too crazy right now to write about, but now you know.

Brutus today scored huge with discovering our neighbor’s oversized tennis ball and fell madly in love. Lisa, our rad neighbor, let brutus take it home and he spent all afternoon playing with it and just had the happiest look on his face (as happy as a dog’s face can look).

For brutus it was a giant tennis ball that made his day. For me this week it was finally getting Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 for my Intel-based Mac. For those of you that think it’s nerdy, fine, [warning: nerd speak ahead] but I had a legit copy of CS2 that was based on the IBM Mac processor and ran like a champ on that machine. But I have an Intel based computer that when it runs anything for the old processor, it runs itself through another application thus slowing down the computing power. When I would run Adobe CS2 it would crash when 2 Adobe aps were open. It would take forever to open and save complex files. Now that I have CS4, things run so fast and cleanly that I would literally giggle with excitement that nothing crashed and that files would open SO FAST. For someone who’s livelihood is really held in Adobe’s hands, you’d think I would have picked this up earlier, but I didn’t.

The fact that files opened fast was MY giant tennis ball this week. It’s the little things in life that make it so fun.

In other Brutus news, he told me that everyone should listen to any band that contains any member of The New Pornographers. ( Neko Case, Destroyer, Swan lake, AC Newman) These are his favorite bands. That’s what he said, I don’t make this stuff up and interject my own opinion. That would be silly.