wil and kris (and gracie and ava)

no offense robbie/microsoft, since this can happen with any computer, but i thought this was pretty funny.

so wil and i have recently come to the realization that we need to buy those rectangle magentic vent covers to place on one or two of our downstairs ceiling vents to direct more of the air upwards. when we sit downstairs on the couch i actually need a blanket sometimes, but then when we walk upstairs it’s so hot….we haven’t used the covers on our bed in i don’t know how long.

now that gracie has gotten pretty comfortable in the house, she’s started to find her favorite “spots”…under the side chair, on the linoleum in the entry, under the bed, etc. while working in the office, she has found that her spot is under the computer desk, sprawled directly on top of the entire vent. she has done supremely well at blocking the source of air into the office without knowing it.

so i decided, to make this a win-win situation, since we need a vent cover, and since she loves covering vents, i need to figure out how to attach her to the ceiling vent in the downstairs, and voila, problem solved!

ok, so i just wrote this entire post and it ended up being a much dumber joke than i thought when it was in my head, but after all that typing, i can’t get myself to just delete it all.

here’s a quick update to make this post actually have a purpose: i am good, wil is good and gracie is good.

i have been working a lot lately, which is a good thing i suppose.

today (saturday) is my first day of in eleven days! i work tomorrow afternoon and monday and tuesday, so after tuesday i will have worked 14 of the last 15 days!  sheesh…. with no overtime.  it seems that my many days have been perfectly spaced over three separate weeks.  this is part of my own doing, though.  i’ve picked up two extra shifts and requested certain days off which resulted in these killer two weeks.  i am somewhat exausted but it’s nice to have a day off to relax a bit.

in other work news:

i became a shift supervisor again last week.   my manager, shiloh, has been quite pleased with my performance at this store so he wanted to move me up a bit quicker than he anticipated.  since i moved up 2 months sooner than expected, he put me up for a raise (quite unexpected).  instead of the maximum 3.5% raise we all hope to get after a stellar review, shiloh requested a whopping 6.25% raise for me! we were nervous that it wouldn’t be approved by our district manager, but we got the word on thursday that it did! now i am making 8.50 per hour instead of 8! (i know, it’s a small amount, but that fifty cents can go a long way!)

Shiloh also wants to move me up to assistant manager as soon as possible.  i know that i am on my way; but i have to deal with school right now.  we’ll work the asm stuff out later.

have a blessed saturday,

-wil

well, it looks like every single post from now on is going to be about gracie…ok, that’s not entirely true, so don’t write me off completely yet. but she is pretty dang cute and fun, so it’s hard to not think about her and talk about her.

except i will admit her puppy-ness can really inch under my skin sometimes. like right now, while she barks incessantly in her crate. but what’s more annoying, her barking or the construction workers outside listening to a blaring jessica simpson?

oh good, she stopped. i am actually surprised at how well she’s been doing. even though she has to go out a few times a night, she already knows to just quietly whine and wait for us. and last night, she made it from midnight to 8 am! yay for sleep!

after a few days of walking up one stair and whimping out, she now loves to walk up the stairs, and then walk back down…and then up, and back down. and on her way down, she loves to hang out in the middle and stick her head through the railings above wil as he sits on the couch. she very often forgets that she’s bigger than she thinks, constantly climbing through the legs of the dining room chairs, under the side chairs and through the balusters. i dread the day when she sticks her head through without being able to pull it back out.

we love taking walks together with her and heading over to the dog park…especially since the evenings have been so nice recently. and everywhere we go everyone gets so googly eyed over her, and then they are shocked to see how big her paws are and how big she will get when she grows up. she’s already such a little princess.

wil and i would like to announce the new arrival to our family…

(we haven’t figured out her full akc name quite yet)

here are the stats on our new little gal:

• breed: great dane
• color: harlequin (she’s mostly black with white and gray splotches)
• mom: “My Lady Madelyn”
• dad: “Damien Eye of Darkness”
• birthday: may 27th, 2006 (we realized it was meant to be when we found this out!)

some fun things about her (we are already smitten): she really likes water…when we first gave her a drank, instead of drinking it, she preferred to lay her face in the dish and blow bubbles with her nose! she got used to the house and her toys pretty quick, but the actual stepping over the threshold seems to be a big deal for her…we have to wait like 2 or 3 minutes for her to stare into the house before coming in. and she has three white paws and one black one and her tail looks like it was dipped into a can of white paint. we just can’t get over how cute she is and how fun it is to have her, even with the multiple “accidents” already…

wil and i are really looking forward to her becoming our baby and having fun with her as she grows (a lot!). we love the new excuse to get ourselves outside to enjoy the tennessee summer together!

just to let you all know…there’s a 67.28% chance that wil and i might be coming home tomorrow with this…

* update: so, the goal for you is to name that dog!!! even though we might get her tomorrow (which the percentage is getting higher and higher as we speak, since we just got back from petsmart and we already set up her crate!), it may take a few days to get to know her personality enough to name her so you’ve got some time to think. we are leaning towards gracie, with a full (and funny) akc name, since great danes are usually a very regal and royal breed. we’d love for you to be part of the process! so get creative and leave a comment with your best akc dog names for “gracie”…

a walk to the grocery store for some ice cream with my love makes for quite the fine evening…