Cleaning

I know, I know...it's been more than a month since I last posted. But if you ONLY KNEW just how much snow we've had, you wouldn't blame me one bit. It's all we can do to keep ourselves from being completely buried in the white stuff.

See? That's all 5'3" of me standing in front of the snowbank that is slowly devouring our house. In fact, it has grown quite a bit since that picture was taken (about two weeks ago):

That's all 6'4" of Nate standing beside the snowbank earlier today. See? It really is a whole lot of snow. There will be more pictures later, but FIRST, I want to show you THIS:

Above is the reason I should never leave anything sitting out that contains ink. All I did was put the printer ink cartridge out on the desk...I was going to take it with me so I could stop at the store after work because I can't ever remember which kind of printer cartridge I need. Alas, Leo, who has been a VERY bad dog lately, decided that it looked like a chew toy, so he jumped up on the chair and snagged it off the desk. I went outside to start my car, and when I came back in, he walked into the hallway to greet me -- with ink all over his front paws and all around his snout. I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of what he looked like, because all I was thinking about was containing the damage.

Leaving the cartridge out was Mistake One. Screaming, "LEO! PUT THAT DOWN!" was Mistake Two. He got all freaked out and decided to run for the hills. When I chased after him, he thought we were playing some kind of game, so it took me a couple of minutes before I could tackle him and drag him into the bathroom. In that short amount of time, he managed to get approximately 5,234,997 inky footprints on the floors of our house.

I got Leo into the bathtub, turned on the water, soaped up his paws and snout, and he wriggled free from me and went running through the house again, leaving at least another 3,758,224 inky pawprints on the floor before I caught him again. And what was Roscoe doing as all of this is going on? He was sitting under the dining room table, laughing at me. Really. Did you know that dogs can laugh? I swear, they can. And they point, too.

Remember: I had just started my car...because I was LEAVING to go to work. So, as I finally scrubbed the last of the ink off of Leo and the floors, I realized that I'd left my car running through the entire de-inking process. Because of that, I'm sure that at least one acre of rainforest died. But is that MY FAULT? I think NOT. It's all Leo's responsibility. He's going to have to get busy with recycling or something to make up for it.

Well, enough about that! Back to the snow, which has been the bane of Nate's existence, since he's much more adept with the snowblower than I am. Below is our driveway, looking toward the road. It's basically a canyon. And that's me at the end of it.

In order to get our mail, Nate has to clear away part of the snowbank so that the postal workers can access our mailbox. There it is, jutting from the big pile of snow.

Also, because Leo discovered that he could climb up on the snowbanks and just walk over the fence, Nate has cleared out the area around our fence. He hasn't cleared out the center (there's no place to put that much snow), but he created a very interesting maze that the dogs can play in. Below is Roscoe chasing Leo through the canyons in our backyard.

Oh, in keeping with the "cleaning" theme, today I bathed the dogs. They weren't too happy about it, but they survived. Here's Roscoe, glaring at us:

And here's Leo. And yes, that is a ton of Leo fur all over my sweater. He's shedding like there's no tomorrow. You'd think he'd want to hold onto his fur until the snow stops.

That's all for now. Love you all...