Miscellaneous Ramblings

• I had my painting class last night and Tyler did NOT want me to go. The little stinker actually hid my coat in his room. He gets major points for creativity with that one. I am plugging away at my painting and having a blast doing it! On Sunday while everyone else was napping, I got in an hour and a half, sitting in front of the sunny window and painting. It was lovely.
• I have realized that James has a weird and annoying habit of chewing on the corner of his coat. It is starting to get frayed. I pulled a card out of Dad's playing book and put a dab of Tobasco sauce on the coat. It wasn't five minutes before I heard James spitting in the yard, trying to get the taste out. I hope it works. When we were kids, we had a dog named Stealth. We kept him on a rope outside so he would not run off into the wilds of Loma. When he learned to chew through his rope, Dad put tobasco sauce on the rope. Although Stealth has never been known as a smart dog, or anything even close, he did figure out that he needed to find a different place on the rope to chew through.
• Speaking of Stealth, he was our one and only dog. I specifically remember driving out to our friends' house to choose a puppy. There were little black puppies all over the kitchen and Dad shook his keys to see who would come over first. I guess Stealth did, because we took him home. He was a very friendly dog, part black lab and part golden retriever. Dad had dreams of making him a hunting dog, but an early incident involving a close-range truck backfire sort of ruined Stealth's chances of being around loud noises, gunfire included. I do remember Dad putting a pheasant wing (or something) on the end of a fishing pole and dragging it all over the place to teach Stealth to track the scent. At one point, we left Stealth in the care of some friends on their farm. He managed to find and eat a significant amount of rat poison while there, and he was never the same after that. He was still friendly, but his intelligence level was rather diminished. He would howl at the moon, squirrels, and nothing at all. Which is probably why when Dad heard him howling one night, he disregarded the ruckus. Turns out, someone was breaking into the church that night. But enough rambling about Stealth...
• We got a new-to-us couch last night, delivered via bread truck by none other than Jimmy Stewart himself. I thought that was random and funny. Through a random set of circumstances we ended up being on the receiving end of a free leather sectional. As it turns out, I have no sense of space...as in, what will fit where. I just can't estimate things like that, and the couch was not going to fit in Dad's truck. Lucky for us, Jimmy Stewart lives next door to the couch people, and had an almost empty bread truck handy for delivery. Thus, we got a couch delivered in a bread truck via a complete stranger named Jimmy Stewart.