abby used to be a clean, lovely, white pup.

this new yard has turned her into real dirt-diggin, ground-sniffing dog! (she was even dirtier than she looks in the pictures! and gren has sap all over his face. what were they doing out there?)

gotta go finish watching “the real match game story: behind the blank”

did you hear that charles nelson reilly died last week? sad.

gren’s weather gauge says, “monday was a little too warm for april here in the northeast,”

“but wednesday should bring us closer to normal temps.”

we went to a bike auction in a neighboring town this morning. at 9am the mayor and some city hall employees stood on the steps of the building and auctioned 45 bicycles to an eager crowd of locals. it was fantastic.

the bidding began at one dollar and went up in dollar increments. (like i said, fantastic.)

in fact, this cutie came home with us for only one dollar:

it is a smidge short for tom, but since he got outbid on the bike he wanted, it will do for now and then will be great for sharing with shorter-legged visitors.

by comparison, this bike was crazy expensive:

we won it with a bid of five whole dollars.

they both need a major tune up, and a cleaning, but for a total of $6, they will be perfect for getting us around the local trails.

since we were out and about so early on a saturday morning, we also took advantage of the beginning of yard sale tag sale season and searched for some bargains.

we came home with a bulletin board for the craft room, some nice note cards, some books, an impact driver:

a monkey book for little miss monkey toes:

tom’s favorite find of the day, a box full of computer goodies:

the box said, “free, take all or take none, please.” what’s a boy to do? take all of course!

and a very important buy, a new old air popper:

we already have one, but live in fear that it will some day stop working. and who knows when we might have to make massive amounts of popcorn quickly. better to be prepared, especially when preparation costs only two dollars.

here we witness old old popper welcoming new old popper to the cabinet:

is it just me, or does that picture remind you of the mummenschanz? ewww. so creepy.

some good stuff and a fun morning, all for under 20 bucks.

let’s see…what else has happened in the past few months?

well, it is a good thing that we have all of this firewood:

because it snowed quite a few times:

so we (uh, i mean tom) snowblowed:

we made fires:

we played in the snow:

knits were knit and gifted:

(mittens for laurie and fingerless gloves for my sis)

and there was a party for a soon-to-be baby:

im sure some other stuff happened between december and now…what did i miss?

i made cookies today.

grendel and abby “helped”:

most of the cookies are of the bar variety, and not interesting enough to photograph. however, i am pretty excited about some of the sugar cookies i baked. some of them are the typical snowman, star and christmas tree shapes. the rest are meant to represent the animals of the house.

first up, abby, grendel and grendel’s best friend piggy:

you can read more about piggy by clicking here and scrolling down.

next is a sheep and a monkey:

the sheep represents all of the yarn around the house and the little sheep tape-measure that seems easier to find, lately, than the heavy-duty tape measure and so most of our house and belongings have been measured in sheep. the monkey is because monkeys make tom and me laugh and are often spoken of in our house. your’s too, right?

yup, a monkey makes me laugh…unless it is in a recent dream taunting abby and me in our backyard (despite my empty threat to throw a hatchet at it) and then somehow gets in the house, trapping me, tom, abby and grendel in our bedroom with no phone to call for help. that type of monkey is an evil monkey. you can tell by the eyes:

creepy.

he can sit like that for a very, very long time.

the kitchen is unpacked and we think we figured out the livingroom/diningroom layout…we just have to find the right wall color. it is so nice to see boxes disappearing. it was even greater to watch the pink carpet (pictured above) disappear.