insanity

All ski slopes open.
Average base depth: 37"-52"
Forecast for snow Wednesday, and highs at or below freezing through the weekend.
(!!!!)
I have dutifully been checking items off my list: ski pants, helmets, goggles, gloves, wrist guards, snowboard boots that fit. A condo beside the skilift has been rented. We leave on Friday. All that remains is planning the menu, shopping and packing and steeling myself to simply ignore the cost of lift tickets and ski rental. In the past, I normally make DH pay for everything so I don't have to see it. Yipes but this is an expensive hobby to have. Too bad we're not into just taking walks in the state park.

Here's a cool thing that happened this afternoon. I scooped up E and Q's friends at UU this morning and took them home with us. After they tromped through the ravine behind the house for a while, mucking up their clothes and getting faces full of scratches, I took the whole gang up to the library. They were thrilled. Seriously. The kids were all so good and sweet and so into hunting down books and reading that the librarians weren't at all irritated with us when I lost track of the time and kept them there past closing time. Even when they realized we had something like 200 books to check out. See? Kid-cuteness pays off occasionally. We got home and both kids grabbed their books and curled up on the couch admist fleece blankets and warm pillows and a fluffy Roxy dog to read. I felt like I was in a Norman Rockwell painting, it was so sickeningly sweet.

Speaking of Roxy, she is such a terminally happy dog that it's verging on psychotic. Her tail never EVER stops wagging. EVER. She is either in normal wagging mode, cautiously wagging mode (when she's in trouble, which happens a lot) or over-the-top wagging mode which means her entire body from the neck down is wildly thrashing back and forth. She has this plume of a tail that curls up over her back so it's a perky, feathery wag. I found it adorable at first, then mildly irritating, and now I think she's just insane.
"You wanna go for a walk?" WAG WAG WAG
"You need to go out?" WAG WAG WAG
"Time to go to your crate." WAG WAG WAG
"If you destroy another one of my daughters stuffed animals I will replace it with you." WAG WAG WAG
"Did you pee on the floor? Am I going to have to kill you?" WAG WAG WAG
"The cat is stalking you and will soon jump on your back in an enraged hissing fit."
WAG WAG WAG
"(silence)" WAG WAG WAG

It's driving me nuts. No one, no animal can be that happy every freaking second of every day. She has to be insane.

In fact, as I'm sitting here composing a silly blog entry about my insane dog and wondering if I should just delete the whole thing, my dog is in the living room being completely baffled by a ridiculous toy. This toy is a truely horrific attempt to make a rabbit wear a frog costume but to me it has always looked like a frog that is in the middle of eating a rabbit. Whole. Because the rabbit's head is hanging out of the frog's mouth. And even more horrifying is that when you press its hand, it wiggles and sings some inane song to the tune of "My Boyfriend's Back". So Roxy stole this toy from E's room and inadvertently pressed its hand. She is whining and cocking her head and is visibly upset that this half-eaten rabbit is singing "Hey La, Hey La...." while desperately wiggling to be free. And of course the entire time? WAG WAG WAG. I tell you IT NEVER STOPS.