I Like #284

 Welcome to 2023!  I'm deciding to start out the year in a good frame of mind, hopefully I can keep it up!  I missed the last week thanks to traveling but it was wonderful to spend some (albeit chaotic) time with my family.  We ice skated, went to see luminarias (a NM tradition), hiked, played games, celebrated, visited extended family, saw old friends from childhood, made slime, played with the dogs, adopted new dogs (my sister), kept disagreeing dogs separate (very challenging), looked at christmas lights, did a little sewing, went to church, sang carols, watched Christmas movies, helped my mom move her longarm and rearrange her studio, and many many more things. All in all, a very typical Christmas for our family.

One final pre-Christmas thing to like:  I like my lego Harry Potter advent calendars!  I reuse them every year, disassembling and packing them away in their little doors to come out again the next year.  I made a parade of my little lego minifigs this year right before leaving on my travels.

And of course I like the dogs!!  So many dogs at my mom's house, seven dogs and seven people.  The dogs had to be kept in three separate groups which was very stressful, but we all survived. 

My mom's puppy Quark is already much bigger than he was at Thanksgiving and just as adorable,  on this trip he made good friends with Spooky, and by the end of the week they were playing very well together.  Blue still isn't quite sure, but we made introduction progress through the week, and we'll keep working on it the next time I visit.

Quark and his very much older brother Swatch, who does very well with him but tires of being used as a jungle gym/chew toy.  

Quark and Spooky!  I got a cute video of them playing that is on my instagram if you follow me there.

Blue is a snuggly love but isn't sure he wants to make friends with new dogs, so we go slowly.  He mostly wants to sit on the sofa and go for walks.  He is ever afraid that he is going to be left behind on some cool adventure.  Here he is in the back of my sister's car as she was trying to load up to leave a couple days before I did.  He did not want to get out-  I had to get a leash.

And here he is in my car.  Which was not even going anywhere-  we were unloading quilts we'd picked up from a show the previous day (a trip he had gotten to go on BTW) but open car doo means potential adventure in his mind, so he had to jump in.  At least the roll of quilts he landed on was rolled in plastic.

We went up to the ice skating rink my parents' town set up in the city park and my sister and I and the kids had a blast ice skating.   

My mom took lots of pictures, but I try not to show the kids so here's Becky and I being dorks!  On our way home from ice skating we saw a loose husky running across the main trafficky street so we stopped and got her.  She was pretty skinny, but absolutely beautiful. Horribly, she had a collar on her that was so tight she couldn't even eat or drink the stuff we tried to give her.  As soon as my sister took it off she gobbled down some leftover pizza we had and drank a bunch of water.  We tried to take her over to the Lincoln County Humane Society, but they were closed.  While over there, the local herd of loose horses came by.  That's also a horrible horrible thing-  they aren't actually wild horses just a loose herd someone turned loose.  They shouldn't be on their own, but the town has really struggled to come up with a solution.  In the meanwhile, they just graze around town wherever they can find grass (behind our church on Christmas Eve, and in the Humane Society yard the next day).  I got out of the car to look for info about the humane society and one of them came right up to me.  He seemed hungry so I give him a piece of leftover pizza.  Everyone got mad at me- and it's true pizza is probably not actually a good diet for horses, but he seemed hungry.  After I got back in the car, he was anxiously searching out additional pizza. 

We decided to take the dog to my parents' vet who had some kennel space, but by then my sister had fallen in love with her.  Sort of ironic, because she was friendly to everyone but immediately bonded to my brother-in-law.  They checked her for a chip (nope), and posted her on the local lost dogs page (nope), so my sister and her family decided to adopt her.  They called her Kubota (all their dogs are named for vehicles), and she's really precious.  She played with their dog Checker and with Spooky and with Quark.  Blue even did fairly good meeting her.  They sniffed quite well until Blue got a little scared and growled so we separated them.  She's going to be a great addition to their family.  My parents also almost adopted another new dog over the break (another stray brought into the vet with a broken leg) but luckily they were able to find his family.

One of the really nice thing about this particular visit is that we got to get together with three different sets of childhood friends who happened to be in town.  One set we met in the evening to walk through the lights, and we all got a kick out of posing with our faces in the little reindeer. That's our friend's littel girl in the bottom reindeer I blocked out.  We got my dad to pose with the rest of our family but under duress, so I figured I spare him sharing the photo. I love getting to catch back up with people you haven't seen in years.

There were lots of other things to love, but I'll leave you with some funnies from my brother-in-law.  They have pet Guinea Pigs, and he has fallen in love with AI-generated art.  You put in prompts and then the AI makes these computer generated illustrations.  He's been putting in Guinea Pig and..... for months now and shared some with me.

Guinea Pig Nativity (I love that the fur on the Guinea Pig sheep couldn't just be regular fur but is straw).

Guinea Pig Scientist!

No idea what this prompt was but it made me laugh!

Wishing everyone a wonderful 2023, and for more things to like, please click over to LeeAnna's!