Cousins Day

Yes, Martha, there was a cousins day, finally! It had been two months since the last one, because first Kathy and her husband, and then Peach and her husband had been traveling. I had spent some time with my mother and we played canasta, but it's not quite the same thing!

We had quite a kertuffle as I was leaving. Shiloh has discovered great joy in escaping out the front door. He's usually pretty good about following me back, but occasionally he immediately races out into the street (which is how he became "broken leg puppy" and an SPCA dog to begin with!), and if she can manage it, Polly will escape with him (which makes it more difficult to catch him, BTW, since the two of them are on an adventure, but Shiloh by himself isn't really sure what he wants to do).

Polly is, by the way, back to her old self. I was so relieved. She trembled a good part of a couple of hours and then went to sleep. When I woke up, she was gone from my lap and sleeping in the living room. Pretty soon, she came waltzing into the kitchen just like nothing had ever happened. She's still fine today, and even jumped into my lap, which she hadn't done in several days. I hate dogs.

Anyway, to avoid escape problems, I put a gate up in the hall, to keep the dogs in the back part of the house. When Peach and Kathy arrived, I was gathering up all the puppy paraphernalia and the puppies themselves and headed to the door, not realizing that Walt was taking the gate down because he didn't want to trip climbing over it. Naturally, Shiloh zipped out the front door and the chase was one. Have I mentioned I hate dogs?

We finally got all the dogs in the house, the puppies and me in the car and we were off to my mother's.

Since she had felt too shaky to go to the store, I had brought lunch, which we ate and then instead of our usual card game, I took her to Kaiser to pick up her meds and then to Safeway to do a shopping. When we got home, I fed the puppies and THEN the card games began in earnest. We played six over the course of the two days. Kathy won two, Peach won two and I won two. Guess who was disgruntled about it all!

While we played, we ate the hors d'oeuvre that I'd brought, which was brie with apricots, balsamic vinegar and walnuts heated in a crock pot. It was a new 1.5 gal crock pot which, I discovered, only had one heat and I think it was high, so the thing cooked too long at too high a temp, but it was good anyway.

After three games, Peach fixed us all a drink. She doesn't remember the name of it, but it had "kiss" in it...and she forgot the cream that was supposed to go in it, but it had vanilla vodka, chocolate vodka, raspberry syrup, regular vodka, and simple syrup in it. It was very sweet (the cream probably would have cut that)

It came with shaved white chocolate on top.

Kathy made a delicious chicken and rice dinner.

We munched on chocolate chip cookies while we played the last games(s) of "65" and then, after the puppies had eaten, we all went to sleep around 11 p.m. Amazingly, with all those people and all those cute puppies, I didn't take one puppy picture!

My mother is feeling a bit better, though had a terrible time with leg pains last night, probably because she walked too far around Kaiser yesterday, more than she has in a very long time. She does have fluid in her lungs, so is now on a diuretic and she has to have lab tests on Tuesday and see her doctor on Wednesday. I will go with her for those. Mainly she's just angry that she has to be sick, that she has to take pills (which she hates to take), and that the degenerative disk problem in her back requires her to sit for about 15 min. each hour to prevent excruciating pain. She's just angry that she doesn't feel 70 any more, I think.