Employment!

Finally, after following what feels like a hundred dead ends, I have a summer job!


I get to be a dog wrangler at Dog Days daycare, just two blocks away! The best part is, after I've worked there for a month or so, Winnie Boo gets to come to work with me! The pay isn't great, but the commute is the shortest I've ever had and I get to play with puppies all day :-)

More Google map fun

Google maps has done it again, this time with "Street View." Right now its just a few cities, but for example here is where I lived when I was in New York last year. You can rotate 360˚ and then "drive" all over the city. They must have had a van with a panoramic camera taking shots every few feet, tied that info to GPS, and the figured out how to map that all together perfectly.

If I had had this last year, I could have taken a virtual walk from the subway to my apartment in NY before I did it in real life. Cool.

Winnie!

Happy Gotcha Day, Winnie Boo!

One year ago today, we were frantically packing up our dorms after graduation so that we could take a long drive to Watertown, Minnesota to pick up our fuzzy girl. Welcome home Pooh Bear!

Brewing!

After a long hiatus Dave and I finally got a brew in yesterday. It took a very long time partially because we had to get together all our equipment that has been in boxes for months, partially because we have not done it for so long, and partially because we were being tricky about it! This was the long talked about lavender beer. Yes we have attempted to imbue the flavor of the lavender flower using .2 oz of dried flowers to 5 gallons of liquid.

Here is a photo of it bubbling away in our laundry room here. It smells distinctly like juniper and lavender right now, who knows what it will taste like!

You can also see that I am going to need to build some more shelving in the brewing nook. Its kind of a pile right now.

Tonight Megan and I had a ridiculously balanced and responsible night. After I got home from work we...

- Walked to our local co-op to buy some local organic turkey (using our own bag) and bread crumbs
- Cooked dinner
- Cleaned the apartment
– Worked out at the exercise room they have here (very nice)
- Came home and did our finances

I feel like I should eat some ice cream mixed with beer or something just to mess things up a little. Well come to think of it...

Dog park!

Today was my second official day of freedom, so Winnie and I celebrated with a long walk through the airport dog park..... pictures!

Winnie, wanna go to the park?

Winnie challenges a cocker spaniel to a chase

Zoooooooooooom!

Winnie wins!

Relaxing in the dandelions

Streamlined corgi

It wouldn't be a happy dog park trip if it didn't include a roll in the dirt...

Let's go home!

Time for a nap... Winnie loffs her lobster.

1/4 of the way to a DVM

I finished my 20-hour-long preceptorship this afternoon, which was the last official assignment of my first year! Part of me feels like the year flew by, and another part feels like St. Olaf graduation was soooo long ago... Both are probably true. At this time last year I didn't even know that I was accepted to vet school!

I'm still waiting to hear from the St. Paul shelter about summer work, but I did get accepted to the Widlife Rehab Center's internship program for the second half of the summer... Short-term plans are sleeping a lot, hanging out with Winnie, and learning how to get around St. Paul by bike. Come visit me while I'm not stressed out from school for a change!

Northfield blogging

Ahh blogging in the slow lane lately. I am hanging out in Northfield right now at the old and now empty 1740 doing even more cleaning. My life right now is all about streamlining. At the start of this week I had 2 homes (Northfield and St. Paul), 2 jobs (St. Olaf and Macalister), a dirty studio, and a show up in Northfield. The final goal will be end all business in Northfield.

But yesterday I took down my show in Northfield (the webpage is still up of course), am going to be out of my studio today, and hopefully out of my town house here today as well. I just made a big trip to the Rice county recycling center to drop off all the toxic stuff I have accumulated from car repair since last May! They took it all for free, go recycling. On June 1 my lease here runs out, and on August 31 st my contract with St. Olaf runs out, and that will be that for now.

I also signed the paper work for my Macalister job this morning. Way more than St. Olaf! I had to basically had to re-write my resume from memory and then even go home and get some phone numbers. But thats ok, it is worth it for the Job! I start June first and am eager to get going.

Thats all for now. During all this cleaning and removing my self compleatly from Northfield I keep generating more boxes of junk that are now filling the loft. So more cleaning and unpacking to go! Streamlining, streamlining...

Plant Blogging

Megan and I have been collecting plants the past few weeks and have managed to turn our little apartment into a green house! And we arn't even done yet I don't think. We had a growing fungus gnat problem and discovered that our peppers and cilantro were covered in evil aphids! So we went the the store today and bought some Bon-Neem insecticidal soap at the advice of a knowledgeable employe of Linders. I wanted to buy something a little more powerful (read toxic bug killer) but she said that would be overkill. It seemed to work really well, the gnats are gone. It says to re-apply in a week to make sure they are all dead.

After closer inspection, lots of our plants had some aphids but none as bad as those peppers and cilantro, whom we threw away. The thread that linked them all together was they call came from the undergrad plant sale at the U of M. Boo undergrad.

Anyway, the amount of plants around here is pretty fun. We have

- a tray of lettuce greens (x3) and mustard greens (x3)
- Lemon Verbena
- Bay leaf
- Curry plant
- Parsley
- Sage
- Rosemary
- Thyme (yes like the song)
- Lavender
- Jade
- two Dark Opal basil (purple)
- one cinnamon basil
- two sweet basil
- one lettuce leaf basil
- Gold fish plant
- Apple mint
- ???? mint
- Jasmine
- climbing nasturtium
- cherry tomatoes (x3 in 1 pot)
- venus fly trap
- white cedar bonsai
- ficus bonsai

Wow! Thats a lot! I think we are going to give up the peppers, but I want the cilantro back and perhaps some more flowers. Right now most things are eatable. Today we were wondering what came first, did the huge south windows bring about the plants or did having plants make us get the south windows? I think its a little bit of both, but it works out great anyway!