Sunday, November 29, 2009

General Lee

The General Lee:

General Lee:

General Lee:

General Lee is my new foster pup - a 2 year old chihuahua. He's a tiny little guy who had a big scare. He was attacked by a big dog and ended up with broken ribs and a punctured lung. He also has the shakes, but I think that's just a chihuahua thing and not a result of the attack.

He has this cast-like bandage thingy on one side to keep his ribs straight.

And he has this huge puncture wound on the other side.
Poor little guy. Is it any wonder he growls whenever any of my dogs come anywhere near him? He also growls at the kitty too, but you gotta cut him some slack, as the kitty IS bigger than him and therefore a threat, right?

He is on cage rest for the next two weeks. I've spent the last few days carrying him around while I putz around the house. (Decorating the Christmas tree proved to be too difficult so I had to put him back in his crate for that task.) He loves to be held. So far, he's been quiet and accepting of all his crate-time, too.

If you're in the market for a lap dog, General Lee will be ready for adoption shortly after Christmas.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Lots of Strikes

I struck out on Wednesday. Three strikes = a strike out.

Unless you are bowling. Then three strikes means you get a turkey. A turkey for Thanksgiving, how apropos!It was a night of strikes!

NFBF:
Mitchell:
Dan:
Chandler:
Karissa:
Eric (new nickname = Velvet Balls):
Nicole:
See? LOTS of strikes. But since this is my blog and you can't stop me, I'm gonna brag and let you all know that I was the only one with a turkey! To counterbalance the bragging, I will let you know that Karissa won the first game and NFBF won the 3rd game. Huh...I wonder who won the second game? Oh, yeah...that would be me. :)

The gang:The gang plus many children:

Friday, November 27, 2009

Snuggly

The best thing to do when you're feeling down?

Go back to bed and take four snuggly pets with you!!
Isn't it cute how snuggly Frankie and Al are together?

Every other minute of the day, Mo wants to chase Al and poke him and prod him. But for some reason, she will leave him alone at naptime. So nice.

Georgie isn't so snuggly. She always sleeps at the foot of the bed as far away as she can get from me. :)

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Her Name Was Lola...II

The Fabig's had their annual Casino Night last week. If you recall from last year's casino night, you will remember that every Las Vegas style casino party needs a showgirl:
And new this year, every Las Vegas needs an Elvis (played fabulously by NFBF):
And an Urban Cowboy:
And men in tuxes...
Rat-pack style:
Classic style (with a real bow-tie tied on the first try!):

Oh...and some casino games!
$2500 was raised for Project Cure!

There was a raffle at the end of the night for some good prizes. Kiri won the Massage Envy gift certificate. I put almost all my tickets in to win the bike AND I won...oh...nothing. Though if there was a prize for Most New People, I would have won - I brought 7 new people to the party! More dinero for Project Cure!!

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The Brown Dogs Are Five!

November 1st was unofficially the fifth birthday of my brown dogs. Happy birthday, Frankie and Georgie!!



They weren't too excited about turning five.
"We didn't even get any cool presents."
"Birthdays are boring."
I am hoping that being five years old will bring Frankie the maturity he needs to not be a spazz kid on the agility course. People have been telling me for three years now that he'll grow out of it! Yeah, right. Next agility trial is in December. We'll see how being a "grown-up" works for him!

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Sad.

Remember how I told you about all the outside cats in my neighborhood? There is one cat in particular whose favorite haunt is my front yard. I notice him the most because he looks exactly like Al. He's a big ol' black cat with a medium long coat. More than once, I've pulled up into the driveway and freaked out because Al is outside sitting on the front wall. Al is not allowed outside!! So I yell at him and then walk over to the wall to pick him up and take him back in the house where he belongs. And the black cat, who is not Al, will run away at my approach. Oops - mistaken identity. But, just to be sure, the first thing I do when I go inside is find my kitty.

Sadly, this scenario won't happen ever again. This weekend I saw the black cat, who is not Al, dead in the street in front of my house.

I am so sad for the beautiful black cat. Poor kitty.

Hey readers ... PLEASE keep your cats inside!!! Thanks.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

14th In The Nation!!!

I am sad to report that Storming the Castle didn't win the Great Urban Race National Championships. :( I know you all assumed that we would. Sorry to let you down.

However, we did come in 14th out of 90 of the best teams in America! Woo hoo!! Only 22 of the 90 teams finished by the 3 hour race cut off time. We finished in 2 hours and 37 minutes. This put us 7 minutes out of making the finals. We are little bit disappointed (well, I am, anyway. I don't think Christy is as much) because we (meaning me) made an error that cost us about 10 minutes, but we are still proud of our fairly decent result. And we are hooked on urban adventure races!! SO FUN!

The race took us from the French Quarter in New Orleans to Tulane University (about 5 miles away) with various stops in between. We caught a streetcar towards Tulane while our super-stellar internet support, Kiri and NFBF, were busy looking up clues for us. Our mistake was getting off the streetcar when other people did, even though we hadn't finished mapping our points. We decided after getting off that we didn't really want to follow those people. We made decent use of our mistake time by going into a tavern to buy $20 worth of ones. One of our clues said we needed to donate $10 to St. Jude, but the donation needed to be in singles that had the letter F in the serial number. Donating the money:A lot of people skipped this one because they thought it would be too hard to find people with whom to trade money. When we told other teams that we did it at a bar, they felt kind of silly. :)

We got back on the streetcar and saw a team from Austin - the notorious collaborating teams who rock this race. The boys got off so we did, too. We couldn't keep up with them running, but we caught up at the clue that led us to Mystic Signs:
They got way ahead of us again (cuz they actually are runners!) but we caught up to them again at the streetcar stop. They were having a bit of a meltdown - arguing if they should run for a 30 minutes to Tulane or wait 15 minutes for the streetcar. This was a no-brainer for me and Christy. Run? To Tulane?? Yeah, right. The Austin boys took off running and 20 minutes later ended up getting on our same streetcar, all out of breath. Hee.

At Tulane we had to find a triangle puzzle written in chalk somewhere on campus. Wow - that could take forever. Luckily we saw people gathered around, so we didn't have to search too long.
The task was to count how many triangles were in the clue. IMPOSSIBLE. Some of the intended triangles were actually trapezoids. And the pink lines were smudged and you couldn't tell if they were supposed to be on top of or separate from the blue lines. We knew that all we could do was guess. Many of the teams were all aflutter about how unfair this clue was. Also at Tulane, we had to solve a ridiculous math clue (thanks to both Christy and NFBF for not making me do this!) to find out what room in a certain building to go to. In that room (201), we had to do a word search puzzle. We rocked this and gained some time on some other teams.

A random clue on the list was a dark and fuzzy picture of a bell. You needed to find the bell and take your picture touching it. No one could find the bell. All the locals we asked didn't know where it was. Google was no help. I talked to several teams afterwards and none of their internet supporters could find it. Yeah, well they don't have internet support like mine!! Kiri found it (after looking thru 300 pictures of bells on Flickr!!). She's a super-star!! At about the same time, we happened upon it on Tulane's campus as we were running by.
We then took a streetcar halfway back to the French Quarter to a juice bar clue. We had to make juice by squeezing oranges by hand. Mmmm, citrus smells good! Running after drinking a glass full of fresh OJ is a little uncomfortable though. One good part of the OJ stop was that we showed one of the volunteers there how unfair the triangle clue was. She realized that the clue had been sabotaged (dang Tulane pranksters!) and called it in to the race headquarters.

At this point, time was getting short and we still had 5 clues to go. We debated whether to take the triangles as our skip or the cruisers. The cruisers were these really cool 2 person moped things (I borrowed this photo from another blog, thanks Vignette!):
You had to drive them around a mapped out course through the city. We figured t was going to take us 10 minutes to get there, 10 minutes to drive them and 10 minutes to get to our next clue. If we skipped it, we'd save 30 minutes. But....if we got the triangles answer wrong, we'd get a 30 minute penalty. We decided to take our chances on the triangles guess, hoping that due to the sabotage, they would accept any answer. (Turns out that the bottom two lines and all the pink were added by the pranksters!) So, as fun as the cruisers looked, we passed them up.

We raced back to the French Quarter to the St. Louis hotel. We found the conference room indicated and inside the conference room we saw...LIVE 6 foot ALLIGATORS! We had to pick up the alligator and carry him around the room. Now, this alligator was pissed! His mouth was banded shut, but he was hissing and trying to snap. I felt really bad for him and didn't know if this was the most humane task to do...but I was still pretty excited to get to carry a real live alligator!!

We had to take a picture of our team with a cathedral, a clock and a man on a horse...all in the picture:
We knew where this was from our previous day's 9 mile walk around the French Quarter and nearby areas. Preparation finally paid off!

We had to take our picture with Martha - A Market Customer (location found by NFBF and Kiri):
The threes indicate the last digit of the year she was sculpted. The last task was nearby Martha. We had to go on the stage at the French Market and complete a Charade. I got to do the acting. My phrase was Queen of Hearts. Heart was no problem, but I couldn't get Christy to get Queen. She got girl with a hat, but never made the leap to girl with a crown. :) I changed my tactic and did sounds like "lean" and we got it in no time.

RUN RUN RUN back to the finish line. I hate running. Seriously.

We knew right away that we didn't make the top 8. The photo checkers estimated we were around 17-18th. Our photos and clues were checked - our triangles answer was accepted like we hoped - a good gamble! We hung around and watched the other teams come in. We beat the Arguing Austin boys!! That was cool!!

Since we weren't a part of the finals race, we spent the afternoon exploring more of New Orleans. I mapped it and we walked an additional 6 miles - after the race!

Christy drinking a well-deserved beer at Ignatius:
We can't wait til next year! We're going all-out to make the championships again!!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Going Away

I am going away...and I couldn't be happier!

Christy and I are off to New Orleans to compete in the Great Urban Race Championships. Woo hoo! Wish us luck.

Bye!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Teemu Selanne Thinks I'm Hot

On Halloween night, Pat and I went to the Phoenix Coyotes game. Before the game, we went down to the glass seats to watch the visiting team warm up.

Teemu Selanne skated by and looked right at me. Huh. He must think I'm hot. WOO HOO! Whatcha doin' after the game, big boy?? ;)

He skated by a second time and looked right at me again. Teemu Selanne - looking at me!! I'm feelin' pretty darn pleased with myself...

Oh, wait! He doesn't think I'm hot. He's just confused. Confused because I am a big white blob. A big white blob with horns. Wtf? Oh hold on a second...the big white blob is an...egg? An egg with horns?

On his third skate-by, he gave me a big huge smile. Ah....deviled egg! Get it? I think Teemu has a thing for deviled eggs.


No one gave Pat a second glance. Hockey? check. Mullets in the building? check.

The deviled egg costume was a huge hit. Whenever I was walking the concourse, people would stare and just as I passed by them, they would get it. I could hear them start laughing and saying Deviled Egg! A-ha-ha-ha-ha!! One guy had to come up and ask:
Him: The egg costume is really cute! I just don't get those horns...
Me: I'm a deviled egg.
Him: OH!! I AM SO STUPID!!! A-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!
I got to be part of the intermission costume parade. I think Howler thought I was a child and that is why he is patting me on the head.
The game went into overtime and the Coyotes won in a shoot out. AWWWOOOO!

Monday, November 2, 2009

Halloween Costume Parties

I love it when Halloween falls on a Saturday, because then you get two nights of parties. Two nights of parties means two nights of wearing costumes! I love costumes!

This year I put very little effort into my costume, unlike last year when I spent hours and hours on ebay acquiring all the right pieces for our Ferris Bueller group costume. It was Pat who went all out this year, buying the necessary pieces, applying sequins, spending hours on makeup application, etc:
This year I spent about 15 minutes online ordering a Snow White costume and a black wig. Snow White with Jamie: (Oh, sorry...he's Yanni, damn it)
Nicole, the lovely hostess of the Friday night costume party, is a housewife a la Mad Men.
The lovely hostess made these lovely cookies. Mmmm....cookies! I think I ate about 13 of them!
Josh also spent some time putting together a clever homemade costume:This lasted about 10 minutes before his arms (legs?) got too tired and he turned it all around and became a farmer.

Irene came as dirty laundry. Brian didn't want to be a household chore, so he took the easy way out with the doctor costume.
But the best costume of the night, in my opinion, was this guy, who came as "NFBF - that blurry faced guy from that really cool blog". Ah, genius.

The next night we went to a party hosted by one of our soccer friends. I needed to get my money's worth from the Snow White costume so I wore it again. Jamie didn't have the necessary pieces to be Andre Agassi: The Meth Years so he brought Yanni, damn it, back again. Pat went home and went to bed. (We went to the Coyotes game first - blog post coming, and we had to be up at 5:30 for a work event/5K- blog post coming).

Different night, same costumes. With Louie, our host:
with Uriel from soccer:
Another super-fun night. I love Halloween and I especially love Halloween weekends!