11

it's been a crazy few weeks around here & i've skipped posting anything.  honestly i thought my next post was going to be bad news about Cookie, but fortunately that is not the case.

Sept brings 2 celebrations for us:  our Anniversary & Cookie's birthday (always bittersweet without Butterz)!  this year marked 11 for both of those.  for us, it was Sept 15th and for Cookie it was Sept 22.  i'm so glad to have both of these as my life!  notice, they are not "part of" my life, but they ARE my life!  it doesn't matter how many remote controls get destroyed, how many times someone pees in the house, or how much hockey gear gets strewn all over the place, i am so happy to have Nacho & Cookie - and i won't tell you who does which!

so Nacho & i spent our day in the most fitting way, doing what we love to do!

at the time, it was a bit unseasonably chilly here so i was afraid we were done for the season.  but somebody somewhere likes us & not only did we get a little temp rise, but the water turned to perfect glass!  it will most likely be my last run of the season, but it was worth it!  the ride back home was just as nice!

this is how i like to end the season!

during all this time we were wrapped up in some pretty serious issues with Cookie.  the short of it, she was showing signs so similar to Butterz final weeks that it scared us crazy.  you are never ready to let them go, but i mean we REALLY were not ready.  suffice it to say, she has pulled through.  we don't know exactly what the cause was, other than she definitely had an infection & she is still on steroids, but we are glad to  have her back at 98.9%.  we will certainly take that.  so it was actually a pretty big deal for us to take the break we did on our anniversary & head out.  at any rate, she spent her birthday getting spoiled rotten with some relaxing beach time

and some ice cream

and she still rocks it like a 3 year old!  

we do love our Cookers!

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Concrete Idea!

i love industrial & nothing says that to me like concrete.  i'm also a big fan of Benita Larsson over at Chez Larsson & when she posted her response to the Panduro concrete challenge, i just knew i had to do this!

it's an old post of hers, but i love the simplicity of it.  so Nacho & i set off to create our own Door Stops this past weekend. yippee!  you can see Nacho was as excited as i was as he laid out our supplies!

Nacho volunteered i made him help me cuz it involved mixing stuff & i'm just a girl so i knew i'd get it wrong. thank goodness for that! i only bought a 10lb bag of concrete mix & we ended up using all of it - we actually could have used about 2 more pounds though.

so mix it until it's like peanut butter. i would have totally got this one wrong & added too much water. i could tell he was nervous when i took over adding the water.  apparently you have to add it slower than molasses! 

 then i used plain old cooking oil to line my pan with.  i bought a simple organizing tray i found at Target. problem is i like it so much i want to reuse it in the house!

 the letters came from Michaels & i got one for all 4 of us:  Cookie, Baxter, Nacho & me!  put those in the pan backwards.  although in hindsight, because the sides of my pans are not straight up and down, i could have waited & put the letters on top & had just as cool of an effect!

 just add the concrete, holding the letters in place so they don't slide around until you have a nice layer over them.  keep packing the concrete as you go to get out any air bubbles while you work. we used the end of a trowel, but a screw driver end would work too in this container.

 keep adding until you fill it up.  i only did 2 in this container then used a different container that was sort of in use in my kitchen drawers but had a neat bubble design that i thought would look cool.  i used it for the other 2 stops.  let it dry 24 hours then just turn over the forms & let the concrete stops slide out.  i  had better luck than Benita, because my stops slid right out without breaking either of the molds.  i didn't have as much luck picking the letters out of them.  you can see in the photo below that 3 of the letters came out almost entirely in tact, but the N was not so lucky!

inspired by Benita's love for all things white, i was going to paint all of mine white, but decided to repurpose some bright paints i had in the garage - i swear we could put any paint store out of business.

so i started with a coat of outdoor primer just to make sure any colors i did looked good.

here is Baxter getting his bright blue on!

Cookie hard at work holding the bedroom door open

Nacho not really doing much of anything, just sitting there waiting for a job.  i kept mine the plain white that you see above. that's me, nothing special, just plane jane!

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