Indianapolis visit

On the last day of their visit, we took our guests to Indianapolis. Derek took the day off of work, so he chauffeured us all over town. We had lunch at Bazbeaux pizza. The line was out the door, but it was worth it. Especially for the creamy cucumber salad dressing. Do they sell bottles of that stuff?

Then we visited the Indiana State Museum. I love this museum because it combines everything about Indiana: geology, fossils, native peoples, history, current artists. It's like five museums in one place. They had an exhibit on Subversive Knitting. It was small, but intriguing. I never saw anything like this at my grandmother's house!

I was also awed by the tiny knitted sweaters of Althea Crome. They are amazing--not only tiny, but beautiful, witty, and clever. (Completely gratuitous link from her website, to a page of tiny dachshund figurines in tiny sweaters--this is insane! I think it is in Dutch, but teckel means dachshund, as it does in German. No, they aren't called dachshunds in German.) Here I am, peering at the minute and wishing for a magnifying glass:


I first read about her work in Bloom Magazine. Yes, Bloomington has its own magazine (not to be confused with the queer magazine from New York, which happens to have the same name.) Even cooler, it is available free at local shops and restaurants. You can also subscribe, in case you live in a less cool place and can't get it in your local stores. They have been in print for a year and just keep putting out longer issues with more interesting people and topics. The photos alone are enough reason to look for it. One photo series followed the Farmer's Market throughout the seasons. I think I ought to frame these pictures and put them in my kitchen! Talk about food porn!

After admiring the museum exhibits, we refreshed ourselves with snacks in the Riverside Cafe, right there in the museum. The view was almost as nice as the exhibits:


We went to see a movie about dolphins and whales at the IMAX theater. It was lovely, but just a little too soothing for tired tourists. Yawn!

We briefly toured Circle Center mall, amazingly failing to buy anything. Perhaps because our arms and luggage were full and our wallets were empty? We had an early dinner at the Spaghetti Factory, since the food available in bus stations is apparently even more limited than that found in airports. Yes, it is hard to imagine, but bus travel was reported to be EVEN LESS efficient, convenient, and comfortable than air travel. So it was with some trepidation that we delivered our guests to their waiting motor coach.


But all was well, and they made it home safely some 18 hours later (without starving, but only because they brought food with them.) We miss them already! Who will be the next to stay in our guest room? Derek's mom was planning to visit, but her husband broke his foot. This injury may delay their visit. Maybe Emilie's parents will be next? Stay tuned . . .

Inaugurating the guest room

Yes, we finally had guests in our guest room!


We put the finishing touches on the room:


And on the dog. Dharma put on her fanciest collar for our guests. She also had a bath, with ti tree oil shampoo. We weren't able to take any pictures of that, because we were both wet and had our hands full. How can one little dog be so wiggly?


Our guests arrived Tuesday evening to a meal of lasagna, salad, and bread from my favorite restaurant, The Bakehouse. I finally used my grandmother's dishes. They didn't look too grim, especially with food on them:

The tiny mysterious plates made excellent little dishes for holding olive oil for dipping our bread. Much healthier than butter pats!

The next day, we took our guests to the local restaurant, The Runcible Spoon. The name comes from the poem by Edward Lear The Owl and the Pussycat. A runcible spoon is a tasting spoon, with one big spoon for stirring and on the other end, a small spoon for tasting. They were more popular before the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, I guess. This is a medieval French word. Other proposed definitions include a folding spoon, a wooden spork, a three-tined pickle fork, or a slotted ladle. But this food historian prefers the tasting spoon, since she has actually seen the term in a medieval cook book. (Sorry, Edward Lear didn't make it up, even though he does like made-up words almost as much as Lewis Carrol.)

It was a lovely day and we had breakfast outside at the Runcible Spoon. Then we shopped all over downtown, including Yarns Unlimited, Howard's Bookstore, and Caveat Emptor (a used bookstore whose name is Latin for "Let the Buyer Beware." Ominous, isn't it?) We took our yarn to the Eastside branch of the The Bakehouse and ate too much and knitted and crocheted. I worked on this hat:


Then we did what all good vacationers should do every day. We took a nap.

Since this was Naplover's birthday, we took her to the fancy food but casual dress Scholar's Inn Restaurant and Wine Bar. (We're really doing our part to support local business!) It was lovely, especially the chocolate fondue dessert. Then we watched one of my favorite movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark. You'd think the loose interpretation of history would bother me, but I love this movie. When I was little, I thought that Indiana Jones was based on my dad. Really. He was a history teacher in a big brick building, he wore a tweedy blazer with leather patches on the elbows, and all his female students were in love with him. He was fearless around spiders. He even worked on an archeological site during the summers, the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. So, allowing for a little artistic license, he was clearly the basis for Indiana Jones. I even think he looks a little bit like Harrison Ford. Those royalty checks should be coming in any time, now.

My Daddy, being a good sport and wearing the hat we got him on vacation. (With my mom, who is showing great suprise that the cruise line decorated their room with birthday decorations.)

Thursday, we got together with my good friend TammyJo for lunch, then did much the same sort of thing: eat, talk, nap, knit and crochet. Boy, do we know how to have fun, or what? I worked on this scarf:


We let Naplover's daughter pick where to eat dinner. She knew right where she wanted to go. She had spotted the signs from the highway: steak AND sushi. What more could you want? So, we went to Domo (which I think is just an intensifier in Japanese, meaning something like "very much"), a local Japanese restaurant, where the chefs cook dinner at your table, juggle knives, and make bad jokes. And we had steak and sushi. Yum. No raw fish for me, though. I think Indiana is just a little too far away from the ocean for the raw fish thing to be a good idea. If I were in Japan, it might be a different matter. Actually, sushi isn't really about raw fish. Click here for way more than you ever wanted to know about that subject.

More about their visit (and the awesome knitting display at the Indiana State Museum) in the next post.

Paging Martha Stewart

We're having a lot of fun fixing up the guest room and getting ready for Naplover and Bean to visit. Unfortunately, I am only heterozygous for the Martha Steward gene--I like arranging things and making them look pretty, but I am not so big on cleaning. So, while I arrange the orchids, the dust bunnies are roaming freely under the furniture (Sorry, no picture of the dust bunnies, they're kind of shy.)

We have a slightly Japanese theme going on, but we didn't feel like we could justify a new set of bedding when we have three complete sets for this bed alone! (We don't really have any sets of bedding for our own bed, the queen-sized one.) So, unless Target has a nice bed-in-a-bag (or, even cuter, the WHOLE room-in-a-bag, with curtains and sometimes even little throw pillows) on sale sometime soon, this is what the bed will look like.



We discovered that we have an amazing quantity of Japanese (or at least Orientalist) knick-knacks.

Despite four college degrees between us, it still took us over an hour to put up the blinds. The instructions were pretty poor, and they were only in English, so we couldn't even check the other languages for clarification (Does anyone else do this? Sometimes the German or French instructions have DIFFERENT mistakes, so you can glean more information from them. I bet if I could read Japanese many directions would become much clearer.) I think these directions were written in Lolcatese, the language of the Laughing Out Loud Cats. I am sure the cats would have been laughing if they could have seen us, especially when Derek fell off the ladder (he's fine, and he even managed to avoid falling on the blinds.) Stupid humans. Cat's are so much more coordinated!

Once we moved all of the junk out and still-full boxes out of the room, we realized it looked a little bare. Since priceless Japanese art was not in the budget, we tried to improvise some wall decorations.



These two "prints" are actually framed furoshikis, which wrapped up gifts that my brother and his sweet Japanese American girlfriend sent us. Here is a picture of the two of them:

Then I went to the local scrapbooking store, Bloomin' Scrapbooks, to look for pretty paper. (Unfortunately, the Bloomingtonaut was not able to join me in my quest, since she is slaving away on the last few tiny revisions to her dissertation. Hurray for the Doctors Bloomingtonaut!) Here is what I found, for less than a dollar each:

All "fixed" (but a little confused!)

We took Dharma in to the vet on June 3 for her ovariohysterectomy surgery (more commonly known as "getting her fixed"). There are several reasons for getting Dharma fixed. (1) As cute as she is, one is certainly enough and we don't need any more little Dharmas running around the house and keeping us up at night (Dharma does that just fine, thank you!). (2) Dharma's breeder requires it, which is a pretty common practice with purebred puppies. (3) But perhaps most importantly, getting your puppy fixed greatly reduces their chances of getting reproductive system related cancers (i.e. ovarian, uterine, and breast cancer -- or testicular cancer, if you have a boy dog). In fact, if you have your dog fixed before her first heat cycle (unfortunately, as many of you will recall, Dharma beat us to the punch), it reduces their chance of developing these types of cancer to virtually zero.

The surgery was done on Tuesday, and Dharma had to stay the night at the vet's office for observation and to make sure she was doing okay. Emilie was able to pick Dharma up on Wednesday afternoon and bring her home. She only had two stitches, and they were right next to her bellybutton, so the scar will hardly be noticeable when she is wearing a bikini. Dharma was on some pain medication and was supposed to be taking things easy for a while (you know, no running, no jumping on the couch, etc., all of which is simply impossible for a dachshund to avoid!). Emilie then took Dharma back to the vet today (a week later) to have her stitches removed. Dharma now has a clean bill of health and is free to do whatever she wants.

Unfortunately, in the meantime between having her surgery and getting her stitches removed, Dharma developed a "very delicate condition." More specifically, she thought she was pregnant! Her mammary glands were all swollen, she had morning sickness, and she started lactating. We called the vet, who assured us that this was not an uncommon occurrence after getting a puppy fixed (and I use my highly trained skills of lawyer-speak here to parse his language to indicate that while this is not "uncommon," it is also not "common"). Then, about a day later, she got very confused and assumed that all of her toys were little babies! She took her toys and placed them very carefully in a nest (also known as the pile of dirty clothes in the closet).

Note "buckwheat" (the red thing at the top of the picture) and her new lambskin teddy bear (at the left side of the picture) carefully placed in our pile of dirty clothes while Dharma watches over them. We are still missing one of her toys and assume it is buried in there somewhere.

Dharma would guard her "babies" day and night, mostly refusing to eat or go outside to potty for fear of letting her babies get out of her sight. She would even try to help her babies nurse by placing them against her stomach. After about a day, apparently the babies were a little more developed, because she would carefully move them out to the couch during the day. Oddly, she eventually got to the point where she apparently figured the babies would want to play, so she would bring them out and drop them at our feet. We would throw her "babies" across the room and she would chase after them and bring them back for us to do it again. So, now we're not sure if she was having moments of lucidity and knew these things were toys, or perhaps she just wouldn't have been a very good mother and enjoyed watching her babies be thrown across the room.

But as if that weren't enough, we had friends over to hang out and have snacks on Saturday evening. And the Bloomingtonauts brought Dharma some treats. They gave her some tasty little green chewy bones that are all healthy because they came from Bloomingfoods, the local organic cooperative. But they also brought Dharma a nice toy bone that squeaks. Dharma loves her new toy so much it has become her favorite.

Dharma showing off her new toy.

In fact, she loved her new bone so much she actually adopted it (i.e. she added it to her litter, placed it in the dirty clothes with the other toys, and started taking care of it like it was her own baby).

Dharma in her nest with her babies -- pink ball up at the top of the picture (which Dharma is confused by since it is obviously bald), her lambskin teddy on the left, and her recent adoption (which we have nicknamed "little red")

Dharma still will hardly let her new toy out of her sight. Here she is actually using it as a pillow so she can keep it close.

Thanks soooo much Bloomingtonauts for giving Dharma one more mouth to feed!

(Incidentally, the Bloomingtonauts kick off our summer parade of visitors and guests at our house. Next week Naplover arrives to stay for a few days, along with Bean. Later in the summer we are expecting a return visit from one of the Bloomingtonauts, as well as visits from both our parents.)

A birthday party!

(Sorry, faithful readers, that we've been a little slow updating our blog.)

Dharma celebrated her first birthday on May 26! It was such a momentous occasion that Derek actually stayed home from work that day to celebrate. (Oh, and it was also Memorial Day.) We're pretty sure Dharma didn't really understand that she was now a year old and got to start eating the big girl food (well, okay, maybe "big girl" is a bit of a stretch since she is less than 10 lbs., but she did get to start on the adult dog food).

To help celebrate, Emilie made Dharma a "pupcake" which consisted of a few treats in the bottom of a foil cupcake wrapper with some peanut butter Kong Stuff on top. Dharma really enjoyed it, but it was pretty rich so she would only take a few bites at a time.


We also got Dharma a small bag of presents, which she got to open herself.


Including a nice new plush bone...


...which she promptly "buried" in the couch for later enjoyment.


She also got a cute little frilly collar...


...which can also be worn as a tutu! (Dharma was really not too sure about the whole tutu idea -- I think she is asking Emilie "Do I have to?")


She got a lamb-skin teddy bear, which has become one of her favorite friends (and notice that she is still wearing the tutu).


And a bag of pumpkin cookies (from Bloomington's London Dog pet boutique)...


...which she promptly munched down on.


(Gee, do you think our dog is maybe just a little bit spoiled?!?!)