HOW is it already the end of March?!?!?! This year is flying by!

I dislike April fool's day - I always fall for at least one thing during the day (usually several)....here's hoping I'm not an April fool this year....

It does make it easy to remember my cousin's birthday. Happy Birthday Harriet!!!

I'm so proud of Kevin. He got a letter in the mail that he's been selected for a scholarship! He didn't even apply for it so we guess that one of his professors must have recommended him for it.

The letter also says there will be a reception for scholarship recipients which means there may be an excuse to dress up and go out in our future *yay!*


unrelated, but also happy news. Smokey is finally getting back into his lazy dog routine, even playing with his toys. He has been so fixated on Rocky (the bird) that its good to see him getting back to normal. He still stares at Rocky sometimes but nothing like how he was over the weekend, he'll even leave his staring post to sit in my lap :) he's big to be a lapdog but we make it work.....

Meet Rocky

We still have the bird. We had an alert put up on our neighborhood's website but haven't gotten any responses. I haven't seen any fliers or heard about anyone missing a bird. The poor thing might not even be from our neighborhood, since it can fly there is really no telling where it came from - or how long it was out, when we got it some food it just ate and ate. So, it looks like we're now bird owners.

We didn't want to keep calling it "the bird", so we decided to name it. We got lots of name recommendations - including Bandit so we'd own Smokey and the Bandit, but we decided to name it Shamrock (since it found us on St. Patrick's day) and call it "Rocky."

Its been a tough weekend for Smokey - he just stares at Rocky constantly, and we have to reprimand him when he tries to jump at the bird. Poor things, they are stressing each other out. This photo is what Smokey has looked like for a good part of the weekend - sitting and staring at the bird, looks like Sylvester with Tweety bird. They are both eating, which we take as a good sign, but we'll have more work to do with Smokey to get him used to not being the only pet in the house.

New Friend

Kevin made a new friend today - a parakeet showed up in our yard! Thankfully Smokey was inside the house when the bird showed up.

Its very domesticated and a 'people-bird' because it came right up to Kevin and wanted to go into the house.

We'll have to try to track down the owners, but for now we have a bird at the house, and lucky for me - a lady at work has a cage that I can borrow and since she has parakeets she's able to tell me exactly what we need to feed it and keep it healthy until we can find the owners..

A neighbor told Kevin he should tell me its a St Patrick's day gift, it is green, and pretty cute.

Spring Break

Kevin is on spring break and I’m on weekend. Despite what people think, I do NOT get spring break off even though I work at a university. I do hope that it will be quieter at work next week so we can finish up some of the work that’s piling up on our office desks.

I know that Kevin has been looking forward to the break. He’ll still be working on school but won’t have to attend class and can just continue reading all of the books he has to read. Thank goodness I do work for a university – we’ve been making great use of the library to get some of the books he needs.

We’re kicking off his spring break by smoking a pork shoulder today. He got up early and started the coals – I didn’t even hear him get up! And then once the coals were ready we put the meat on. It’ll taste good I hope – I’m a bit skeptical of how much mustard went into the rub. I hate mustard and the smell of it putting on the rub nearly made me gag.

Random thoughts:

• I can’t believe DST starts this weekend, I don’t like leaving for work in the dark….here’s hoping I get used to the time change quickly, you wouldn’t think one hour would make that much of a difference, but it sure does.
• Kevin and Smokey have re-synced their haircut schedule. Its hilarious that both my boys get their haircuts on the same day, but it makes it easier to remember when they went
  

Note: The link was provided by CSN stores, but the thoughts are all my own.

Kevin is becoming quite the Mr Fix-it. He fixed our lawnmower this week! We couldn't get it to start a few weeks ago and he was going to take it to the shop but didn't want to get charged a bunch of money for them to do something simple. He worked on it and diagnosed the problem, and with the help of videos (thank you YouTube!) was able to replace the ignition coil. We were in disbelief when it started up. I'm so proud of him.

I need to take a photo of the garage, we worked on organizing it last weekend and he got a pegboard to organize his tools. It is so nice to be able to easily grab whatever tool you need....Our garage is starting to look like a little shop.

We get to spend this weekend with my brother and sis-in-law. I am so happy they're back from Nicaragua, it has been so strange not to get to see them both. We had seafood last night and today's plans are Indian food and a Rockets game!