2009 Jalisco Terrace House-hop and 2 of 6

We had our annual neighborhood house-hop on Saturday and as always, it was a late but very fun night.
Somebody said there were 32 of us. We started at 6:00pm and worked our way to four homes throughout the evening with ours being 3rd on the list. We usually offer up our place every other year as a host house. It's fun to have that many people over and seeing them enjoying our digs as Tammy and I don't do a lot of entertaining. Here's a set of photos from the party that I posted to my Flickr account.

I'm enjoying having a heated garage for a change but it comes at a price and I'm not just referring to the additional cost to heat it. Many of our side streets are full of slush from an 8-inch snowfall we had last week and that slush sticks to the underside of our cars where it eventually melts in the 40-degree temperature of the garage leaving lots of water on the floor. I was squeegeeing it out onto the driveway to be scooped up and thrown on our snowbanks but with the temps being in single digits as they were for most of last week the water quickly freezes to the driveway and that's not a good thing. Tammy had the idea to get a wet-vac from Sears and vacuum up the water to pour down the drain in our laundry tub bypassing the driveway altogether. Why didn't I think of that?

We finished panel 2 of 6 for our entertainment center over the weekend. I'm not so good at estimating how many hours of work are left to do on a piece. When I say we've got 10 hours left, I've probably more realistically got twice that. The sort of stained glass projects that Tammy and I do are typically much more labor-intensive than much of what you're likely to see at craft fairs and shops. It can be a slow process but we love the challenge.

Here's a closeup view of what a single panel looks like.  The 3rd of 6 panels is in the queue and ready for our attention.

For those who read here regularly, you know that Charlie is our puppy-mill dog. We didn't actually get him from a puppy-mill but we suspect that the person we got him from did. He's a nut, to put it mildly and we love him but he marches to his own beat and he's either slow or stubborn to understand when we don't like something he's doing. Lately, that something is trashing our Christmas tree. We've come home several times in the past week to find broken glass ornaments strewn throughout the house. Much of the time he'll chew the ornament to bits but it doesn't appear he's cut himself at all. The world is his chew toy.

I was putting dishes in the dishwasher this morning and for the first time ever I noticed Toby sniffing around trying to lick the plates. He's never done that before but I'm quite sure I know where he learned it.