Early Morning Visitor

First there was the fox party in our backyard and then this morning I looked out the window to see this little girl.


Although I was thrilled to have my camera still sitting in the master bathroom (from the fox party a few days ago) I was sad that I didn't have a long enough lens to really capture a good picture. The thrill only lasted a few minutes.

and then it was time to say goodbye as she trotted down the driveway . . .

Addicted to Stress

Sometimes I think that maybe I must be addicted to stress. I can’t seem to get away from it and none of the stress in my life hasn’t been put there by me so I can’t really complain . . . about the stress. But I can, however, complain about the enormous amount of pain I’ve been in lately. Yesterday was a particularly bad day and it was bad enough to motivate me to call for help first thing this morning. I could sense that things were getting worse instead of better and I am in need of a fix and fast. So I called to make an appointment with a physical therapist and luckily got in right away. She only had to put two fingers on my upper back (near my neck) to say “Holy cow, you’re tight” and she told me that I most definitely carry all my stress in my shoulders. Great, now it’s confirmed that stress is causing me all my problems and aside from the physical therapy to fix the muscles, I just wish I could figure out how to eliminate some of the stress from my life. But that’s a puzzle that won’t be solved here tonight. Instead I will amuse myself with the rest of the story . . .

Karlo has been feeling bad for me and I’m sure he’s as thrilled about this situation as I am. Poor Karlo is in perfect health and shape and yet he is missing out on our fun activities because of me. I think that is almost a worse position to be in. How frustrating that must be. I don’t want to be responsible for not only me missing out on our activities, but him as well. So I went ahead and booked our motorcycle weekend get-away. Come Hell or high water I will figure out a way to do this (lots of pain killers I’m sure). And Karlo seems to be doing his best to help out too. He offers me massages and today he seemed to be really taking special care of me. I was so impressed with him and his driving on the way home from work. I’ve told him over and over that his driving stresses me out and I’ve begged him to take it easy - FOR ME. But that usually goes upon deaf ears and that frustration just stresses me more. But suddenly he seemed to be driving slower and taking it easy. I sat there in the passenger seat feeling my shoulders lowering and the tension releasing. The fact that Karlo FINALLY seemed to care made me feel sooooo good.

THEN we got within 5 miles from the house and he makes the biggest mistake ever. He says, “Boy, this air conditioner is really dogging the car.” OMG, did he ever blow it. And here I thought that he was just caring about me. He had no choice but to drive the way he was driving. There goes his brownie points, down the drain.

Weekend Recap

What a busy and fun day Saturday was. We scrambled around in the morning getting ready for the gallery opening. After we got the power on, signs up, flag hung, accessories and last minute things brought out we were ready to roll. That’s when Karlo and I started our argument as to what he was going to do for the next four hours. Now the day before we had a conversation where I told him that I was so looking forward to the gallery open hours because it was going to give us a chance to just kick back, relax, hang out, and do nothing (with no guilt). I told him that I wanted us to set aside those hours to not worry about, or worse yet, do any house chores. He never even commented on these wishes of mine and silly me . . . I thought he was agreeing, but in reality he wasn’t even listening to a word I said. So at 10 o’clock when he insists that he can’t ‘waste four hours sitting around’ and he wanted to get started staining the spindles on the deck, I wanted to choke him. Asking him to grab a book and a lawn chair and just hang around with me was apparently asking too much. But I won the battle and he reluctantly dragged a chair out and we ended up having the most lovely four hours.

We had a hour before our first visitor and during that time we both read a little, and talked, and brainstormed crafty ideas, and planned our next vacation. I even had WiFi in the shack so we could surf a little. It was great. Then we threw the horse shoes for a while until our first guests arrived. We visited and had fun until the next guests arrived. Before we knew it, we were busy non-stop visiting with friends for the next three hours and it was time to close up shop and fly down to Haddam for the family get-together. I wanted to cruise down in this . . .

But instead we took the motorcycle and the ride down was beautiful. The party was a blast. I was very delinquent taking pictures because I was too busy feeding my face, playing volleyball, and catching up with my family. Here’s the only picture I took of my new little buddy.


It was the perfect day. And THANK YOU Penni for sending us home with a week’s worth of delicious food! Yummy. We took off from Haddam after 6 PM and set the GPS for home. It took us on a completely new route that was spectacular. Almost the entire route was uncharted roads for me and it was so scenic the whole way. I had a ball on the back of the bike.

Sunday was much more low key, mostly due to the tremendous amount of pain I’m in due to a pinched nerve in my back. This has been going on now for over a week and I’m at wits end. I tried to force myself to have a normal day by starting with yoga, but that unfortunately didn’t go so well. I couldn't really do it and it brought me to uncontrollable sobbing - not only due to the pain, but due to the fact that this is happening to me at the beginning of the summer. Why is this happening? I hate it. Then I forced myself to drive my own motorcycle for a lovely 30 mile loop. I did this to test the waters to see if there’s any chance in the world that we can take our 2 day weekend motorcycle tour that we had planned for my birthday. Jury is still out on that one and we are quickly running out of days to make a decision.

I did a lot of lounging around and feeling sorry for myself. The most excitement of the day was watching Cooper get his first bath. Peanut got one too and they were both good sports. I think they really enjoyed the cool and refreshing dunk in the water. Oh, and the next most exciting thing that happened was buying a bocce set and a badminton net for the next gallery opening. Hope you can make it!

Green Valley Arts Gallery Openings

Getting ready for the opening of the gallery for this season. I'll have the 'shack' open to the public one Saturday per month from June to September (maybe even October too). I've been very busy getting the place ready. Not only did we make those little 'shack improvements,' but I've been busy bringing in artwork from other local artists and getting it all displayed. The shack is actually starting too look like a real gallery now thanks to the additions from 'real' artists. I'm very excited to be displaying and selling these new pieces and I hope you have a chance this summer to come and check it out.

Please note that tomorrow's opening is going to be low key. I have to close up shop ASAP to get to my niece and nephew's graduation party. I still can not believe that Nicole is going to high school next year and John will be off to college. How did this happen so quickly? My nephew will be Husky . . . and practically my neighbor in September. How exciting.

So anyway, the gallery will be open for business tomorrow, but all the other dates will be more of a party. We are hoping to have guests not only see the gallery, but also pack coolers, bring chairs, and spend the day visiting. We have horse shoes now and with any luck we'll add the bocce and ladder toss games to the yard. Really looking forward to seeing friends over the course of the next 3 months . . .

Fox Party

There was a fox party at our house last night. Up until then, over the course of the past 3 years I only spotted one red fox in our backyard. But last night we had a half dozen of them running all over the place all evening long. They would come darting out of the woods, run around, and then go back into the woods in the same spot. You could hear them ‘barking’ (for a lack of a better term) all night. There was one baby fox and a few more adults and we marveled as we watched them romping about.

Lisa was over (with her camera) and my camera was not more than 15 feet away most of the evening and yet neither of us took any pictures. My excuse was that I didn’t have a long enough lens to get any good pictures. Lisa's dog Molly was on alert. She sat and stared toward the backyard for hours just waiting for another sighting so she could bark at them. Peanut couldn't be bothered with the racket, but Cooper got all excited and ran around our deck trying to figure out what the commotion was about. I'm not sure what was more amusing, watching the foxes or watching the dogs watch the foxes.

This morning, as I was getting dressed, I happened to look out the window and there were the foxes again. Baby and mommy . . . running all over the yard. They jumped into one of the horseshoe pit sand boxes, rolled on their backs and had a grand ole time. They went from one sand box to the next. That was it, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran downstairs to get my camera, ran back up, shot a picture . . . and the stupid flash went off completely wrecking the picture. Then the foxes ran onto the slope near the gallery, making it impossible to get a good shot. That combined with the facts that I still didn’t have the right lens on the camera and I was in danger of being late for work made me give up. What I should have had was a video camera. Oh well. Maybe they will be back tonight.

Footnote: The photo above is not my own. It's borrowed from the internet.

Shack Improvements

I figured these improvements didn't really fall under the categories of "home improvements" so I saved them for a blog posting all their own . . .

I have been brainstorming all sorts of inexpensive solutions to covering the ugly sub-floor in the Love Shack. You name it, I thought of it, but what I settled on I never dreamed up even with my crazy imagination. I saw that good ole Job Lots was selling commercial carpet tiles for $2 each. We would only need 56 to completely cover the entire shack wall to wall, and that sounded like an incredible bargain. So we ran down to the nearest Job Lots to scoop them up, but what do think happened when we got there? Their supply was low and there wasn’t more than 5 or 6 of the same color or pattern. Karlo instantly gave up and wanted to leave. Not so fast! There has to be a way to make this work. Karlo, stood there in the isle, completely losing his patience with me and shaking his head in disapproval. He told me that I’m nuts as I painstakingly removed every single piece of carpet from the shelves and built piles of lights versus darks, and patterns versus non patterns. The whole time Karlo is complaining that this idea is ‘gypsy’ (as he always calls things that he doesn’t like). But I didn’t listen to him. I was convinced this would work and I took the bold chance at piling 56 of these crazy tiles into our carriage. Off we went . . .

We got back home to the Love Shack and got to work. Well, I guess you could say I worked. I laid out 6 or 8 tiles in my preference of pattern combinations and then I proceeded to lay down on them and rest as Karlo worked on measuring and cutting. Before too long I had 3 or 4 naps and we were done. I personally love it. Others may think I’m crazy, but come on, it is an art gallery after all. Karlo later admitted that it was cool. And that made my day :-)


I got a couple other things in preparation for the first opening this season (more on that real soon). First I needed a little flag outside the door to state that the shack is indeed 'open for business.'


And in addition to that, we bought a slightly larger OPEN sign for the roadside. Karlo wanted to test out where he would hang it and I snapped a picture of his little parade down the driveway. Too cute.

More Random Home Improvements

I’ve been wanting one of these big deck umbrellas for quite sometime and we finally got one. Of course we haven’t gotten much use out of it yet. Remember that long run of consecutively sunless days? Well that was immediately after us buying that umbrella! But we broke the sunless streak this weekend and we actually got to lounge under it for a while. It was blissful.

The next home improvement project that I want to document is a little hard to show so here is my best shot . . .

A few weeks ago our friend Nancy (previous owner of our house) came over for a visit. It was a particularly hot day and when I asked her what I could serve her she said, “Oh no trouble, all I want is a ice water.” Great, all she wants is something that I can’t give her! So I thought it appropriate to give her hell for the fact that we have this crazy expensive Sub Zero fridge that refuses to make an ice cube. And I know what you’re thinking . . . get some ice cube trays, but that doesn’t work so good when you have freezer that is a drawer that needs to be pushed closed. The water would be everywhere by the time the door shut. So the timing was perfect. Nancy called her husband and he was able to give us some advice. Apparently this high-end fridge acted up on him too, but a little trick with the hairdryer seemed to fix the problem. Finally, we have ice again. This was a very exciting event. So exciting, in fact, that we celebrated with some frozen blueberry smoothies (totally should have taken a picture of those, but we sucked them down too fast to even think about finding the camera). They were delicious and I’m now addicted to the idea of having ice cubes in the house.

And on the subject of over-priced high end items that don’t work for beans . . . Every ceiling fan in the house is a Casablanca with some impossibly difficult control. It literally takes us 10 minutes to figure out how to change a speed or reverse a direction and Heaven forbid we have an electrical storm. All the fans in the house freak out, spin out of control, lights come on and then the control fries and needs repair. Our patience with these fans have truly been tested. When we discovered that our bedroom fan was stuck in one speed–High (which is completely unacceptable) we decided to give up on it. Not to mention the darn thing was butt ugly and I hated it.

So we ditched the expensive Casablanca and it’s fancy control and got a modern and stylish Home Depot model. It has a simple ON/OFF switch (what a concept), a light that only comes on when we ask it to and all three speeds work. Aaaaaahhhhhh, so much stress will be relieved and we’ve been sleeping like babies ever since installing it. Sweet dreams.

Home Improvement Projects

Picking up where I left off in my last post . . . We did manage to get a few things done while I suffered through my miserable sinus infection. I thought maybe the sight of flowers instead of weeds in our big wooden container would make me feel better so I finally scraped away the weeds and inserted these. Much better, I must say.

We also decided it was time to install the horse shoe stuff that we bought last year. It took us 6 months to decide where to put it in the yard, but we finally settled on setting it up near the fire pit. We haven’t actually thrown any horse shoes yet, but eventually we’ll get around to testing it out. For now I just like to look at the pretty sand boxes that Karlo made.



It’s also that time of the year to clean out and set up our little outdoor pond - no, not the big one, my tiny little goldfish pond. It’s been a frustrating ordeal trying to buy the fish that go into it. We drove all over the place with no luck. In the meantime we were at a little festival in Eastford where Karlo spotted the perfect fish for me. He was so pleased with himself that he found me a fish that I can’t kill.

What he didn’t know was that within 2 minutes of him letting me hold it (while he drilled the hole into the dock post) that I would accidentally drop the bottom piece right off the dock and into the water. Thirty minutes of trying to locate it and fish it out of the pond until we finally gave up and found a broom handle to hang it off of. Something that was supposed to make me so happy made me so upset for being such a ding dong. But now that he’s up and flying I do get a kick out of watching him. Especially given the fact that I have since found my ‘real’ fish and they are now happily swimming in the little pond. I won’t torture you with those bad pictures again.

Catching Up

Boy, it seems like forever since my last non-vacation related blog post. It’s going to take me a while to get back into the swing of talking about nothing. So let’s see, what have I’ve been doing since we got home . . . Oh, that’s right, not much of anything due to the fact that I got hit with some God-awful plague two days after returning home. The plague turned into a nasty sinus infection and I’m just barely getting over hit. It’s been terrible. Two weekends in a row I was just about completely out of commission. I missed a couple of days of work and just slept and slept. I really do hate being sick because I hate sitting still. uuuugh.

The worst part is that I went from being in really good shape to doing no exercise what-so-ever. My idea of ‘exercise’ for the past two weeks was walking up the stairs. I just can’t even explain how completely exhausted I’ve been. I would get winded walking from one room to the next. And the thought of all my hard work with P90X and all that biking just going down the drain made me want to cry. Today was my first taste of getting back into the groove of my life. We took our typical after work 1 hour hike and although I did feel out of shape, I made it through and I can feel the strength in my legs. I just need to work on getting my cardio back, but hopefully that will come back quickly.

The dogs survived us being away quite nicely. I am so thrilled that Cooper fell right into the free-feeding routine. This was my biggest fear of getting another dog. What if we were not able to continue with our free-feeding? That would have completely upset our applecart. But good ole Coop didn’t let us down. He had a check up at the vet last week and he weighed exactly the same weight as when we got him. Such a good boy. He didn’t under or over eat in our absence.

I haven’t really accomplished much around here in two weeks, but Karlo has been busy with some projects around the house. I will take some pictures and continue this report shortly.

Our Final Day

Well today was our last day and we didn’t have an itinerary planned. There were plenty of options, but we settled on a boat ride and biking, of all things. I guess we didn’t get enough of that in Montenegro. We walked the 3+ miles round trip down to the harbor to see if we could hop a ferry to one of the many islands off shore. Unfortunately we found out that we missed the ferry and the next one was to leave in the afternoon. We still wanted to go so we walked back to the hotel, lounged by the beach for a couple of hours, and then made the 45 minute trek back down to the harbor. I guess the 6 miles of walking wasn’t enough exercise for us because when we arrived to the island of Lopud, the first thing we did was seek out bike rentals. We found some cute mountain bikes and I was thrilled. I thought we would take a nice leisurely ride for an hour. Wrong. It started out nice enough. I think I was smiling in some of these pictures.

But our hour quickly turned into 2 hours and our leisurely ride quickly turned into serious technical and steep mountain biking. It was a windy day and I was dressed really warm due to the fact that the boat ride was chilly. So here I am on our last leisurely day of vacation, sweating, panting, huffing and puffing, and pushing this stupid bike up a mountain for no good reason. uuugh. How did this happen? After another mile or so I protested and demanded we ride back down to the shore. Well the ride down was much worse because we weren’t dressed properly - no bike shorts and worse, no helmet. Remember the windy day? Well the wind was blowing from my left which is not ideal for my hair. My long bangs were completely covering my eyes and face as I’m trying to negotiate this rocky technical trail. Get me to pavement and I’ll be happy.

Well, I spoke to soon. We got to pavement all right, but then what do you think happened? We decided to bike to this lovely sandy beach. Doesn’t that sound nice?

What I didn’t know was that it was on the other side of the island and do you remember my description of Croatian islands? They are all just tips of much larger mountains that just happen to be poking out of the water. So we went from sea level up and over to the other side. Once again, huffing puffing, sweating and maybe a little cursing. And to think I was so missing the biking. uuuugh. We found the beach, we waddled and breathed a sigh of relief.

Then we had to huff it back up and over to get back to the ferry landing. I was pooped. Good news was that I slept very good. Right up until 4 am when it was time to head to the airport for our 25.5 hours of traveling to get home.

And that completes my very long winded recap of our entire vacation. If you've been following along, thanks for sharing our journey with us. To see the complete sets of pictures (OK, not really the complete sets, but lots more) please follow these links: Montenegro Highlights & Dubrovnik Highlights. Or to watch all the pictures in movie form, click here for Montenegro and here for Dubrovnik.

Normal blogging will begin tomorrow . . .

Touring the Old Town of Dubrovnik

Today was our big day to go back to the Old Town of Dubrovnik and we were quite proud of ourselves for getting on the right buses and figuring out the whole public transportation thing – something that we are notoriously terrible at. The day was mostly overcast and we thought it best to do the highlight attraction right away, before the threat of rain. We bought our tickets to walk along the top of the wall that surrounds the city and started our day with that most incredible walk. I loved every minute of it. The views were incredible and that whole experience makes it to my grand list of “Cool Things To Do In a Lifetime.” It’s right up there with a gondola ride in Venice, a trip up the Eiffel Tower, etc.


The walk was supposed to take an hour, but it took us longer due to all of my picture taking. As it turned out the weather held out for us all day and I really enjoyed walking through the old city without all the big crowds of cruise ship tourists.

Isn’t if funny how we get annoyed by tourists when we ARE tourists? [insert cheesy tourists pictures here.]


We got back in the late afternoon and by the evening the rain finally couldn’t contain itself any longer. It started to pour just when Karlo decided he was hungry and wanted to go out. You can imagine the conversation where I’m whining and he’s calling me a whimp. Fine. I put my rain jacket on and off we went with our big hotel-issue umbrella. That was a nice touch in our room, but when I think about what we paid per night, they should have given us a dozen umbrellas. So we walked down to the strip in the heaviest of the rain. Once I got over the initial shock of getting completely soaked we actually had fun walking in the rain. The wind was strong and the waves were fun to watch as they crashed over the rocks. We looked like a scene out of movie, huddled together under one umbrella while walking in a downpour. We had the entire promenade to ourselves. We managed to find a restaurant that was still open - most closed due to the rain, and as soon as we sat down the rain stopped. Unreal.

We sat and lingered long enough for my pants to almost dry out (gotta love the high tech clothing) and by the time we started to walk back it was 8:45, prime time for the sky to get interesting. To my surprise the sky was looking amazing due to the dark clouds. And did I have my camera? Of course not. I wasn’t going to carry it in a downpour. I practically made us run all the way back to the hotel, but by the time we got there and got back outside it was too late to capture it on ‘film.’ Oh well.

Testing My Time Limits

After breakfast on the boat we said our final goodbyes and made our way to the hotel in Dubrovnik. It was a beautiful resort on the side of the hill overlooking the sea. We decided that today would be all about relaxing and spending time at the hotel. We got our bathing suits and books and lounged by the pool. I lasted exactly one hour (almost to the minute) before I could no longer sit still. So we changed our clothes and went for a long walk along the water’s edge. We waddled in the water, which was tricky due to all the rocks. There is almost no sand here in the Adriatic Sea and it’s such a shame to have such amazing water, but surrounded by rocks. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine my bony body laying on the rocks like the locals do!

We walked and walked until the sky completely cleared and we decided to go back to the hotel and sit by the beach this time (change of scenery for me). When we decided to do this Karlo’s reaction was, “This is exhausting” . . . because we had to change our clothes again. How funny. Doing nothing all day is really draining. Who knew changing your clothes would be so tiring?

So we changed back to our bathings suites (again) and lounged on the deck chairs by the ocean. You could almost set your watch to my attention span. You guessed it. I lasted one hour. It was really getting hot and the water looked so inviting. I was sick of laying around, but who was I kidding? My “swimming record” for this trip was about mid calf.

Time for another long walk . . . and before we knew it the evening was approaching. We got cleaned up and headed out in search of sunset pictures.

That turned out to be a dud, but we had fun taking pictures of each other on the beach . . .




. . . and had a really nice night of sitting by the water, strolling the promenade, eating dessert, and watching others dance. Yes, sadly all we did was watch rather than dance ourselves. Sort of disappointing because we chickened out. The other dancers were really good and we really enjoyed watching them without embarrassing ourselves. When we got back to our hotel there was live music right outside our window. It was “Romantic Sunday” as they named it and we went to bed with the beautiful sounds of a jazz saxophone playing love songs below our window. It was awesome. Not sure what was better, the music, the sounds of waves crashing, or the fact that you can sleep with your window wide open, no screens, and NO bugs anywhere.