We went there...

We brought home Macy from the animal shelter yesterday. We've been casually looking for a second dog for about a month now, and actually went to look at a border collie yesterday, but Macy's little melt-your-heart eyes just had me smitten. She's about one year, a shepherd mix (who can say no to shepherds?!), a little bigger than Lily, and quite the girly-girl. We know she was owned (and apparently she slept on the bed - we learned that quickly after she jumped up twice and got all comfortable!), but not much more than that. After we interacted with her for awhile outside, we went home and brought Lily to the shelter. No growling, just sniffing and curiosity. Much better than a lot of other dogs upon first meeting.

Macy has kennel cough right now, so we're trying to keep her calm and trying to get her to eat a little (she's thin as can be!). Lily has had a couple of territory issues with her inside the house, resulting in some fights, but we're keeping an eye on them and they are so far really good outside by themselves.

Eric's been good about introducing them the right way (we stood outside in the rain last night for 20 minutes in the backyard, too!), and making sure we don't show favor to one over the other (although, he's been getting on to me when I try and cuddle with little Mace with Lily around ;). We're crossing our fingers that things continue to get better and work out!

Never Doubt a Lily Dog...

...Because she'll just be capable of doing stuff like this:

It was a little cooler today so I put Lily's bed outside on the porch in her doghouse (thankfully, her old, getting-kinda-gross bed) since we're still waiting on our porch heater to get here. That is what we come home to. Bye bye bed. And faucet insulator caps. And foam piping on the air conditioner (for the 2nd time with a 2nd fence around it).

You can't get mad at the girl because what else is she supposed to do while we're gone 10 hours for 5 days out of the week? Oh, if only she knew how many thousands of dollars we've already spent on things for her... *sigh*

Getting Started on Gardening

For the past few months, Eric & I have been learning to compost after I took a short class from one of the City's programs. After hearing on the news awhile back about how great compost is for growing plants, I was curious, and now I'm hooked. We plan on having a big garden in the spring, so we are starting to prep and research in hopes of great crops! My goal is to have at least 50% of our food come from our garden - I have plans for lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and much more, and I plan to learn how to can and freeze at the same time. I didn't have much luck with containers the past two years, but I'm aiming to improve those odds as well. (Everyone says containers are harder anyways, right?!)

I'm still in the beginning stages of getting things planned out (library books have been borrowed for studying during the drive for Thanksgiving!), but I've learned a lot so far. I've been bookmarking websites left and right (thanks to Pinterest, who loves to take up at least an hour of my day), and just last week discovered smartgardener.com Can you say AWESOME?! So here's our yard space right now that we'll be working with (I still have to check into how much sunlight this side of the house gets though). You can see our compost bin back there, too!

And here's part of what I've been working on through Smart Gardener:

You lay out your garden (we're doing raised beds since our ground is mostly clay), and then it calculates how many people you want to feed and your location and gives you recommended plants, recommended placement of plants, a to-do list by week on when to plant, and more. I was super impressed.

So between now and about the end of February, we'll be working on plans to follow through with this...stay tuned!