Hello! Happy Monday! I hope your weekend went swimmingly.

I’ll admit that I’m a little behind on updates. I didn’t have a chance to write about this last week because during my usual post-writing time, I was careening through town with a wounded beast as cargo.

Try to be a little more dramatic, Brody. Seriously.

To backtrack a little, last Thursday evening Justin and I decided to cut Brody’s nails since they were starting to toe the line between claws and talons.

Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but he had a vet appointment the next day and we didn’t want to run the risk of getting yelled at for neglecting poor, defenseless B$.

So we were cutting them in the usual fashion, i.e. I had B in a headlock while Justin cut his nails just in case B decided to get wily and make a run for it. B was doing great and then, to our horror, we cut a little too low and his nail started to bleed. He didn’t seem bothered by it in the least, something for which we were extremely grateful, but man, did it get aggressive.

B thought it was hilarious that we had his foot wrapped in a towel and kept trying to bite it, and he thought it was even funnier when he made a break for it and we chased him through the house. This would have been fine-normal, even-were it not for his bleeding appendage. It looked like a flippin’ murder scene in there. Justin felt horrible but was already late for work so he had to go, which left me and B to fend for ourselves.

I remembered reading about a product that is sold at pet supply stores for just such an occasion, so I weighed my options and decided that the plastic floor of my car would be easier to clean than the entirety of our house so B and I took a field trip to Petco for some first aid products and a big ol’ chew toy for B. The bleeding stopped and I briefly considered calling a disaster relief cleanup crew to tackle the house and car before bucking up and handling it myself. B wasn’t fazed by any of this and seemed pumped with his new chew toy, so after a reassuring text to Justin to let him know everything was okay, we moved past it.

But then B had to go to the vet the next day and that’s where the mess really hit the fan. In addition to a newly acquired bum toe, poor B also has a bump on his side that we wanted checked out, and according to Justin, B was horrified that the vet wanted to see it. B didn’t behave like the gentleman we all know and love-apparently he hollered…a lot-but the vet forgave him for his hollering, he forgave her for having the gall to check him out and the vet thinks the bump is harmless. Everybody wins!

It was a stressful way for B to cap off the week. We decided that he deserved an adventure for persevering through those harrowing days so we woke up early on Sunday to go for a hike so that he could go screaming through the woods and blow off some steam.

And run screaming he did.

He couldn’t have been happier.

After our hike I made some blueberry Greek yogurt pancakes (which are delicious, give ‘em a shot-recipe here)

and cracked open a photography book that I recently ordered from Amazon.

via

The owner’s manual that came with our camera just wasn’t cutting it for me and I know I’m not using the camera to its full potential (or even close to its full potential, for that matter). I don’t see myself signing up for a photography course within the next few weeks and I would like to be able to take some nice shots when we go on vacation next month, so I picked up this book in hopes that it will shed some light on the topic for me in the meantime. I’ll let you know how it goes.

After maxing out Brody and Justin’s patience quota by taking hundreds of unflattering candids, I decided it was time for a baking break. I tried to re-create some peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies that I made a while back that came out great, despite being on the lighter side of the butter spectrum, but this batch turned out…less great.

Each baking sheet of cookies that came out of the oven looked less edible than the one before it. That picture doesn’t even do them justice, they’re worse in person. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all. That’s what I get for not writing down the recipe the first time!

Any fun stories from the weekend? Baking disasters? Vacation tales? Tales of unbridled joy at the mini Spice Girls reunion on the closing ceremonies of the Olympics?