Our *Temporary* New Addition

After we moved, we kicked around the idea of getting another dog or fostering one of the greyhounds that Rescued Racers has up for adoption. The week we babysat Dream's mom, that kind of made the decision for us since she acted so strangely and totally distanced herself from us.

While she was staying at her foster mom's house one weekend we had a wedding, Dream met a dog who'd just come from the track and they got along great. He went to a foster home, but his foster dad's allergies began to get really bad and he could no longer keep Longshot Manny aka "Barney."

We'd seen Barney at Borders several tiems doing gift wrapping with us, and he and Dream got along very well so we agreed to let him crash with us until he gets adopted. It's a little different having a 2-year-old boy in the house ... he likes to get up early and isn't the most graceful dog in the world. He's a bit bigger than Dream and really couldn't sneek up on anyone if he tried!

So far, he's getting acclimated very well and seems to like it here. He even slept until 9 a.m. today instead of getting us up at 3:15 like he has the past few mornings.

Family Christmas

Working in a casino, there's really no such day as a "holiday," which mean 95% of the time Roger will have to work. Fortunately, He was off by 6 and my mom and Bucky came to spend Christmas Eve with us.

Bucky had never been to our house and seemed to enjoy hanging out with Dream :). Rog's parents had planned to come the Friday before, but caught a bug that was going around and came the following Friday to celebrate.

Carving the turkey

Dream liked our new pickle ornament

Rog's new drills and mom "drilling"

Santa always brings new PJs

Dream was all about helping Rog's mom unwrap her gifts

A Truly Monumental Day

One of the features we liked about our house when we bought it was the two-car garage, which has been limited to a one-car garage since we moved in. With winter upon us, and Roger spending more time scraping his windows, we finally got things sorted out and organized yesterday afternoon so that two vehicles can comfortably fit inside.

We also had a little extra motivation when we found out for sure that Heidi will be staying with us for a few months satrting in January when she does an internship. We'll see who wins the battle of the covetted garage spots when we have three vehicles jockeying for position :).

The light on the garage door opener wasn't working either, even after we replaced the bulb. After some poking around, Rog figured out what the issue was and now we even have a light that works with the garage door opener!!

Now It's Starting to Look (& Feel) a Lot Like Christmas!

Last weekend we got our first snowfall of year, and Mother Nature wasn't a tease this time! We picked up about 4 inches overnight Friday/Saturday before getting another 4 dumped on us later that evening.

Dream wasn't too happy with it, but by Sunday she was running and flopping into the snow. I tried to get a picture of her when she first started to play a little bit, but she's so fast all I could get was her back half!

We were none too happy when we realized that we would now have to dig ourselves out. And we thought that living on a culdasac with 6 houses would keep us from getting scooped out until the bitter end. Fortunately for us, the county was plowing away on Meadow Wood Ct at 7:30 am! By the time Rog got off of work at 9, it was pretty much covered, as was the driveway. The driveway's on a pretty good hill, and combined with the snow he could only make it about half way up.

Sunday afternoon I went with a group to deliver presents to kids whose parents are incarcerated and found a few surprises. The first being that many other subdivision roads had not been cleared, which made for an interesting ride at times, and how the kids either lived in a shack or a four-car garage homestead. Incredible.

Sawing, Trimming and Lots of Vacuuming

On Friday night we braved the elements (a light mist and a bit of chill in the air) and picked out our first regulation size Christmas tree.

The alumni association at works runs a tree lot on one of our parking lots so finding a good place to go was pretty easy :). Of all the real trees I've had, this is the first one we didn't wait until it was 30 below and go tromping through a tree farm to cut it down so just picking one pre-cut was a little wierd. But it did get a fresh cut so it smells good and will take in more water. It's not dry yet and there's already a ton of needles on the floor.

It was a bit tall when we got it home, but other "fresh cut" from the opposite end solved that issue. We're probably the only people within 500 miles that have a tree in their dining room. We don't have any furniture there so why worry about moving things around in another room?

Here are some pictures of Rog getting it set up, a picture of each of our favorite ornaments (try to guess which ornament belongs to whom) and the finished product. Now to get started on some shopping...

Merry Christmas to Us

Our Christmas shopping for each other is done ... we finally decided it was time to retire the old TV we had in our living room that was a hand-me-down from Rog's parents. After our Black Friday fiasco with Sears, we found a plasma for the same price at a local electronics store if we were willing to wait a few days for their inventory to be replensihed. Not a problem. It's so nice to be able to sit on the coach and actually be able to read the Dish guide!

And yes, we watch Ugly Betty.

We've also done some shopping for our hound, she got her gifts yesterday. Her new "trick" that she learned at the end of the summer is how to dig shallow holes in the yard and eat the dirt. A lovely habit which turned worse when she started digging in our new grass!! To help her kick her habit, we bought boots for her to wear in the yard so she can't dig. She seems really impressed with them so far... She also got a sweatshirt since she has not body fat and a thin coat of fur she sometimes shivers in the house. She did not seem pleased when we took this picture, but we swear she's not possessed. Maybe because she had her "howliday" pictures taken by the rescue group earlier in the day.

Tis the Season!

Seeing this video really makes us realize that it is the holiday season :). It isn't the original, but even thought it's a few years old it's still pretty funny!

40 Hours Roundtrip

On Thanksgiving we were able to visit both families in Springfield, and managed to eat two humongous meals in a span of 4 1/2 hours. Everyone is doing well, except Dream kept looking for her friend Phoebe at my mom's house.

Our Friday got off to a bad start. We'd basically been assured by a salesman at Sears in St. Louis that we'd just have to call him before 10 a.m. on Friday and he'd sell us a 46" LCD TV at the sale price and order one if they were sold out. Roger called at a little before 8 and the guy said he was sold out and nothing he could do for us. After a call to his manager, who promised to call back and never did, we decided to take our business elsewhere.

Friday did turn around, even though the best "deal" we got was on a dog bed! We finally got to meet Mason, Brian and Lindsay's son who was born in July. Our camera was buried in the back of the car so we didn't get any pictures, but I stole some from their site. He sure is getting big!

Love That Midwest Livin

Promise this will be the only post all year complaining about the weather patterns of the Midwest, BUT...

To this day, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND how we can reach a high of 76 degrees this afternoon only to look at the forecast and see that the "feels like" temperature tomorrow night will be 20!!?!?

Mother Nature must be having a total mood swing this week or something.

Time to Catch a Breather!

Wow.

We've been busy for the last two weeks.

Aside from the normal things that keep us busy week in and week out, these last two weeks have been littered with special events, primarily work related.

In a span of 11 days...

- Dream modeled her new pink camo collar

- I put the wraps on our alumni magazine

- Our soccer team advanced to the state quarterfinals - we lost and we froze watching the game

- We hosted a state quarterfinal football game and won - which meant we hosted the semifinal game...

- In conjunction with the semis, we also hosted a tailgate party for our alumni ...

- On the same night we had a preview party for our largest fundraiser of the year

- We held our annual auction and raised lot of money. Bids were entirely out of our league so we came home empty-handed but with a few drinks in us.

- I drafted an amendment to a city ordinance for the school...

- Which was presented and recieved even better than we had anticipated

- Rog replaced some wood on the house and painted

- The bulk of our leaves fell off our of 5 million trees

- Several nights of meetings --> yuck!

After all of that, we can now take a bit of a breather. The president of our school is great and decided that tomorrow is a holiday too, which means 5 days for me! Rog gets his standard Thursday and Friday off, but we at least get to go home and stay until Saturday morning.

We are very thankful to be able to get away for a few days!

And Then There Were 12

After several discussions and a few bids, we had two good-sized poplar trees taken down in our backyard on Thursday.

The people who initially lived in the house must have been tree huggers, with these two trees out, we're down to "The Dirty Dozen" in the backyard ... the dirty part being especially true after this weekend! Is it necessary to have 14 trees in one yard, much less just the back??!?!

The guys who won the bid to take the trees out were amazed that they didn't fall during the ice storms we had last year since they were about 35 feet tall and top 10 or so feet were dead. Rather than rolling the dice through another winter, we sucked it up and had them removed. Great timing though since almost all of the leaves were still on the branches :).

Finally Some Halloween Pics

As you may have read in a previous post, we celebrated Halloween along with Erica's 30th birthday by going to a party at a haunted mansion near the brewery and crashing downtown to avoid any mishaps on the ride home.

To complete our disguises as tourists, complete with zinc oxide, maps, tree finders, fanny packs and socks with sandals, it was necessary to use a camera with actual film in it which is why the posting of these pictures took so long. That and scanning, and an "internet outage" in our area for about 2 days....

Here are a few pictures from our group. Jon and his brother, Drew, were the Dick in a Box guys ... Jon's nasty 80s coat was perfect! We also had Angelina and Brad (Deana and Kyle) with babies fo different races and lots of tatoos. Tons of awesome costumes at the party, we got some great ideas for next year!

Up & Running (And Drinking Wine)

We're up and running again after a few minor repairs to our tower. We thought we lost the hard drive, my IT guys at work saved the day (along with all of our stuff)!

Last weekend Garrick and his new girlfriend came to visit. Since it's prime wine time, we decided to hit Sugar Creek.

Besides having good wine, great live music and awesome views of the

Missouri River bluffs, it's only 20 minutes from home :).

The place was PACKED for a Sunday, several buses came in including one from Springfield. On that bus was a lady with the craziest hair we'd ever seen ... or maybe just the craziest we'd seen after 3 bottles of wine. All of her hair was off to the side of her head in kind of a bee hive. These are the best pictures we could get (front and back) without being totally obvious.

Since she was on the Springfield bus, we're pretty sure Garrick and Janice will run into her when they're out on the town.

This past Saturday was Erica's 30th birthday, and a bunch of us went to this huge Halloween party at a haunted mansion. I took some pics with a disposable camera so I have to wait to finish the roll and get it developed. When you see the pictures, you'll understand the camera issue.

Pardon The Interruption

Once again, please accept our apologizes for the lack of recent posts. We've encountered several issues with our hard drive and the power source of our PC tower. Repairs have been substantially completed by our wonderful IT staff, so we should be posting with images very soon.

Getting The Halloween Spirit

Last weekend we stopped by a farm between our house and Harrah's that had been advertising it's Pumpkinland since we now have a good-sized area to decorate for any festive day. The place was pretty cool, kind of like the Roloff Farm from the little people show, but on a smaller scale and with no trebuchet. Several zip lines, a pirate ship slides and castles made from bales of straw.

They also had a petting zoo, and just for Melissa Llano, I got my picture taken with the llama ... who was less than enthused to be in the little hut much less in the picture!

We picked out some pumpkins and have started a nice fall display on the front porch, we weven have lit skulls and pumpkins on stakes along the sidewalk. Pretty scary stuff!

Weekend With Family

Since Roger has Thursday and Fridays off and my cousin Kara was getting married this weekend, I took off Friday and we headed home to spend some time with our family and friends.


Here are a few pics...

The wedding was nice, it was at the same church and hotel as our was. It was pretty interesting, both the bride and the groom as well as about 1/3 of the guests were deaf ... but there was still a ton of dancing going on.

Guess which one of the two in the bottom picture was feeling a little rough the next day.

Some Excitement at Work

On Thursday, my school was the first high school in the nation to lauch a widget on the Yahoo platform. The company that did all of the coding and design for us works with a PR firm who I worked with on publicity for our launch.

Sending items out over the new wires can sometimes be expensive, but it really gets results! So far we've had pickups from Tucson to Charlotte, N.C. to a newspaper in China along with quite a bit of notice from the local crowd. Never thought I'd see my name ina paper quite like this... http://usstock.jrj.com.cn/news/2007-10-05/000002750213.html

It's nice to see the fruits of your efforts pay off.

Happy Birthday Dream D!

Wednesday officially marked Dream's 8th birthday, and probably just the second one she's actually celebrated. We got a big "Happy Birthday" treat for her from Treats Unleashed, a great bakery and boutique next door to our vet.

She's definitely a cookie monster. After we gave it ot her, she took it into the living room and went to town.

About 5 minutes later, we decided we should maybe take 1/2 of it and save it for the next day since it was after 10 and we didn't want her to get sick in the middle of the night. We go to the living room and it's GONE. What a pig!

We're "babysitting" her mom for a long weekend and thought she might be with us to celebrate. We picked her up on Thursday and have her until Monday night. She's such a sweet girl! We'd love to keep her, Roger in particular, but D has been acting wierd over the last few days and is very protective of me...maybe we're just a one hound house. But she has gotten better.

And by the way, we have some grass growing :).

Operation Peppermint Patch (and Power Wash!)

Phase I of our backyard "renovation" was ripping out the playground and getting rid of the sand box. After scooping out 19 yard waste bags worth of mulch from the area between our back gate and the retaining wall over the last week and a half, we finally successfully completed Operation Peppermint Patch over the weekend. If you look back a few posts, you'll see some big green plants under the playground .... that's peppermint and it was growing ALL OVER a section of our yard.

Roger got a tiller on Friday and while turning over the dirt, ripped out the remaining peppermint roots. On Saturday, I did probablly the closest thing to farming I"ll ever do, sowing grass seeds, covering them with straw and watering.

Sunday was supposed to be a day to stain and seal part of our fence that we'd power washed earlier, but it was supposed to rain on Monday and Tuesday (didn't on either, of course). So I moved from Operation PP to Operation PowerWash and got about 1/2 of our fence done in 3 1/2 hours.

But the weekend wasn't all manual labor, we hung out at the Irish festival on the riverfront with Dream's rescue group. One of the guys tried to do the caber toss and actually broke the women's pole when it fell backwards. It was pretty funny!!

Think it's been a while since this fence has been cleaned? I don't think our neighbor's dog was too impressed with my work ....

Sad Day at the H-B House

Friday was a very sad day at the Henning-Buhr house.

For the last several months, Phoebe had been struggling with various allergies and a few skin irritations and had been on and off of a few different kinds of medicines to help resolve her issues.

Last week, my mom took her to our old vet for his opinion and after a few shots and a prescription, she was feeling much better. On Tuesday, she went back to the vet for a check-up and a blood draw to determine if the steroids she had been givin by the other vet had damaged her liver or kidneys. Her white cell count was low, while some level in her liver was very high which could mean several things. The only way to determine exactly what was happening was to sedate her and do an X-ray, which was scheduled for today.

This morning Pheobe had a very hard time getting up and had to be lifted into the truck to go for her x-ray. She got sick on the way there and the vet did not think she could make it out of the anasthetic needed for her x-ray.

Tonight she's pain-free, itch-free and on a comfy bed hanging out with mom and Larry's other dog Blackie, who they put down in May. What an unexpectedly rough day.

Holy .... Do We Have Cake!

As the director of PR and marketing, it's my job to create positive impressions both internally and externally for the school where I work ... from placing news items to creating the warm fuzzies.

Since 40 years ago today, the school opened its doors for the first time, I suggested we treat the boys to a birthday party lunch to know the advancement team. I hadn't really put much thought into exactly how much cake our "party" would need, except a lot.

For three lunch periods today, roughly 2 hours, five people from our end of the building and the school president served 15 humongous sheet cakes to our entire student body ... roughly 1,150 teenage boys. I've never seen, smelt or had to cut that much sugary stuff in my life! Glad I'm not in food service.

Aside from the decorated cake we saved for meetings tomorrow, I'm pleased to report that we had just 1 piece left over :).

One Down...

Do you remember where you were on this day last year?? Hopefully you were enjoying some Louisiana shrimp and a few choice beverages with us….

We’re pleased to report that as of today we’ve officially made it through one year of marriage. At the school where I work, they’re big on “reflection,” so we decided to reflect on the last 365 days of our lives … it’s amazing what went on in that seemingly short period of time.
• We purchased our first house.
• Roger bought a new truck.
• Heather got a new job.
• Roger earned a promotion.
• We traveled to England and France.
• Our extended family grew by one (Mason M. on July 31).
• The extended family lost two (Jerry in February and Blackie in May).
• Several of our friends were married (Mike & Sarah, Heather& Jim).
• Two different cousins announced their wedding dates (Kara 10/07 and Kristen 8/08).
• Hard to believe that my mom and Larry celebrated their 10th anniversary.... I must be getting old when it seems like a couple of years ago.
• Rog’s niece, Heather, graduated from high school.
• We learned so many new skills in home repair, and painted for when seemed like weeks on end.
• We re-learned how to drive in the snow and ice (no snow in STL our first winter here)!
• Most importantly … everyone in our immediate families has a clean bill of health.

Here’s to many more great times with our family and friends!!

Lazy Day at Grant's Farm

Again ... playing catch-up with the posting. But we're still just a week behind now :).

Janell came to visit us last weekend after making a stop in Brentwood to see one of her friends who'd just had a baby.

After a little shopping on Saturday, we wanted to go somehwere that was slightly touristy, free and had beverages - which took the car to Grant's Farm, home of the Budweiser Clydsdales.

It was actually kind of cool, you ride a tram through an area with a bunch of wild animals before it drops you off in a zoo-type area with a huge beer garden. Since it's owned by A-B, plenty of cold frosty samples for the grown ups to cool off with.

It was a bit warm, so rather than pay $2.50 for a water we grabbed a free beer at the mid-point before checking out more animals. We found a camel that was being kept busy by some other people, as I was trying to zoom in and take a picture of a camel toe, it shipped its head around and shoved its nose and mouth into my beer!! I was so mad, and the thing had the audascity to smile at me afterwards ... big jerk!