At the Beach

This past Sunday, Shawn and I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was lectoring at the 8:00am Mass.  We actually brought Satchel to Church with us, and we left him in the car.  (We came back to find him sleeping on the front passenger seat...so he didn't seem to mind hanging out in the car by himself for a little over an hour.)

We headed to Golden Gardens Park in Ballard, which has a good stretch of beach area.  This was only Satchel's second trip to a beach, and he loved it!  He's starting to go out into the water a bit.  Once the weather gets warmer, we'll have to actually get into the water ourselves and see if he follows us.  (I'll let Shawn do that...since water in the Puget Sound stays right around 52 degrees year-round!)

Here are a few pictures:

After walking on the beach for about an hour, we went to the Little Coney restaurant that's right next to the park.  It's just a tiny little place, but it's pretty good...and they have yummy corn dogs.  :)  After lunch, we headed over to Cupcake Royale (my favorite) to get a few cupcakes to take home for the afternoon.

It was a great way to spend a Sunday morning! It was also really nice to know that by the time we got home after all of this, it was still only 1:00!  So we still had all afternoon and evening to do whatever we wanted or needed to do.  For me, this meant reading, and for Shawn, this unfortunately meant working.  But at least he got some fun in on Sunday, too!

You Didn't Believe Me, Did You?

When I said that I was going to start blogging again at least once a week, you didn't actually believe me, did you?  Ah, well...you know what good 'ol Robbie Burns said about the "best laid plans of mice and men."

Things have been good around here. Nothing terribly exciting.  Satchel is growing like a weed!  Last time we weighed him, he was 43 pounds...but I think that was a couple weeks ago.  He's six months old now (as of last Friday)!  He still loves playing fetch, and he'll often bring us his ball to play with.  He's getting better about going on walks, and he's learning not to pull on his leash.  He's actually really good at this...as long as there are no other dogs around.  He loves playing with other dogs, so if he sees one, he doesn't seem to understand why we're not just rushing right up to play.

In non-dog news...well, there really isn't much.  We've been doing a bit of work in the yard, but nothing major.  Work for me has been very busy lately.  Gotta love it when kids wait until the very last day to try to submit all their assignments, and then I have to grade them really quickly so that they get the credit for it.  Fun times.  Especially when it's a situation where the student needs the credit from my class to graduate...like, tomorrow.  Shawn's been pretty busy at work lately, too, although it hasn't been quite as bad as we were afraid it might be.

The rugby season has ended for Shawn.  His club has both a Super League team and a Division 1 team (for all intents and purposes), and they both made their respective playoff tournaments.  Considering that his Super League team was one of the worst in the league last year, this was a big deal for them!  Unfortunately, they lost last weekend to NYAC (New York Athletic Club), who is undefeated this year.  But even then, it was actually a close match.  Certainly something to be proud of!

I think we're both looking forward to the summer.  We don't really have many plans yet (just a quick trip to Denver planned in June), so I think it's time we pull out the calendars and start setting some dates.  If we don't plan ahead, we end up wasting lots of weekends and not getting to do everything we want!

Okay...I'll do my best to blog again before another 3 or 4 weeks passes.  :-)