Catching Up

Hi everybody! Well, I'm sorry that I've been away for awhile. After my June bloggie break, I was going to really get back into serious blogging, but seems like I'm still kind of busy. After this week, though, it should be much better...for the next few weeks, at least. This week, my tutoring students finish their class, so I'm done with that...except I will probably keep meeting with one or two of them, off and on. We'll see.

Skeeter and Casey are doing pretty good...although I think yesterday we nearly lost Casey. She was outside, and it's pretty hot out there in the afternoon...there wasn't really any shade or anything, and we didn't realize that she was out of water. When we finally figured it out, she was panting worse than I've ever seen, huge, shallow breaths, her tongue hanging out and losing an inordinate amount of drool, her body hot to the touch. We gave her water, and she drank, and lay down on the cool tile floor...but wouldn't cool down. We think she was probably pretty close to sunstroke at that point. We took her in the front yard and hosed her down, and then let her lay on the tile kitchen floor again. After a little while her breathing calmed down some, her body cooled off, and by an hour later she was panting much more normally, and was more interested in her usual stuff again. It was probably pretty close, but I praise the Lord that we realized it in time and that she's OK. She's still moving pretty slowly today, and panting some, but that's probably a combination of the humidity today and the leftover weakness from yesterday.

Skeet is getting so big! She's close to 8 lbs. now. She's 6 months old, and really more of a cat now, than a kitten. She's still on kitten food, and she's still going through that goofy teenager-ish, 'don't-touch-me-don't-pet-me' stage, and she still bugs the life out of Casey, but she'll probably grow out of that.

My beautiful niece is growing too -- can you believe she's 8 months old now, going on 9 months!!! She's just the cutest little dark-haired, dark-eyed baby you ever did see! I have a few pictures here, for your enjoyment:

My niece and I, on the 4th of July

Is that not the cutest little sailor outfit ever?!!

My mom was making me crack up, but we still couldn't get Ariana to smile!

Ariana with her mommy and daddy, my sister and brother-in-law

Ain't she the cutest!!!! She's getting sooooo big!! Auntie Bekah loves you, Little One!

I have some other pictures to post, just some funny photos from who-knows-where that my dad gave me. Here are some great dog pictures:

And I have yet another great picture for you. This one is actually a real photograph, although it might not look like it. I will try to get the picture posted in such a way that you can click on it and see it larger, but in case it doesn't work, this is a real picture of a flyby being done past an aircraft carrier. The text at the bottom of the picture says:

This was an actual flyby during deployment of the Nuclear Aircraft Carrier USS Stennis. The pilot was grounded for 30 days, but he likes the picture and thinks it was worth it. Yikes!

Well, I am getting a post ready about the wacky Sisters Night I spent with my two sissies, Loi and Kryssy of Yellow Rose Yearnings, on last Sunday night, so stay tune for that! Also, the July edition of Rebekah's Picturesque Guessing Game will be coming soon! Goodbye for now!