Radio Appearance Saturday

We'll be guest hosts, along with Laurell, on tomorrow's (Saturday's) Mouth of Wonder — live. It's shaping to be a year in food kind of wrapup and sounds like it's going to be a blast. M+D will be coming along, so we may have a special guest for the Ask Rula segment.

Listen to the stream, catch the it at PRX page, or wait for the post on the blog.

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Update: a couple photos below. It was a lot of fun, we were all on the air, all weighed in with our Santa Fe eating options, and M read her question for Rula. And Stacy swears the show will be on iTunes any day now.

 

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Further update: since the topic of favorite restaurants of the year was discussed, we went out to one of ours, Vinaigrette, that evening. A few nights earlier, we went with M+D to the other best of the year, Lan's Vietnamese Cuisine.

unofficial take-your-dog-to-work half-day

Had a half-day the day before Christmas, and my coworker Natalie was hankerin' to bring her dog Jess into the office. At her last job, Natalie brought Jess to work with her every day.

Jess: how could you say "no" to this face?


Not so much here, where dog-bringing-in is officially verboten. But people sometimes do — it's more of a don't ask, don't tell, don't poop in the courtyard policy. But since the office would be pretty deserted right before the holiday, and we had no deadlines...

I decided to bring Cheyenne, since all everyone at the office has heard about from me lately is how much I want a greyhound, and we filled out an application, and we're going to look at one on Saturday, and zomfg! we brought that doggie home, we have a dog now! omg omg!

My other coworker Susan, brought in Queenie, the younger (and more active) of her two Aussie cattle dogs. They all got along great. It was fun to see Cheyenne with the other dogs. If they walked around, she followed them. If someone came in to our suite, she had to go check it out. Everyone told her how pretty she was, and ooh-ed an ahh-ed over her. One coworker said she looked "like a Chagall painting."

Clockwise from top left: Susan, Natalie, Jess, Queenie, Cheyenne.


Cheyenne meets my boss, David.


Susan talking to Queenie in my office, Cheyenne is baffled


Sacked out briefly on the pile of blankets I brought. Yeesh, that rug is really bright.

More Snow and Such

The snow started late yesterday afternoon, and by this morning was about 6-8" deep and still coming down. Headed out to start clearing everything out and, of course, the new dog needed to go for her morning constitutional.

A bit of a digression. Everything about a racing Greyhound is recorded and analyzed and it all goes to a giant database that, with the help of your dog's ear tattoos, you can track. So, thanks to this, we know Cheyenne's lineage, we know that she wasn't a particularly good racer (like her littermates) and never reallly made it to The Show. And we know that she came to us from Tuscon.



She was, I guess, relatively game upon stepping out into the snow. Immediately attempted to get back in. But with a little urging, headed out into the powdery white stuff. We're working on getting a proper coat for her — lest you think us spoiling her, note that Greyhounds have light fur and very thin skin — so used an old base layer, with somewhat mixed results. Anyway, pretty even-keeled (which describes her basic state), she did her business and got back inside to her bed quickly.

I was at work today, but at the end was rewarded with this:



BTW, M+D are safely here, beating the storms that covered the north- and midwest. They arrived in town last Thursday, traveled with us to Abq to meet Cheyenne, and were dogsitters on Monday. We've gathered for dinners, they've done their own things during the day (weather permitting).

This isn't due to melt, and there's supposed to be more over the next couple days, guaranteeing a white Christmas here in Santa Fe.

Cheyenne

Just in time for Christmas, our own Santa's Little Helper. Only been here for about an hour-and-a-half; wasn't particularly freaked out by the house, but cautious. Now, just sleeping.

More — let's be honest, much more — later.

tree decorating with Stacy + Jim

As mentioned before, We invited Jim + Stacy over for tree decorating, dinner, and drinks (not necessarily in that order).



Stacy was very industrious and did a great job, despite her claims of never having done any tree decorating.



Jim was also quite fast, when he wasn't menacing Stacy, Hitchcock-like, with one of our many, many bird ornaments:



...or trying to eat them:



Bram opted to document the process and ply us with Mai Tais, in lieu of decorating. Here's this year's lovely ornament from Joan + Ken.



Everyone was happy with the results!



Enjoy the holiday spirit(s), everyone!