Many holiday miles

We've gotten some miles on us over the past weeks -- been through four different states in the limo, but the staff's avoided Alabama for once so that's a plus.

(Careful readers know Maggie's a 'Bama native, so we can't be too harsh. But, when she has particularly impertinent days, Bandit's fond of saying "You can take the girl out of Phenix City......")

Anyway, we had a very nice visit with grandma, Aunt Audrey and Cousin Ellen in NC. Ellen is pretty cool because she's got a long dog, too, named Duncan. It's a Corgi, and we accept those as extended family. (Extended...get it?)

Now we're at the beach. It's raining, so that makes the walks a bit shorter because Staffer Dad doesn't like water on his head and he can't handle us and an umbrella. The beach trip was nice -- we got to stop at our fave walk area at the Osceola Forest. We stopped once other time at Staffer Mom's fave truck stop near Tallahassee (good coffee). That was the best! We found gum in the parking lot near the car. Staffer Mom wasn't very happy about that, but it was good stuff. Peppermint, maybe.

It might clear off tomorrow, so we'll be walking more. It's been windy here, and we saw some overturned trash cans down the street. Score!

Thanksgiving reading

We've been doing a lot of reading this weekend -- Grandma was here, and she played with us a lot, but she also was gone shopping a lot, too. The blogosphere is amazing right now. Our buddies Joey and Maggie over at The Long and Short of It are posting terrific stuff constantly. Who knew Gypsy Rose Lee had a dachshund? We were thrilled to find out!
They also posted the classic scene -- Staffer Dad's absolute fave -- from Pink Panther..."Does your dog bite?" If you've seen it, you know. And the Dachshund Dude's Twitter feed keeps us hopping! If you tweet, check him out.

We found this blog, too. It seems appropriate, and we feel like turkeys for not mentioning Thanksgiving. We're thankful for a lot of stuff, and we should say it.

We're thankful for Staffers Mom and Dad, Grandma, moles, green pillow, popcorn, our great aunts and uncles, Ernie (not Kitten), computers, our blogger buddies, plastic monkey, warm blankies and snackies.
It's time we said it.

We've been slacking

No, we haven't been in timeout -- and we're pretty sure that's what you thought. We've just been slackers. We've just been having a pretty good time, and we took a break. But we're back.

We'll try to catch you up with our latest adventures:
- Right before Christmas, we woke up one morning and heard all sorts of strange sounds outside...it sounded like the chainsaw and giant suck machine (vacuum cleaner?) all at one time, so that couldn't be good. When we finally got to go outside and check out the noise, we found our favorite big pine trees were missing from the backyard. Bandit was particularly upset to find all the excavation work he'd done around the tree near the weird bush was all gone. Now there was a big hole full of wood chips. We're not really sure what caused this, but we figure there will be lots of termites and grubs in that part of the yard when summer comes. That can't be bad.

- Christmas was fun. Grandma came and slipped us food under the table a couple of times. Staffer Mom took some time off and when she does that, she tends to cook a lot. This time, she cooked so much, she dropped food on the floor a lot, so that worked out well. She can stay home more often.

- The staff got a Wii. And frankly, we think those things are hazardous. First of all, they always move the furniture to play with it, and when Staffer Mom is Wii boxing she gets pretty violent. Last night, she nearly stepped on Maggie twice. When Staffer Dad's playing Wii bowling, he won't let us in the den at all. This was quite unexpected for us and remains an annoying situation.

- Then, we spent New Year's at the beach. It was cold there, but the staff lets us sit on the couch at the beach house and that made up for a lot. Unlike last year, they didn't make us watch all five "Planet of the Apes" movies. Instead, they took the stupid Wii to play with. Now we're worried they'll take away our Wimbledon and U.S. Open vacations to play with that stupid toy.

So that puts us about even...except for our new nighttime yard game. We'll tell you about that later.

Weekend at Grandma's

We took a really long road trip this weekend and ended up at Grandma's! She built a whole new room on her house, and we think she did it for us. We love the new room! If we stayed with her, we could live out there and stay off of her good rugs. She has a big yard and we dug there with some success. She says the bigger holes are snake holes or vole holes, but we think she should let us dig and find out.

Anyway, it was a good trip and we think the limo smells better now than ever. We spent a lot of time there, and it finally smells like us. It's about time.

Busy holiday weekend!

From Maggie: Wow! It's been a real fun time indoors and outdoors for the last day or 2. As we'd mentioned, Grandma's here, so that's fun....there's always more stuff for us to check out and there always seems to be more food around to drop on the floor. It's never a bad time. And outside, it's been raining, so the ground is nice and soft. The mole traffic has been steady, so there are plenty of trails for us to snort through.

Last night, the staff thought it would be funny to put a Santa cap on Bandit and reindeer horns on me for a picture in front of the Christmas tree. Right. First of all, I'm not sure why I got the horns. Anyway, they ain't staying on my head, and Bandit's just a big ol' wienie for letting them put the hat on him and pull his ears through the little elastic strap. What an idiot.
Anyway, the photo session was probably not what they'd planned. They did try to bribe us with snacky treats, so we ate as many as we could. Whatever. We'll post some of the photos because we know they'd want us to put them up (and we know they suck).

Grandma's here!!

That means lots of things....more treats, more time in the house, more chances to run around the kitchen and pick up scraps. AND, she let us have RIBS!!! Yep, she brought home ribs for dinner with the staff, and we got bones from it. Dad made sure we didn't choke or fight, so that was good. Now we're just plain tired, and headed for the couch.