thus far (with pictures!)

Our weekend is off to a very solid start. We've been enjoying the company of the Goldens and their precious doggie Eva, and it's been an entertaining 18 hours thus far!

But wait-- let's back up to how my weekend began. I arrive home from work ~4:20 yesterday to find this:

What you're looking at is Lola's crate she resides in during the day while we're at work. And inside the crate is her brand-new (seriously. I bought it April 30.) adorably soft green argyle dog bed. Or what remains of it. The blue fluffy stuff and cedar chips are the gory innards of her helpless victim. Ugh. What a mess. All in her cage, around her cage, under her cage (??)...anyway. 25 minutes later I've got everything cleaned up and have vowed to never buy her another thing. We'll see how that lasts. Ungrateful little punk.

Fast-forward a few hours, and Chris & Katy get here! The doggies have a little get-to-know-you session, and Katy and I play that team-building exercise where you have to untangle a bunch of tangled-up ropes...only the ropes are leashes with very wiggly and uncooperative dogs at the end. And we're tied up in the middle. Fact: Lola really loves company! Especially canine company! Shortly thereafter, we humans set off to have a long and leisurely dinner at Brett's while the doggies hung out at home (facing each other in their respective cages, that is. Sans pillow if you're Lola). A few hours later we came back home to spend the rest of the night looking at pictures, talking about the Babysitter's Club, and referree-ing (how the heck do you spell that?) our children's play. And it's possible that Chris & Matt didn't actually engage in some of the above-mentioned activities. Anyway, here's our kids at play:

You may notice that there's a slight size difference. There's also an enthusiasm difference, and unfortunately, it's not in Eva's favor. We spent most of the night trying to rescue her petite body from Lola's giant, strong paws and teeth. What can I say...my daughter is a socialite!

As the night got later, the conversation got more hilarious. At one point, Chris (the quintessential nerdy mechanical engineer) was actually trying to convince the rest of us that logarithms and calculating cosines are actually important and relevant skills that the average person should be utilizing on a semi-regular (if not daily) basis. Right. I'm not convinced. Later, after showing Chris & Katy Matt's rectangular feet (I swear his feet are a perfect rectangle: all 5 toes the same height) and comparing them to my "normal" feet (5 toes of ascending height), Chris had the nerve to call my feet "xylophone feet". And make the xylophone noise (brriiiiinnnggg!) over and over. At that point we realized we should probably go to sleep before we really made fools of ourselves. But it sure was funny. (And Matt would like to add that "they DO look like xylophones!")

This morning, while Chris & Katy are attending Chris's brother's graduation festivities, Mattie and I headed over to Washington Farms to pick ourselves some strawberries.

I apologize for my squinty eyes and windblown hair. I forgot my sunglasses...and I can't really control the wind. My bad. Anyway, we are happy with our bounty and excited to eat strawberries (both plain and chocolate covered), make strawberry bread, and freeze some for later! One sketchy side effect of strawberry-picking, though:
It may be hard to see in the pictures, but I got a rather alarming rash all over my strawberry-pickin' arm. It itched a lot. Luckily, it's gone down a lot, so I think I will probably survive. The rest of our afternoon has been spent studying old accounting textbooks (Matt), blogging (yours truly), and watching the girls play. Aren't they cute?! Okay, sorry for the picture overload, but I've been seriously slacking on the picture-posting lately, so I felt like I needed to over-compensate. Have a wonderful rest of the weekend!