Endless Love

This is a really hard blog post...

If you know anything about me, you know that I absolutely LOVE animals. To be more precise, I love dogs.  In fact, we have five.

When I met Eric, I knew he was someone I wanted to keep in my life because he had Cali, a goofy Boxer who had the attention span of a three year old. The way someone treats their dog is the way they treat other people, and that's SO true! If you didn't know any better and he was talking to you about her, you'd think she was his child rather than his dog. 

When we lived in California, I'd take her to the doggy salon so she could get pampered and dolled up:

The day we brought Izzy home, Cali took care of her as if she were her own puppy & loved her to pieces....

....and usually ended up stealing Izzys bed.

Then when we brought Cole home, she did the same thing with him. They are INSEPARABLE! Basically, when one gets up and goes to another part of the house, the other follows. As of late, he's been extremely attentive to her, checks on her by giving her kisses then snuggles up to keep her company.

When John was younger, he liked to wrap her up and play "Hide the Cali", then rough house with her. Yes, she's a VERY patient dog! lol

She always brings us "presents", whether it's a sock, towel, or torn up toy..she always wiggles and gives you a present right when you walk in the door followed by a nice kick to your knee cap.

Whenever we had a chance, we'd let her loose over at the beach and she'd run herself ragged!

As we all know, time ticks on and we all age. Sadly, dogs aren't excluded from that. Cali is now teetering on fourteen years old...and you can tell the age is wearing on her. Eric still swears that she's five and not a year older. Her cataracts are making it very hard for her to see stuff that's put right in front of her face, she has (MAYBE) 4 decent teeth she can use to eat with..arthritis flares up really bad on her hips...agh..it's heart breaking. All she does now is sleep, which I can't say I blame her. Getting up to go outside is a massive challenge for her..and when she is standing, she's wobbly and her footing is failing. 

Eric is madly...madly in love with her and it completely breaks my heart because I know "the time" is upon us..and he's going to be a hot mess. Well, all of us are, but he's going to take it the worst. At the most, we have a week left with her and we don't want to prolong her suffering despite not wanting to let her go...

Back in December, I noticed her health wasn't doing all that well, so I came up with an idea to do "Puppy Portraits". Sounds silly, right? Well, I ended up arranging a photographer to get some pictures / portraits and they came out better than I could have hoped for:

Now that we have the pictures, I wanted to make some sort of "shadow box" for her. Me being me, I clicked around online for a bit to see if I could find something along the lines of what I was wanting to do and ended up finding this:

It's pretty cool, but runs about $35 a pop. Since I'll be making one for each dog, that'd come to $175 in total! That's a bit steep, especially since I can do it myself. After doing a little bit of research, I found some recipes to make "Dough Ornaments" or  "Easy Crafting Clay" so I can do molds of all the fur balls paws. 

So, Eric and I started working on those today, did a trial run and ended up making a few impressions "just in case" some cracked while baking or they didn't come out right. In the process of working on Cali, we figured we might as well do the other dogs paws since I can make theirs into little ornaments. 

 Cali and Macie prints before

Cali and Macie prints after

As much as I picked on Cali & her smushy face, I really love that googly dog. She always cuddled up when she knew I wasn't feeling good, a fantastic watch dog & let me know when someone was coming, always did the happy wiggle dance when anyone walked in the door, extremely patient when John would hang all over her or try to ride her like a pony...a very,very loving dog. I'm going to miss her crazy little nub nub go nuts when I look at her, her snoring which rivals Erics, and yes, even her lethal farts. Cali is so special that not only has she had one family love her more than words can say, but had a family before us who loved her dearly. How many dogs have that sort of luck? She's beyond lovable and has made many, many friends throughout her journey with us. 

Value your pets and love them with all your heart. 
They deserve it.

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Beautiful Bastogne

Sorry, I suck. I totally brain farted on this post and I happened to look at my blog dashboard to see this one still sitting as a "draft". SHAME ON ME! I originally started writing this during Memorial Day weekend...

Anyway.. Bastogne....

Dad, Eric & myself headed on over to Bastogne (it's in Belgium) today since Dads been wanting to check it out. He's a huge War buff & loves history, so it's only fitting that he wanted to check out the place that had The Battle of the Bulge. We made it a point to get up early today since we wanted to make good time there...luckily, it's only MAYBE two-ish hours from my house! After some rough patches "here and there" between gas stations that decided not to take my spiffy Belgian bank card to gas stations not having restrooms, we finally made it to Bastogne.

Once we arrived, when you first make your way into town, you're greeted with an Allied Forces Sherman Tank Turret. Friendly, right? LOL. From there, we made our way over to the Bastogne Historical Museum.

Sadly, you're not allowed to take ANY pictures inside. I started having flashbacks of Saint Pauls Cathedral all over again!! Luckily, the prices were reasonable (around 9.50 euro a piece) and we also received information guides to listen to while we were walking around. Poor Dad was crawling the walls because he wanted to take pictures SOOOO bad due to all the historical stuff that was in there (a lot of it is similar to stuff he actually owns), so he was rather bitter about the camera rule, despite the educational experience that it was. 

Here's some pictures I managed to find online...apparently someone was able to get around the whole " no cameras" rule:

The sign that says, "BASTOGNE" is actually in a picture you can kinda see to the left of it. Three American soldiers were holding it up after the were able to fend off the German forces: 

Belgian refugee's being evacuated

 They even had a small documentary movie playing in a cinema within the building so you could get more of an idea as to what the soldiers dealt with during the war. Pretty interesting stuff! From there, we made our way out of the museum area and trolled around the souvenir store. I managed to find a mini stein, shot glass as well as a walking stick shield, patches and even a mini building of the Memorial that was across the way:



After inflicting some retail damage, we dropped all of our goodies off in the Xterra and made our way over to the Memorial:

Here's some info I was able to find online about the Memorial:

*The building of the Memorial*

"Some architects were approached for the building of the memorial and presented a scale model. In March 1947, the project of the architect Dedoyard is adopted.


The monument has the shape of a five-pointed star, each of the five branch measuring 31m in length and 12m in height. A circular gallery with columns, being 10m in diameter, surrounds the central part. The initial project planned the presence of a statue of a GI at each point of the star. The chosen materials are sandstone (stone of the area) and small granite.

The names of the American states are inscribed on the two sides of the ring and the badges of the units having fought during the Battle of the Bulge appear on the paving stones made of dressed stone.

The story of this battle is inscribed in golden letters on ten walls of the gallery, including the sentence which gives all its value to the symbol the Memorial of the Mardasson is: "Seldom has more American blood been split in the course of a single battle".

"The Belgian people remember their American liberators – 4th July 1946."

Eric & I sitting on the steps of the Monument

Here's a little video I took while on the top (it's a 360 view). Sorry it gets s lil shakey at the end! A bee came up and got in my face!

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Part 1 of ....uhhhh....alot..

Since I’ve been on the move for the last week, I figured it’d be a smart idea to journal everything as I went along rather than try to remember it all at once. Ya know, so it’s atleast fresh in the mind considering we were all over the place. When Eric and I went to Georgia for a few weeks back in 2007, I had a hell of a time trying to remember all the little, but hilarious, things that went on:

April 9th, 2010 – Ypres, Belgium

Dad and I started on our little adventure to enjoy a week over in England. This has been a trip I’ve been WAY excited to partake in considering I’ve usually been stuck in Belgium due to work, or traveling to The Netherlands or Germany. Sure, it sounds rather stupid to complain about going to those two places all the time since I’m sure there are people out there who have never been to either one of those countries, but, since I live just “down the road” from them, it loses it’s unique charm & experience, ya know?

Sadly, Eric wasn’t able to join us considering some things at work just weren’t lining up for him. Hopefully I’ll be able to bring him over to England sometime before we PCS within the next 2 years so he can experience SOME traveling. I feel bad for him since he’s barely been able to see any of Europe..and we’ve already been here for a year!

Anyway, Dad came to Europe about five years ago and visited a town called Ypres. In all honesty, I’ve never heard of it..but apparently it had A LOT of history from World War 1. Since it wasn’t too far from where our Ferry was (only an hour away), we stopped off there and managed to check the place out. There’s an incredible building there called “Cloth Hall”. When you look up pictures of this place online, they do NOT do this place justice. It’s absolutely breath taking! During WW1, this building was completely bombed out to the point you wouldn’t know it was as massive as it truly was. Within the building, they have a war museum dedicated to all the events that took place in the small town, uniforms from German soldiers, example from the Gas War, and tons and tons of information about 1914-1918. It was really interesting! Since I have SkyTV (it’s a British cable company), in November,they heavily advertise “Remembrence Day” which they use a red poppy as it’s symbol. One day alone, it’s said that 30,000 people died due to bombings and gas attacks in that particular town…that’s absolutely insane to me!

Perfect example as to how large some of the ammo was..

A picture of the after math...

Original wall from Cloth Hall after the bombings

Love letters to soldiers

We spent a great deal of time in the place and reading all the information (it was displayed in English, Dutch, French and German) in addition to taking TONS of pictures. While you’re walking around, they have some audio playing overhead with a narrator reading things from soldiers letters, documentations, and even war journals from Officers. I think the one that creeped me out the most was when I was checking out the gas mask display area and they had a scenario playing as if a gas bomb went off and there were gas masks in a display case. The case lit up with a misty green color and you could hear the voices choking and crackling as if someone was dying… brings the true nature out that someone DID die if they didn’t have their mask on properly.

Gas canisters

After we were finished with Cloth Hall, we went over to the Rememberance Memorial (The Menin Gate). This thing was overwhelming! It’s dedicated to the men who died in battle and were never found…VERY daunting when you realize the hundreds and thousands of names that are on the walls (54,896  names). When you think about it, there’s more names than there are bricks. Everywhere you look, there’s names..outside, inside, along the stairs…just everywhere. They have all the names listed under the country they fought with, their rank and what their job was (gunner, pilot, artillery). I took a ton of pictures, but they just don’t do it justice. This is something you DEFINITELY need to see in person to appreciate it’s history!

Mini sculpture of the entire building

Once we finished up there, we headed off to Ostende since that’s where our hotel was (Imperial Best Western) and checked in for the night. It was rather amusing when we finally got there cause when I originally booked the room, it was making the place sound VERY spacious and all that jazz. My mistake, lol. I forgot that we were in Europe. Correction.. I forgot that we were in Belgium. When we got to the room, the two double beds were smushed together to make one queen sized bed..and the bathroom really didn’t offer much privacy since the door was frosted glass. With some careful planning (and distraction), when morning time came.. we managed to take our “showers” without mentally scarring one another.

See? Very private.

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