Oh, the Drama!

I hope you have plans for get togethers and fireworks. I have to admit that I do not-- we don't live close to family and our friends here tend to get together with their families so we usually just hang out the two of us and have a nice relaxing day. Hubs will be throwing a small pork butt on to smoke today, so we'll have yummy pulled pork for dinner tonight and then pork quesadillas for at least one day if not two this week.


Saturday night we went to see U2 (the main show) and Florence + The Machine (opening act). It was amazing, but incredibly hot. We had seat 1 & 2 in our row. . . . which for some strange reason was not on the aisle but in the middle of a row because they ran two sections together (seat 46 of section I was next to seat 1 of section J). We were packed in like sardines. Still, totally worth it.



We had to travel out of state to see it, so we spent the night in a hotel and had one of my students dog/house sit.

Well, here's the thing-- when we travel, bad things seem to happen. The last time we left town was in May for a quick trip to Pensacola Beach, and on the day we left three things happened: 1) the check engine light came on, 2) my dog sitter called because the smoke detectors were going off and my dogs were flipping out at the noise, and 3) my husband's credit card was denied because he hadn't activated the new one they sent-- not to mention that he'd had to contest about $100 of drinks someone had charged to our room from the bar.

Of course this trip was no different. I was feeling sort of itchy in the room (most likely because it was just hot outside and my skin was dry), so I got a little paranoid about bed bugs even though it was an immaculate room. So we got a really bad night's sleep. As we're leaving to come home, my house sitter called, hysterical, because my dogs had caught a snake in the yard. It was a big one, and it would have been horrifying enough for anyone just worrying about the dogs, but she has a full-on snake phobia so she was literally in the midst of a panic attack. As I was trying to calm her down, my husband was making a deposit at the ATM, got distracted trying to figure out what had happened at home, and forgot to get his debit card back, something we didn't realize until we were an hour into the drive.

All of this has me superstitious about our trip to Punta Cana (this Friday!). It would be really nice not to have anything alarming happen during at least one vacation this summer. We may have lost our house/dog sitter over the snake incident, so we might have to board the dogs but maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing since the last two dog sitting incidents have been filled with drama.

As for the snake, either the dogs killed it or it was dropped into the yard by a (very large) bird already nearly dead. I believe the latter because though my dogs are huge and love to "hunt", they pretty much suck at the actual death and spend more time spatting out their prey than effectively killing it. I have a hard time believing that two dogs that can't manage to kill a tiny lizard (we have lots of anoles and blue-tailed skinks that love our house) once they catch it would actually kill what I've determined is a Black King Snake.