I'm baaack! :)

I knew I haven't blogged in a while, but I didn't realize that I was away as long as I was. Time flies when your having fun.  :)

My life went through some major changes in 2012. I lost my dog Shadow, my Aussie sweetheart who thought he was a lap dog at 40 pounds. He always looked like he was smiling and no matter how bad I felt, he made me feel better.
I miss him every day.

I also had foot surgery because I had trouble walking and didn't know why. Turns out I had a bunion! And I didn't even know what a bunion was. I thought the surgery was going to be easy and I could bounce back in a few weeks. Hah! My surgeon really laughed at that! When I looked at my foot after surgery, it was puffed up like a ballon; I couldn't walk at all for 6 weeks and when I could finally put some weight on my foot, I had to wear a splint and special shoe (kind of like a removable cast). Walking was very difficult and don't even ask about stairs. Even now, 3 months later, I'm still wearing a small splint and even though I can walk up stairs, it's not easy when your foot doesn't want to behave like a regular foot.  :)

Nicky at 10 weeks

And, 8 weeks after surgery, we received our new puppy. An adorable, mischievous blue merle Aussie with one blue eye. We all had different ideas of what to name her - the funniest one was from my husband. He said that since we had an Aussie named Penny, we needed to go one up from there to a Nickel - Nicky for short. Well, we all had a laugh about that, but we couldn't agree on a name. So, we had a vote. And, the winner was: Nicky! Well, it's hard to get a picture of an Aussie puppy - they never stay still. You can see this in her puppy picture her breeder sent us before we got her! She is sitting, but because she's vibrating and ready to run off again, the picture is kind of blurry.

To get a good picture of her, I decided to hold her. Well, you can see how well that went over. Have you ever seen such a sad face on a puppy? But, at least you can see her one blue eye.

Well, I'll finish this post here, where you have been introduced to the newest member of this menagerie we have here in California.

But, I'll leave you with a thought for what I will be writing about next - names. What's in a name? You might think this is an easy topic, but you will see in this series that names, in jewelry as much as everywhere else, are very important!