Poof's Letter

Hello my previous owners,

I hope you guys are doing well and have not forgotten about me. I remember you guys all the time and think about you -- why?  Well, besides the fact that I miss you guys, my current owners also totally do not spoil me like you all did!  It's a big change.  So I'm writing this to tell you that I am actually doing pretty well over here, despite my pretty dramatic weight gain.

According to my last doctor's checkup (they gave me a rabies shot - in case I will bite someone someday), I gained 2 whole pounds.  I don't have to tell you that that's a lot for a doggy whose head is not bigger than an orange.  Now I weigh...  (are you sitting down for this part?)  ...   I weigh 20 pounds.  Twenty!  That's 10% more than I should.

My new owners have been whispering quite awhile that I look a bit chubby, and that I'm kind of shaped like a sausage anyway -- and they think I don't understand their whispering, and their concerned looks and the checking my fat around my ribs, but I do, I understand everything.

I just thought they were not used to having a dog at home.  My theory is:  the weight gain is probably because of my cuteness. My current owners cannot possibly refuse my desperate puppy eyes, my begging face.  When I bring out those weapons of mass distraction, they will always share lots of doggy snacks with me.  I even made them felt guilty every time they are about to leave to work:  I put my cuteness, my sad eyes and my weepy crying face, I make some whiny whiny noises, and they always throw me some duck jerky or bacon or some crunchy bones or snacks.  They are soooo easy to fool and to manipulate.

As a result I am in big trouble with my weight though. 

So as the bad news from the doctor came, my owners decided to reduce my meals AGAIN.  If you remember, at the beginning it was 3/4 cup twice a day...  but after we started running around the neighbourhood in the summer they gave me 1 cup, then it was back 3/4 cup for the winter, and now?  Now it's down to HALF A CUP for breakfast and dinner.  Plus, I don't even like the new diet food they bought for me.  I can't read the letters on the bag, but it either says "light" or "low calories" or something like that.  Not cool guys.

Every time they eat, I've been begging them for more food and they noticed that 1/2 cup is not quite enough for me.  Starting last week, they began to give me new snacks which are healthier for me.  My new step-mom cuts a few different types of vegetables such as cucumbers and steamed carrots.  I know you can't believe I like cucumbers but it's true, I quite enjoy them, they smell amazing and they make me full.  And steamed carrots are soft and delicious.

I heard I will soon be getting some new veggies called "celery" and "steamed sweet potatoes" this weekend, so my snack bowls will be more colorful. Hopefully this spring I can show off my new aerodynamic body to Ringo (my new friend - he is a dachshund also and lives a couple of houses next door).

Regarding the weather, I am not too fond of it at all.  Peeing and pooing have to be done *fast* as in a matter of seconds before my butt freezes to the snow.  The owners try to make me wear silly shoes and clothes all the time, and honestly I just prefer going "natural" if you know what I mean.  The last few days we have had a big ice storm, and the pile of snow in the yard is now way too high for me to climb, because my legs are only 3 inches tall.  So I had to poo and pee on the driveway.  My new step-dad is not too happy about that part, he had to clean a bunch of frozen poopoo before he could drive his car out.

Hopefully I will grow a bit taller and walk to the top of the snow and pee over there, maybe write my name in the yard.  My shortness also causes me big trouble when I walk and run after raining or melting snow -- all my chest and belly is covered with mud and ends up too wet and too dirty to wipe off, so the humans have to bathe me in their laundry sink.  It's soapy and warm, but it involves water which is not my favourite thing either.

But I attached some new pictures of me and I hope you don't judge me now -- I promise my cute hot body will come back this spring time. 

Four paws and one wagging tail for you guys,

XOX

Mr. Puffy Mai Wijaya

(a.k.a. "Woof Woof", "Poofball", "Dogbreath", "Dogface", "Poofson", "Sausage", "Black Thing", "Bacon", "Porkchop", "Furball" and many other creative and almost a little bit offensive nicknames my new owners call me...)

P.S.  One of my favourite hobbies is itching myself and licking myself in front of everyone on the living room carpet.  It's awesome!  I'm doing it right NOW.

This is another favorite thing to do: laying near the heater at night.

I am too heavy to move to my bed.

We are back....

Wao we have been absent for more than 1 year - I almost forgot that we have a blogspot and facebook - both of which badly need some TLC. I still can't figure out how some people are able to work full-time and have kids and keep all their accounts updated on Twitter, Facebook and Blogspot, and also keep up with their daily lives.

Someone should write a book how to juggle all these activities .... especially raising kids ....!

The updates since last year:

• We went on vacation for 5 weeks -- actually I went for 5 weeks and Russian for 3 weeks only. With his lack of vacation days, we enjoy as many weeks away from work as possible.
• Uchi got some TLC before and after our vacation
• My sister was in town for 3 months annoying Russian
• We have been spending many hours at work last year
• We have gained a lot of weight, both of us ...  time to start a serious exercise program when the weather gets warm

Above are the quick updates from last year, we definitely will post new pictures soon :)

No Snow in March???

Minneapolis always gets snow in March - so what happened this year?!  Not that we complained about the warm weather but should we be scared of Global Warming now?


".... That's right, a snowless March. March, typically, is one of the metro's snowiest months.
Do you remember the last time we went through this particular month on the calendar year without a drop of snow. "According to the record books, you have to go back to 1878," University of Minnesota Meteorologist/Climatologist Mark Seeley said. Seeley's job is to keep track of this kind of stuff. "Pretty remarkable," he said."

For the whole article: No Snow in March?

New Updates from us and Uchi

Yeah usual excuse I have for each time I did not have time posting blogs - busy busy busy :(

I tried my best to share my time to refresh Inubaka blog and catch up with other things which are not related to work or Uchi.  So far it has been working .... Actually let me reword that: So far it might be working for all things related to work, but I am still obsessed with Uchi. Every day I try to find something to improve/decorate/clean in Uchi.  These are all the changes to Uchi so far:

1. We painted the hallway

2. We painted the kitchen

3. We painted the living room

4. I sewed & we placed several curtains

5. We made a blue backsplash around the kitchen

6. We decorated Uchi a little bit with orchids & other plants

There are still a few projects I wanted to do and learn ... sewing the curtains was fun, but you can stain them & make your own patterns as well.  We'll see if that happens. 

The pictures are coming soon.....

Pictures from Last Year

The last touch up was done to Uchi (Oct 27)

Our Halloween Party

We didn't dress one - but one of our friends was dressing as gorilla

Our Stair before renovating

Underneath our loft

Underneath our second floor hallway

Our Loft with new carpet (nicer and softer)

Laundry Room before painting

Best Buy's washer and dryer (cute blue) in a blue painted laundry room

Our messy Kitchen

Our Messy Garage

We installed our garage openers (we did not have enough lights for all the garage openers)

Our kitchen island was used as a temporary table to build new computer

Thanks to Erni's new knives - really sharp ones

 Painting our guest bathroom (same color with our laundry room)

Trandition Blue 

 

Painting our loft green

"Crocodile tears" is the name of our paint and we picked it because it is a funny name

Complete painted loft

Cleaning our driveway

Our White Christmas and white Uchi

That was me cleaning our driveway

a new exercise tool for us

Reflect Back....

Saying goodbye to 2009...  many things happened to us last year:

* We are home-owners
Finally, after years of waiting, we dared to place our footprints in MN.
We experienced our first painting (which was painful) and shoveling snow.

* Still "aliens" but with no-visa needed
Got a green card -- no longer need a corporate sponsor to stay in the US

* First Ticket
My first traffic ticket in MN, just on the day when we moved to a new home. (For not stopping "completely" at a stop sign -- what a ridiculous argument from the police officer, apparently he was so sure that I did not fully stop. What imaginary people stop completely 100% at a stop sign when there are no other cars around?!)

* Celebrated Our First Year Anniversary in Chicago
See Chicago Trip 2009

* Russian got a new Job
See New Job

* New babies -- NOT OURS!  (Don't start posting rumors on the internet!)

A couple of friends have had their babies this year: Ernita (Ethan), Elena (little Vasya), Lani (Aiden), Ely (Livia), Touby (Kyle), Zhichao (Sarah) and few others ... sorry I don't remember their baby names.

* Babushka came to visit

We got a surprise visit from Babushka, see babushka

* New Hair Cut

See the boy-cut

* First Time Biking to work

Biking is not a new thing - but biking 25 miles a day is a new thing, see biking

Hopefully we will continue experiencing new things this year!  Good things more than bad things, of course.  And same wishes to all three of you reading this blog!

Haven't Forgotten About the Blog -- Just Busy With Uchi

Wass up people - one day before the year changes. Time to complete last year's blog!

We finally moved into our Uchi.  The last 2 months have been craaaaaazyy, so I didn't have enough time to work on the blog. So here's what happened so far:

1. Our home was complete on November 2nd, and it took them several days to do touch-ups and a final walk-through and inspection.
2. We officially became home-owners on November 3rd at 2.30 PM
3. We didn't move in right away since the days after our purchase were really cold. We did several stages of moving, the first one was November 9th where just for ceremony we boiled a pot of tea in our kitchen for the first time, and then we officially moved in on the weekend of November 13th, half the stuff by ourselves, and the other half with some help from friends.
4. Our first project was replacing the basement door knob (door between first floor and basement) with a knob which we can lock. This project was done before we moved anything.
5. For the first few weeks, we were either sleeping on the bed without any linens or sleeping inside our sleeping bags. We were really slow in buying our furniture.  But we already had a sofa and dresser from a bit furniture sale earlier that month.
6. The first bigger project was replacing the carpet on the second floor. At the same time, we completed painting our laundry room prior to Best Buy's appliance delivery.
7. We didn't have a refrigerator and washer/dryer until our 3rd weeks living there (the garage was our fridge for a while). The first appliances we bought were refrigerator, washer and dryer from Best Buy which we returned a week after that - they were either too expensive or too big. At the end we got everything from Lowe's.
8. We celebrated our Thanksgiving with our nice neighbors, who invited us to eat dinner with them. The next day we spent going around buying furniture for the house and cleaning out our old apartment, a huge chore.
8.5. I lost my phone a week before Thanksgiving and finally found it on Thanksgiving when we were going to use our dryer (yup, first electronic device to be ruined inside Best Buy's washer). Finally we bought $8 cellphone from Best Buy during Thanksgiving.
9. One week after Thanksgiving, Jermaine & Russian built a new desktop computer and painted our guest bathroom.
10. We put up our first blinds in the master bathroom.
11. The kitchen was the first room we completed unpacking. The second one was our walk-in closet.
12. Early in December, we finally got our furniture (dining table and chairs, tv stand, bed frame and mattress)
13. We completed painting our loft before Christmas.
14. We spent our Christmas vacation building book cases and rearrange the loft library. We also didn't really do Christmas gifts, since we had bought so much house stuff at random sales during the holidays.  Whenever there was a good deal, we'd buy games and books and comics as well.
15. Russian experienced the joy of shoveling the driveway three days in a row!  We had lots of snow during Christmas weekend.
16. We've managed to avoid the swine flu so far, but both of us got colds during Christmas weekend.  First me, then gave it to Russian.


As you can see we have been really busy taking care Uchi, our selves and working to earn bacon and eggs. Slowly we started to decorate and clean and unpack.

So far we really like Uchi and really glad that we decided to purchase this lot.
HAPPY NEW YEAR And See you next year ....

P.S: I still could not find my usb reader, pictures from above home improvement/mess will come soon.

Home Construction (Day 74 - October 27)

Today our porch got painted - below is the picture we took:
1. Our last window is installed.
2. Our porch has been painted (halfway)
3. Our door is painted
4. Our garage doors are painted

Home Construction (Day 73 - October 26)

On Monday, there were small changes in Uchi :

1. The painter was there and just started his work.
    We noticed our door was painted

2. The mosquito netting was installed.

I hope they will double paint it again

The mosquito net

Home Construction (Day 72 - October 23)

We visited Uchi today again - but there were no changes. The weather has not been friendly to our painter guy this week. He hasn't been able to paint our porch or front door or our garage doors this week.

During the weekend, we visited Uchi again and met him. He was trying to start his work by preparing the taping between windows and door. He needed to catch up with his schedule since we are closing om our Uchi soon.

This weekend, on Saturday especially, the weather was quite friendly to him, so he was able to paint all the garage doors.

Our pictures will follow soon.

Home Construction (Day 71 - October 22)

Finally we could enter our Uchi today...
These are the changes from yesterday:

 The knobs for our closet doors

 

The knobs for all regular doors

Another thing we noticed is that Uchi has been cleaned : )  someone came to wipe and vacuum everything and did other small touch-up paint jobs.

Home Construction (Day 70 - October 21)

Today we visited Uchi and the ironic part we could not enter because

Can you tell the difference?

Yes, they changed our main door knob and added the deadbolt -- tonight we arrived a little bit too late, so the main office was already closed. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to get in...

For today, the changes we noticed are:  just that they added door knobs to all the doors (including all the closet doors).

Home Construction (Day 69 - October 20)

Today we didn't visit Uchi and, just as we've started noticing, whenever we don't have time to visit our Uchi they manage to complete another milestone!  So, for today it's:

MILESTONE#9 FLOORING INSTALLED

It seemed to us that they had finished the carpet a couple of days ago -- but today is the official completion day since they cleaned (vacuumed) the carpet.  Before, it was covered with lots of little fuzzy fuzzballs.

Home Construction (Day 68 - October 19)

Today I got a chance to visit Uchi earlier than usual.  I had an appointment with a local carpenter to install hardwood on our main floor.  So I was there for 2 hours and no activity was happening during those hours - seems we won't have much progresses today.

The one change I noticed is that our lawn became all green today...   well, sort of green...   kind of fake green, actually.  They did hydro-mulching, which is basically hydro seeding but without seeds in the spray, and it looks something like this:

Yuck!

It looks like our lawn is made of moldy nasty bread now.

Of course, we were planning to do hydro-seeding for our lawn since it will be cheaper than sodding - but I just found out today that our community would not allow that.  What?  YES.  The builders can hydro-mold our lawn, but then we aren't allowed to hydro-seed it.  How's that for fairness?

Oh yes.  And today our Uchi was still really dirty - no one has cleaned him up yet!  : (

My NEW Hair Style

Guys, take a look at what came off of my head today:

WOW.  You could build a whole Lili-wig out of that!

OK, you ready to see what's left?

Check it out:

Tadaaaa...!  That's the top, and are you ready for the "big reveal"?!

THAT is the new hairstyle, ladies & gentlemen!  I hope you like it.

It's way way more comfortable, low-maintenance, and cool.

Home Construction (Day 67 - October 16)

Today was "carpet day!"  (Isn't there some saying like "carpet diem!" or something like that?  Carpet the day?  No?  Maybe?  Hmm...  my Latin is rusty.)

So Uchi is basically done - except for a few small things they still have to touch up, such as:

  1.  Vacuum the carpet -- right now it's covered in carpet-fuzzballs
  2.  Clean all the windows (covered with stickers) and countertops (covered with dust)
  3.  Clean the bathrooms -- all the debris in the tubs is gross
  4.  Remove all the cardboard covering the floors
  5.  Install our remaining bedroom window, the one above the garage
  6.  Swap the two toilets which they installed in the wrong bathrooms!

They have 1 week to finish all these things, and then the home will be ready for inspection!

Here is all the progress they made today & yesterday

1. They added these wire shelves to the laundry room closet, to the main coat closet, the guest bedroom closets, the linen closet and walk-in closet.

2. Added hangers for toilet paper and hand towels to all the bathrooms.

 

 3. Carpeted the foyer, main room ("great room" or "living room" -- we keep hearing all these names, and they seem to all refer to the same room?), the stairs, all the bedrooms and closets (except for one closet in the laundry room, which would be silly to carpet, since the laundry room itself doesn't have carpets).

 

4. Installed the glass door of the master shower.

So, with today's interior work, our Uchi is basically DONE.  (Not counting the 5-6 items listed above...)

Home Construction (Day 66 - October 15)

After 2 days of toxic-fumes, we decided to skip visiting Uchi today - to give our lungs a chance to recover.....

Home Construction (Day 65 - October 14)

Today when we visited Uchi, we could see from outside that all the lights were turned on - we were wondering why??????

It turned out the painters were still painting and doing some touch-up around Uchi.

That's one of our painters - and below are the touch-ups he just completed for our staircase.

He did a good job - I didn't notice that it was a touch-up

They also installed all the doors which used to be here and left their marks (they were spraypainted yesterday).

Home Construction (Day 64 - October 13)

Today we got a chance to preserve the memory of our Uchi's first snow fall - his first winter : )

Our roof was a little bit covered by snow

It was snow heavily yesterday - the manager decided to post this on our main door

Uchi smelled like toxic-fumes today - they decided to paint all our doors (they un-installed all doors and placed them in our foyer and our master bedroom).

All the appliances were covered --- they were preparing to paint the whole home again.

Home Construction (Day 63 - October 12)

Over the weekend, we had our first snow .... it was quite weird - the leaves have not change into fall color yet and the grass was still green

Then on Monday morning, we got even more snow .....

Ok now about Uchi, we didn't visit him today : (   But we had the best excuse ever.

Our good friend was not feeling well all day, so we decided to go with him to the hospital (same one Russian visited last year). He had stomach pain all day and though it was from food poisoning but boy was he wrong.

After 5 hours of waiting, 1 episode of Dancing with The Stars and couple of tests and 1 CT scan and 1 bag of fluid and 2 nurses and 1 room change and 19 millions personal questions which were mostly repeated by different people, 6-7 different forms to fill out and 2 glass of radio-active fluid, it finally turned out that he needed emergency appendectomy.  His appendix was swollen and infected, and his white blood cell count was elevated.  He was already fighting the infection...

The nice surgeon gave him a whopping TEN minutes to think about his life, call his mother in Florida, sign some consent forms, etc., and then he was wheeled off to surgery just like that!

We had been there since 6pm.  He was taken into surgery at midnight.  At around 1am he was woken up, and wheeled upstairs to the recovery ward.  We followed him, along with his older sister, saw him to his room.  He said two words and then passed out completely.  The poor guy hadn't eaten since lunch time, and was all drugged up and tired.

At 2am we left for home.  It was a looooong day.

So we hope that you (and Uchi) will forgive us about missing today's home-construction update.