Best-Laid Plans

This past weekend, we had plans to go to Baltimore for a party celebrating the 60th birthday of Earl, my son's future father-in-law.  Since we didn't want to drive down and back in the dark, we decided to get a hotel room through Hotwire.  We found a good deal at a pet-friendly Westin near the airport, so we booked it, planning to bring Jodie along.  We figured Pax would be OK home alone for 24 hours (although he probably wouldn't be happy about it):

We planned to go down in the afternoon, see the progress on Alex and Ashleigh's house, walk around Ft. McHenry with Christine, and go to a cool salvage store called Housewerks.

Well, we all know what happens to the best-laid plans.  Life gets in the way.

The previous weekend, Jodie ate something nasty on the beach before we could get to her and take whatever dead thing it was away from her.

Four days later, when I went to get her out of her crate first thing in the morning, I was greeted with a mess in her crate.  Whatever she ate gave her a nasty case of uncontrollable diarrhea.  We put her on a limited diet for a couple of days, hoping that by Saturday, she'd be OK.

She wasn't.  And we had no one we could leave her with--all of the potential pet sitters were in Baltimore for the party. So on Saturday morning, we sent our regrets and headed for the vet's office.

Jodie is now completely recovered, so this isn't a post about a really sick dog.  It's also not a post about us feeling sorry for ourselves because we missed a fun party, lost money on a prepaid hotel room, and spent more than $200 at the vet because our dopey Lab ate something she shouldn't have eaten:

It's really just about making the best of an all-around bad deal.

Because in the end, Doug and I had a good weekend.

It was bitter cold here this past weekend, so we lit our gas logs early and kept the fireplace going all day.

I made tomato pepper-jack tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwich croutons.

I baked cookies:

We watched the Ravens beat the Jets and saw our UD alum Joe Flacco throw a great touchdown pass.

I finished sewing a quilt for Brian, Christine's boyfriend:

And I painted the inside of our kitchen hutch with two colors of leftover Annie Sloan Chalk Paint mixed together.  We also changed out the ordinary metal knobs for glass ones from Home Depot:

We also just enjoyed being together all weekend in our cozy little cottage.

Life can be good even when our best-laid plans fall apart.