SHEILA: OUR CRAZY AUSTRALIAN CATTLE DOG!
Here is Sheila in the fall sitting in the middle of a big pile of leaves. She is chatting with some other neighborhood dogs. I imagine she's saying: "I'm here! I'm here!"
Sheila is enjoying a warm summer day at the beach. She is sitting at the end of our dock looking at the boats and seagulls.
Sheila loves to chew. Very few toys survive her powerful jaws! This weightlifting dumb bell is her favorite!
GYRO: ADPOTED KITTEN TURNED BIG CAT!!!!
Gyro knows who king of the castle! Here he sits full-grown with a jealous Sheila far in the background. Gyro is so good-natured that he doesn’t mind being herded by Sheila—but it wasn’t always that way…
An unsuspecting Gyro kitten cleans himself while Sheila drools on top of him. I don't want to know what our Cattle Dog is thinking here!
Gyro has grown up so fast! Here he is at six months. He sits proudly in my office window distracted only for a moment from the "moveable feast" of birds and squirrels outside. Sheila can't get to him either!
One of Gyro's baby pictures. He thinks he's such a big boy as he boldly drinks from Sheila's dish!
FRIENDS AND FUN!
The last day of Washington Romance Writers annual retreat in West Virginia. We're exhausted authors but we're still smiling! From top left: Elizabeth Holcombe, Annie Moran, Laurin Wittig, Lisa Dyson. From bottom left: Denise McInerney, Pam Poulsen, Karen Lee.
Here is a photo I took of my very best childhood friend and fellow author, Mary Burton, strolling Times Square in July of 2003. She's smiling because she just bought some cheap t-shirts for her kids from a street vendor. This was a big deal for her, because unlike me, she hates to shop!
Still in New York in that lovely Summer of ’03! My fellow writers, Denise McInerney, Pam Palmer Poulsen, and Laurin Wittig bask in the regal setting that is Rockefeller Center!
JUST FUN STUFF!
Opening Day! It’s April 14, 2005, the Home Opener for Washington DC’s new Major League baseball team the NATIONAL’S! Here is my husband, Dan, and son, Owen, high up in the stands at RFK Stadium. Baseball is back in DC—yay! President George W. Bush threw out the opening pitch. I spent most of the game watching the First Family eating hot dogs in the Presidential Box—which you can see draped in blue bunting to the far left of Dan’s hat!
Owen and I are standing at the base on Devil’s Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming! It is sacred to the Native American people who live in the area, such as the Lakota, and it is the location for the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. It was a gorgeous late June day. We walked around the base of Devil’s Tower which is about 1-1/2 miles!
Owen and I are in the parking lot of the Cody, Wyoming rodeo grounds! It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen live! The barrel racing was the BEST!
Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah! Hiking the 500 feet down into the canyon was fairly easy! The winding path back up was somewhat more strenuous! Rock formations called “Hoo Doos” were carved by wind—spooky and beautiful at the same time!
In Las Vegas you never know what is going to happen! Here Owen and I sit buried in layers and layers of paper and plastic after a performance by the Blue Man Group! That’ll teach us to sit on the third row! A few minutes later, Owen met the Blue Men. He’ll never be the same!
It was a humid and hot afternoon in early July as I strolled in the backyard of Elvis’s Graceland in Memphis. I thought it might be interesting to snap a photo of the back of The King’s “Palace”, I didn’t know that Dan had me in the frame. I’m wearing the MP3 device which guides you around the property with the voice of Elvis chiming in from time to time—strange—but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else!