Settling In and Moving On....

Its been two weeks since we've moved and added Cali to our family. We are finally settling in. I no longer need an alarm clock since Cali wakes me up between 6:30 and 7 am every morning. On the weekends I can ignore her until around 8 am but after that she is relentless. This new schedule doesn't seem to bother Mike any as he stays in bed asleep for several hours longer! We also have quite the exercise regime in place. I had to take a nap on Saturday to recover from it. Perhaps we should have gotten a lower energy dog? Nah...that would be boring!

I'm winding down work in the Burridge lab and officially start at Duke May 4 (keep your fingers crossed the paper is accepted). Its seems almost surreal to be saying goodbye to this place after so long. I can honestly say I'm excited to be starting a new adventure and a new scientific project. I feel like I've grown all I can here. As excited as I am about starting a new job, I'm extremely sad to be leaving so many good friends here. Lucky for me we still live in Carrboro and I'm only going a few miles down Tobacco Road (I know, its to the "bad" end but what can I do?). I'm going to enjoy the next 4 weeks but will also be sad to see them pass.

More Cali pictures

Monday night Mike and I took Cali for a really long walk to Southern Village to play fetch on the field. We got hungry so we headed over to get some pizza before going home. As you can see, Cali wanted some too.
Her favorite of the toys is the squeaky Hot Dog. She loves to play with it. We had to ban it from our bedroom after being awaken by it way too early in the morning.
Cali's Aunt Laura and Uncle John sent her a 'puppy package'. Inside was all kinds of good stuff like tennis balls, squeaky toys and even tips for us on training.

Mike and I have really been enjoying Cali. Here are a few photos from our first week together. The first one is of us napping on Monday. She tried to get on the couch but I had to inform her that she sleeps on the floor. Looks pretty comfy to me!

Cali's Checkup

Our girl went to the vet today. She did really well. She liked the vet-tech better than the doctor, even though the vet tech had to "violate" her to get her temp. I think it has more to do with the fact that the vet-tech is female. She seems to warm up faster to girls. Cali weighed in at 56 lbs and the vet says she looks really healthy. We got her all up-to-date with her shots and she is good to go for another 6 months-year. To celebrate we took her to the dog park for a while to play frisbee. Sorry...we forgot the camera.

Our new dog!

Meet Cali! Short for California Girl, this sweet heart was named for her laid back attitude. We adopted her from a rescue organization south of Raleigh, NC called JCAPL. She was found in the parking lot of Petsmart off of Capital Blvd in Raleigh back in May of 2008. She's been kicking 'round the foster system and we found her on Petfinder.com. She is super sweet and already house trained and crate trained, but needs lots of work walking on a leash. We've only had her for 24 hours but are loving it :)

Here are a few pics I've managed to take. She loves fetching anything and Mike already has big plans for teaching her to catch Frisbees. Cali has already had some visitors with our friend Rob and his son Declan coming over yesterday to watch the Tar Heels/Duke came (Go Heels!) and today our friends Amir and Erika stopped by to make her acquaintance.

Our new place

With the help of some awesome friends, Mike and I moved into our new place this weekend. It was a lot of work but well worth it. This apartment allows pets! I've wanted a dog for, well, ever since I came to NC and Mike has wanted one ever since we moved into together. Here are a few pics of the new place.