Bob celebrates by watching hours of basketball. I celebrate by baking basketball cookies. To each their own.

What will you be doing during March Madness?

What does one do on a cold, dreary, wet Sunday afternoon? Attend a craft fair, of course! We had to support our friend’s sister as she peddled her wares at the Indie Craft Revolution. Now this is definitely the type of craft show that I love. There were no painted Santa gourds or knitted hats for your goose statuette. There was cool shit there. Jewelry, buttons, tee-shirts, artwork, all the things that appeal to the inner indie in me. I bought myself a pair of earrings and had to hold back or else I would have bought more. It felt great supporting the local artists.

Afterwards, we all went to Pi for lunch and didn’t even realize that it was Pi Day. How apropos. If you haven’t been there yet, you have to go! The pizzas there are amazing. My favorites are the deep dish pizzas. I know, I know, Chicago has the best deep dish pizzas, but these rank right up there. Four of us were adventurous and had the Bucktown and the Delmar deep dish pizzas while a thin crust pepperoni pizza was ordered for the three less adventurous ones.

The girls decided that they wanted to do a little shopping in the Loop and so we wandered up and down the street, checking out the shops. And of course, we had to stop at FroYo for some healthy snacking. It’s a frozen yogurt shop where you dish how much you want and choose from a plethora of toppings. You pay for it by the ounce. It is now my new favorite ice cream place and I will be frequenting it often when it opens in my neck of the woods. We all made a pact that if ever one of us has the craving, we will be texting one another for a froyo run.

Craft fair, pizza, frozen yogurt, shopping, friends…that definitely is a great way to spend a icky Sunday afternoon.

Meet Chen, a 1 year-old Chow mix that is so adorable, he looks like a big, fluffy fox. He has been described as “wild and disobedient” and for some crazy reason, my mother was tapped to watch him this past weekend. Um, really? The only dog that she’s ever watched was Kuma, the most lazy dog you will ever meet; all she does is eat, sleep and poop. We had to step in.

Because we’ve had some experience with dogs and I can put the fear of God in them, I knew we could handle 24 hours with him. Usually, when a dog is described as wild, it really means that he’s super-hyper. The perfect prescription to cure the wild: wear him the eff out. And that’s where Kuma earns her keep around this house.

With any first meeting of a new dog, Kuma has to assert her dominance, which she did, quite loudly. Once Chen realized that he wasn’t going to win this fight, everyone got along just fine and playtime ensued.

Now, Kuma will typically pin her opponent down and try to roll over them but Chen wasn’t going to just lie and take it. So there was quite a few chest bumps:

When Chen figured out that Kuma wasn’t going to back down easily, he thought he could throw Kuma off her game with this look:

Nope, it didn’t faze her. Kuma just retaliated with a chest kick:

In the end, after hours of on-and-off playtime, Kuma said enough:

When the owners came home, they called to thank us for watching him and exclaimed that he was so well-behaved and calmer. I would like to take credit for that, that I worked my magic on him. But in reality, he was probably too tired to misbehave. I’m sure he’ll be back to his old self soon.

Friday night we gathered up a gang of peeps and hit the Maryland Heights Community Center for a trivia night in support of the St. Louis Genealogical Society. Katie’s mom is involved somehow, so it was a good thing to support, and my main man, Kevin Carbery was the MC, so we figured we’d go and have a good time. Of course, we did manage to have a good time, but it wasn’t due to our trivia skills. Carbery’s trivia skews a little bit older, question-wise, so we knew we’d face an uphill battle. In fact, I’m not sure if we’ve ever finished better than third in a Kevin Carbery event (if that doesn’t seem shocking, you had best educate yourself on our illustrious trivia history). Regardless, we went into this knowing it would be a challenge, and a challenge it was.

Somewhere along the way I lost the sheet with all of the categories, but I remember we did really well in Sports. The TV and Movie categories were heavily loaded with 70’s and 80’s answers and we got killed on Presidents yet again (always presidents. You’d think we’d learn — it’s not like there’s a dearth of presedential information out there. We should just read a friggin’ book). St. Louis History was a good category, but we didn’t do very well in that either. Makes me want to take a trip to the History Museum in Forest Park.

Perhaps the biggest shocker of the night was the Celebrity Couples category. We had Jen’s sister Chris (and her US Weekly addiction) as our secret weapon for that one, but it turns out that old celebrities can be couples too! Also, I think the concept of celebrity was stretched a wee bit when there were not one, but two questions about famous composers. Really?!?

Small gripes aside, when everything was said and done, we weren’t anywhere near the top. In fact, I’m not sure that anyone knows what our final score was because it got to the point where we were more focused on the food and drink than the competition at hand. In the end, everyone had a good time, but let this beatdown definitely proved the age old adage: if the oldest person on your team is 31, you better hope for lightning in a bottle if you want to compete in trivia against people who map their family tree for fun.

Thursday night, Kuma was sitting quietly at her corner, keeping vigilant on the comings and goings of the neighborhood dogs and critters when suddenly she started going insane. This was not your usual “How dare you walk in front of my house” barking but it was more of a “Omigod, omigod, omigod! You’re on my lawn, get of of my lawn!” She kept up her crazy barking and smooshing her face in the window, I finally got up to check out the situation. I opened the door to see this little guy on my walkway, so of course, I go and pick him up. The little guy was so terrified, he was shaking. After a couple of minutes of cooing and snuggling him (he is a fantastic hugger), he finally relaxed a bit and I brought him in. Well what do you know? No collar. Why am I not surprised? Why are owners so irresponsible? Grrr. This absolutely makes my job so much harder.

When Bob got home, we drove around for 45 minutes, looking for people who looked like they were looking for this tiny, tiny animal. No luck, though. Katie was our savior and loaned us her cat carrier for the night so we could keep him from peeing around the house and from Kuma thinking that he was a moving squeaky toy.

I took him to Animal Control the next day to see if he was microchipped and sadly, he wasn’t so I had to leave him behind. Hopefully, his owners will be smart enough to call looking for this little cutie-pie.

You can’t win them all. Running total: 7 families reunited, 1 still lost.