A Dog's Foray Into an Outdated Wardrobe

Yesterday, my sister and I were talking about getting a friend for Baerli.

Me: Should we get a girl dog or a boy dog?

Lizzie: Maybe we should get a girl dog, then Baerli can have a girl friend. And we could put cute bows in her fur.

Me: But Baerli's not technically a boy dog anymore, he's an it. We could probably get away with putting bows in his fur.

Lizzie: Mom has some old dresses in her closet we could put on him.

The next half hour we spent raiding the old dresses and clothes in my mom's closet and we found some goodies. Here are my favorite outfits on my patient, treat-loving dog.

He looks like a circus dog:


My sister was laughing so hard she could hardly lift him up enough to show off Baerlie's hot 80's jumper:

The vest with a lovely clashing peasant skirt:

My sister got jealous of his fabulous skirt:

And one last picture of him trying to tear of his flame bandana:

St. Paul Winter Carnival

A few weeks ago, I checked out the St. Paul Winter Carnival and never posted pictures. The carnival takes place every winter in downtown St.Paul and features ice sculpture, snow sculptures, ice skating, performances, contests, and a hot dish tent. We went mostly for the ice sculptures which are always awe inspiring.

This one is the entrance sculpture that everyone is allowed to walk onto and take pictures. My little sister and her friend:


This elephant was just one part of the "Three Ring Circus" sculpture and I thought it adorable with the peanut balancing on it's trunk:

Two ice people dancing the night away under the stars:

This homage to The Wizard of Oz was my favorite:

It's hard to tell from the picture because it's so dark, but the kid in the yellow sweatshirt was wearing shorts. In below zero windy weather!!!

The hot dish tent. Minnesotans are extremely proud that what the rest of the US calls "casserole," they call "hot dish."

MIKA!!!

Last Wednesday my sister and I went to see Mika in concert at First Avenue in Minneapolis. At the moment, he's hugely popular everywhere except for the US, but luckily he's still touring here. The concert was FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC!!! Not only is his voice amazing, but he is also aan incredibly high energy performer. His cd is titled "Life in Cartoon Motion" and the concert was focused around that theme with over the top sets, props, band members, and of course, Mika himself. You can watch some of my favorite songs here, here, and here. Here are some of the (somewhat low quality) pics I snapped during the show.

Mika jamming out in a fabulous purple jacket. Yes, we were this close and it was AWESOME.

It's hard to tell, but you can kind of see in this pic that the backdrop was a beautiful color mural and there were lights and flowers everywhere on stage.

One of his props for his song "Big Girl, You Are Beautiful."

I don't really remember which song this led into, but we loved the random skeleton puppet and the massive amounts of confetti coming down on the stage like snow.

Mika got to sexy for his shirt.

Belting it out. I like this one because it looks like he's ready to eat a chunk of the mike.

After his band left the stage, the audience called him back on for an encore and what ensued was the craziest, coolest thing I have ever seen at a concert. Prop guys hoisted a huge white sheet on stage and had it backlit. Then the band came out in sheep and wolves costume and they put on this old-schoolish cartoon with just their shadows and theme music playing. Then the end of it they launched into "Lollipop" and let loose tons of 2 foot diameter balloons to bounce around in the crowd like beach balls and ended the song with those flying around and confetti spraying everywhere over everything. Completely amazing and undescribable, but I'll try and do it with this woefully low quality clip and pic.