Respect the Lunch Break.

Damn, Heather beat me to spreading the word about The Dog Whisperer. Last week, my Dad said You've got to see this show, and then I went home and worked on two different unexciting projects, in between which we all gazed in awe at Ceasar Millan.

OH MY GOD CEASAR HAS A BLOG. I'll see you all later.

out of which is frogged the Sock of Frustration.

1) It makes me very nervous that there is just a button on blogger that says "delete this blog." Shouldn't you need three different passwords and a sworn affidavit from a mental health professional? Shouldn't there be two keys, entrusted to respected community elders, that must be inserted and turned at precisely the same time? My blog is so mortal.

2) I saw at the grocery store a book called The Da Vinci Code Diet. I thought that was a little fucked up until I saw The X-Men 3 Diet ("Fight intolerance your way to fit!") and The Whatever Lindsey Lohan's Latest Vehicle Is Diet ("Stop eating!") and realized that it's all just part of a marketing thing based on some genius's observation that people will purchase books if they contain diets and will probably pass as suddenly as Atkins did, after a long, drawn-out period during which people ask themselves over and over again I wonder when this Atkins thing is going to go away.

gobsmacked!

I was on amazon ordering The Life Aquatic for my dad, and came across a snarky review hailing from my hometown. Lo, it was written by the little sister of my now-defunct best friend.

Weird!

out of which is borne the Sock of Frustration

Well, after two hours of tears and bloodshed (but really more the metaphorical-type) and about 12 restarts and 3 uninstall/reinstalls and giving up and installing the version with about half the features, it appears to be working. Oh! Ha! It wasn't on! Let's see here...

Okay, yes. It appears to be working. Although the little pill isn't showing up in the taskbar thing... we'll just assume that that only happens when you're running the firewall and the wifi protector and whatever the hell else I didn't install. Boy were you going to get an earful if that didn't work.

superfishy?

They don't call them "viruses" and "anti-virus programs" for nothing. The metaphor is quite apt. Last year, my computer was infested with more diseases than a 17th-century gutter whore, and I took it to some geeks with a business and they cleaned it up and installed PC-Cillin (or something antibiotickey) on it and then everything was fine for a year.

And then a couple days ago I was notified that my subscription was about to be up. And I dutifully got online (for FOUR FREAKING HOURS) and downloaded the new version and some $5 add on* and the next morning got it to install itself and felt pretty good about taking this prophylactic step, instead of showing back up at the geeks' place with spyware and viruses and everything else in about three months and dropping another $150.

But. It would appear that in the intervening year, the PC-Cillin company got some Faith-Based Initiative funding from King W, because it is now completely pro-abstinence. It will not let me onto the internets. All of its help functions involve connecting to the internets (which is not so helpful, as you can imagine, when the problem is that it won't let you connect to the internets). So, I went what seems to be the typical route with this whole abstinence thing - I turned it off, and here I am skanking around with no protection whatsoever.

I know that I should work on this whole PC-Cillin thing until it is working and acting like a condom and not like a repressed wingnut. I really know I should. It's probably just a setting. I know I should work on it now.

*I don't know what it was for. I don't know if it downloaded and was installed. I did pay $5 for it.

RIP

Wife: I'm in love with your brother-in-law.

Gob: You're in love with your own brother? The one in the army?

Wife: No, your sister's husband.

Gob: Michael? Michael!

Wife: No, that's your sister's brother.

Gob: No, I'm my sister's brother. You're in love with me - me.

Wife: I'm in love with Tobias.

Gob: My brother-in-law?

Wife: I know it can never be, so I'm leaving. I'm enlisting in the army.

Gob: To be with your brother ..

Wife: No!

Baumwolle!

Today, as I wandered the halls of the building where I work, I came across a woman and her daughter, looking a bit eighties* and forlorn, outside the closed office door of a person who was likely still at lunch. From my own office I'd seen them twenty minutes before, walking toward the entrance of the building, holding the same potted plant and tupperware container of baked goods. I smiled brightly, as they seemed very sweet and had a nice potted plant, and as I walked into the mailroom, the words "performance art" popped into my head.

Then I thought that perhaps I have been on a college campus too long if that was my first interpretation of a woman and her daughter standing in a hallway with brownies and a ficus. Then I thought that this particular campus is likely the last place performance art would ever be happening.

*this is not meant to be perjorative -- mostly I see it this way because the young girl has the same rumpled hair, knobby knees, and dark-socks-with-light-sneakers that I sported at that age.

I left my nickel at home.

Yesterday, Other sang an impromptu song about Michael Moore, in which he called him a "fat liberal guy in dirty pants." I don't think I've ever heard a better description of Michael Moore.

Then everybody'd be surfin

Did you know that Hershey's makes a "granola bar"? I didn't know this until I got hungry at work today. It was damn good, too, despite the pretzels that the Hershey corporation has decided to throw into everything recently*. I was skeptical that it would offer the same nutritional value as, say a Kashi granola bar, but I was impressed that they packed six different forms of sugar as well as possibly more than one** type of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in there. Wheat and oats were in there, too, about #16 and 17 on the list.

Sometimes you could make the case that I get a little too angry at companies for their utterly shameless crusade to get your money. But really, if you can delude yourself into thinking that a "granola bar" made by Hershey's is a healthier alternative to, say, a Snicker's bar, then you might have bigger problems.


*My theory is that their recently deceased inveterate bachelor uncle was the king of the pretzel empire and had no other heirs or something, leading to a pretzel surfeit.

**They're not sure, really.

This story is called "The Very Long Fence."

I've taken the dogs to the park by myself before, but always to the paved, bourgie-boo, manicured and landscaped Community Park, where people play softball and kids have plenty of monkey equipment. Today was the first time I ever took the dogs to the Woods alone. In the Woods, we see and chase (well, some of us) squirrels, deer, and raccoons. We see and don't bother frogs, turtles, and snakes. I can and have gotten seriously-maybe-I-will-die-here lost in shopping malls, parking lots, cities that I've lived in for oh, eighteen, nineteen years, which is part of the reason I'd never ventured to the Woods alone.

Luckily, "The Very Long Fence" is not a story about how lost and trapped in a thunderstorm I got today. I let the dogs lead, and they have little else to think about in their charmed lives than mentally mapping spaces they would like to chase critters through. No, "The Very Long Fence" is a story about the hubris of the Lou Dog.

Lou likes to walk on paths parallel to the main path where the rest of the family is. He's a very contrary guy. He will lay perfectly still in a great pose until the millisecond before the shutter closes. He will only want on the bed when he is not wanted on the bed, and when you do want him on the bed, you have to drag him up howling, and he will impatiently tolerate being petted, ears plastered to his head, until the second he can bolt. He will only eat a bone if he thinks that you want the bone, so we've developed elaborate and loud* rituals designed to make him eat what is supposed to be a treat. Lou is as grumpy as a billy goat.

So, when Lou Dog started walking alongside me and Jane on the other side of the Very Long Fence, I was not surprised.



Typical behavior. I talked to him as we walked, and posed the suggestion to him that perhaps there was not an opening in the fence where the trail turned left, and that perhaps he should go around and walk on our side. He brushed that off pretty quickly. So, what the hell, I figured, he's a dog. He's been here probably over 200 times, with no exaggeration. He has nothing else to think about. So we kept going.

Of course there was no opening in the fence where the trail turned left. Lou would've had to walk around about double the amount of fence he'd already walked past to join up with us, and didn't seem particularly interested in that option. So the doggie logic kicked in.

Can I dig under the fence?


No.

Can I climb over the fence?


No.

Oooh! A hole! Maybe I can fit through it!


No, no, actually I can't.

I have a picture of when Lou finally gave in and walked back the way that we came; the look on his face says that he really should've appreciated my wisdom and not walked on the other side of the fence. But it's taken 2 hours to get three pictures up, and it's Religious Channel time.

UPDATE: Praise be to fast connections:



*I'm gonna get that bone!
Bark! Bark bark!
I'm gonna get it!
BARK! BARK BARK BARK!
et cetera.

What you're interpreting as incomprehension is actually just a bad attitude.

I have been doing the kind of blog reading where you unhinge your jaw and gorge yourself on years' worths of archives. Read backwards and thus forwards. Following projects (for these are knit blogs) from beginning to end, frogging and gauge disasters and all, until the project is successfully modeled or mysteriously never spoken of again. This is not a bad way to spend five hours of your day.

We took the dogs to the park this evening, and played the game where we saunter off in different directions and then take turns hiding from the dog, Jane, who runs herself ragged looking for us. Once in about every 20 times, she'll miss you and go flying past where you're crouched among the trees and unusual leaves and you get to see her in all her nose-to-the-ground doggie intensity, running like a racehorse.

Those moments make up for all the time she spends chewing on her feet.

He's new? Oh, so you haven't taught him how to be a dick about the copy machine yet?

Here Bailey is, sitting at the kitchen table. This is proof that, (1) My mom takes a hell of a good picture, and that (2) Bailey can now officially get away with anything.

Wicking Cotton All Day Long

So, the other day, several items came out of my bag sticky. The first one was something from the office that I'd just brought along on a whim, so I figured without even really thinking about it that it had gone in sticky. The second and third things were my sock pattern and my journal. That's about when I got to thinking that there was some kind of problem.

I hauled every bit of junk out of the bag, and there it was: a packet of strawberry preserves from McDonald's with the corner missing. For a second I thought positively nothing of it - I do stupid shit like put an open packet of strawberry preserves in my book bag all the time. Lindor ball peanut butter and saltine cracker crumbs are permanently stuck in the seams of that bag. But then I remembered that I haven't eaten - nay, consumed - a particle from McDonald's for 11 years. Also, I don't like strawberry, or preserves.

I had not put the open packet of strawberry preserves into my bag.

Luckily, in addition to putting idiotic things into my bag, a lifetime of doing so has taught me to protect what I have. My journal rides around in a heavy-duty Ziploc bag, and my sock pattern even came with its own protective plastic sheath. My knitting goes into a plastic grocery bag. I kind of look insane, I think, when I'm pulling all of these things out of their respective bags in public, but I'm already out of place with my shirts that cover my navel and pants that come all the way to my ankles, so a plastic bag isn't going to push me over the edge of cool.

Anyhow, I checked with Other, who denied putting the opened packet of strawberry preserves in my bag*, so it's either a case of mistaken bag identity... or SABATOGE.


*And it's really not like I think he *would* put an open packet of strawberry preserves in my bag, but I didn't want to go straight to sabatoge. And I know he hates littering.

because really, pants, one thing that I do not need you to be is smaller.

Dutifully, I got up at 7 this morning and called in and said I am not coming in today. And woohoo, went back to sleep. And then I got up around 11 and ate some breakfast and thought about all the stuff I could do (bills! laundry! e-mail*! knitting!) and then passed out until about 5. At 5 I remembered: this is what sinus infections feel like.

Which means that tomorrow I'll have to go a-beggin' for the antibiotics, and tonight I'll need to hit the store for some Shirley Temple ingredients.

*I can't believe that I've turned into a jerk who can't send a measly e-mail.

wither? yonder.

The exodus of students from this town was not nearly as mass as I would've liked it to have been. Take your cell phones and your flip-flops and your lax attitudes towards traffic laws and get the fuck out. One more WOOOO and I swear to Jesus the potato gun is coming out.

At one point I had more to say, but I guess bitchery and threats are all I can produce right now.

I'm a napalm bomb for you baby, chicka-boom.

When I was little, I would sometimes dread things so badly that I'd imagine that I died before I had to do whatever it was, just to comfort myself. Performances, doctor's appointments, anything, really, that involved people looking at me. Math tests. There were a lot of nights during which I contemplated suicide before a math test. I never intended to kill myself, of course, just thought about how nice it would be if maybe I died.

I haven't felt that way in a very long time, until now.

Electrocution is imminent.

Lizard Brains in Love

One day last week, I went home for lunch instead of eating at one of the dining halls. The next day, Other and I worked out something where he would drop me at work and then pick me up and we could go do stuff. He got home around noon that day, he said, and got really excited to see my car in the driveway, thinking I'd come home for lunch again. He walked into the house and called to me before realizing that my car was there because he'd dropped me off at work.

Friday after work, I discovered that my car battery was dead. Saturday, I borrowed Other's car. About 4 hours after I got to work that morning, I looked out the window overlooking the parking lot, saw his car, and was like, Other's here!!! But... he wasn't.


They're Lighting Their Arrows! Can they do that?

Wow. I mean, wow. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to invite Steve Colbert to speak at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner is SO SO fired. Probably from the limo about 3 seconds after the Bushes were out the door.

Of course the guy got a cool reception from the Bushes - did the Wizard give Dorothy a warm reception? (Okay, I have no idea if the Wizard did or not.) Did the Emperor hug the little kid who pointed out he was naked? (I'm pretty sure he didn't.) What I'm saying is, why would the Bushes give a kind reception to the guy who'd just done a full-frontal attack -- in a completely earnest tone -- on dubya himself? I mean, that shit isn't supposed to happen. Dub was mad. That was beautiful.

It would probably have been better for the dubster to laugh it off, to negate it by accepting it and as such putting it into the category of friendly ribbing. But it wasn't and he didnt, and - you've got to see it.

And I Suppose It Shouldn't Come As a Surprise That He Thinks He Can Do This
"Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws: President Cites Powers of his Office", from the Boston Globe. Apparently over 1/10 times the president signs a bill into law, he's stuck on a little legal post-it note that says, "or not."

And Finally
This article is not nearly as cool as the title implies, but is still interesting.