Chasing some thoughts as they flit through my tired brain

I like tea.  Might have put too much sugar in this cup, though.  I gave Roxy a kong toy with frozen peanut butter and dog treats stuffed inside.  She chewed happily on it until she chased it under my desk.  She was heading my way to tell me to fetch it for her just when I noticed that the gnawing sounds had stopped.  Smart dog.  I think I chose the wrong book to read.  I want to read it, and I want to want to read it more, but I clearly don’t want to read it enough since I’m here typing instead of reading.  I’ll read it.  Tomorrow.  Tomorrow is Tuesday.  Tomorrow is almost February.  Technically, today is also almost February.  When does almost start?  Definitely not earlier than halfway through the month before.  I was having this conversation with someone about age recently.  I’m almost 33.  Who says that at this age?  When you’re a month away from your 13th birthday, it makes sense to say you’re almost 13.  Almost 9.  Almost 16.  But almost 33?  Three weeks to go.  So do I give in and just say I’m 33?  I’m closer to 33 than 32.  Or do I hold on to 32 (“as long as you ca-an”) until the actual day?  Seriously, I wonder about this almost every day.  The cardio machines at the gym ask me for weight (depressing, but that’s not one of the choices) and age.  From a purely physiological (is that the word I’m looking for?) standpoint, 33 would be closer to the truth.  I hope the machine doesn’t mind that I’ve been lying to it for almost six months.  Almost.

Musing on nothing in particular

  • John caught Riley drinking my coffee this morning.  Later, he (Riley, not John) knocked the trash can down the basement steps and possibly ate some of the coffee grounds that spilled out.  Is my dog a caffeine junkie?  How did this happen?  How did I not notice?  It would certainly explain the high-strung behavior…
  • John made a pot roast (roast beef?  Is there a difference?  I don’t really care – delicious either way) for dinner tonight.  The house smells fantastic – like red wine and onions.  Warm red wine and onions.
  • I got a 96% on my fourth homework assignment in my data modeling class.  I was debating whether or not to argue with the professor because I think (and John agrees) that she’s wrong about that one answer.  I decided not to.  I got a 96%.  Arguing for a 100% isn’t necessary.  I’m letting it go.
  • I’m drinking white wine instead of red even though we’re having pot roast (or roast beef) for dinner tonight.  Ask me if I care.  (Hint: I don’t.)

Things that have nothing to do with each other

Car trouble.  Not the big kind.  The annoying kind.  I drove my car last Friday.  Then I left it in the driveway over the weekend, and the temperature dropped Monday night.  Tuesday morning, I went out to start the car.  Nothing.  Not even engine sputters or clicking.  Completely dead battery.  John jumped the car, we checked for the culprit and found nothing (no lights were on, no doors were ajar, the radio was off) and I drove to work (about 20 minutes).  That afternoon, around 2:15, I tried to start the car again.  (I needed to get home so I could give Roxy her medicine around 2:30.  More on that later.)  Nothing.  Completely dead battery.  I got the woman who was parked next to me to help me jump the car again.  I crawled all over the damn thing once it was running, looking for any doors not shut all the way or lights on that shouldn’t be – still nothing.  I drove home, taking the long way.  John did a ton of googling.  Turns out this car often has battery drain problems.  Something is draining power even when everything is off.  The problem is that everyone’s solution is different.  And we don’t have one yet.  For now, we have a workaround (it helped that I was going to Baltimore today and didn’t need a car).  Last night, after I got home, John unplugged this power connector thing that’s inside the dash on the far left (facing the driver’s side door).  This morning, he plugged it back in and the car started right up.  He drove it to work today, unplugged it again, and was able to start the car to get home.  So something in the group of…things that the power connector controls is what’s draining the battery.  The next step is to figure out which thing it is so we can fix it.  Or replace it.  Or…something.  Now that I know I can start the car, it’s not an emergency.  It’s just super annoying.  And it turns out that this is why my power locks don’t work half the time.  There’s not enough power left in the car to trip the locks, and I have to actual open the door with the KEY.  How barbaric.

I have no segue for this next thing.  I was going to go with “You know what else is barbaric?”, but it doesn’t make any sense.  So I’m skipping the segue.  Sue me.  Also, I keep trying to spell segue “seque”.  I’m not sure that’s a word in any language.  What do I know?  Maybe it is.  Maybe it’s what a sequin becomes when it grows up.

My point is that I want to talk about Roxy now, but I can’t get there from power locks that don’t work.

I don’t even have a whole lot to say about Roxy, except that she’s doing okay.  She had a seizure this morning, and she’s still having them every week to week and a half, but she’s recovered pretty quickly from her last few.  The biggest headache has been the change in medication.  We added a new one (the third) that we had to give her three times a day, 8 hours apart.  That is HARD.  No matter how we schedule it, we either end up having to give her a pill in the middle of the night or be home in the middle of the afternoon (2-ish – like yesterday), which is difficult when we have to be at work.  And it’s so new (and so different from her regular medication schedule – twice a day, 12 hours apart) that even I’m working from home, I can’t remember to give her the pill on time, so we either end up giving it to her really late and skipping the next one or we skip the one I forgot and give her the late one.  Thankfully, the drug company just started making an extended release version.  We picked it up yesterday and started this morning.  Twice a day, 12 hours apart.  That we can do.

And here’s a video of my adorable puppy.

Roxy doesn’t want to play my games from Susannah Brewer on Vimeo.

This holiday snuck up on me

I don’t know why I expected to be productive today.  I really really wasn’t.  At all.  Nope.  The only good thing I did all day was keep the dogs company so I could put off the guilt of dropping them off at the kennel.  Something I will be doing within the hour.  The guilt is rising.  At least it’s only two nights.  We’ll be back before they know it (I hope), and they can spend the whole weekend draped over our toes as we spend lots of quiet  hours working on our schoolwork (John plans to put in some quality thesis time, and I have my last calculus quiz to work on).  We may watch the rest of Twin Peaks.  We started it a few days ago, and we’re five or six (seven or eight) episodes in.  We’re looking for stuff to put off getting caught up with Doctor Who and Torchwood.  I’m not ready to not have any new episodes of those to watch.  So I’m treating Twin Peaks like a movie, kind of.  The end isn’t far off (it wasn’t on the air that long), and I want to know what happened!  I could do without the music, though.  Truly awful stuff.

I’m not ready for Thanksgiving.  Mentally.  How did it get to be late November?  Wasn’t it August, like, yesterday?  What happened to August, anyway?  Well, crap.  I must be old.  Maybe I can find a way for the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to slow down a little so I can enjoy them.  Unlikely.  I can’t get today to slow down – how could I get whole weeks to stop rushing by?

On the other hand, no work for four whole days!  Yay!  Save some green bean casserole for me.  That’s all I care about this year.  That and sweet potatoes.  And stuffing/dressing/however it’s made – I love it either way.  Really, it’s just the turkey I can do without.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Death by brisket or barking pug – your choice

We have had an eventful couple of days.  I tried to poison us, and then we got attacked by a pug.  Not on the same day, thank the whatever from high atop the thing (because I am a DORK), because I don’t know if I could have handled that.

First things first: I made brisket for dinner on Sunday.  It cooked all day long, smelled fantastic.  Last time I made it, I didn’t cook it quite long enough, so I added time this weekend.  I kept an eye on it, added water, and kept it tightly covered, but I guess I didn’t add enough water at the end.  Maybe.  I’m not sure, but the bottom was not edible.  Very tough.  The rest of it tasted fine, so we ate it anyway and put away the leftovers.  Within a couple of hours, by bedtime, I was not feeling so hot.  Like so not good that I was contemplating sleeping on the floor next to the toilet.  The smell of the brisket was SO strong we had to open the windows, and when I did crawl back into bed (bathroom trashcan nearby), I tried to sleep sitting up, knees up, head tilted forward and toward the fresh air coming in from outside.  I didn’t have a good night.  By about 3am, John wasn’t having a good night either.  Neither of us could sleep facing the hallway (even after John closed the door) because the overpower smell of brisket was nauseating to us both.  That’s a tragedy.  Brisket is one of the best smells in the world.  We were a little woozy the next morning, but we got over it.  John even made a brisket sandwich out of the leftovers for lunch today.  He’s braver than me.  We’ll see how he feels tonight.

This morning, after a light dinner last night and a normal night’s sleep (I’m feeling much better, thank you), I took the dogs for a jog around the neighborhood.  We turned down this one street, and every dog on the block started barking at us.  Making a HUGE racket.  Roxy and Riley were really good, though.  They stayed on the sidewalk with me, didn’t bark, didn’t lunge.  About halfway down the block, a woman across the street from us was admonishing her barking ankle-biters and eventually scooped one of them into her arms.  We got past them, but all that little-dog barking was getting louder and louder…I looked back and I saw a pug charging across the street toward us.  I grabbed Riley’s collar to keep the crazy down, and the pug stopped short right in front of Roxy, who didn’t even flinch.  That pug was inches from her face, barking his head off, and Roxy stood her ground and looked at him, head cocked to one side like she was confused.  Maybe she intimidated him (’cause Roxy’s SO scary).  He ran back home a few seconds later.

For those of you who were wondering, John feels fine.  Maybe it wasn’t the brisket.

I probably jinxed it. I do that a lot.

Cold weather = dry air = dry skin = can I just spend all day every day in a bathtub full of moisturizer?  That wouldn’t be weird, right?

Here, have an insane puppy.  I’m tired.  Too many interrupted nights for sick puppies.  But yay!  No incidents last night or all day today!  I think we might be able to sleep through the night tonight.

I’m going to regret saying that, aren’t I?

Avoiding an egging

We weren’t particularly in the mood for Halloween this year.  John picked up some candy yesterday, but we didn’t decorate, we didn’t look for costumes for ourselves, and as of this morning, we’d decided to pretend we weren’t home.  I had visions of us leaving all the downstairs lights off and hiding in our room with dinner, the dogs, and the Roku, blinds closed.  I would have put a bowl of candy on the front porch, but that would have been it.  Then John got home and decided we weren’t going to be those neighbors.  Instead, the lights are on, the doorbell is ringing, the dogs are going nuts (Riley LOVES Halloween – he’s so excited he gets to say hi to all the little kids), and we’re holding dinner until the rush is over.  But the kids are cute.  This one little boy was pretty clearly dressed as Thor, so I asked the idiot question: “Are you Thor?”  “NO.  I’m FIVE.”  I stopped asking.  Another little girl ran back to her parents yelling, “I petted the doggie!”  That’s SO much better than candy.

Allons y, Alonzo!

Two sick dogs does not a happy household make.  They’re miserable, we’re miserable, and I can’t believe I’m looking forward to seeing solid dog poop again.  I mean, really.  We haven’t made it through a night without some cleanup necessary in the morning.  It’s been almost a week, but at least in the beginning, it was just one dog.  Last night I shot downstairs at 2:30 in the morning because I heard Roxy’s collar jingle.  I thought maybe she was just getting up and I could get her outside in time.  Nope.  There was already a mess.  I cleaned it up while they were outside and went back to bed.  Got up at eight this morning – another mess.  I’m fairly certain the second mess was Riley.  We were thinking about crating them tonight, but honestly, it’s easier to clean up the floor than it is to clean up the crate AND give each dog a bath.  Before work.

Enough about dog poop?  Okay.  The only other thing on my mind is my DE midterm tomorrow morning.  And Doctor Who.

[Beginning of Doctor Who section – if you’re not interested (I’m looking at you, family),  you can quit reading now.]

We finished Season 4 of Doctor Who today (and Season 2 of Torchwood).  I have two things to say:

  1. Rose got her Doctor!  Yay yippity yay yay!  Makes me very happy.  And maybe a little teary.
  2. I am NOT ready for a new Doctor.  Do I have to?
  3. Does this mean we get Martha on Torchwood?  And maybe Mickey?  I could live with that.  Don’t answer me.  I’ll find out soon enough.
  4. Donna was my favorite.  She was AWESOME.
  5. GREG.  The fish-head episode is long over.  Unless there’s another one even MORE literal than the one I’m thinking of.  What on EARTH were you going to tell us?

I could go on, but John is making dinner and it smells SO good.

What is this – I don’t even – gah

Do I live in North Dakota?  Near any Great Lake?  Do I live in ALASKA?  No.  Do I live below the Mason-Dixon line?  Yes.  Is it October still?  YES.  Then why WHY did I wake up to this this morning?

It doesn't look so bad here, but it was early.

I mean, really, weather, what’s going on here?  The snow switched to sleet briefly and then right back to snow.  It came down steadily ALL DAY LONG.  I don’t live in #$*&% Minnesota, people!

If this is an omen, I may not be leaving the house this winter.  I’ll have to get my groceries airlifted in.  New tires just became a higher priority.  Maybe I should teach the dogs how to pull a sled.  And I can learn to snowshoe.

On top of that, it seems we now have two dogs with stomach problems, so off to the vet we will go (again) Monday morning.

(Obviously – or maybe not if you’re ignoring the news – everyone in the Northeast has it worse than us, but that is not the point.  It’s not even Halloween yet, for crying out loud.)

Wildlife sighting! Hearing, really, but who’s ever heard of a wildlife hearing?

The other night, John and I got up at 2am to let Riley out.  (Riley has been having intestinal difficulties, and we were trying to avoid waking up to another gigantic mess.)  I stepped out onto the deck to shoo him into the yard, and I heard hooting.  Like actual owl-type hooting.  The kind I’ve only ever heard exaggerated in scary nighttime scenes in Disney movies.  And those are always set deep in the woods or on farms or something.  I certainly didn’t expect to hear it in our treeless suburban neighborhood.  And then I heard a second one.  TWO OWLS.  In my backyard.  At 2 in the morning.  May I never hear that again (if only because I prefer not to be up at 2 in the morning).

Hey, I managed to embarrass myself on Twitter this morning.  On the plus side, John Scalzi replied to my tweet.  On the minus side, I came off looking like an idiot.

And on top of that, I look like a nerd trying to impress someone with a big word.  In my defense, I ran out of characters when I tried to say “irrelevant to the discussion” instead.  I was being concise.

I’m going to hide now.

Update: To make the whole Twitter thing worse, I was just catching up on my blog reading, went to Whatever, and found that the article was apparently in yesterday’s Washington Post and John Scalzi posted it on his own blog then.  So now I’m an idiot who clearly doesn’t keep up with his blog.  Just great.

Not doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Naturally.

What I should do: study for my calculus midterm.  What I’m going to do: play on the internet and possibly watch TV.  Then?  Bed.  I have to go to Baltimore again for work tomorrow.  On the one hand, the work I’m doing in Baltimore is the best thing about my job.  On the other hand, I have to go to Baltimore.  It’s far.

I need more sleep.  Roxy was due for a seizure over the weekend, but she never had one.  This is good news (seizures are bad), but it means I’ve been watching her like a hawk when I’m home and I keep waking up at every random sound in the night, convinced it’s her.  I’m tired.  But she just licked my elbow and wagged her tail, so everything must be fine.

Update: I jinxed it.  She just had a seizure.  But at least it was before we went to bed.  (She’s fine.  Walking it off.)  I’ve been playing phone tag with the vet since yesterday.  She wants to talk about changing her medication.  (Roxy’s, not the vet’s, just so we’re clear.)  I’m all ears.

Double espresso doesn’t hack it

There is not enough caffeine in the world to make me alert today.  Roxy had a seizure last night (right on schedule – it’s been a week and a half), so we got to bed late, and then I got up at 5:15 and was out the door by 6:20 (for the third day in a row), which is clearly not early enough because I was trying to be in DC by 8 and it was 8:30 before I got there.  Traffic sucks.  And it was raining, which only makes traffic worse.  I stopped at Starbucks before I got on the highway, and then the barista handed me my coffee, and then she got this horrified look on her face (seriously, like the world was about to end) and said, “Oh no! I put TWO shots in your coffee!”  “How many are there normally?”  “Just one.”  “Don’t worry about it.  It might help.”  It didn’t.  I still had to sing along to the radio at the top of my lungs to stay awake on the GW Parkway.

Also, I think I’m over my usual Starbucks order.  It hasn’t come out right for weeks now.  Disappointing because when it’s right, it’s SO good.

What kind of lab hates to get wet?

Roxy eats mud.  I don’t know why, but she’s tearing up the lawn.  I keep meaning to ask the vet about it.  Or at least Dr. Google.  Tonight, John suggested I try to deter her.  He handed me a full water bowl.  I went out on the deck, he pointed the flashlight, and I dumped half the bowl on her head.  She hates that, but she came right back on the deck (she was ignoring me when I was calling her in because she couldn’t tear herself away from the mud).  This might work.  The spray bottle is probably a better tool than the water bowl, though.

Hope your day started better than mine

And I’m not talking about the weather.  Sure, it’s cold, rainy, and gloomy, but I plan to stay inside most of the day, all cozy with the dogs.  No, John and I got up and got ready to go out (he’s heading to his parents’, I was going to run a couple of quick errands), but before we could leave (thankfully, really), Roxy had a seizure.  She’s been having them about one every week and a half or so, and I knew she was due for one this weekend.  That was one of the reasons I had planned to stay home with her rather than go to PA in the first place.  And maybe she did me a favor by getting it over with first thing – now I don’t have to worry about it every time I leave the house.  Not for another week and a half, anyway.  We (me and Roxy) spent about half an hour on the floor together, me holding her still, her drooling and panting on my right shoulder and arm.  I certainly won’t be going out in the clothes I was wearing, and that sweater might be a goner.

She’s partway back to herself now (she’s eating).  Once she recognizes her name, I’ll feel comfortable leaving.

Of dentists and dogs

“Now relax” should be banned from all dentists’ vocabularies.  They should get fined every time they’re caught saying it.  Sure, I’ll relax now that you’ve poked me in the cheek with a giant needle, shoved a giant rubbery tray thingy between my teeth to hold my mouth open, shined a light in my eyes, and started up the drill.  Totally relaxed, no problem, taking a nap.  (I wish I could have napped.)  It was awful.  All three hours of it.  (Would’ve been a FANTASTIC nap.)  My dentist is great and all, very nice, friendly staff, but that doesn’t mean I look forward to going.   (I know, I know – who does?)  And yesterday is why.

This morning I found Roxy in the bathroom with the door closed.  No idea how she got there.  I worked from home today, and around mid-morning, she had a seizure.  (She’s fine now.)  I usually keep a pretty close eye on her during her recovery phase (she rambles around the first floor, slobbering on everything, bumping into the walls, the furniture, getting stuck under the table – she tried to take a chair with her, legs first – and I try to keep her out of the water bowl, keep her from knocking things over, from slobbering on the books on the bottom shelves…the important stuff), but as she gets closer to normal, I start going back to other things.  I checked my email, realized I hadn’t heard her stumble into anything for a minute, and went looking.  Not in the dining room, not in the kitchen, not in the hall, not in the family room…but I could hear her breathing.  The kind of breathing she does when she’s head first into a wall and her nose is getting smushed.  (Happens a lot – I know that noise.  To her, people.  Happens to her. During recovery.  Geez.)  Followed the sound of her breathing, found her in the bathroom.  Behind the closed door, under the pedestal sink.  Maybe she needed some alone time, but I don’t understand how the door closed behind her.  She’s not that clever.  Certainly not in that state.  Wish she could tell me.

It’s no secret – the dogs run this house

Roxy is mad at me because I’m making her wear a sock again.  I noticed last night that she was obsessively licking one of her rear paws, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it when I checked it out, and it didn’t seem to be hurting her, so I left it alone.  Then this morning I heard the licking noise again (horrible noise), and when I got her head away from the paw, I could see that she’d managed to lick ALL OF THE FUR off two of her toes.  It’s kind of gross.  And again, except for the hairless part, nothing looks weird, nothing looks irritated, there’s nothing stuck in her paw….her nails could use a trim, but I’m fairly certain that’s not what’s bothering her.  So I wrestled her into a sock and used electrical tape to hold it on.  Now she’s pouting.

Riley is jealous because Roxy got to sit in my lap while I put the sock on her.  All Riley has ever wanted is to be a lap dog.  All 80 pounds of him.

It’s a mitzvah

Once again, the impetus behind my semi-quasi-half-assed (but still!) massive cleaning effort today is not the desire to live an uncluttered, streak-free, dog hair-free life.  Oh, no, I can live quite happily with clutter piled high and nose tracks on the windows, as evidenced by the state of the house.  I do have some pride though, and I refuse to allow someone – anyone (other than John) – to see the house like this.  Unless they helped put it that way.  And unless they’re in John’s band.  I don’t go to great lengths to clean up when the band comes over to rehearse.  Although maybe I should.  ANYway, I’m cleaning because we’re expecting a visitor this weekend.  Not just a visitor – a refugee fleeing the hurricane.  A refugee with cats!  Because cats shouldn’t have to fend for themselves in the middle of a hurricane.  Instead, they’ll have to fend for themselves in a house with dogs.  Honestly, I’m not sure which they’d prefer.  We’ll manage just fine.  Although based on the weather right now, it seems totally ridiculous to be planning for a hurricane.  It’s sunny, a little muggy, bright blue sky, fluffy white clouds that are not in the least bit intimidating…

Oh, speaking of intimidating, I passed a car yesterday (a dinky, dented, old Honda or something – not impressive (not that there’s anything wrong with Hondas – I’m just painting a picture)) with the license plate DOMN8U.  Really?  In that car?  Napoleon complex much?  It’s so aggressive and hateful.  Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Update: My house will not be a haven for hurricane refugees after all.  But hey – it’s clean!  So I can enjoy that.  And I’ll see my refugee friend in a couple of weeks.  All is well.

Cloudy – yes, rainy – yes, but gloomy? Never. Cozy.

All this rain means walking the dogs is out of the question.  So maybe it’s gloomy for them.  It’s been raining almost non-stop all day long.  Very good for the lawn.  I wish I could send some of this rain to Texas.  They need it.

Wait – it stopped.  Walking the dogs is back on the table.  Well, not literally.  I would ruin our pretty (expensive) dining room table if I walked the dogs on it.  And it wouldn’t be good exercise for them.  Not long enough.  Aaaaannnnd…that was dumb.  Moving on.

But not very far. Since I find myself incapable of writing anything anyone might want to read today, I’ll leave you with this video (courtesy of the The Daily What and Say OMG (I think that’s where the original came from)).  It’s only 2 minutes, and the payoff is totally worth the wait.

If you were a dog

If you were a dog, would you want to be an outside dog or an inside dog?  A big dog or a little dog?  A dog with responsibilities or a pet without a care in the world?  I’m watching our two sleep the day away, and I’m just a teensy bit jealous.  Only a teensy bit.  I think they’re sleeping because they’re bored.  I’m not entertaining them.  (I’m working.  Clearly.)  I’m not sure I’d want to be a dog if it meant (as it must) giving up reading.  And talking.  Somebody asked me the other day if all this working from home is isolating.  I don’t feel particularly isolated.  I’m not talking as much as I would if I were in the office, but I don’t think I’m making up for it when John gets home.  (John may disagree.)  I don’t feel starved for human contact.  I talk to the dogs (although not as much as you might think), and I spend plenty of time emailing and calling work people for work stuff.  In fact, I think I spend too much time on that and not enough time on what I wanted to get done in the quiet of home.  Hey, if I turn into a dog, I won’t have to work. Unless I’m a working dog.  But working dogs always seem to enjoy their jobs, so maybe that would be okay.