Month: July 2014

Nearly time

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I need a new laptop.  I’ve needed one for a while, but it’s not urgent.  There are other things to focus on.  But the time for a new laptop is creeping steadily closer.  I want a small one (11 inches?  13?  Definitely not 15, and I don’t want a netbook.), it has to have a camera, a full keyboard, and it has to be fast.  Not difficult, right?  It’d be nice if it had more than one USB port (my little work laptop only has one), but I can get around that.  There are lots of little USB hubs out there (like this one – it even comes in different colors!).  Oh, I have to not hate the touchpad.  I hate the touchpad on my work laptop so much I refuse to use it.  I take a mouse and mousepad everywhere I go with that laptop.  I like the touchpad on my personal laptop, so I know they exist.  Must find one.  I don’t think I’m asking much.  I just need to actually shop for it.  Which I’ll do someday.  My poor pretty pink laptop is slowing down.  I can’t even upgrade the version of Linux I’m running because my graphics card is out of date.  I think it’s only 6 years old, but apparently that’s just too much oldness.  Too much age.  I’ll have to put it out to pasture and replace it with a younger, faster model.  I’m sorry, pretty pink laptop.  I still love you.

Conjunction Junction

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Some books are mysteries (I just read a good one), some are romance, some are thrillers, and so on, right?  I mean, genre fiction – it exists.  Duh. A couple of the books I read recently covered at least two genres each, depending on how you want to categorize them.  They weren’t bad (I enjoyed them both), but I didn’t go into them with any idea what they were about, so it was a bit of a surprise to find that one was a Victorian mystery with vampires and werewolves and oh wait it’s a romance, too, and the other was a superhero book (that part I knew) with zombies (surprise!).  Are authors afraid their readers will get bored?  Or maybe the authors are bored?  I really did enjoy both books, but the premises sound so sensational, so ridiculous.  (Trendy?  Maybe.  Yes.)  You know what, though?  I don’t care.  I want to read anything and everything.  Mostly.  If it’s fiction.

Riley swears it was a beaver

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After more than two months of trying to sell our house on our own, with only the two low offers right at the beginning, John and I decided to hand the work over to someone else.  We signed with an agent last Sunday, so now he’s in charge of marketing our house and following up with the people who come to see it.  He’s the guy who put us on the MLS for a small fee, and he’s been super helpful these months, answering all kinds of questions and providing advice, so we figured if anyone was going to get a commission from us, it should be this guy.  He hosted an open house for us today, freeing us up on a Sunday afternoon for the first time in a while, and our fingers are crossed that he’ll get our house sold.

We’re anxious to get moving, and not just because the life we have planned is going to be so cool.  We need to get out of this house before Riley destroys it.  He’s never been a chewer.  Really, never.  That was Roxy, and she was only destructive when she was a puppy.  Riley was never interested in chew toys, even, unless he was taking them away from her, and then he didn’t bother to eat them.  He just kept them away from Roxy.  So imagine our surprise (and horror) when we came home last Saturday morning to find this:

And this:

And this:

We were only gone for TWO HOURS.  And, of course, we had an open house planned for the next day.  We spent the whole rest of that Saturday fixing the house.  It’s all better now – no sign of the rampage Riley must have begun the second we got in the car.  He took a chunk out of another wall (similar to the last picture) a couple of days later, but he hasn’t done anything else like it since then.  We brought in a couple of sticks from the yard, and he seems to be focusing on those.  During the open house today, we took him to a pet store and he picked out a couple of chewy things (which was also kind of jaw-dropping – he’s never paid any attention to what’s going on in the bins in pet stores).  We don’t want to have to crate him all day, so hopefully the chew toys will work.

I don’t get it

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Sunbathing is not for me.  I don’t understand how people do it for hours on end.  I can’t even manage half an hour.  I figured I’d take advantage of an afternoon off to see if I could get rid of some tan lines before the wedding (strapless bridesmaid dress – it’s making me do crazy things, apparently), so I put on some sunscreen, laid out on the deck, set a timer for 15 minutes, and started to sweat.   It was awful.  And boring, even listening to Anne of Avonlea.  I flipped over after 15 minutes, but I didn’t make it more than another 3 before I gave up.  I was so uncomfortable!  So I’ll just have some (hopefully faint) tank top lines over my shoulders and two fairly pale legs.  This is what I look like.  I can deal.