general

Good idea, Mom

1 Comment

You know how sometimes you have a problem (major, minor, whatever – in my case, very minor) and it has a very simple solution, but you just can’t see it?  I was talking to Mom and Dad on my way home from DC yesterday, and I mentioned that I kicked off my shoes as soon as I got in the car to give my feet a break.  Unfortunately, that meant I was driving barefoot, which is 1) never comfortable in the best of times, and yesterday wasn’t the best of times, and 2) possibly not legal in DC and Virginia.  Mom suggested I keep a pair of sandals in the car to switch to on my home.  Of course!  Brilliant and simple.  So this morning, I threw my comfy flip-flops (the cushy ones) in the car, and I drove home in comfort.  Great idea, Mom!  Makes me want to smack myself in the head a little bit for not thinking of it myself.

Just a little.

My goal was to be in bed by nine.  It’s 9:15.  So, um, good night.

Donating for lazy people (like me!)

7 Comments

You know what I love?  Charities that pick up from your doorstep.  Since we moved to this house, we get regular calls from AMVETS, Purple Heart, and the National Children’s Center (NCC) telling us they’ll be in our neighborhood on a certain day and asking if we have anything to donate.  I ALWAYS say yes, and then when they call with a reminder the day before, I spend that night (sometimes the next morning before work) scrambling to find things to donate.  It’s never hard (okay, sometimes it’s hard), and I love it because it forces me to reevaluate everything in the house.  Especially the closet.  (Also, you know, it’s good to donate.  If you want to be all altruistic and stuff.)  The only time it becomes a problem is when I say yes to both Purple Heart and NCC and then realize they’re coming by on consecutive days.  So I had to make sure I had least two bags’ worth of stuff, so I could put one bag out this morning for Purple Heart and another one out tomorrow morning for NCC.

If you’re interested in something totally unrelated, you should check out I Am Bossy.  Have you been watching Bossy’s (no) book tour across the country?  She’s crazy.  And funny.  (I overuse the word “hilarious”.  I’m aware of this.)  And she’s met Jenny (The Bloggess) twice, I think.  I think that would be awesome.

Better late than never

3 Comments

One week ago today, John and I got up ridiculously early (for a Sunday morning) (no, 5:20 is always ridiculously early) in order to get to DC (via metro) so he could run in the Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run.  His training had completely derailed, since we had three feet of snow clogging all the paths and streets, and then when it finally melted, he got sick, he was working late, he had schoolwork – everything came together to make it hard for him to be ready.  He ran the Army Ten-Miler about three and a half years ago, but he hadn’t hit that distance since then.  And since he didn’t feel prepared, he was half-convinced the sweeper bus was going to pick up and take him out the race.  He had to keep up a 14-minute mile pace to avoid being picked up.  He knew (and I definitely knew) he’d do better than that, but that didn’t stop him from being nervous.

We go to the metro at Dunn Loring and got on the train.  Everyone who got on that train, at every stop, was a runner.  (They’re the only ones crazy enough to be going to DC that early.)  By the time we got into the district, the train was packed, and we all got off at the Smithsonian stop.  I wish I’d had my camera out because I looked back over my shoulder as we rode the escalator up and saw that the platform next to the train was one solid mass of people.  It looked really cool, but since I was part of that mass, I couldn’t get into my bag.  (I was playing sherpa, so I had the backpack to hold all sweatshirts, towels, water, etc.)

We followed the crowd from the metro to the grounds around the Washington Monument.  The race started in waves, so they didn’t expect all 15,000 people to be at the starting line at once.  The first wave was scheduled to go at 7:40, with the last wave at 8:00.  John was in the red wave, which I think was the second one.  All John had to do was pin on his number and go.  Of course, we’d just commuted in for more than an hour, so John (and every other runner) needed to find a port-a-potty.  Fortunately, there were tons of them.  Unfortunately, probably 7500 other runners had the same urge.  We joined one of the REALLY long lines and started to worry.  It didn’t look like it’d be possible for him to make it to the front of the line before the last wave started.  (It didn’t matter which wave he joined, so missing his wave wasn’t part of the worry.)

We waited in line for a while, and then he sent me off to find any alternatives.  I ran across 14th Street (near the starting line) and found another row of port-a-potties with NO LINES.  I raced back to John, waved him out of his line, and sent him running in that direction.  Feeling much better, he found me again as the next to last wave was starting, and we got him in the crowd.  And it was a crowd.  SO many people.  They were sent off, but they were packed in so tightly that they all walked for another few minutes.  So I walked along with them, outside the railing.

The crowd of runners (only one wave, I think)

John in that crowd. The race has started, but nobody's running yet.

There they go.

I found a great spot along the rail right by the finish line (I was already there when  I look that last picture), so, along with some other very enthusiastic spectators, I shouted myself hoarse cheering on the finishers.  Long before John came in, Erik and Margaret joined me at the finish line, bringing much-needed caffeine.  We cheered John across the line, and then headed for our meetup point.  Here’s Erik, convinced he can spot John in the sea of people:

And here’s John, triumphant and sweaty.  He finished almost four minutes faster than his last 10-miler time.

From there, we hopped the metro out to Ballston to have a yummy brunch with Erik and Margaret at Whitlow’s, and then we went home, where both of us collapsed of exhaustion, even though only one of us deserved the rest.  🙂  Go John!

Look what we did!

5 Comments

By we, of course, I mean mostly John.  After mowing the lawn (John), some light weeding (me), dog poop scooping (me), and then tying up a sagging bush (blame the three feet of snow that sat on top of it for a month) with neon yellow string (mostly John), John decided that today was the day to somehow attach these extra pieces of latticework (or trellis?  not sure what you’d call it) to the corner of the deck.  In the morning, we’ll have a little shade.  I haven’t figured out what to do about late afternoon.  I took pictures!  I forgot to take a before picture, but here’s one when we were two-thirds of the way done.

Actually, here’s a before picture, no trellis yet, with John hard at work doing…something.  On a ladder.

And here’s the finished product.  From the yard…

…and from the deck.

Since I had my camera out, I figured I’d take some pictures of the yard when it’s at its best.  And the dogs.  So here’s most of the backyard, with my flower bed in need of mulching.  Maybe next weekend.

Here’s the rose bush that’s trying to take over the deck.

Technically, that’s two rose bushes.  Here are few pictures of the dogs taking advantage of the shade.

It’s breezy and the wind chimes are…chiming, I guess, and we could hear them clearly if the windows were open, but did you see how high the pollen count was today?  My car is covered, and even though I was outside most of the day, there’s no way I’m letting clouds of pollen get into the house.

Most of the day got away from us, but all the chores are done (minus the grocery shopping) and John asked for two hours to himself so he can concentrate on his project for school before we settle in with dinner and maybe a movie.   He’ll have to spend much of tomorrow on his project, too, but at least he’ll have done something today, and he won’t have to worry about the lawn and stuff.  And tomorrow morning, we can catch up on the four hours of Lost we have saved on the DVR.  Hopefully, the rest of my weekend will include nothing more taxing than a morning run tomorrow, catching up on TV, lots of Internet time (I have to get my fix in on the weekends, now that I know what my weeks at work look like), a trip to Wegman’s (hardly a chore), and some play time outside with the dogs.  Maybe at the dog park.

For now, I need a shower.  And comfy clothes.  And I’m in for the night.  Oh, one more thing for tomorrow – set up a couple of lunch dates with a couple of friends.

I have priorities, really I do

1 Comment

And they don’t include working after I get home on a Friday evening for several hours.  But I promised myself I wasn’t going to talk about that.  Instead, I’ll mention that Roxy got so excited about the pieces of lamb fat she was going to get that she repeatedly walked herself into the narrow dead end between the arm of the couch and the wall.  Head first.  She doesn’t like to back up, so she’d stand there, tongue out, tail wagging, with her nose just barely over the arm, until I nudged her backwards with my hand on her chest.  Like three times.

John is in the office pretending he’s Brian May, and I’m pretending I have time to check some of my favorite sites before my eyes close.  We don’t have any plans this weekend (other than the usual light house cleaning, lawn mowing, grocery shopping, and something (I know there was something else I wanted to do, but did I write it down?  Say it with me.  No!)), so I hope to run and relax.  And relaxing had better include catching up with my favorite online people.  Also my new favorites, thanks to a recent thread at the Dooce Community and, of course, Spoke’s Blog Love series (first day here).

Before I go to bed, this is for Mom, Sandwich Stealer (not that one), Jess, and other people I could name but will not.  Today.  Just you wait.

I think the point of mentioning my priorities in the title was so I could say I still have mine, and I think they’re in the right order, but I need to work a lot harder at figuring out how to make them happen every day.  Or most days.  I feel a bit overwhelmed, and not by anything bad, but by not being able to make time for all those little things I like to do.  But I will.  I will figure it out.

Stop talking about work!

14 Comments

I was convinced for most of the morning that my students were going to give me terrible evaluations.  Things kept going wrong in class today.  We had some technical problems I’d never encountered before, so even though I tried to handle it well, I felt like I came across like I didn’t know what I was doing, and then some students thought they followed my directions (they didn’t), and when they didn’t end up where I said they would, again, I’m afraid it looked like I steered them in the wrong direction.  And after THAT, they were all in the right place, the same place for once, and a button that has always appeared (and that they have to press to continue) wasn’t there. All before lunch.  But it was getting close to lunch, so I called it technical difficulties, said I’d check with my team to see if they were working on something, and sent them to eat early.  I sent a HELP email, found out there is a bug, got a workaround, and by the time they got back from lunch, we were ready to move past it.  I don’t think I fully recovered from that during the afternoon, but I peeked at the evaluations after they all left, and everyone said really nice things.  No mention of how incompetent how I felt or how frazzled I thought I looked.

What?  Don’t judge me.  Of COURSE I peeked.  Like you wouldn’t.

Yesterday, one of the guys in the class came up to me during a break to tell me how relieved he is about the system and how confident he feels about being able to use it.  He used an older version of it at another agency and hated it, so he wasn’t all that positive about having to use it here.  But he said the training was good, this version was much improved over the other one, and he liked my teaching.  He taught English in Kenya while he was in the Peace Corps, apparently.  Nice guy.  (Of course I think so.  He complimented me!  (I am that shallow.))

And I need to stop talking about work.  Let’s pretend I don’t have to work.  Gee, I have an awful lot of free time…

Mid-morning excitement

4 Comments

So I’m teaching this training class today when the fire alarm starts flashing and we hear a garbled and crackling announcement come out of speakers we didn’t even notice were in the ceiling.  No idea what the announcement kept repeating, but we came to the conclusion that we should probably evacuate the building.  We joined all the other people streaming up the stairs (the class is held on the lowest basement level), but no one knew what was going on.  The security guards on the main level said only the alarms on the basement levels were going off and no one in the rest of the building had any idea what was going on.  They determined it was a false alarm pretty quickly (or so we heard) and we all went back inside, but the whole experience makes me a wonder a little.  I can only assume someone somewhere was taking it seriously, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.  Nuclear summit, anyone?  Federal building?

I remembered one other reason I don’t want to make metro my primary way of getting to work: I can’t read on the train anymore!  How horrible is that?  I discovered that I get a little carsick on the metro (train-sick?  Motion-sick doesn’t sound right.  Nauseous will do, but that’s a little strong for how I felt.) even while not reading on Sunday, when we took the metro to and from DC for the race (but that could have been ’cause I’d hardly eaten.  Maybe I was hungry).  Then yesterday, I tried to read in the morning and found I couldn’t.  I tried again on the way home (Persistent, right?  Well, it’s important!), but I could only read when the train was stopped.  So if I can’t read, where’s the advantage of letting someone else drive?  Sure, I can’t read in the car, but I have books on CD.  And yes, I could download those books to mp3 and use my headphones, but that takes work.  And lest we forget, I’m lazy.  And super tired when I get home from work.  I’m barely able to make dinner.  I didn’t mean to start whining.  Not that much, anyway.

It’s early and I have some free time

10 Comments

Sometime last month I installed a widget to track blog stats, and since then I’ve gotten a little obsessive.  Which is completely ridiculous, since my highest views-per-day count is only 49, and that was unusual.  This is not a high-traffic site.  🙂  But I like to watch the search terms that bring people here, and in the last week or so, quite a large number of people (comparatively speaking) have been coming here from a search for “bernese mountain dog puppies”.  One time (ONE TIME!) I posted a picture of some adorable puppies that happened to be Bernese Mountain Dogs (because, let’s face it, they are the cutest puppies), and now all these people hoping for a Bernese Mountain Dog site are disappointed.  Sorry, people.  But they came!  Maybe some will stay.

This morning’s class is supposed to start at 8:30.  It’s 8:18, and I haven’t seen a single person.  Usually there’s at least one person who comes early.  Besides me.  I have to be early.

Whoops.  I was just plunged into darkness.  The lights in this room are motion-sensitive, and I guess one person typing in the back of the room doesn’t create enough motion to keep them on.

Hey!  There’s my one early person.  Time to stop playing.

Metro does not make my commute shorter

1 Comment

With the nuclear summit going on in DC today and tomorrow, I decided to avoid the road closures and additional delays by taking the metro to work.  I drove to one of the western-most stations with a parking lot, left the car there, and took the train in.  It was kind of nice to let someone else be in charge of the actual driving, but since it added a half hour to my commute (each way), I don’t think I’ll be doing this regularly.  And today was a light traffic day, according to the news.  It seems everyone took the opportunity to work from home.  Wish I could have done that.  Kind of impossible with my job right now, though.

I got home around 6 and spent a very pleasant half-hour or so hanging out in the backyard with the dogs.  Riley actually fetched the ball.  Only three times, but still.  Then he decided that he’d be most comfortable stretched out on top of me, so I fought him for blanket space until I gave up and went inside.

I have no interesting thoughts tonight. Here’s what’s going through my mind (word for word, practically):

I’m SO tired.  Go to bed.  Why are you still up?  Don’t you have to get up early?  Again?  So go already.  Stop typing.  Why does the dining room look so clean?  Oh, John swept.  Man, that makes quite a difference.  I bet if I dusted it would look even better.  “Hey soul sister, ain’t that mister mister on the radio, stereo….” Ohmygod shut up already and go to bed.

We can thank Spokeit for putting the Train song in my head, although lately that hasn’t been hard.  I hear it everywhere, and while it seems like it’s in danger of being overplayed, I still like it.  But “shut up already and go to bed” is the part I’m going to listen to, so good night.

Collapsing now

Leave a Comment

You know, I didn’t run 10 miles today, but I’m completely exhausted.  Getting up at 5:20 on a Sunday morning is not natural.  It’s evil.  But it was a good day.  Beautiful morning, once the sun came up.  John did great, beating his time from the Army 10-miler by 4 minutes.  Come back tomorrow for more about today, including pictures.  Going to bed now.

Short Saturday post

Leave a Comment

This is getting to be a habit.  The short posts on Saturdays, I mean.  We had a nice leisurely morning.  I ran six miles (takes me forever to do that) while John mowed the lawn.  I got back in time to help him pull up dandelions in the front yard.  Ate a quick breakfast, took a quick shower, and then we went to DC to pick up his race packet and have lunch.  DC was mobbed, of course, since it’s the weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival, but we got a good parking space on the south side of the Mall, right at 12th St.  And then realized we had to walk to 4th and F to pick up the race packet.  Not the best planning.  Had lunch at Elephant and Castle (mobbed for lunch even though it was 2:30), and then headed home.  It was much later than we planned, but I guess that’s how it goes.  I went to Costco to pick up Roxy’s medicine and then bought new shoes from the Naturalizer outlet nearby.  I might still check out Nordstrom’s tomorrow since they carry Dansko and Sofft.  The Clarks outlet was disappointing.

A recap of my day is not the most exciting reading, but it’s all I can think of at the moment.  I’m tired and we’re getting up at 5:20 tomorrow morning.  I’m going to bed.

Oh, the cherry blossoms are all gone.  Not out here (there are lots of cherry trees still blooming around here), but in DC, they’re all green now.  I’m sure that’s a huge disappointment to the thousands of tourists in town this weekend.  It was a beautiful day, though, and DC looks great in spring.  The sky was almost a September blue.

Busy weekend ahead

1 Comment

Eventful, at least.

Okay, you got me, there’s only one event, but I have things to do!

I spent most of today finding out what I’ll need to be able to do everything this weekend.  I got shoe recommendations from my friends online and found stores that carry those brands, I talked to the vet about how to switch Roxy’s medication correctly so we (hopefully) avoid seizures, I picked up the new prescription from the vet, and I figured out how we’re going to get to DC and where I’ll watch the race with Erik and Margaret (who I’ll be emailing soon) and where we’ll meet up with John again for Sunday’s Cherry Blossom 10-miler.  So tomorrow, I’ll buy shoes, John will do homework, we’ll pick up Roxy’s new medication, and we’ll run down to DC to pick up John’s race packet.  Quick trip.  And we’ll drive, of course, not run.  That’s for Sunday.  And then, we’ll get up absurdly early Sunday morning (so I’m sleeping in tomorrow, but I will run at some point during the day), drive to the nearest metro stop, metro in to the race, have a late breakfast with our friends, and come back and finish our Sunday at home.  Hopefully being lazy.  And at some point, we’ll mow the lawn.  And maybe mulch a flower bed or two.  Or not.  That doesn’t sound very lazy.

Pardon me while I announce what is obvious by now.  John is running in the Cherry Blossom 10-miler Sunday morning, so anyone who reads this and is in the area is welcome to join me, help cheer on John, and then have something to eat.  I wish you were all nearby.

John walked in the door just a couple of minutes ago, almost too tired to hug me hello, so I’ve started the rice and I have to go stir up my stir-fry.  He needs to eat well and get plenty of sleep for the next couple of days.  That should happen every day, for both of us, but you all know how hard it is to make that happen.  We’re better about the eating well.  Not so good about the sleep.

I want a new drug

11 Comments

My prediction about not getting a full night’s sleep last night came true, unfortunately.  Around 11pm, John nudged me awake because he heard Roxy start convulsing downstairs.  We rushed down there in time to get her seizure pillow (an old (and now disgusting) throw pillow) under her head.  John went to get stuff to clean up after her, and I sat down on the floor next to her to keep her head on the pillow and keep her flailing legs from driving her into a wall.  The seizure ended after 20 or 30 seconds, but her breathing was still really heavy (expected) and her legs still made occasional twitching motions, like she was trying to swim (she was on her side).  Within just a few seconds (maybe 10 or 15), she started convulsing again.  In only about 20 minutes, this happened again and again until she’d had a total of four, maybe five individual seizures, with those twitches and tremors in between each one.  At the start of the fourth one (or fifth – I couldn’t count that high last night), I left John with her and dashed upstairs to find my jeans and shoes.  If she can’t stop, the emergency vet is the only place to go.  After that last one, though, while I was on the phone with the emergency vet, she stopped.  We weren’t sure it was over, but after ten minutes or so, she got up and started her recovery routine (wander around the house and bump into things until she comes out of it).  The emergency vet suggested we bring her in, of course, but when I tried to get them to tell me what they could do, they couldn’t really say.  If she was convulsing and unable to stop, they could inject her with anti-seizure drugs, but only in that circumstance.  Otherwise, they’d just watch her and then call a neurologist in the morning.  We decided, since the seizures had stopped for the moment, that we could just watch her overnight and drop her at our normal vet in the morning(WAY more affordable) for observation during the day.  Which is what we did, and I’m glad, since she didn’t have any more seizures, I felt comfortable having her where I know they know her, and it only cost $23 for the day instead of the hundreds the emergency vet always charges.  Short story (too late, I know): she’s fine for now.  We did finally do a little more research into the cost of switching her medication to zonisamide, and here’s where Costco totally made my day.  Our vet had heard that Costco sold zonisamide for less money than other pharmacies (like CVS), so I finally called today.  We have several near us, so I picked one and called.  We’ll need 500 mg a day for Roxy (they come in 100mg capsules), so a month’s supply is 150 capsules.  The guy at the Costco pharmacy looked it up and told me it would cost about $30.  For 150 capsules.  My jaw dropped and the guy had to ask me if I was still there.  I voiced my disbelief (So formal.  🙂  I said, “Really?”), and he said that if we’re Costco members, it would only cost $27.  That was the first I’d heard that I don’t have to be a Costco member to use the pharmacy, but let’s not get sidetracked here.  I hung up the phone with the Costco guy and called CVS.  Maybe the medication came way down in price or something.  I asked CVS to price the same dosage, same number of capsules, and that pharmacist told me that 150 capsules of the generic brand would be $289.  To actually get the brand name, it would cost over $400. Seems a little unreal, right?  So I called a different Costco pharmacy.  The woman at this one got the same $30 price as the first Costco pharmacist, but agreed with me that it didn’t sound right.  She double- and triple-checked it, though, and came up with $30 as the price for 150 100mg capsules of zonisamide.  Roxy’s medication change just became affordable.  So now we have to figure how best to wean her off the phenobarbitol without an increase in the number, frequency, and intensity of her seizures.  But yay for Costco!

Also, yay for Curiosity!  Check out her award-winning stick-people drawings (here and here).  While I’m at it (finding good stuff online), I went through Steps 1 through 5 just reading this post. Of course, then there’s this.  Twisted and hilarious.

And now I really need to find something light to eat.  I’ve gone past really hungry and back into who needs food territory, but that doesn’t mean I should not eat at all.

Not as bad

2 Comments

Today was not as bad as yesterday.  Different, certainly.  And I kind of forced it to be better.  The day still started too early, and I was still on my feet all day, but after I collapsed into a chair during our lunch break, my coworker brought my sandwich to me, unasked, so I could spend the entire break off my feet.  He’s a nice guy. I had already decided not to run today (SO hot outside), so that automatically freed up some time once I got home, but unfortunately, about an hour of it was taken up by work stuff that came up during my commute.  (It kinda sucks when your whole team is spread out across all four time zones.  We all rely on each other, and that means we have to be available when the guy in Seattle needs help (for example).)  I’d planned to take the dogs to the dog park, but by the time I was free to go, it was almost sunset (when the dog park closes).  So that was out.  I spent some time with them in the yard, but it’s not the same.  (For them.  It’s about the same for me.)  Anyway, I forced my day to be better by making sure I had time to myself (and I ordered Indian (my favorite) for dinner).  I thought I’d make it Internet time, but it turned into TV time instead.  I watched a couple of shows John has never been interested in.  He gave up on Flashforward after the third episode (I should have), and he never even started Cougar Town.  Stupid name, but I like the show.

I’m having DVR priority issues again.  Why does every show I want to see come on Tuesdays at 10?  We record Southland and The Good Wife every week, and we want to keep up with V, but it comes on at the same time.  So annoying.  We’ll have to resort to hulu.com for V, I guess.  (Yes, we watch a lot of TV.  Someday, I’ll list our shows by night they get recorded, which is a mostly meaningless piece of information to me.  I don’t care when it’s on.  I just want to make sure it gets recorded so we can watch it later.  The DVR is the greatest invention EVER.)

Anyway, it’s after nine and I need to head in the direction of bed.  Which reminds me…I’m expecting my sleep to be interrupted tonight.  John said Roxy had a seizure this morning before he left for work.  Normal length, and it was a cluster (one followed by another), and if she follows her pattern, she’s already a little overdue for the next one.   We’re still investigating switching her to a new medication.  We’re looking for other (cheaper) ways we can get it.

Oh, was that John’s car door?  He mentioned he might get out of class early tonight…

Yeah, not his car door.  A neighbor’s.  I’m tired and I need to go to bed, but I just started to browse through my regular sites and I miss having time to play on the Internet. Yes, I’ve said it before, and yes, I could have this evening if I’d skipped all the TV, but it’s too late now, and I’m tired.  So, Internet, I’m sorry I’m neglecting you.  Forgive me?

Stocking up on Easter candy

3 Comments

John has a weakness for Cadbury Creme Eggs.  Since Easter candy started showing up in stores, I’ve bought a handful every week for him.  I figured today would be the last day to get any (and Wegman’s was, for once, a disappointment – no Easter candy in sight!), so after the grocery store, I headed to CVS to add a few more to the stockpile.  An employee met me at the door, directed me to the candy aisle, and then helped me find the last Cadbury display.  John owes that guy.  His stash of creme eggs should last him quite a while.

We watched Up last night.  Such a good movie.  I don’t know what took us so long to see it.  I need to add all Pixar movies to my birthday list.  We have a couple (Toy Story, The Incredibles – love The Incredibles), but I’d like to have the others.  We’re watching Inkheart right now.  Well, we were watching it, but we took a break ’cause John’s mom called.  I’d never heard of it, but we noticed it on HBO yesterday, and it has Paul Bettany in it (we like him), so we recorded it.  It’s…entertaining.  Not good.  Kinda dumb brain candy.  Paul Bettany’s good in it.  🙂  Huh.  I just looked it up at imdb.com and found out that the woman playing Brendan Fraser’s wife was Colin Firth’s girlfriend in Love Actually.  The one who cheats on him.  Hate her.  Who would cheat on Colin Firth?  She must be stupid.  (And fictional.  What’s your point?)

Roaming the Internet when I should be outside

8 Comments

Thanks to this post at Three Word Chant! (punctuation theirs), I think I’ve found my new favorite place to go for a chuckle.  Check this one out.

I found that link because I’m in the middle of organizing my bookmarks.  Again.  (And that means I have to go to every single bookmarked site to see if I want to keep it.)  When I organized them last time, I put all the blogs I read in one folder, in alphabetical order.  When I have free time, I go through the list in order.  But I’ve had so little free time lately that I haven’t been getting far down the list, and I’ve inadvertently been missing some of the sites I used to read daily just because their names start with letters in the second half of the alphabet.  Then I feel bad for neglecting them because that reminds me of always being stuck at the back of the line (for lunch, for assemblies, for field trips) in the elementary school because my last name started with an S.  Now my last name starts with a B, but that hardly matters ’cause no one asks us to line up in alphabetical order anymore.  Anyway, I’m over that, but I don’t want to treat my favorite blogs the same way.  So now, my favorites are in a Daily Blog folder, separate from the rest.  Yes, I play favorites.  And I need to update my blogroll, but that will have to happen on a day that’s not so beautiful.  Because why am I inside?  It’s gorgeous out there!

I have to shower (ran six miles this morning – go me!) and then go to the library.  I need books on CD for my super-long commute (now that I’m not carpooling anymore).

Also, I am totally losing my mind.  There was something else I planned to write about, but I have NO idea what it was.

Lying to your kids and the dog park (not related)

Leave a Comment

I went for a long run this morning – yeah, this morning.  It was awesome.  I don’t have to be downtown most Fridays, so I enjoyed sleeping until 6:30, running in the cool morning breeze, and watching the sun rise.  More like squinting ’cause the sun wasn’t high enough for the brim of my hat to block it.  But it was nice.  On my way back, while trudging up the hill to the house, I saw my across-the-street neighbors packing the trunk of their big SUV.  I asked (unnecessarily, ’cause duh) if they were going away for the weekend, or, after a glance at the overstuffed car, a year (like I can talk).  Mr. Neighbor, rather than half-shouting his response across the street like a normal person would, walked over to me and told me, in a low voice, that they’re taking the girls camping, but first, they’re going to surprise them with a day at King’s Dominion.  Now that is a very cool surprise.  And from the look on the teenager’s face as she put her stuff in the car, she’s going to be way happier about the day at the amusement park than the camping.

John got stuck in horrible traffic on his way home from work, so I took the dogs to the dog park around 6:30.  Riley had a wonderful time, as usual, and Roxy stuck to my heels like she was glued there, as usual.  I met a nice family who’d just adopted an adorable dog.  The dog is about a year and a half, a rescue, and the prettiest little thing.  She’s about Roxy’s size, black all over, with long, thick, golden retriever-ish fur.  They adopted her last Saturday and this was their first time with her at the dog park.  They (mother, grandmother, daughter, son) were all really nice.  I’d like to run into them again sometime.

Censoring myself

Leave a Comment

I discarded a post that went into detail about the annoying verbal habits of a coworker of mine.  SO annoying.  But that’s the sort of thing that can get me in trouble, work-wise, and I decided not to post it.  I’m applying the lessons I learned from Dooce.  Who was in town yesterday, incidentally, because she was invited to participate in a forum on workplace flexibility at the White House.  She planned an informal get-together last night, and much as I would have loved to be there to meet all these people I’ve been chatting with, the timing didn’t work out for me.  Sad.

You know, it’s hard to avoid writing about work sometimes.  I just deleted a couple of sentences about John’s work situation.

Well, since I can’t manage to think about much else, I’m going to quit.  We watched an episode of Castle tonight, but it took nearly two hours to get through it.  We took turns pausing it to vent about the day.  We do feel better, though, and we were able to finish the episode.  (Oh no for Beckett!)   I love that show.

Oh, how I ache

4 Comments

It was a beautiful spring today, all budding green trees and cherry blossoms, but by the time I got outside to enjoy it (and run), I was one big ache from standing all day.  I can handle the talking all day (not much of a stretch for me, plus I drink lots of water), but standing ALL DAY LONG in heels (even low ones) makes me ache all over.  The only shoes I want to be wearing for that long, while standing, are my running shoes, and I think even that would get achy (ache-y?) after a while.  So running this evening started out pretty rough.

The cops were out in force when I left work today.  All the way down Constitution Ave, they were ticketing cars parking along the curb.  (Parking there ends at 4pm for rush hour.)  I saw one woman dash across six lanes of traffic, in the middle of a block, to plead with the officer writing her a ticket.  For a second, I thought she had to be crazy to run across Constitution like that, with so many cars on the road, but then I realized rush hour is the best time to do it.  We were all basically parked.

I spent a few minutes during my run this evening playing with a neighbor’s dogs.  This neighbor lives at the opposite corner of the neighborhood from us, but I run by their house most days, and I’ve met their dogs a few times.  Vader is the sweetest black lab.  Adorably friendly, low energy, nice dog.  Their other dog is an energetic yellow lab named Xena, who was the most adorable puppy.  I know, they’re all adorable, but she really was.  So when I went by, Vader met me at the top of the fence.  He jumped up to reach me and licked every part of me he could reach (mostly my arms,  but a few swipes of his tongue got my neck).  Xena, though, proved herself to be the smartest dog I have ever met.  She had a tennis ball in her mouth, and when she jumped up and put her paws on the fence, I reached for it so I could throw it for her.  She pulled her head back and jumped on the fence, and then crouched down in the same spot, put the ball on the ground, and rolled it to me in between the slats in the picket fence.  I picked it up, threw it, she fetched, and on her way back, she jumped on the fence again (kinda bounced off it) like she was marking the spot, dropped down, and rolled the ball out to me again.  We did it over and over again until I decided I need to keep running.  So smart!

And that reminded me of the little girls I met last week when I was running with the dogs.  We were coming down the sidewalk towards a little girl and her dad, and when she saw Roxy and Riley, she ran behind a tree and told her dad she was scared.  I slowed to a walk and reeled the dogs in, but as we got closer, she crept forward.  I stopped and asked her if she wanted to meet them.  She looked at her dad, who said it was okay, and she came over.  She shied away from Riley (he’s way too big for little kids, even though he loves them (to EAT! (Except not really.  The eating part.  He does love them, and he’s pretty gentle.))) and went straight for Roxy.  Now, Roxy doesn’t care about people as a rule, but she doesn’t mind being petted by kids, so she just stands there.  Tolerating it.  She’s the perfect size, though, so kids always want to pet her.  It’s her destiny.  Or her doom.  Or, you know, just something she has to deal with.

I would walk 500 miles

Leave a Comment

I learned today (something that should have been obvious, but, well, wasn’t to me) that my phone will die if it spends an entire day underground.  For the second day in a row, my cell phone started the day fully charged, but by 4ish, when I leave the underground room I’m spending every day in, it has already turned itself off because the battery died.  You’d think I would have figured it out after the first day, but no.  How hard is it to figure out that if a phone spends nine hours searching for a signal, it might run out of battery power and die?  At least it’s not as final as that.  That’s why we have cell phone chargers.  But I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll turn off my phone when I get there tomorrow.  Problem solved.

I watched part of Benny & Joon tonight.  I really like that movie.  And Aidan Quinn looked good in it.  Big blue eyes.  Early morning tomorrow (that’s going to be an unfortunate habit before long), so I’m off.