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Overload

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Stress.  Busy day.  Lots of work done, lots of work to do, not enough time to do it.  And then the realization that I have to take an exam for my data modeling class before Monday.  Almost didn’t go to classes tonight, but was sane enough to remember that one of the things that is stressing me out is my incapability (incapableness?  Lack of capability?  I don’t think any of those are words.) to eat right (I say as I take teeny bits from a piece of Dove chocolate), and I usually feel better after the gym.  So I went.  And I do feel  better.  A little.  But tomorrow is another crazy day (with a long commute with my boss) and it seems to have started already and – no.  Tomorrow is tomorrow.  Not here yet.  Even if I am mentally calculating how many hours of sleep I need before getting up early tomorrow.  (I’m coming up short.)

Yoga’s great for calming me down while I’m in class, but that feeling doesn’t last long enough.

Of course, I’m very rarely anywhere NEAR Kristen Bell’s meltdown level.  This is funny, kinda cute sometimes, and so very weird.

Strike up the band

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Stand back, people, history is happening.  This post, this very special (not all that special) post, is my 1000th post. That’s a lot of zeroes.  That’s a lot of inanity.  I always miss little milestone like this.  It’s only dumb luck that I happened to look at the number of posts this morning.  I missed my car’s odometer passing 100,000 miles when we drove to Long Island to visit John’s grandmother on Christmas Eve, even though I knew it was coming because I noticed how close it was the day before.  I remember birthdays (usually) and anniversaries (sometimes), but even though I try every year, I blow right by the smaller things (like the anniversary of our first kiss, or the anniversary of adopting Roxy and Riley).  I remember it a few days early, think to myself “don’t forget this year”, and then I remember again a day or two after it’s passed.

My point is that the fact I noticed this and am doing something about it (however little) is as momentous as the fact that this is post #1000.  Where’s my musical episode?  I should have had ten of them by now.  I guess I’ll have to settle for these.  The last one isn’t from a sitcom, but you’ll have to forgive me because 1) it’s awesome, and 2) it’s my special blog day!

A combination of two of my favorite things

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John and I discovered How I Met Your Mother a few months ago (November, maybe?).  Seven years late, of course, but being so far behind has its advantages.  We’ve slowed down some, but there were some nights and weekends where we’d watch episode after episode after episode…  We’re in season 5 now, aware that we’re catching up quickly, so we only watch a handful of episodes a week now.  🙂  Anyway, I found this on YouTube last night.

I want them to finish singing it! They stopped at the best part. Man, I love that show.

Let’s watch a dog diving through a pile of leaves instead

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These last two days have gotten completely away from me.  Too much work, not enough play.  Or homework.  And a cold.  Poor, poor me.  Let’s all be sad.

Actually, I felt much better today than yesterday.  I’m crossing my fingers that this trend continues.  Especially since I have to go downtown tomorrow and I REALLY don’t want to be miserable that far from home.

Of course, if I end up feeling miserable tomorrow, I can make myself feel much better by watching this video (via The Daily What) again.

That was hilariously adorable.  This one is just scary.

Things that have nothing to do with each other

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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.

At least I got an extra hour out of it

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How does a whole Saturday, no, a whole weekend disappear like that?  It had productive moments, but mostly – I need a do-over.

On the non-productive front, we started two new shows over breakfast.  Grimm looks like it could be really good.  The other show, Once Upon a Time, looks interesting, but maybe not quite as good as Grimm.  I still want to watch it.

One of the things we didn’t do was buy a new flower pot to plant the remaining avocado sprout.  John said flower pot to me and all I could think of was this:

It starts a little late, but I can’t find the beginning of the scene on YouTube. Close enough.

I need to take better notes

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There was something I was going to write about, something John said or did, but I don’t remember what it is.  I had a very frustrating day that went straight into an online midterm review.  That went pretty well.  I feel better about the exam, at least.  So instead of whatever it was I was thinking about earlier, you can have these instead.

1. Look!  An adorable baby goat playing king of the mountain and being adorable!

And 2.  This (from reddit) makes me laugh every time I look at it.

I think I need to see Madagascar.  Jungle animals doing hilarious things sounds really appealing at the moment.

Totally incomprehensible

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I don’t know what it is about this song, but every time I hear it, I cry, starting from the very first time I heard it.  Like tears streaming down my face cry.  Sometimes with sobs, sometimes not.  I don’t get it.  I mean, I like it.  I like it very much.  Maybe it hits me deep in the hillbilly roots I don’t really have.

Be-bop-a-lula baby

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Tonight’s random hodge-podge of things I feel compelled to tell/show/say to you is brought to you by Dire Straits, who have gotten stuck between my ears.  It’s mildly uncomfortable.

First, an apology to everyone who let me complain to them today: I’m so very very sorry.  On the phone, in person, over email, I was all bitch, bitch, bitch, and moan, moan moan (with a little bit of whine, whine, whine here and there), and you know what?  You didn’t need to hear that.  No one deserves that.  And it didn’t make me feel better, either, so who benefits?  Exactly.  I’m sorry.

Second, this video is cool (from The Daily What).  🙂  I love Disney (I can ignore all the evil corporate stuff because I love the movies), and I LOVE when they release stuff like this.  My edition of Lady and the Tramp shows Peggy Lee singing “He’s a Tramp” (with the guys howling and barking as back-up) intercut with the animated footage.  Fun to watch.

Last, yoga is HARD.  (Yes, broken record, whatever.)  There must be a name for the sequence we start with.  That’s the hardest part, moving from one thing straight to another like that.  If you know the name (I could ask the instructor, but how is that fun?), please tell me.  We start in downward dog, then extend one leg up behind us, then bring it forward into a deep lunge and reach up with our arms (crescent, maybe?), stretch forward, then into a plank and down to the pose that sounds like chupacabra and looks like the down position of a push-up, and then up dog and back to downward dog.  And all over again with the other leg, and we repeat more times that I can keep straight until I fall over.  After I fall over, we move into things I can actually do (kind of) and that don’t hurt (much).  Then we stretch.  I love the stretching part.  And the breathing part.  And now I’m home and I just ate more rice pudding then I meant to and I need to go to bed because I have get up absurdly early again to go back downtown in the morning.  So good night.  I said good night!

Isn’t running supposed to get easier the more you do it?

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This morning’s run was HARD.  My legs felt super heavy and it was humid and I wasn’t sure I could do it.  I ran the first mile and then ran a 2-mile loop twice to get halfway through, and I realized that if I did that loop twice more I might jump in front of a passing car.  It’s hard enough to run that many miles (for me).  If I have to see the same things over and over again, I’ll go nuts.  Or quit.  Actually, that’s the biggest problem.  If I’m running laps near the house, the temptation to just go home every time I get close to the house is a little too much for me.  I’m much more likely to do the whole thing if it’s out and back.  I won’t turn around early, and when I reach halfway, I have no choice but to do the whole distance to get home.  Anyway, I got to the five-mile mark after two loops and decided to run the last five miles out and back.  It was better, but not easier.  I found myself chanting “Just keep swimming.  Just keep swimming,” half the time.  I don’t know why I thought it (I haven’t seen that movie in a long time), but Dory was a welcome distraction.

I saw a woman who ran so neatly.   Her elbows were in and her strides were short and she looked so efficient.  She made me notice how much I move while I run.  I’m not exactly throwing my arms around a la Phoebe in that one episode, but I’m all loose-limbed and my hair was bouncing around my head in its braid and I kept adjusting my shoulders and posture – one good shake and I might have fallen apart in a pile of bones.  Not trim and tight and economical.  Maybe I’m doing it wrong and that’s why this morning was so hard.  I saw that woman twice, and both times she made me feel like a slobbering pile of flailing limbs.  I’m sure she didn’t mean to – she looked like a nice lady.

I have four empty shelves now. They look so lonely.

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The books (the fiction), they have been reorganized and reshelved.  I finished just a few minutes ago.  For now, they’re all flush against the front edge (John loves it), but I have a compromise in mind.  I’ll try it tomorrow.  I have pictures, but my phone’s USB cable is upstairs (and the pictures aren’t that great – let’s hope for sunlight tomorrow) and I’m not willing to go get it.  Once I go upstairs tonight, I’m not coming back down.  I also weeded out all the duplicates today.  We have multiple copies of 54 books.  In some cases (The Left Hand of Darkness, War and Remembrance), we have three copies.  There are a couple others we have two of, but for various reasons, I want to keep them in our collection.  The duplicates will probably join the inventory in the basement.  Unless we find someone who’s dying to have a hardcover edition of The Hidden City (the third book in David Eddings’ The Tamuli) or a copy of The Winds of War that is falling apart (most of the books are in pretty good shape, but not this one so much).  Or any of the 48 books I didn’t name.  47.  John doesn’t want to get rid of the extra copy of Johnny Tremain.  (Just like I don’t want to get rid of my extra copy of Anne of Green Gables.  Sure, I have the box set, but I remember reading that copy.)

In other than book news, I found two of the greatest videos ever on The Daily What today.

The first is a bunch of cows looking crazy interested in a Dixieland combo in a field in France. Good music, funny cows.

The second is a juggling video. AMAZING.