Well, shit. My parents won't be back until the 13th, which pretty much blows the shit out of biking *next* weekend, too, for the same reasons. Meanwhile, we now have two dogs, one of whom doesn't like children of any kind and the other of whom has diarrhea, however that's spelled. They're both wimps and are having sort of dominance wars which are running something like this:
Chantico: *leap leap bound* (translation: Play with me! Play with me!)
Annie: *high-pitched yelp* (translation: For the love of God, DON'T HURT ME!)
Chantico: *panicked whimper* *hides under couch* (translation: I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY!)
Lucy: *glares at everybody* (You brought ANOTHER DOG into MY HOUSE?)
Chantico: *leap leap bound* (Play with me! Play with me!)
Annie: *growl* (leave me alone)
Lucy: *HISSS, GROOOOOOOOOWWWWWL*
and so on and so forth.
I have not finished my Xena drawings, I have not seen next week's preview for Buffy, I have not gone biking, and I stepped in dog shit sometime this afternoon. I am, how shall we say, CRABBY.
I also have to get up at 5:30 to bring my parents to the airport, so I'm going to bed now.
Maybe I won't be able to do the Homer ride this weekend after all. My parents are going to DC, and we are dogsitting. I forgot about that. Annie doesn't eat much unless I'm around. Hrn.
I thought I had some things to post, but I'm not sure I do. :) Nevermind, then. *laugh*
Oh yeah. I also did 25 pushups yesterday at the end of my workout. Today my arms huuuuuurt. :) I had to do wussy girl pushups, because my lower back is so fuqt that I can't do regular ones, but maybe if I lose weight this will change. Oot!
OH! I saw the bastard with my LICENSE PLATE! *MY* license plate! ROGUE! On a RED PORSCHE. I don't LIKE porsches! *sulk*!
Well, I'm all sort of stretchy-sore from walking and working out the last couple of days. I must say, only being able to go to the gym 3 times a week sure makes me more inclined to try to get there on those 3 days.
Ted and I went to see FotR again last night. I think having missed 20 minutes of it the first time around (I had an upset tummy) made it more fun, although the 20 minutes I missed were not the dull parts. The dull parts are the, "We're walking, we're walking, we're paddling, we're paddling, we're paddling some more," and Two Towers is the book I gave *up* on because there was so much "we're running, we're running, we're running some more..." However, I'm still looking forward to the second movie, and I'll be terribly disappointed if at least *one* theatre doesn't run all 3 of them back to back when they're all out. :)
I read 3 books yesterday! Yay me! :)
Boy, walking 4 miles yesterday really wiped me out. I slept for 10 hours last night. O.O But it was a nice walk, and I got up and went to the gym this morning (yay me!) and watched Farscape last night before I went to bed, so overall it didn't suck. My whole body is a bit numb today. :)
gym:
- 150 crunches
- bench press: 50lbs, 3 sets of 15 *gnaaah!*
- butterfly press: 60lbs, 3 sets of 12 *gnaaah!*
- shoulder press, 24lbs, 3 sets of 12
- bicep curls, 12lbs, 3 sets of 12
- tricep extensions, 30lbs, 3 sets of 15
- lat pulldown, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- chicken arm wing thing, 50lbs, 3 sets of 12
- inexplicable arm pulldown thing, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- 75 crunches
I'm going to go do some more laundry (whee!) and read a book now, because while I got off to a great reading start this year, I've read practially nothing the last 2 months. Sheesh.
Oh! But before I do, I must mention that Ted got his second belt in shoshen riu! Yay Ted! Yaaaay!
Today we have blogging about ice ages, which is not because I went and saw the movie last night (it was cute!) but because I was just reading an article about global warming and that always kind of gets my panties in a bunch.
The thing is that we only have a couple hundred years of records at best, and while I expect that it's wholly possible that humans are contributing to some degree to global warming, the thing that nobody ever mentions is that the earth is STILL IN AN ICE AGE. Okay, let me modify that statement a little: we are in the tail end of an ice age; this is by no means one of the warm periods of Earth's history. We're warming up, yes, but this is not a warm period.
Now, a question of great debate to scientists is, are we in fact at the end of an ice age, or are we in an inter-glacial period, meaning that any moment, glaciers are going to come thundering back down on us like they did twenty thousand years ago? Well, who the hell knows? We don't have the ability to predict that. No doubt many people would point to the greenhouse effect we're currently seeing, and the rising temperatures, and say, "By George, it's all over! No more ice!" And perhaps they'd be right.
There's certainly geologic evidence for the greenhouse effect having happened in the past, and I don't dispute that humanity's (relatively) newfound ability to dump massive amounts of crap into the air is probably a factor in the greenhouse effect we're seeing today. But nobody (when I say nobody, I mean the media) ever seems to bear in mind that we've only got a couple hundred years of weather records at best. Nobody (that's a more inclusive nobody) has any idea at all what the ozone layer's typical status is, for heaven's sake. It's four billion years old (ok, I don't actually know when Earth developed an atmosphere). Humans are (if you reaaaaallllly stretch the definition of human) three million years old. Homo sapiens are a three or four hundred thousand years old. And we've been looking at the atmosphere in a scientific and recordable fashion for what, five decades?
This article is rather more scientifically backed up than my frothings, not that I know anything about the author. The whole topic is just a pet peeve of mine, mostly because of the way it's presented in the media, I guess. I'm not saying we shouldn't replace aerosol cans and styrofoam with something better, if it's available. Using fossil fuels that dirty up the atmosphere is not a good idea because if nothing else, we have to BREATHE that air. But at the same time, some perspective, people, perspective!
Ow. I went for a 4 mile walk. All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time, but boy do my feet hurt now. Actually, it was a really *nice* walk, but boy do my feet hurt now. :)
I'm such a dork. We got a bill from ACS, whose service we had cancelled, and all grumpily I called up and said, "We cancelled our service, but we got another bill, and I thought the last one was the last one, so I was just wondering if we were going to keep being billed until the end of time."
And the very nice lady looked it up and said to me, "Actually, that's a credit," and upon her saying this, I saw that indeed, after the BIG BLOCK LETTERS that said AMOUNT DUE BY MAY 9, 2002: $ it also said, CR.
Boy, do I feel dumb. Fortunately, I hadn't been horribly rude, and the lady was very nice to dumb lil' ol' me. O.O And now *they* are going to send *us* a check next Monday. Heh. O.O
OH and last night we made a mad dash for the comic shop and got there after 8 but they hadn't ACTUALLY locked up yet so we tore in (and were summarily scolded by Amy who works there) but while we were there we ran into Geoff Wright and his brother whose name I simply CANNOT remember (how embarrassing) who are people we worked with at Internet Alaska and they are doing well and the Nameless Brother is getting married in July having gone to Chicago with the girl in question and then both of them turning tail and running back to Alaska after a year (sound familiar anyone?) and they explained as how they had a Wednesday night happy hour thing (in hiatus for the summer, but due to start again this fall) at which between 4 and 40 people show up and hang out for some varying period of time and then stagger home and Geoff said that now that he had our email addresses he was subscribing us to the happy hour mailing list whether we wanted him to or not *laugh* and HE has two kids now, and the puppy he used to bring to IAI has grown up into a great big dog with an enormous block of a head and leeeeeeeetle skeeeeeeeeny legs! (she's a boxer) and it was really a lot of fun to see them. Oh, and they now own Alaska Web Art so I told them if they needed any contract work done to get in touch with me. :)
i am just a posting fool today!
no brain, no brain, no brain at all. must balance the checkbook today. and do other things. important things. like, um. make brownies, maybe. or possibly cookies. donno yet. and pay bills. but not until i've balanced the checkbook.
oooooh i've been meaning to say. you know how the moon gets all big and orange because of atmospherics in the early evening? yesterday at 5:15am when I was out walking Chantico, it was like that. not as dramatically, but still. and misty. it was very pretty.
something about walking, i was going to say something about walking. oh! i was going to say that i actually managed to be faster than the bus this morning. i don't really walk all that fast but i still got home before the bus came by, so i feel smug. not only did i save oh, two minutes or something, but i got an extra 25 or 30 minutes worth of exercise. yay me!
LAURA. i have to email you. i'll do that right now.
gym:
- 150 crunches
- leg press, 150lbs (1 set), 160lbs (2 sets) of 15
- inner thigh crunch thing, 80lbs, 3 sets of 15
- hip abducter, 90lbs, 3 sets of 15
- leg extensions, 40lbs, 3 sets of 15 (just can't handle 50 on this, bah)
- leg curls, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- back extender thing, 3 sets of 15, 50 or 60lbs, i forget
- butt blaster, 3 sets of 10, 20lbs
- walked home, 1 mile or so
So far this morning I gymmed and walked home and showered and walked the dog and cleaned up the kitchen some and walked the dog again and got breakfast and I have a meeting RIGHT NOW.
From Angie's page:
1:30am:Peter Wingfield really does have an enormous nose. He's incredibly attractive, I don't dispute that, but seeing him in profile is somewhat amusing, particularly with Adrian Paul also in profile right next to him.
*howls of laughter* *howls and howls of laughter*
I prefer to think of his nose as *magnificent*, not *enormous*, but then, Angie says: i thought about using 'magnificent,' but thought of that as a very kitlike phrase, so i didn't. ^_^;
It is turning into a very Peter Wingfieldy sort of day. *happy cackle* And Angie is swooning repeatedly over Methos' first scene, and so I am smug and pleased and hee hee hee.
Anyway, I didn't swim this morning, snif. But Ted didn't know I wanted to, because I went to take a bath last night but Shaun had just taken a shower and was starting laundry and there was about three seconds worth of cold water and so in a fit of temper I just went to bed. At 9:15. So I didn't talk to Ted. Because he wasn't home.
I'm going to go do some work now. Really.
I woke up at five to five from the most patently ridiculous dream. I woke up laughing so hard I was snorting and shaking the bed, and Ted panicked, afraid I was horribly injured somehow. *helpless laughter*
I dreamed that there was some kind of event going on at UAA, and that Peter Wingfield was going to be there for a contest to see who was the best stage wizard, and the winner got a sewing machine. Now, Sarah was in this dream, and she and I both knew that it was very, very funny that the prize was a sewing machine, because at some (non-real) con that she and I had gone to, there was a costume contest which Peter had not known about in advance and he had to borrow a sewing machine and sequester himself in his room for the entirety of the con when he wasn't onstage, so he could get his costume done.
Emily and Deirdre were also in this dream. We discovered that there were a whole series of events playing at UAA, including a staging of Hamlet, which Peter was in before his wizard show. We all decided together that we would go down to -- ooh, this has reminded me of another dream about a house -- go down to UAA together, only for some inexplicable reason I needed to change my pants. While I was running around trying to find pants to wear, I pulled open a door and discovered it looked down into the back of the gym, which is where the shows were being performed. There a few feet below me, was Peter Wingfield, in a grey t-shirt and black sweats, dancing. Three or four other people were 'on stage' -- on the gym floor -- as well. I thought, "Oh! We should stay here instead of going down to UAA, the view is much better here!" (This was after taking a moment to admire Peter's bum, which I did.) Hamlet, it seemed, had been turned into a musical. Glenn Close was in it.
So I went to look for the others to explain that we should stay, and then there was some tomfoolry wherein I went into a locker room which actually was not separated from the stage at all, and I got in Ophelia's (who was, I think, being played by my sister's roommate Cecilia) way and kept putting the old pants that I didn't want to wear on and forgetting to put the new ones on.
At some point in this, the other three gave up and came looking for me. I managed to get my pants on, and we headed out to ... well. The stage/gym, although we were actually heading for the door. However, by that time, audience members were being dragged into the show, and as we passed, we were pulled in. The entire cast (the whole cast and as much audience had been dragged in, which was a goodly number of people by then) including ourselves all lay down on our stomachs facing stage left, although by the time we actually got down the back row of the cast was popping to its feet again, a row at a time in a very choreographed fashion. Emily and Deirdre were in the row immediately behind me, and I was in the row closest to the audience (hey, it's my dream!) and they popped to their feet and I popped to mine and stepped back into line and we started doing a chorus line, but I couldn't get on the right foot, and Deirdre gave me a look of such withering disgust that I began to laugh.
And snort. And shake. And snort some more. And giggle. And laugh and laugh and laugh, until I shook the bed and woke Ted up and had to explain that he wasn't going to think this was *nearly* as funny as I did. I, however, was belly-laughing (ow! crunches yesterday! ow!) and had tears rolling down my face. It was so very, *very* funny.
And as I told Ted about this, Chantico came LEAP BOUND RUN CHARGE up the stairs and LEAPT onto the bed and wriggled and wriggled and wriggled and I laughed and laughed and laughed and now it's six in the morning and I've already spent half an hour outside and it seems like there's no point in going back to bed because I'd *like* to go swim in half an hour, although I'm also awfully sleepy and I'm a little afraid that going swimming will end in taking a three hour nap this afternoon.
Also, the house dream: I dreamed there was a house on a corner and it only cost $120K and Ted and I went in to look at it, but my Mom was already looking at it, and from the inside, it was clear it couldn't possibly cost only $120K: it had a tower with a three-story switchback staircase, at the top of which was a master bedroom. On the way up the tower (the first time) it overlooked the ENORMOUS SUNKEN LIVING ROOM, which, upon exploration, proved to have a huge kitchen off to the right and an enormous windowed office beyond it and a dance studio (well, it wasn't *yet*, but it could be!) to the left of it. On the way up the tower the second time, there were two or three bedrooms, not exactly off the stairs, but more like the stairs went into them and went out again; and Ted went in to take a shower in the master bedroom, but when he came out he was speaking gobbledy-gook, and we had to make sure he came out through the *right door* so he could get his language back, and by that time we'd discovered that the owner of the house was still in it, so showering in her house seemed kind of rude, and by that time the house cost $667K anyway, which my mother seemed to be considering as if it were quite reasonable but which Ted and I couldn't exactly afford.
I'm really sleepy. O.O
I went for a 9 mile bikeride. Yay me! Except I'm going to have to go get my bike fixed now, because I have no first gear range. Oop. But it was a nice ride! I biked out to the end of Northern Lights Blvd, where I'd never been before. It's a lot easier to do some of those hills on the road than it is on the bike trail. O.O
Hah! Dentist appointments abound! Zilli at 4:10 Monday afternoon; Ted at 11:30am May 2nd, and Catie at 9am May 7th! I've only been trying to get around to doing this for about four years, so it's quite an accomplishment. :)
Chantico and I found a good game to play this morning! We went out for (another) walk and I was standing around waiting for her and crunching the paper-thin ice on top of the mud puddles (which I have always thought was a good game), and Chantico thought that was a GREAT idea and leapt around going CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH POUNCE POUNCE POUNCE on the ice. *laugh* It was fun. :)
Y'know, I wanted a dog in part so I would get out of the house more. I'm not sure I was thinking 15 minutes every 90 minutes....
She was looking kinda dumbWith her finger and her thumb
In the shape of an L on her forehead!
I actually woke up with that song in my head, or rather, it placed itself in my head very promptly, which was good because it's the first song on my workout CD (well, actually, it's the second, but the first one won't play) and so it put me in the proper mood to go work out. Sort of. Anyway, I managed to go work out, at least. :) And now I must tell you, a bowl of oatmeal is just a sad little cry for help in the raging hunger of my tummy. :)
- crunches: 150
- bench press: 50lbs, 3 sets of 12, I think. Maybe 2 sets of 15 and 1 of 12 or maybe 3 sets of 15. Something like that.
- butterfly press: 60lbs, 3 sets of 12 or 15, again with the forgetting
- shoulder press: 20lbs, 3 sets of 15 ... or maybe one of 12.
- bicep curls: 10lbs, 3 sets of 15
- tricep extensions: 10lbs, 3 sets of 15
- lat pulldown: 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- walked most of the way home: 1.5 miles or so?
I just realized I failed to do any more crunches at the end of my workout. Oops. Also, when I got home, Chantico had escaped her kitchen prison, so we went for a walk at the end of my walk. :) And I crossed at the school crossing (we live right next to an elementary school) and the cross-guard held the STOP sign up for me so I could cross the street safely. *beam*
I let Chanti bring a stick in from outside becuase it's soooooooo much easier to let her have a stick than to try to keep her entertained myself. This is how people end up with spoiled teenagers, isn't it? But she's awfully happy with the stick . . . and there is dead tree bark all over the floor now. I need to ... shower. Yes, but what I meant to say was vacuum.
Chantico has this very funny habit of leaping into the snow, then sliding down hills on her belly with her feet extended in front of her. She's going to be *so* disappointed when all the snow is gone. :)
I didn't get any *actual* work done this afternoon, but that's the fault of my network guy who told me to download and run Norton AntiVirus, which took over an hour, so I started goofing around. You see the result.
*Gawd*, the puppy is Ms. Energetic today. She's murdering her blanket right now. I hope she sticks with that. I don't have to pay attention to what she's doing when she does that. *laugh* She's got her head stuck in it now, got herself almost all covered and is rooting around and snorting. Silly animal. :)
Man, what a headache. I guess I must not get them really all that often, because every time I get one I'm impressed with how much it sucks. Or maybe I just like to complain.
*helpless laughter* I just looked at the top of my computer monitor, where I had this rather unflattering view of Lucy. This one is much cuter, although not nearly as funny. *more laughter*
I think the aspirin I went upstairs and got is kicking in already. Yay for no food or something, although that's probably part of why I've got a headache, now that I think about it. Duh. It's not my fault. I meant to eat, but the dog decides she needs to pee every time I get food and so I didn't manage to get any earlier. :P I did put the dog's blanket into the washer AGAIN, and washed her chew rope, too, because it was gross, and now it's going THUMP rumblerumblerumble THUMP in the dryer.
I've done five Xena drawings now. I suspect my tolerance for this will peak at seven at the absolute most.
Gnaaah. Chantico came upstairs at 7:20 or so -- after Ted had left for work, so I have to assume that the overly-taped-up cardboard wall I put in place last night actually held the little darling all night, blessing of blessings -- and was Incredibly Hyper Puppy, which continued as I brought her out, and then after I brought her in again. She gallumphed around and I let her, to the detriment of one of Ted's comic books, the remains of which I spanked her with, causing her to finally become more subdued.
Did I mention that the gym called me yesterday and gave me a free pass because it'd been closed last Friday? The girl who called me said they'd been having trouble finding people to work, and that she'd finally given up and gone home in exhaustion after working 14.5 hours on 2 hours of sleep, which I thought was not unreasonable. I'd kind of suspected the problem was lack of people to work, and I was relatively pleased that they called up to offer me a pass, so, y'know. Copacetic.
I feel like Miss Dehydration Lass today. Headachy. :P
Surprise visitor! Jai dropped by to return the first SiP GN and to talk. It was fun. :) I hope she manages to get some lunch, though. *laugh*
Owie!
Well, actually, I'm a lot less sore than I thought I might be. My sitbones are a bit owie, since I went biking, and I can feel various and sundry muscles, but I'm not all that sore. That's a good thing. I think.
I totally failed to go swim this morning, thanks mostly to Chantico bounding upstairs at 5 minutes to 5 this morning. She did this because she needed to go outside and go to the bathroom, which she did very promptly when she was brought out. She didn't even complain much when I locked her back in the kitchen and staggered back to bed. I probably should have stayed up, if I wanted to swim, but it was still early enough and I had been in very deep sleep and dreaming, so instead of feeling awake I felt like I was going to vomit. I ended up not getting up til 8, which was a lot later than I'd intended to.
Maybe I need to go to bed *really* early tonight, in hopes of being prepared for the puppy getting up around 5.
What I also need to do right now is get some breakfast. Hungry me!
Well, we went to Gosford Park on Saturday, and Ted /did/ go along, and liked it, and I enjoyed it a great deal. So did everybody, in fact, although we all agreed that the accents made it sort of mushmouthed for the first half or so of the movie. This wasn't helped any by the fact that the sound system at the Bear's Tooth is a little lacking, so what might've been clearer in another theatre wasn't there. Ah well. Still, a very enjoyable movie!
Today I got up and went to the gym and did a lower body workout, which, if I remember correctly, went something like this:
- 150 crunches
- leg press, 150lbs, 3 sets of 15
- hip abductor, 70lbs, " "
- inner thigh crunch, 1 set of 70, 2 of 80
- leg extensions, 40lbs, 3 sets of 15
- leg curls, 50 lbs, 3 sets of 15 (i think)
- calf raises, 50lbs, 3 sets of 15
- butt blaster (that's what the machine is called, not my fault), 20lbs, 3 sets of 10
- bench press, 50lbs, 3 sets, 15 reps
- butterfly press, 60lbs, 3 sets, 15 reps
- back extender thingy, 50lbs, 3 sets, 15 reps
- 50 crunches
Then we went shopping and then we came home and after a while I went biking! Yaaaay! Not a terribly long ride; a little over 3 miles, but I went biking! Yaaaay! I'll go on a slightly longer ride tomorrow evening, I think, but the trails aren't clear yet and I'm not all that keen on riding on the road if it can be avoided, so paranoia and I are keeping the rides short until I gain a trifle more confidence in people not running me down in their SUVs. But I went biking! For real! Outdoors! YAAAAY!
boring food entry: pb&j w/chips, glass of milk. 1 chocolate chip cookie. chili dogs (2 dogs, 1 bun, chili & cheese), glass of milk. plenty of water.
weight loss goal this week: 2lbs. What this will put my weight at depends entirely on what scale I'm standing on, but I figure if I can make them all say 2lbs less that's a good thing. So there will be a lot of biking and gyming and swimming and less eating. Damned Bloom County diet....
I got a Shape magazine in the mail and it has a lot of scantily dressed women in weird poses, so I think I'll do a bunch of those for my 1000drawings project. Big plus: being in a magazine instead of on a computer screen means I can work on them not in front of the computer. :) But I'm going to do one maybe two more drawings of Xena first, though.
Wow, so thirsty. Must drink *more* water.
Chantico has been *very* good. She's still breaking out of the kitchen at night, and still peeing in random places on the floor, but during the days she's been very good indeed about going outside or at least using her papers in the kitchen to go to the bathroom on. And she's gotten HUGE. O.O
The farking gym was closed. A piece of paper taped on the door saying, sorry, we're closed, call some phone number or another for details--
--which I have just called, and the nice woman on the other end has no idea why it's closed. Fnrt. She did, however, take my name and number so they could give me a free pass for the inconvienence, which is *something*, at least. Fuckers. I was really up for going to the gym. :P
Instead we went to The Scorpion King, which was such utter mind candy that it doesn't do anything like leave a bad taste in the mouth. Or any taste at all, for that matter. Its most remarkable feat is that it is a 90 minute fight sequence, which is fairly remarkable. It has enough plot to hold the fight sequences together, there are no gaping plot holes that I noticed, and did you know Ben Affleck is going to be playing Jack Ryan in the next Tom Clancy movie? Morgan Freeman, from what Ted and I can tell, grows up to be James Earl Jones, which we thought was amusing. :) Ben's a much better choice than Harrison Ford, who was just too old for the character. Ford would be a fine President Ryan, but the early adventure stuff should be done by someone younger. I think Alec Baldwin made a terrible mistake in not playing the character a couple more times. Oh well. He didn't ask my advice. And Matt Damon is doing The Bourne Identity, which I hope will be a better movie this time than it was the first time they made it; if you want a good example of why you shouldn't make a movie that really *does* follow the book, watch the original Bourne Identity. It's a great book, but it was a stupifyingly dull four hour movie. Which I watched all of, for reasons that probably seemed good at the time. Like, it felt so good when I stopped, or something.
Anyway, and that's pretty much my review of the Scorpion King, if you see what I mean.
We went to The Rookie last night, actually (two movies in a row! woot!) and it was a perfectly fine feel-good baseball movie. I don't know why baseball movies work for me. I think it's something they put in the water that affects the American unconscious. Anyway, it was fairly light and yeah, a feel-good movie.
Tomorrow I think I'll go see Gosford Park, which is playing at the Bear's Tooth. I should ask Mom if she'd like to go. Maybe I'll do that!
I have done that! My Mommy wants to go to the movie with me! So, she expects, does my Daddy, and so does my roommate Shaun, and so perhaps I will see if I can shame Ted into going. ;) He's not sure it's his kind of movie, but perhaps he'll want to go if a bunch of us do. :)
I should look up bike seat prices and stuff like that now, but I feel more like working on a drawing.
AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Deirdre is PREGNANT! I'm going to be an AUNT! That's very COOL! She's due in December sometime. Ehehehehe! She just called to tell me.
*laugh* Actually, she called earlier today while I was asleep, and Shaun said that it was important and I should call her back, so I figured that was what it was, but it is now confirmed. Baby on the way! I'm going to be an aunt! hee hee hee!
Ok, so, 1000drawings is launched. I'm still dithering about how to do comments on the drawings, since I generally have something to say (stop looking at me like that). I think right now I'll just leave it be, and when I get some more stuff done I'll maybe start making pages for the different people I draw. There's a lot of good stuff of Lucy Lawless, and she doesn't wear a lot of clothes (at least, not as Xena), which means I can draw the body beneath the clothes more easily, and that's the really hard part.
Probably most people don't give a rat's ass if I do commentary or not, but it helps *my* brain. Pllblbht.
I'm gonna /try/ to do a series a week. 5 or 7 sketches a week. That's a lot, so I donno if I'll do it or not, but hey, wth. Worth a shot.
Chantico decided 4:40am was a good time get up today. I ended up spending the rest of the night on the futon, where I was sort of vaguely able to keep an eye on the dog, although not well enough to keep her from pooping on the floor near the door. Oh well. At least it was near the door.
I'm working on a drawing which I'll probably have to do six or eight times before I get it right. It wouldn't take as many tries if I'd do it in pencil, probably, but for some reason I'm doing it in pen. Well, I'm doing that because I like to draw in ink, but it makes it real hard to erase, you know? I'm sort of thinking of scanning each of the drawings as I do them just to, I don't know. Show off my doom, or something. The annoying this is I can see the problems. It's just that fixing them is very hard. Anyway, so should I scan in the buggered up drawings? It might be a sort of interesting thing. Or maybe it's just interesting to me, which is very, very likely.
OTOH, it's my fucking website, then, isn't it? :)
I figure I only need to do eight or ten thousand drawings like this and I oughta be pretty good. Shaun discovered that Title Wave has at least some sketchbooks, though, and he picked several of them up, one as an outright gift to me and the other he took out of our trade credit, and so now I have two brand new sketchbooks and ... several others. Anyway, these new ones have rather nice, heavy paper, and I think I'll just try to fill up all the pages in them over a few months. What the heck.
Um. Oh, so I didn't get to the gym this morning. I'll go tonight. People should probably harrangue me (did I spell that right?) about it, so that I actually go, but I'll feel better if I go. Feh. Darned dog.
I had a dream about a way to build a .. no. it wasn't a dream. I had an _idea_ about how to build a thing the dog couldn't get through. It's an actual construction project, but I think it would work, and I was pretty confused and disappointed when I came downstairs at 4:45 this morning to find that even though I'd had this good idea, it hadn't been implemented yet.
I also dreamed that Ted had done the taxes wrong and we only had to pay $500 instead of $2200, but that really /was/ a dream. :)
And oh yeah. We went over to the comic shop yesterday with issues 1-6 of Ultimate Spiderman, and they gave us $102 in store credit for them. Wow! :)
Well! I woke up this morning to discover my website had been hacked. So, for that matter, had Uncatchable and On Your Left, all of which use GreyMatter as their blog system. Rogue To Ruin and House of Cards hadn't been hacked, but they're not blogs. Instead of my homepage, there was this graphic, signed Mr. X. (I'm reasonably certain the guy at hoppers13 is not the one who did the hacking. The Mr. X graphic is just kinda cool. And, well, it is!)
So it turns out there's a security hole in GreyMatter, which the author claims is not a security hole because it'll never happen if you use GM properly. The fix for it, though, requires going into an area that I have no recollection at all of ever /using/ before, not even to look at, and so to my perception it's set up with a bug in it by default and requires active user intervention to turn it off. It is, of course, vaguely possible that I did in fact go in to that area and inspect it and back out of it without hitting the 'clear' button, but I don't *remember* doing it.
Anyway, the whole thing is very startling to me. I've been hacked, for heaven's sake. How absurd. o.o I'm not upset about it or anything, and I don't think that GM has suddenly become Evil Incarnate; in fact, I still quite like it. But O.O!
let's see if this republishes the main page. i suspect it will, but who knows...
A page from Angie's book, keeping myself honest. I used to do this on my now-defunct gym page, so not a bad thing.
- workout:
- 100 crunches
- bicep curls: 10lbs, 2 sets of 15, 1 of 12.
- bench press: 40lbs, 3 sets of 12 or 15, I forgot already
- butterfly press, 40lbs, 3 sets of 15 (should do 50lbs next time)
- lat pull-downs: 50lbs, 3 sets of 15 (couldn't handle 60lbs, drat)
- shoulder press: 20lbs, 3 sets of 15 (I think)
- walked a mile or something. halfway home, anyway
Now I need to go shower and figure out what to do with the dog and go have coffee with my Dad and talk about OYL. *spaaaz*
I have just had a Stupid Human Moment.
I was standing around in a snowbank, waiting for Chantico to wear herself out, and suddenly, I fell down.
I think the snow under one of my feet gave out, but it /felt/ like I just fell down. It was pretty funny. *laugh* :)
oh yeah, and a couple more puppy pictures: Shaun and Chanti, and this just doesn't look comfortable.
Right, then! As I was saying, the bike guy was cool 'cause I was wearing my Rogue jacket and as I was leaving he said, "Hey! Is that Aeon Flux?" And while, no, it certainly isn't, there's a certain similarity in the drawing styles that I can appreciate, so I said, "Nope, it's Rogue, just a copy from a very stylized artist," and he went, "Oooh! X-Men and X-Women! Cool! Excellent!" and other stuff like that, so, well, he was cool. *grin*
(ooh, here's a very good RL Aeon costume) (you'd be surprised how long it took to find a good sketch of Aeon on the net!)
oh oh oh oh, I remember why the bike guy was particularly cool. I was wearing my jeans jacket, which has a ... have I taken a photo of this, finished? Let me go do that...
Adventures in Puppy-Owning
At a quarter to three last night, Chantico came hard-charging, as Ted puts it, up the stairs, having escaped from the kitchen. This was the first time she'd done it in the middle of the night, although she'd made it quite clear that all our contraptions and piles of stuff to keep her locked in were merely a nuisance, not actually an obstacle. She is a Puppy Houdini.
So Ted got up and put her back in the kitchen and added Yet Another Layer of Preventative Measures, which we then listened to her thump, wriggle and whine her way through. It became obvious the only way to prevent her from charging up the stairs was going to be to put her behind a closed door. Ted, who has a heart of oatmeal unless he's pissed off, objected to this, and spent a good forty minutes trying to come up with a way to lock her into first the kitchen and then the downstairs bathroom without actually closing the door (it's very, very warm in the downstairs bathroom, and the door being closed only aggravates that). Eventually Chantico did something (sniffed in the litterbox, I think) which caused Ted to have a temper tantrum and sulk off to bed.
Being hard-hearted, and it being three forty in the morning now, I closed Chanti into the bathroom without angst and went to bed, where I didn't go back to sleep until somewhere after 4:15am. Chantico was not dead of heat exhaustion or dehydration this morning (she shouldn't have been; she has a giant bowl of water for downstairs), although she was (and is) rather subdued. She insisted on having breakfast *before* she went outside, which is, I gather, how Ted has been doing it, but went running desperately for the door when I said it was time to go outside. Unfortunately, I'd left the leash upstairs and while I went to fetch it she peed on the entry mat. I figure this is my fault, not hers, and she did go outside and do the rest of her business very promptly. Good puppy.
And now she is writhing around with some chew toys under my feet, and all is pretty well with the world.
Non-Puppy Adventures
We, which is to say, Ted, accidentally broke the bike pump last night, so we went to buy a new one, and had a very entertaining discussion with the guy at The Bicycle Shop (yes, that's what it's called) who was, well, very silly. It was fun. :)
The Anchorage Peoplemover (bus) system sucks.
However, I did get Outlook Express to admit that it will support more than one mailbox, and now I can check my email for mizkit with that instead of webmail. It's a sad thing when OE is an upgrade.
Oh! And last night I was working on business cards for On Your Left, and had of course posted my phone number on them, and had people take a look at them to give me design opinions, and Henry was forced to call me! He *does* have a lovely voice. Yum!
And today, I am hitting my friends up for money!
In May, I'm going to be doing the Talkeetna Clean Air Challenge, which is sponsored by the American Lung Association of Alaska. It's a 60 mile ride from Houston, Alaska to Talkeetna, Alaska, and then back again, for a total of 120 miles (not being a math major, I can do simple addition). I'm supposed to raise $400 by May 8th, so I'm hitting up my friends (and co-workers, but not via my webpage for the latter) for money. If people would like to donate money, they can use the link above. I'd adore it, too, if you could send me an email telling me how much you donated, so I could keep some kind of track of how much I'd collected. You could, I suppose, post it in the comments section, for that matter, if you were the bold and showy type. :) (I'm sure ALA keeps track, but it'd be useful for /me/ to know, too, so I could see how far short (or ahead) of the $400 goal I am!)
For those who have a hard time remembering, my real name is Catie Murphy, not Kit. :)
If you would prefer, you can paypal me a donation at kit@mizkit.com, and I'll do the rest of the work for you. :)
I'll also keep a give-me-money link over on the side of my page so that if this entry gets lost in the depths of the page a donation link will be easy to find. :)
Ooop. No guitar class this week. Death in the teacher's family.
the good part of this is ir gives me more time to practice, which i haven'y bewen doing enough.
nio, i haven't just entrereed the Land Of No Capds Or Spelling. I've entered te land of Trying ZTo Type One-Handed WQhile Hsnging Onto The Puppy'srope zToy SAt TheSame Time. :)
Oatmeal gets cold very quickly when you eat it outdoors at 21°F.
This morning, Chantico and I had an Alarming Encounter With A Moose And Three Small Children. This is Very Alarming Indeed if you are a 9 week old puppy! Or, for that matter, a small child. Well, the moose part was alarming to the small children, anyway. I walked them to school (we live right next to the school) and they regaled me with other stories of Moose Encounters that they'd had, and all was well.
I didn't log on to the computer at ALL this weekend. It was kind of refreshing. :) Instead I, um. We did errands and we did shopping and I read two Diana Wynne Jones books and I watched a couple of movies (Coyote Ugly, which was just about the right speed for my little tiny mental processes on Saturday night) and Quills, which was very, very good (I think I might have a little crush on Joaquin Phoenix. Heck, I've even learned to say his name. Joaquin, not Phoenix...), and, um. Oh. I made BBQ pork ribs for dinner and nobody was home to eat them. :P
Superman never made any money
saving the world from Solomon Grundy
and sometimes I despair
will never see another man like him
boy, i love that song.
The darling dorgy broke through the kiddie gate as soon as I was in a meeting and couldn't chase her, and went upstairs and crapped on the carpet. *sigh* Good thing she's cute.
Got the stuff for the loan reinstatement for Ted's loan. Yay us.
Well, I went through the twelve zillion pieces of paperwork and I still don't know anything about my dental insurance, but the desk is cleaner. I emailed my HR person to see if she could tell me something useful about my dental insurance, but she hasn't answered yet. I successfully made some choco-peanut bar cookies. It took several minutes to figure out how to make the new oven work, but wow it's all shiny and new and pretty! And it baked the cookies without burning them to death. :)
Still can't work. T1 is supposed to be 70% operational tomorrow. Feh. Guess I'll work on OYL for a while. Vroom.
Bleh. Don't feel good. Would call in sick, but I can't work anyway (the server move has still got the VPN down, and there's now no ETA for getting it fixed *sigh*), so why waste a sick day? *Tired*.
Impatient for bike trails to be clear. Wanna go biking. Well, right now I wanna go to sleep, but in the grander scheme going biking sounds nice.
The puppy is snoring under my feet.
Oh! Smug! Angie got her birthday present, and wasn't expecting it at all, and was very pleased!
No brain. I would call a dentist if I could remember which one I was supposed to call. Perhaps I should try going through the twelve zillion piles of paperwork on the desk and seeing if I can figure out what kind of dental insurance *I* have....
Remind me to call a dentist tomorrow.
We've outsmarted the dog, and it only took us three days. She's been climbing over the kiddie gate since about two days after we got it (and quite handily, I might add; we watched her do it this afternoon), but cleverly, we thought to put the two tall stool/chairs we have for the kitchen bar in _front_ of the kiddie gate, and she couldn't climb over all of it. That should stop her for a couple weeks, anyway.
The new stove is very new and white and large!
YAAY! New stove this afternoon! The landlord just stopped by to say that between 1 and 2 he and his son would be over and they'd install a new stove! HOORAY!
Maybe now I will not burn the cookies. Morp. I made cookies last night and scorched them. I mean, blackened to the point of inedibility. I *never* ruin cookies. I'm very sullen about it. :P And I'd never even MADE that kind of cookie before (choco-peanut bars) and I'd been wanting them for ages and *sulk*. Shaun says I took it very well, actually. :)
NEW STOVE! HOORAY!
My back hurts. Yes, I took some drugs for it. Hopefully in a while it will stop hurting. The dog is driving me insane. My work is telling me that FTP isn't secure and I have to do this whole stupid workaround because there was a server move over the weekend and they haven't got the new T1 turned on so none of the VPNs really work. Zilli is mewing his fool head off. The Middle East is on the brink of nuclear disaster, and Garrett and Sarah think that Sharon should demand the US release Leonard Peltier, since the US government is going around making demands nobody has intention of listening to. Why not join the fun?
Okay, that last thing is kind of funny. :) And this, as Garrett says, is why he's not a world leader.
Forgiveness is obtained, and check out Christi's new digs!
Poor Ted is not well this morning, and so I have not gone to the gym. I don't think he's going to work, but I'm not quite sure what's going on.
Chantico is being relatively good. This means she has not pooped on the floor, and that each of the three times we've gone outside (in the last 90 minutes) she's gone to the bathroom. It does not refer to her chewing on my toes or charging the kiddie gate and knocking it over so she could get free and romp around the house and terrorize the cats. Or chewing on my chair. I need to go upstairs and get her one of her skinny chew sticks that she likes so much, but if I do that while she's awake she'll just fling herself against the gate and I'll have to chase her all over the house.
I thought this was a *good* idea?
I suppose if I'm bitching about loan stuff, I ought to mention the up side, too. I called the Alaska Student Loan people, to whom we have been hemmoraging money in order to get Ted's loan out of default, and they have set up their reinstatement program, and will send us the paperwork, and what this means is that the extra $N hundred that I am sending to them in order to try to catch up can be sent to 3 other loans instead. So there is actually quite a lot less doom, because I now have more money to go around, even if it sucks violently that the stupid federal people decided I could afford to send them more money.
Also, I got my calendar for On Your Left done finally (by blatantly nicking Christi's calendar code, which I will ask permission/beg forgiveness for tomorrow).
*Also*, Chantico seems to be getting the idea, a bit, that when I'm downstairs, I'm not for playing with, which is good.
WOOOO SARAH! House loan! House! WOOOOOOO! WOOOOOOOOOO! YAAAY! WOOO! *beam* WOOT!
Well, I called up the other loan people to see why my stupid student loan bill had doubled, and they said, "Oh, it's because we got your paperwork that you sent in saying how much money you were making, and based on that, you can afford to pay twice as much as you're paying."
Well, no, actually, I can't, fuckwits. But I can't change it to a smaller payment until I've made 3 payments (on time and in full) at this new rate.
This is stupid.
My at-least-in-theory correct W-2 has finally arrived. Turns out they are in fact withholding an extra $25/paycheck. That's good. I'll see if it's good /enough/ after we do our taxes, of course. If not, maybe I'll ask them to withhold $50/check. Blah. That's a lot. Stoopid taxes.
What a stellar morning this is turning out to be. I failed to prevent the dog from crapping on the carpet, but did manage to ruin my breakfast, because oatmeal just does not reheat well, and I had to throw the damned dog outside again. Also, poor Zilli was being chased by Chantico and Zilli jumped up on the counter to get out of the way and then realized I was there and went OH SHIT! and jumped back down to where the dog could chase him again. Poor kitty.
Chantico chased Lucy upstairs into a corner of the bedroom. The kiddie gate is getting bent out of shape from Chanty jumping at it. It also doesn't actually prevent her in the slightest from getting out, if she wants to, now.
I felt so sorry for the poor cats that I gave them the leftover milk in my cereal bowl this morning. The astute among you will deduce that I didn't last very long on my frootivore diet. I ended up with upper-belly cramps last night (I /expected/ lower-belly cramping), and only belatedly considered the fact that given how little fruit I eat, that suddenly throwing nothing but fruit into my system was perhaps not the brightest idea. I think I need to eat more fruit in /general/ before I try this again (fortunately, I've still got apples and oranges and (glick) a banana up there). So maybe I'll give it another whirl next week, or maybe I'll just train myself to eat apples instead of cookies. Apples must be morally superior, right?
Anyway, so I went to bed at about 7:30 last night because my tummy hurt and I was feeling incredibly pathetic and lame. I didn't need 11 hours of sleep, and thus slept somewhat fitfully, and my back is somewhat achy, whine whine whine.
The cats are now upstairs being bad. I am almost happy about this, because their version of bad doesn't involve crapping on the carpet.
Clearly 2 apples, a banana (gaaah), two glasses of juice and however much water I've drunk today (not enough, although the juice counteracts that somewhat) is not enough to convince me I'm doing anything like eating enough. I am sufficiently empty-tummied that drinking water causes me to feel the water sliding over the walls of my stomach.
Which I could actually deal with, I think, if it weren't for the fact that I'm theoretically supposed to go swim in 45 minutes and the idea of expending energy on a tummy this empty makes me very crabby. I don't think I'm going to last very long on this thing. Like, probably right up to about when dinner is. :)
I'm sure this is good for me on some moral level. It certainly would clean the old system out. Jump-start a diet, too.
On the other hand, my head is about to be enveloped by my hungry tummy.
So I've been in pain for pretty much the last year, because I screwed up my back after I blew my knee out last March. On Sept. 11th (it's a little hard to forget) I woke up with spasming back pains, and went and got some muscle relaxants which I was supposed take every 12 hours as needed. The thing about me and drugs is that I apparently have a pretty high drug tolerance, and so back then I took a pill and nothing happened, and eventually I took another pill and eventually after that went to bed and woke up at 3am with more back spasms, and took another pill and four ibuprofin, about twenty minutes after which I fell through the bed and the next day my back was a lot less painful. I took a pill or two over the next few weeks, and then stopped.
Saturday my back wasn't spasming, but between taking care of the dog and the ache of the back, I was totally exhausted and pretty much in tears. So I took one of the muscle relaxants, and after a few hours of that not doing any noticeable good, I took a couple ibuprofin.
And after a couple of hours, I was practically pain free, and have been for the last two days.
Now, I ask you, why the hell didn't I do this four months ago? Or two? Or even one? What is wired wrong in my tiny little brain that I have to be incapable of functioning before I'll do something about it?
Suddenly I am reminded of Flit.
Actually, the CD won't go past the first song without being prompted, but it works after that. Weird.
Ooh, my cousin Kerry changed her webpage layout. I like it. *eyes my own page layout* I haven't changed it in FOUR MONTHS!
*eyes the cd i made last night* It was working last night, but it just played the first song and then went whrr whrr whrr and wouldn't go on to the next one. Trying again... I'm going to be very sour-faced if this doesn't work. *mutter*
The kiddie gate we got to keep the doggie in worked for about a day, apparently. Shaun said she kept getting out last night and when I got up this morning she'd gotten out and pooped on the carpet. *sigh* Also, weirdly, Zilli keeps climbing the gate, instead of jumping over it. Climbing it and balancing on top of it sometimes.
Well, goddamn it, the CD won't move on to the next song without hitting the 'skip to the next song' button. WTF!
I went to the gym this morning and I'm in an amazingly good mood, all chipper and happy, despite officially being a lardass. Tomorrow I'm going to go on a 3 day system purge and eat fruit and drink juice and water for three days (or alternately for as long as I can stand it, but not more than three days) and then I'm going to really truly start watching what I eat, because I am tired of having a fat little convex tummy and I want a sleek little concave tummy and a whole hell of a lot less hip than I've got.
Ted is threatening to get his hair frosted. I think that'd be all sexy. :)
I got the Five For Fighting CD today. Listening to it now; it's purdy good. Hey, where's the Ricky Martin CD? I'm gonna make myself a workout CD as soon as I figure out how. But I have to go upstairs and find the Ricky CD. I already have an embarrassing mix including the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, so might as well make it complete. (Like I'm kidding anybody. I freely admit to liking pop music.) Also, Chantico (who has been VERY good) is upstairs alone and that makes me nervous. And plenty of Meat Loaf/Jim Steinman on the CD, too, of course. What stream of consciousness? bbiab.
Note to self: distracting Chantico from what she's chewing on by inserting my foot between it and her is a good way to make her think my foot is the new thing to chew on.
Argh. I went upstairs to make lunch and stopped to practice my chords on my guitar, and I've been trying to hold the thing the way I'm supposed to, as a right-hander, but it just feels *wrong*. I flipped it upside-down to see if I could do it more easily the other way -- which is, when I was trying to teach myself last fall, how I held the guitar -- and voila, my wrist was in the right place, I could hold it properly, it worked for me.
Except the strings are backwards, that way.
Maybe I'll take the guitar to a music shop this weekend and get it restrung, or something.
Of course, this means I've cut the fingernails on the wrong hand...
Sooooo tired. Got up for a while this morning and then actually went back to bed. Woulda stayed there a lot longer, too, except I had a meeting at 9. *yawn*
We need more chew toys for the puppy. She is very chewy. Plus I think she got visibly taller last night while we were playing with her. o.o She chewed apart one of her pee pads (a clean one) this morning. I have to clean it up. It's strewn all over the office.
I amused the hell out of my coworkers by wailing helplessly at the dog while in a meeting this morning. They thought it was very, very funny. :) Between Chantico and the cats, they get a lot of enjoyment out of me calling into meetings. :)
I have _no_ brain.
fairie names (got this from tracie's page)
name: thorn limeweb
behaviour: a creator of bounty and harvest
seen: only in the mist of an early morning
habitat: in brambles and blackberry bushes
*happy wriggle*
(not that the creator of the test has ever seen me in the mists of early morning, clearly. *grooonk* :))
Okay, the puppy has been named. She is now officially Chantico. :) Henry can be smug!
My knee still hurts.
And no. I haven't taken anything for it. Why are you looking at me like that?
My knees hurt this morning. *sigh*
My first guitar class was last night. Um. It was all right, I guess. I think I was the only one in there who wasn't an elementary school teacher. The woman who was sitting next to me talked like a first grade teacher. *shudder* Everything was *won*derful and how *nice* and spoken in a high soft voice like you would speak to a puppy. *shudder*
Speaking of puppies, Ted seems to have decided the puppy's name is Abby (after Abigail Adams, second First Lady of the US). Since I suggested the name, I can't really complain, although I don't think I'm actually particularly fond of it. I may make a final bid for Chantico/Shanty, or I might just curl up in a ball and wish my knee didn't hurt and feel pathetic.
Or how about Chantico?
Henry | Chantico: The Aztec goddess of hearth fires and volcanic fires. When she violated the ban on eating paprika on fasting day by eating roasted fish with paprika, she was turned into a dog by the maize-god Tonacatecuhtli. Her name means 'she who dwells in the house'.
Henry says "Point out to Ted that it's better than 'Tonacatecuhtli.'"
Remy says "Chantico is much easier to pronounce than Tonacatecuhtli."
*giggles*
Well, after an afternoon of using it, Matsutake was deemed too long. Right now, the puppy is being referred to as Cleo. :)
Oh, incidentally, I washed the bread machine thingy, pouring warm dishwater all over my foot in the process, and made bread, which means I now have no excuse to not do my review thingy. Drat.
Hahah! Angie is so cool! She suggested Matsutake as a name for the dog (Shiitake having the obvious nickname problem), and I think Matsutake is perfect, 'cause the puppy is from the Mat-Su (Matanuska-Susitna) Valley! Hahah! Isn't Angie *clever*? Ted, Ted, what do you think of Matsutake?
The matsutake mushroom: The North American Armillaria ponderosa or White Matsutake is one of the best edible mushrooms and has a distinctive spicey/piney aroma. Traditional with rice or in soup, but great with almost any dish or grilled.
This doesn't mean we get to grill the dog, but I think it's a perfect name! *beam*
I think the animals have just defeated me in a battle of wills, or something. The puppy (Shiitake, she sayd tentatively) was snorfling around her food dish looking pathetic and hungry, so I filled up her bowl. Doing this made Zilli come runrunrunning into the kitchen. Rather than deal with Zilli eating the dog's food and then pooping icky poop all over the house, I filled the cats' dish, too. Maybe, she said, pathetically hopeful, if they're all free-range and have enough to eat, they won't eat each other's food . . . .
Things I have accomplished today: yoga. walking the puppy. eating breakfast. fixing some bugs. showering.
Things I have not accomplished today: making bread. writing up my review process stuff for work.
Hm. Looks like I'm ahead so far. Making bread isn't that much of a bother, except I have to wash the bread machine thingy, which is why I haven't gotten that far yet. Writing up my review process stuff *is* a bother, and I'll probably wash the bread machine thingy before I do the review stuff. o.o
We think we have named the puppy! We think her name is Shiitake. Because she likes hiding in cool dark places, but we thought Mushroom wasn't a good name. :)
Brownies are finished, puppy lady is called (and she was very glad I'd called, so that's kinda nice), puppy is now wrestling a blanket to death. Grr, argh. :)
Anyway, we went to the pound and there were a couple of very cute Rottie/lab mix puppies, and we thought about getting one, and we went to ask our landlord if we could have a puppy (and paid rent, and I talked to the landlady, actually, not the landlord, and explained that our stove burners don't light when the oven is on and that somebody came and looked at the stove/oven several months ago and pronounced it choking and dying, and cheaper to replace than fix, but it hadn't been replaced, and could that please happen? and she said oh! yes! and other good things like that. So that was good.) and she said if we had animals already, sure, we could have another one, so we went back to see if either of the puppies at the pound were girls, and when we got there they'd both been adopted. So we didn't get those puppies. One of them was a girl. She had white feets with little black spots on them. Ted wanted to call her Spoot, for Spotted Boots. :) But they went home with people, so that's good!
Then we came home and looked through the paper and found rescue puppies (basically pound puppies who have been collected either from the pound or from people who were going to bring them to the pound, and who are put with foster families so there's more time to look for owners for them), and they basically didn't know what kinds of puppies any of them were, but I called up the lady who runs the rescue and talked to her for a bit and got a couple of numbers to call and called one and on Sunday we went out to meet puppies -- whom we thought were going to be Rotties -- and a couple of them had Rottie-like heads (BIG heads! if the biggest of them had been a girl instead of a boy, we'd probably have brought him home, but we wanted a girl) -- but the one we got looks a lot like a husky, in her face and body. Big feet, though (BIG feet! and big STURDY legs!) and fairly Rottie coloring, so possibly they're Husky/Rottie mixes. Anyway, she's very cute and she still doesn't have a name. Ted won't let me call her Ostrich, even though she sticks her head in dark places a lot. :) We have discussed Oddbit, but I think that's a hard name to say, and Kahvi keeps coming up.
Also on Sunday we went shopping, and went to my parents' house for an Easter dinner, which was really REALLY yummy. And then we came home and had to figure out a way to barricade the puppy (who really needs a name) into the kitchen for the night. That wasn't very successful, but we think we found a way now that will keep her in.
I will try not to bibble about the puppy *too* much. O.O
And that was my weekend!
So I did *most* of the things I intended to this weekend. I didn't get any exercise, but I read some and I wrote some (the next chapter of US is done; I need to post it. I also think I may need to change the time of year that the story is happening in . . . I've been thinking about going back and reworking it from the top), and I . . . um. Well. Got a puppy. That wasn't actually part of the weekend plan, but it happened anyway!
Saturday Ted made French Toast for breakfast (not waffles with strawberries, as Marith suggested I have on my Weekend Off, but a damned fine substitute!), and then we went out and stayed out ALL DAY. We went to the bank and drove by the gym (which was closed on Easter; that's what we drove by to find out) and drove um. Oh, yes. We drove around until we found a music shop at which I purchased a digital guitar tuner, and on the way there we nearly got in a car wreck!
We were driving down Arctic and some idiot tried to execute a left-hand turn in front of us. This is precisely how we wrecked our new car 4 years and 9 months ago (only in that case we were the idiots executing a left-hand turn into traffic. Except traffic, in our case, was completely stopped; the reason we got in a wreck is a REAL idiot was speeding down the turn lane and smashed into us, totalling the little red Neon we'd bought from my Dad *sigh*). So this idiot pulled out of the driveway and Ted and I both thought, "Oh, SHIT, not AGAIN!" and Ted did some very good defensive driving and kind of jackknifed the car into the other lane (where, fortunately, there was no oncoming traffic; he'd checked for it) and back again, and all the rest of what we could do was wait to see if the moron in the other car hit the brakes in time. Which (s)he did, and so there was no wreck. We drove a few yards down the road and pulled into a parking lot and had hysterics. Jesus Christ.
After we got done with the hysterics and got a digital tuner, we went out to the Dimond Center to get a cookie (actually, we had lunch first, after due consideration), and then we sort of spent the rest of the day looking for puppies. Which reminds me; I should call the lady we got our puppy through and tell her that we got a puppy. And I should check on the brownies. More in a few minutes.
YAY TED! Ted was awarded the Employee Excellence of the Month (or something much like that) award at his work this month! He gets a $100 gift certificate to wherever he wants in town (he's going to get one for Bosco's so he can get gaming stuff *laugh*) and at the end of the year he and the other 11 people who were employees of the month over the year will be entered in a drawing to go to Cabo san Luco in January. Woot! YAY TED! He's been working very hard and I'm very proud of him! YAAAAY! *beam*
In other news, the puppy still doesn't have a name, but she sure is cute. :)
Puppy! As of yet still nameless puppy! She is a she and we think she's a husky/something mix, and here's another random gratuitous picture, and here are Zilli and Lucy's reactions. :)
It was a very long busy weekend and I'll write more about it later. :)