Okay, first order of business…
Yesterday one of my coworkers brought me a page from GQ with places you should and should not vacation in when you’re alone. Key West got a big write up as a great place to travel alone, she brought it to me because I’m going. In exchange I will eat conch fritters for her. Of the places you should not go alone, Rio de Janeiro was listed for the reason listed in the title of this post. The title of the previous post was the series of events that would happen if you went to Amsterdam alone. Of course when I read that I immediately asked where I could sign up for a trip like that!
The dog’s nickname this week is biscuit foot. He has feet like biscuits.
My hair is the shortest it has ever been in my entire life barring the moment of my birth. It’s short. SHORT SHORT. It’s also almost all my natural color, too, but that won’t last. Hair gets dyed on Sunday after the open house. I’m going with red and pink for my trip, hopefully it will turn out.
The cafeteria here at the school makes awful food. Just terrible stuff that they overcharge for. However, they do make excellent banana chocolate chip muffins and it is taking all of my willpower to not eat them.
I did not get terrible greasy takeout food last night. Sigh. I decided to behave myself. I took the dog for a long walk and then ate a frozen turkey dinner and some Sun Chips. If that isn’t the most pathetic meal ever, i don’t know what it. Actually, I do know what the most pathetic meal ever is. It’s pretty sad. You only eat it alone and you have to share with the dog.
Okay, I just got a muffin. I’m eating it. I don’t actually want it. I probably won’t finish it.
Breakfast is 9am Sunday at Sobas! So far there are 6 of us. Let me know if you can make it!
Alex posed the question “If you were stuck in “Fahrenheit 451” which book would you be? Which book would you choose to memorize so that you might pass it on to future generations. Alex picked the Gulag Archipelago, David said (in so many words) that he would rather create something new. I picked “A Confederacy of Dunces” because the window it provides to our society is so skewed and so amusing. I do so love that book.
So what about you? What book would you read?
my god this is a day I should not be inside for! So beautiful here.
hupo and the bat

yeah, so I have this dog and while I do love him dearly he has cost me an incredible amount of money for a thing so small. Obviously, I don’t begrudge him the cost of his care and feeding, these are to be expected and I want him to be healthy and happy so he gets pricey food and goodly dog treats and more toys than most kids. Beyond these things my dog has still managed to squeeze from me an amazing amount of cash. He chews, he chews a lot and he has this incredible knack for finding those things which actually cost a lot. He has expensive tastes, what can I tell you. Along with the two remote controls, the pillows, the sheets, the clothes, the shoes and the carpet (all the carpet had to be replaced, but to be fair the carpet was old and stained up, but he was the impetus for the replacement), he also chewed up 2 pairs of prescription glasses. So fiday night I went in and had the glasses and the prescription sunglasses replaced. Luckily, they were having a buy one get one free deal going on, but still, i’ve spent so much on glasses this past year it’s not even funny. No, it’s not funny, it’s damned expensive.
ah well, I needed new sunglasses for florida and I needed to replace the regular glasses as I’ve been wearing the ‘funky special occasion’ glasses almost exclusively.
So that was my friday night, dragging David to Pearle Vision to pick out glasses. Um woo? The only sad thing was that I could not get the same pair of sunglasses that I had before as they were hugely expensive, so I went similar but cheaper. I loved those glasses.
Saturday David, Alan and I went to OPH for massive amounts of pancakes and coffee and all that. After, the plan was to clean the house and get ready for the Sunday open house but luckily fate stepped in and we got a call for a showing. We frantically cleaned and straightened things out and grabbed the dog and headed out to spend the rest of the day in the sunshine. So much better to be outside than inside cleaning. We headed northwest ostensible to find the Anoka cat colony, but we never really found it. Instead we explored and drove and ran around. We stopped at a park to let the dog run wild for a bit and he LOVED that. Dogs like to play games or romp or fetch, but Ghengis will shun all these for a full bore, hardcore run. That’s what he loves best, just running like mad.
Then I got the biggest Ghengis scare i’ve had since I got him. He ran up to the semi-frozen pond and in an instant was on an ice chunk, before I could react and call him back he decided to go to the next ice chunk by way of the thin (THIN) sheet of ice between. A split second later he’s under the ice, completely submerged. I thought my heart would stop. With a scream on my lips as I’m running he comes bounding out of the water. He wiped his face all over the grass to get the freezy water off, shook himself off a few times, got a snausage from me and went on his merry way.
Then I cried a little, that quiet relieved cry when the surge of adrenaline seeps out and you’re left feeling a little scared and a lot relieved and when you play it all back you realize that the whole thing took less than a minute and yet every detail adds up to almost an hour.
More driving, exploring, chip eating, laughing, and talking. This is really one of my favorite things to do, get in the car and drive all over the place exploring. We took highway 65 back into town, marvelled at all the ethnic diversity in the restaurants and promised to get up there and sample the food. I don’t know what it is about Central avenue, north of the city but there’s just this huge diveristy, all this stuff going on and you never hear about it. The best part is that things aren’t divided in any way. You don’t have the ‘Indian’ block here and then the ‘East African’ next and the ‘Lebanese’ all bundled together away from the ‘Ukranian’ Corner. It’s all mixed together, one after the other.
We got home, David napped with the dog for a bit and I finished reading my book. The lesson I learned is that if more than one person, completely unrelated people who don’t know each other, tells me that I will not like Robert Heinlein, they are probably right. I read ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ and I absolutely hated it. HATED. It was terrible. If I had to read ‘Thou art God” one more time I was going to rip the book to shreds. Go take your ‘fish out of water’ innocence and your superior grokking skills and stuff them up your own butt. I also hated the hippie style religious commune orgy bullshit and the ‘we never rush anywhere, we don’t hurry’. Hated.
I also learned that if a lot of unrelated peoplee keep telling me that I will like something I should try it out even if it seems like something I wouldn’t like. I finally saw Monsters Inc this weekend and loved it. I thought it was terribly cute and a lot of fun. Not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination but so damned cute and fun to watch. Not as good as Lilo and Stitch, but what can you expect?
In my continuing quest to make vegetarian comfort food (mostly I’m just craving comfort food, it’s what i want to eat and since I have a vegetarian to feed, I have to make comfort food that he can eat) I made a mexican version of shepherd’s pie with tvp. It actually turned out really well, I was happy with it, but I should have added some corn to the base, that would have helped. Yum.
Sunday posted in a bit, I don’t want to make the world’s largest post here!