If you are driving at night and the car in front of you suddenly bobs and weaves to avoid the flying tarpaulin that then wraps itself around the headlight-area of your car, the very first thing you should determine is if you have enough available light – from the headlights of the car around you, moonlight, street lighting, nearby businesses – and space to pull over IMMEDIATELY.  Not a great spot, not even a good spot, just a spot not technically in a lane and not down a hill or into a lake or something.

If there is no ambient light, and you slow and try to pick out a really good place to pull over, you will lose the headlights of the surrounding cars and will no longer be able to see the edge of the road.  Or the road itself.  When it is truly dark out – we forget this sometimes – it is really really freaking dark.  Furthermore, if you hit your hazards and have a poorly-engineered dashboard arrangement, the blinking of your hazard lights will so light up the inside of the windshield that you will not be able to see the ghosts of lines on the road.

Should that happen, since you’ve got the road more or less to yourself at this point, attempt to get in the middle of the road according to whatever you can see in front of you until you get somewhere that you can see enough of anything to pull over.  If you can block the glare with a hand or arm, do that, otherwise turn your hazards on and off as necessary to both see the road and communicate to drivers far behind you that something is wrong.

But, really, pulling over immediately is the thing you should do.  I’ve tried the other options.  They sucked.

And here’s the other side of the equation:  if you see this happen to someone else, HELP THEM.  If somebody who saw it happen had just pulled up even with me or behind me, I could have seen where I was going and where to pull over.  That thing could have stuck to my windshield as well as my headlights, and I hope that every person who fucked off instead of being useful wakes up in the middle of the night feeling like an asshole.

Yeah – informal for “yes:, does not rhyme with anything I can currently think of.  Usage:  “Yeah, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday.”  Some may make a case for the usage “Yeah!  It’s your birthday!” but the truth is that the correct usage in that case is “Yay!” so let’s just stop that right now and move on if you are speaking to someone over the age of, say, four, as it can be assumed that they know it is their birthday and do not need your confirmation of such.

Yay – a word of celebration, or, sarcastically, of the lack thereof.  Another version of “hurray!”  Rhymes with pay, day, way, and hurray.  Usage:  “Yay!  It’s my birthday!”  or “I have to work on Saturday.  Yay.”

Yah – a mostly useless word, though one could argue that this is appropriate spelling for an exclamation used to make cattle move.  Rhymes with “Ma”, and possibly other things depending on where you’re from.

Ya – 1. preferred The word “you” spelled to indicate dialect.  Usage:  “Good on ya, mate.”  2. See above: encouraging cattle to move.

Ja – a word meaning “yes” in a number of Scandinavian languages.  Pronounced the same as Ya and Yah.

I feel like we have nearly eradicated the continuous use of all caps (not completely, I saw it just today on a gardening forum), and I feel that the internet is now mature enough to tackle this much more complicated issue.

Thank you for your time.

This is no way to go through life:  drunk, naked, muddy-footed, and wet, trying to dry off a soaking wet excited bloody boxer in your laundry room.

Neither of their ears will ever look quite the same again.  It’s mostly nicks around the edges, so they’ll look like well-loved stuffed animals.  Sophie took a small bite to the side of her face.  Roxy comes out worse because she has a ton of neck skin, which makes for good hanging-on, and I think Sophie must have gotten an entire ear in her mouth, because Roxy’s got matching holes on her head and under her ear.

It was Roxy we watched all day yesterday.  I got her cleaned up and didn’t find any injuries that could be improved by medical attention.  She slept a bunch and didn’t eat much, but started perking up towards evening and I think she was probably just exhausted.  Sophie was fine.

And then right about the time Roxy perked up last night, Sophie came in from outside limping and holding up her front left foot.  (And if you have pets and a recent expensive home repair, you just thought “well of COURSE she did!”)  We’d been sitting in the living room, she hadn’t made a sound and she’d been outside alone.  She would put weight on her toes but not on the full foot, so we checked her paw for cuts or a rock or something (including a bite from the night before that mysteriously didn’t bother her for 14 hours), but it’s clean.  And I said, well, okay, maybe she stubbed a toe or something, it’ll pass.

I wrote all the above this morning, and ended up taking Sophie to the vet this afternoon.  She has a mild case of mystery injury.  Of the elbow.  It is possible something bit her on the leg (something with smaller teeth than Roxy, and not very deeply), or she got her leg stuck in something.  Or she fell.  Or aliens threw rocks at her.  There’s a vague scratch or puncture or something, and the x-rays just indicated some swelling.  She’s comfortably whacked out on a painkiller I don’t think I’ve used before, and she has antibiotics.

Sophie doesn’t really like people getting up in her business too much.  She’ll tolerate a lot from me, unless she doesn’t want to, in which case I get the big Elvis Lip pretty fast, and I told the vet tech that they’d probably need to do something about that.  At which point the vet tech tried to take her temperature anyway and saw what I meant.  They muzzled her, and then they had to lay her down on the floor to palpate and rotate the leg.

It was not unlike some of the more memorable scenes in The Exorcist.  Oh my god, the noises that came out of that dog.  It was all muffled because of the muzzle, but I am fairly certain she had some pretty straightforward instructions regarding both Jesus and your mother.  And then, when they were done with the leg and had flipped her over and felt the other leg for comparison, they took her temperature.  If you suffered a brief power interruption this afternoon, sorry about that.

And I did laugh, because I wasn’t anywhere near any of her business ends, but then on the other hand it’s that same rage that fuels these fights, and yesterday was just in general a low day because we don’t want dogs that fight.  We don’t want to have to worry about leaving them at home during the day and coming back to a bloodbath.  I don’t like Roxy’s ears all nicked up.  So it’s probably time to pick back up with the Cesar Millan stuff, making them walk together and wearing them out and things.

We’re in hurry-up-and-wait mode here, now, lest we end up all dressed up and unable to sit down (dog hair) an hour before we need to leave.  Now I’m off to deal with my hair.  Happy Saturday!

This is a FANTASTIC short film about some of the stranger requests for photographs received by the Hulton Archive/Getty Images.  I thought it was going to be a tidy little documentary with amusing anecdotes (the title of the film is “Photographs of Jesus,” after all), and it’s this amazing stop-motion photo-animated romp that is very clever and has totally brightened my day:

To do:

Also, make sure you get mooned tonight.  Tonight’s full moon will be the brightest of the year, with the full moon at its closest lunar perigree since 1993. Last night was trippy enough – you very nearly could have read comfortably by the moonlight.  I have two 8′ long raised beds covered with white frost cloth, and they looked like giant fluorescent tubes laid out in the yard.  I might try to take pictures tonight.

To read:

You’re probably already reading Cake Wrecks, but have you seen the real-estate-photography equivalent, It’s Lovely I’ll Take It?  For as long as we slogged through our house-hunt, we never saw anything this wacky.

Where do your donated clothes go?  Many of them go to Africa to have a really complicated relationship with the economy, politics, agricultural competition, and cultural identity.  I finished this article unsure of what exactly I should do the next time I clean out my closet.

Sappy happy ending story about a dog, a parking lot, a rescue, and a reunited family.

And then spent two hours cleaning the bathroom and kitchen (the sprayer is leaking; the home warranty doesn’t cover “sinks,” it turns out) before the plumber got here.  I’d had to let the other plumber in the bathroom last week when he bled the lines, when there was a giant pile of dirty towels and socks and globs of toothpaste in the sink and piles of hair everywhere and I was embarrassed.

So I suppose you could say I got a clean bathroom AND a new toilet float, all for $55.  Much like you could say I got some new landscaping last week.

This plumber mentioned casually that he would have done the yard for $X, where X = .5*$What_We_Paid.  I am fairly certain that that’s not true, given some of the hassle, but still it made me tired when he said it.

In other news, we can’t find Green Ball.  I fear that it has been kidnapped and am awaiting further instructions.

They don’t have many toys.  We had to get rid of the Buster Cube because Roxy obsessed over it and her generally mild, easygoing self would fly into hysterics if any other dog looked at it.  We can’t have any stuffed toys because GIR and Sophie really like to de-stuff things, including the couch and all pillows, and you can’t teach them to gut one thing and not another.  We also can’t have stuffed things because in Sophie’s mind (in which she is Not Right), stuffed things are babies and OH MY GOD DON’T TOUCH MY BABY GAHHHHH.  Most pet store toys last about 20 minutes.  Really cheap dollar store rope bones will “last” a few weeks or a month, where last = GIR carrying around a filthy bundle of strings.

[From the "This Kills Me" department:  Roxy's previous owners said she loved little stuffed animals and would carry them around and sleep with them.  They gave us a bag of her little toys.  She's never gotten to play with one, because someone else would take it from her, gut it, and then obsess over it.  I want so badly to take her in a room by herself and let her have one for a little while, but she freaks out when separated from the other dogs, so it wouldn't exactly be kind.]

But we have two Everlasting Fun Balls, the older and larger of which has lasted over four years (longer than a couch, in other words) and the smaller of which spends most of its time underneath furniture.  Green Ball is GIR’s most favorite toy.  Green Ball gets put in the food bowl when it is time to eat (or even when it’s not; it’s just generally where he keeps Green Ball, and also Filthy Bundle of Strings, and we have no idea where he picked up the toy-in-bowl maneuver), and oh the whining and crying if Green Ball rolls under the ottoman coffee table (curiously uneaten, though I shouldn’t jinx it).

Well, two nights ago he was whining and crying and crouched down looking under the media cabinet.  Only Small Green Ball will fit under there, and I hadn’t seen it lately, so I got down and looked.  There was nothing there.  He just kept pacing and whining, and I finally got down with a flashlight and he checked all the angles and it was clearly obvious to me that there was nothing under there.  But he wouldn’t leave it alone.  And so last night, GIR was still at it, and I was all “Look, dog, it is not-” and B said “There it is!”

It was on the bottom shelf beside the DVD player.  It’s a neon green jelly ball the size of a softball, you would think that even in our dim living room I would have seen it, but no, I just tortured the dog for two days because he’s too polite to shove the DVD player out of the way and get his toy.

Other ways in which we are evil:  The dog door is not large enough for Sophie to carry the throw pillows from the couches outside.  And I laugh when she tries.  We bought a king size bed, but it still really only holds two dogs.  We make GIR sleep in a chair that we specifically put in the bedroom for him to sleep on.  Sometimes we make them get off the coffee table.

I have to give them credit, though, because they just recently got cut off from some serious spoilage.  Ever since we moved, B had come home at lunch pretty much every single day to let them out for a few minutes.  We had a lot of trouble with Sophie’s housebreaking, and they were prone to accidents and rowdiness if left alone too long.  We do have a dog door (we bought a storm door with a built-in dog door – love it, highly recommend it), but the dogs don’t get unattended access to outside because they are idiots and freaks.  B started a new job that is too far away to come home at lunch right about the time I started travelling for work quite a bit, and so they went from 5 hours alone max to 10 hours, and they’ve done really well.  Sophie occasionally leaves us a present, but it’s a solid one that is pretty easy to deal with on a tile floor.  We have to cover the couch a little better than before, and B’s side of the couch is a little divot-y at the moment, but it’s not nearly as bad as we’d braced ourselves for, and I am pleased that the little heathens are doing so well.

We’ve had one Emergency Vet visit since we moved, and of all possible suspects it was, surprisingly, Roxy.  We don’t have any evidence to prove it, but the vet’s best guess was that she found a tube of Advantix and ate some.  Enough to make her real sick, and possibly if we hadn’t been around when she started getting sick she wouldn’t have made it.  So store your flea treatments in a dog-free zone.  I just recently found out that Xylitol, a common sweetener in sugarless gum, will kill a dog as well – there’s your Public Service Announcement for the day.

And Sophie just brought a small dead tree branch into the house, so there ends the story for the day.

I don’t want to do this.  I like my company, in the abstract.  Great, great ideas.  Shitty fucking execution.  All talk, no management.  And what I need at this point in my career is some fucking awesome mentoring.  Or I’d settle for reasonable utilization.  Or professional development.  I’m not getting any of that.  I won’t get it at a competitor, either, so if I’m doing this I guess I’m doing it to change gears.

I think the thing that’s set me off, finally, is the goddamn rudeness.  It only gets pointed in my direction occasionally, which is more than enough.  It’s never, ever okay to be internally unprofessional, unless you’re talking to someone you don’t give a shit about.  So that’s my answer, I guess.

I may change my mind by morning.  I just now got an email from a customer that we don’t hear from very often, asking me some necessary questions.  Why?  Because I’m not a goddamn asshole, they know I’ll answer the question knowledgeably and not be a dick about it.

I’m not sure I know how to convince a potential employer how smart I am, and I don’t really want to have to, I’d rather have it recognized and used by the one I’ve already got, but I think this is why I’ve been feeling so shitty lately.

On weekends, we generally go out to breakfast.  This is mostly because I can’t produce a meal in less than two hours most of the time, I think.  It’s just easier.  And since we moved to Dallas proper, there’s almost no such thing as a restaurant that’s not really busy for dinner all the time, and we hate crowds, so we very rarely go out for lunch or dinner anymore.  Also, I’ve become dependent on getting out of the house, however briefly (we’ll go sit and eat at Chick-Fil-A, if we’ve decided not to do a proper restaurant), in order to get moving for the day.

This is about to have to stop, I suppose, as I have determined that the stomach pain I have after eating restaurant eggs or scrambled eggs at home really is an allergic reaction.  Cook the shit out of them (quiche, egg as binder in other food, baked items, boiled) and I’m fine, but most restaurant breakfast will ruin my morning.  I can get around these issues at home, and there are some places where I can get an entire meal of eggless protein, but I don’t want to eat at IHOP every weekend.

Anyway, aside from breakfast and errands, we don’t go out much in the evenings.  Because we’re old.  But we’ve gotten a lot older since we moved into Dallas proper.  I hate crowds, B hates crowds, we don’t really like people unless we’ve chosen their company specifically, and even too many of those in too small an area will tire us out quickly.  And there’s nowhere with no crowds.  We moved to Dallas pretty much entirely for a reduction in travel time to the places we go, and I miss the far quieter Mid-Cities when I’m trying to go to the grocery store or whatever.

But last night, we wanted to go see Santaland Diaries at the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, and we were going to go to our favorite Vietnamese place nearby for dinner, which is more excitment than we ever see on Sunday nights.  It turned out Mai’s is closed on Sundays (and I’m pretty sure I knew this and forgot), so we found a mediterranean place (which was fine, but was not the stellar place near the old house) and then went to the play.  Which is only an hour long, so we were home by 8:30.

I’ve been pondering the possibility that I’ve been suffering from a little short-day-induced malaise; probably not severe enough to be called SAD, and probably exacerbated by the fairly extensive work travel I did in November, but that short evening out just about drained my batteries.  I’ve got the random aches and pains, lingering pre-cold symptoms, and I sleep pretty much all night every night, which is not just unusual but completely out of character.  I woke up twice last night, once for a pit stop, and once because Sophie was sleeping with her ass on my face and there’s only so much of that I can take.  For months I’d been getting up at 5, or 6 at the latest, mostly running on anxiety, and I guess the upside to the way I feel right now is that I don’t have a whole lot of anxiety.  I’ve slept in until 8am on several occasions.  That’s just madness!

I’m thinking the way to get through this is to, for one thing, just power through it.  It’ll pass in Januaryish.  We should probably also get out a little more, as it was really nice to go out and DO something, and it was probably good for both of us to not rattle aimlessly around the house like we do.

Interesting aside: same Chris wanted to invite me to his slumber party, I don’t think it was that year, it must have been fourth grade, because there was serious parental tightrope-walking over me being the only girl at a boys’ slumber party. There was, actually, a lost-underwear incident that proved it may not have been a good idea, but I was a naive kid, so it went over my head.

It was a tiny little private Episcopalian school, so even in second grade we weren’t a huge class (though fifth grade was 7 kids, so by comparison it was probably enormous at 20 or so). But, anyway, all this came up because my relatively static facebook account first saw activity a couple of months ago when Chris found me and sent me a message about the 30th reunion of our second grade class next year. That only came up because when we graduated high school, our teacher found us and we all (at least who was left) had dinner together about a week before graduation. We’re all (somehow) 36 going on 37 now, and we all turned 7 in second grade.

And one of the themes that keeps coming back to me is: “and then the internet happened.” That’s how I found our second grade teacher (luckily not yet retired, teaching third grade in a nearby school district) this week in about 5 minutes of Googling. It was a pretty astounding moment for me, getting a response from Ms. T. a couple of hours after my search for her.

And so in the same week that that happened to me, something else happened that blew my mind in an entirely more relatable way.

B’s company holiday party was this week. He’s only been there barely 6 weeks, and it’s probably only the open plan office that made it possible for him to introduce me to most of his coworkers. They are very, very nice, and it was really cool to meet all these people that I know nothing about. And in the sea of names and faces, one of them was someone, let’s call him Jonathan Green, who I met and shook hands with and made nice-nice and that was that.

In 1993, I think, or 92 or 94, I went camping with my pledge sister M. and her guy Jon, who had been the roommate of a pledge brother of my college boyfriend. It was a kind of off-the-cuff spring break vacation, being as it was at a point when I knew about the Internet but hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. So we just went to this state park on the rumor that it was there, and it was Amistad National Park on Lake Amistad that straddled the border/Rio Grande between Del Rio, Texas, and Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. By all rights, it should have been a crappy vacation, but it was phenomenal. We got up in the mornings, M. and I would go out to the car and drive part way out of the park, where Jon would meet us after cutting through the woods to fool the homeless guys into believing he was still at the camp.

And every day, we would get up and get breakfast done, then dodge the homeless guys and drive to the border.  We’d park on the Texas side and walk over into Acuna, hang out, window-shop, have a Dos Equis in a bar, have lunch, and then come back.  On the way we’d pick up a suitcase of beer, and then rebuild the campfire while we still had light, hang out and read, and then cook dinner and start drinking around dark.  It was a goddamn blast, I can’t even tell you why, it just was.

On our first day, the first time we went into Mexico, we wandered down Acuna’s main/only street and found the cleanest looking bar that had come along.  We went in, and the bored bartender served us Coronas, and we used the relatively clean bathrooms, and then we left before the guy in the corner unholstered his Casio for the night’s entertainment.

After we’d exhausted about 5 days in Del Rio, we headed back to Denton via a weekend stop in Austin, where Jon had some friends.  In fact, Jon’s bandmates from Dallas were down for the weekend, so there was a shitload of us in this one friend’s apartment.  There was this tiny little film festival going on that weekend – you might have heard of it, it’s called South By Southwest? – and since we didn’t have anything to do and also had no money, we went to a cheap film screening at the movie theater at the Dobie dorm at the University of Texas.  It was this little cheap-ass indie film made by a local UT filmmaker.  You probably haven’t heard of it – it was called El Mariachi, by Robert Rodriguez.

And that would be enough for a good story.  We wandered into El Mariachi and saw it before anyone else did, and before Rodriguez met Tarantino, and before Antonio Banderas had anything to do with it.  Awesome.

Only:  in one of the first scenes of the movie, El Mariachi goes into a bar with a sleepy bartender before the sleepy musical entertainment with a Casio keyboard gets his ass shot into Swiss cheese.

Yeah, most of that film was shot in Acuna, and the first shoot-up was shot in our little sleepy bar on the main street.

How awesome is that?  I’ve been telling that story for years.

So, there I am, sitting at Table 3 (of 3) at my husband’s company party.  The table has declared itself the Rowdy Table already, and I figure I’m sitting in the right place, and then I glance up at the head of the table.

“Hey,” I say to B, “did you say that guy’s name is Jonathan Green?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Oh,” I say.  And then, “You have to find out where he went to college.”

My husband is no spy.  If he wants a piece of information, he asks for it.  He asked the guy sitting next to Jonathan Green, and then passes the word back to me:  my university, graduated in 1994.

“I…” I say, “think I went camping with him.”  I look at him for a few seconds.  “Yes, I’m pretty sure I did.”

“Hey, Jonathan,” B says, “you went camping with my wife!”

It got real quiet at the table for several long seconds, while Jonathan and I look at each other.  And then I pushed back from the table and met him halfway for a big hug (a hug that completely confounded Table 1).  We had the requisite catch-up conversation (which involved the phrase “and then the internet happened” on both sides), and I am still reeling from it, and from the fact that it’s really taken this long to stumble across someone I knew Back In The Day.

My 20th high school reunion is in a year and a half, so I suspect this is far from over yet.