And then as I was sure I was about to make a decision at any moment, I accepted a job in San Diego.  I’ve given my notice at work and I’m packing up the car and hitting the road on the 24th.  At some point – we have no way of knowing when yet – my husband and dogs will follow.

My plan – until something changes, which I don’t doubt it will – is to rent a room, the cheapest safest sanest arrangement I can find, so I can also pay the mortgage since B has been out of work since October.

So, uh, yeah.  Changes, stuff going on.  I had been wanting to really start stretching my blogging muscles again and now I have a totally legitimate reason to do that, so stay tuned…

“Rumor spurs long line for non-existence housing vouchers”

First you think, gah, this is probably the same editor who thinks it’s okay to repeatedly refer to dead children as “tots” in headlines.  But then you start to wonder how exactly one might qualify for a non-existence voucher, and what happens next.  Is it like Futurama’s suicide booths, or do they use lasers, or what?

Update:  now it’s “Rumor spurs long line for non-existing housing vouchers.”  It’s like watching a train chug up a steep hill: non-existent non-existent non-existent CHOO CHOO!

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.