Best birthday present ever

My birthday isn’t until tomorrow, but I decided the other day what I was going to buy myself with my birthday money (Thanks, Dad!).

A Roomba!

It’s going to take some work to make sure Isis isn’t completely traumatized by the thing, which we wouldn’t even need if she could keep her damn fur on her body, instead of storing it in fluffy balls in the corners and under furniture (and all over the inside of my new car, but I don’t think Roomba can help me there).

Isis barks at the regular vacuum. And at the Swiffer Wet Jet. Both of which are wonderful inventions, but don’t get used as often as is required to keep our floors dog hair free (approx. every five minutes). I don’t expect Roomba to be the perfect fix (yes I do), but the idea of having the thing pick up even a portion of her dog hair is completely thrilling to me.

Certainly we can’t have Roomba roaming around while Isis is loose, but we can program it to clean while we’re at work and she’s in her crate. First we have to introduce her to the thing carefully, because she’s pretty likely to bark her head off the whole time it’s operating.

IM gaffe

Imagine you’re my coworker, corresponding with me on our newly downloaded instant message application. We’re firing messages back and forth while I copy edit the newsletter.

After a few moments of radio silence, the following pops up from me in your instant message window:

We bury our dog poop
in a little doggie composter.

I can’t stop giggling about it. See, obviously that message was intended for the other coworker, who had just sent me this little link about carrying one’s garbage with oneself for 2 weeks.

Guilt ridden

Yesterday, I suited up in matching sky blue rain paints and raincoat to walk Isis.

It was blustery and raining, you see.

You’da thought she’d never been outside the house before, she was so enchanted by all that she saw (and smelled, no doubt). I don’t think she walked beside me for two steps the whole time. I took her to the high school where I let her loose on the soccer field. She went berserk.

I went home and read a book intended to cure the leash-reactivity, based on positive reinforcement clicker training, shunning the prong collar altogether. And here I was, wondering if there were something stronger than the prongs. Like, could I sharpen the points?

Despite a coupla lengthy naps on Saturday, and sleeping til noon Sunday, I couldn’t get myself out of bed before 8 a.m. this morning. So I took it out on Isis. No walk this morning. I’ll be sure to take her on one when I get home, but if I’d taken her on one this morning, then I could feel good about taking her on two walks today.

Even though I let her down today, she’s the greatest workout partner. She doesn’t want to stay inside when the weather’s rough; she’s even more excited to get out walking. Only problem is, her excitement = chafing of my leash hand.

Note: This post and the previous are cross-posted on my Dog Blog. I plan to channel most of the training/behavior discussion there. I’ve had some technical problems posting, but it seems to be working now. For future linkage, see Isis in Progress to the right.

I was wrong

I thought by the time she turned 1, Isis was going to be 100 pounds, or at least 90.

Nope. She’s just 67 pounds. Even after having a medium vanilla ice cream from Dairy Queen to celebrate her first birthday yesterday.

Happy birthday, Princess!

Business trip

Really, there’s no reason why all hotels don’t have wifi.

Here I am, in a spacious suite, by myself, in a one-stoplight town, on business. Four of my coworkers and my boss are in similar suites in same hotel. The sixth person in our department is in her own home, five minutes away.

We’re calling it a retreat. It took me six hours to get here. I’ve been up since 4:30 a.m.

I miss Isis and Rob. I told Rob that Isis could sleep on my pillow tonight. Meanwhile, I’ll be sleeping next to my laptop.

Fake acupuncture nearly equal to real deal

I knew it! Eastern medicine is bogus.

AP – Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than usual care, German researchers have found.

Wait, what?

Almost half the patients treated with acupuncture needles felt relief that lasted months. In contrast, only about a quarter of the patients receiving medications and other Western medical treatments, such as physical therapy and massage, felt better.

Even fake acupuncture worked better than conventional care, leading researchers to wonder whether pain relief came from the body’s reactions to any thin needle pricks or, possibly, the placebo effect.

For the sham acupuncture, needles were inserted, but not as deeply as for the real thing. The sham acupuncture also did not insert needles in traditional acupuncture points on the body and the needles were not manually moved and rotated.

I’m so confused.

Loving too much

Or, OCD is the best diet ever.

Oh, Adobe InDesign, I can’t tear myself away from you. I’m starting to feel weak from hunger, but I can’t bear to go to lunch until I get that column of text perfectly aligned with the top of that photo. I need to make the photo smaller, and edit out the widows and orphans, but each time I edit a line, it shifts the length of the story, and I have to change the photo size again…

Last week, I was giddy with pleasure, spending 8 straight hours hypnotized by InDesign. Now I’m at the point in the process where I can’t believe I’m not done yet. It’s not that the honeymoon’s over, but rather, it’s become clear that this is not just a crush. We’re going to be together a long time, me and InDesign.

Fashion backward

While waiting for Rob to finish uploading the entire contents of his cassette collection to digital format and then to his iPod, so we could watch Prison Break, I watched an episode of Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style.

The subject was a mother of two who wore nothing but capri pants and T-shirts. As the mother of two pets and a boyfriend, I could relate. No, that’s not really why I could relate. It’s the job that’s made me slovenly. I managed to dress “professionally” most of the time when I worked at the below-mentioned University. But now, I need to be prepared to wade in a creek or hike to a mountain goat meadow at a moments notice.

Which means I wear jeans and a T-shirt every day. Or cargo pants. Or khakis. I suppose in the winter I wear some snazzy sweaters…but I know that if Tim Gunn ever visited my closet, he’d be getting rid of 97 percent of my outfits and make me wear little dresses and slacks that touch the floor. (So please don’t submit an application for me.)

Remember Laura Bennett from last season of Project Runway? How she dressed like Audrey Hepburn all the time even though she was a mom who worked from home? Yeah, that’s not me.

As I watched Tim Gunn, I was wearing jeans that were dirty from my walks and class with Isis and a raglan T-shirt with black sleeves that were covered in dog hair from lying on the floor by Rob’s computer while waiting for him to finish uploading the entire contents of his cassette collection to digital format and then to his iPod, so we could watch Prison Break. I was wearing no make-up and there was no product in my hair.

When we got a last minute invitation to dinner (his family always does this. Surely someone knew they were going to celebrate his brother-in-law’s birthday on Saturday prior to 4 p.m. on Saturday), I was motivated by Tim to gussy myself up a little bit. Eye make-up and hair product were no-brainers — I wear those to work. But I also put on lipgloss and mascara. Big day.

I thought for a moment about putting on slacks, but without even looking at them, I decided that all eight pairs didn’t reach the floor, were wrinkled or are too tight. My “Saturday night out” outfit? A pair of clean jeans, belted, and a long-sleeved purple and blue tie-died T-shirt, with the “Om” symbol imprinted in gold, from the Tibet Festival two years ago. Instead of Timberland hiking shoes, I upgraded to my black monochrome Converse classics.

Don’t think I don’t know that Tim Gunn would consider this a “Before” outfit. So would Chelsea. (Happy Birthday, Chelsea!)

Grave dreams

The other night, I had one of my standard getting-ready-
to-go-somewhere-but-I-don’t-have-time-or-enough-space-
in-my-bags-to-pack-all-my-shit dreams. It had a couple of unusual twists in it, but the one that doesn’t really make sense to me is that I was looking out the window from a bathroom in the building where I used to work at the University, and there was a graveyard there.

A man and a woman were burying a square casket. I couldn’t tell whether it was an authorized burial or not; it was sort of outside the boundaries of the cemetery, but they weren’t trying to be surreptitious or anything. The casket itself wasn’t the right shape for a person. Perhaps it contained an animal.

Mental tetris

Ahh, my favorite kind of work day. Aside from the ones where I’m taking pictures on a beach all day.

I’m designing the second half our our magazine and I’m totally mesmerized by InDesign. I can sit here all day and move little boxes around. I can’t pinpoint it, but it looks better in this program than it did in PageMaker.

Not sure if this is a good thing, but simultaneously, there is a meeting in back, meaning donuts and Chinese food readily available.

Looking forward to the weekend, because there are 8 episodes of Prison Break in my future. We’re trying to catch up, but since they didn’t release season 2 on DVD until a few weeks ago, we’re having to hold the season 3 premiere in the TiVo queue. We just might finish season 2 this weekend though.

We’re two episodes past the point where my brother thinks the show jumped the shark. But hello! There was kissing, and train chases, and kissing! I’m rapt.

Interestingly, my brother’s reason is not on this list, but I got a coupla spoilers by looking at it. Knew I would.

But back to the kissing. What do you think Wentworth Miller‘s lovers call him? Wenty? Worthy? W?