Does anyone else get sleepy when they have to go Christmas shopping? Something about watching random people buying copies of The Simpsons movie to put in their kids' stockings and yuppies at the Apple store buying 5 nanos at one time makes me want to go back to bed. So now I am blogging and drinking a McDonald's iced coffee to stay awake. After Aaron's biscuits finish baking, we will probably finish watching Tristram Shandy. Winter couch cuddling is great.

This past weekend we went to Austin and stayed with my sister, and then drove down to New Ulm where Elissa's mom's house is. It was a pretty awesome weekend. We took the backseat out of the Element for the first time, and were able to fit the futon mattress, and Dwight's crate, and all our bags for the weekend pretty easily. Seriously, it's the coolest car ever.
My sister's apt is cozy in a riff-raff, college way, which is one of the best cozies there are. I miss fitting all my stuff in a 15 x 15 space. It adds challenge and character to living.


Elissa's mom's house is in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of land surrounding, and I felt like I was in a country music video. We got there around sunset, and went walking with Elissa, Aaron B., and of course Dwight, down the huge expanse of open space behind the house, complete with two rows of hay bales and a lone tree. Dwight got a kick out of running way far out and then jackrabitting back when we called him, I think. Once we got him home, he slept for basically two days straight, only stopping to eat and take walks. It was a preview of how he will be when he is an old man dog.



Totally off topic, but I'm watching John Mayer is on Austin City Limits right now, and his tryptich tattoo is showing a bit. It makes me want to get tattooed.

Dwight is sleeping upstairs with us tonight, we are bedding down on the extra futon mattress we kept for just such an occasion when we gave away our futon frame on Craigslist. It feels like a campout. (Typically Dwight sleeps in his crate downstairs, and wears one of my hoodies that I modified for him when winter came and it got freaking cold downstairs.)
It reminds me of last winter, when we had just gotten him...we were potty training him, and so would have to get him to go outside every two hours or so in 30 degree weather, and leave him until he went potty. He was also fairly sick for most of that time, so he would stand out there with his tail between his legs, hacking a lung out before he would go. It was very sad. Needless to say, he was potty trained in no time!

I got my rebate from cingular today, and am very excited contemplating what I shall spend some of it on, before I have to relinquish the rest to grocery money. It will probably end up being a book or something, but the funnest part is deciding.

Two more weeks of school, and then Austin, where I will get to see Elissa and Aaron B.! and stay at my sister's new apartment. Exciting. Very.

Anyways, I am wearing lightning bolt earrings that my sister very kindly gave me from her collection because I asked for them, and am about to go read a little before sleeping. Have a bueno night!

These days, I feel like one big potbelly. Last night it was made up of fruit loops and ramen, and tonight it is made up of equal parts canned peaches, cheesy grits, and part of Aaron's tuna melt that he made at 4:30 in the morning and let me share a little of. What are we doing up at this hour? well, I promised myself I wouldn't go to sleep till I finished today's (yesterday's) studying, but you can only stay up so late before today's studying starts infringing on tomorrow's studying, whether you actually go to sleep or not. Does that make sense? Ehn. Neither does the male pelvic organs and perineum. Which is what I'm studying now. You would think it would be pretty useful sexually for a girl to know these things. But it doesn't. If anything, it is the opposite, as everytime I see a guy now, my mind flashes back to cutting a penis in half or de-skinning a scrotum. Ewww. Say it with me.

I have been having serious puppy fever, again, and thus, am annoying Dwight a lot more, especially while he is sleeping, to ask him for more attention! I began wondering today whether this recent obsession with dogs is due to a misplaced maternal instinct. I hope it continues to be "mis"placed until I can get over the sick, claustrophobic feeling the idea of kids gives me.
I am very soon going to use this website (www.strapworks.com) (too tired to look up how to link) to make a Dwight a white collar with candy apple red metal parts, and a matching leash. Can you believe this website? It is so specific--nylon webbing, metal O-rings, etc. Everything you need to make yourself any sort of strap/collar/leash/belt known to mankind. If you end up wanting to order something from there, I will hopefully soon have the 10% off hookup. I am so tempted to Order Now! though, seeing as 10% off will equal about a dollar. If not less.
In any case, we've been looking for a white collar ever since we got Dwight, and still haven't come across one.

Aaron just figured out that some dude has favorited one of my pics on the flickr site, which would be quite flattering, except that when you look at his pictures and his other favorites, you find out it's some 50 year old guy whose favorites are all girls in shorts or skirts. Yeah. That photo (me in crappy clothes hoeing the lawn to be seeded with grass) has 48 views. Which is quadruple the amount of views any other photo on my little-traveled flickr page has ever gotten. Sick, right? One of his other photos features what looks like an 11 year old girl with her back to the camera, in shorts. (He likes to take pictures of people unawares)

Ok, I am starting to feel nauseous. Bedtime.

lately: kitteh hideaway, ant massacre, meeting stray dogs, mushroom chair, guitar hero

Aaron describes the first two better than I could ever hope to on his blog.
Basically, I came up with the idea of making a shelter for the stray cat that we feed, because I found myself lying awake at night thinking about how cold it was going to get. But it had to be really well hidden because our HOA lady is really strict. Luckily, in the last couple of months, our neighbors have started putting out potted plants by their doors. Like, really ugly things, in my opinion--large clay pots that are faux-fancy. But! it gave me the idea to camouflage the hideout as a large potted plant, by having a false bottom to the pot. The finished result can be seen on the flickr site. Now we just have to wait and see whether the cat uses it or not.

Oh, and we massacred some ants with Terro traps. There are corpses floating in the liquid poison, still. We leave it as a warning to the others.

The stray dogs we met looked like dingos, and were hanging out in a Carnival grocery store parking lot near the condo. I sent Aaron into Carnival to buy some cans of dog food and the dollar store next to it for some leashes to capture them with. (Does this remind you of our kitten pervert days, Lis? As you can see, I am expanding my repertoire to dogs.)
We did manage to get one of them, but then it threw a fit. It was insane how crazy that dog got. And it broke the leash. And then this Hispanic family walked out of the store and to a house on the same street, and the dogs followed them to the house. So I walked over to the house and asked if the dogs were theirs, but they said the dogs were "calle" dogs. Which I don't know if I believe. But anyway, we left them because 1) we couldn't catch them 2) I had no idea what to do with them after I caught them 3) maybe they were being fed pretty regularly by that family, because they looked really healthy.

We got the mushroom chair from craigslist and it is officially the most cozy nap chair ever. I think it looks like a mushroom, Aaron thinks it looks like a bird's nest...it's also sort of an eyesore, but makes up for it with cozy-ness. My idea of a perfect day is curling up on it, with Dwight (on a non-anal-gland-juice day) and reading a book. And it's raining outside.

- I Am Legend Trailer

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Guess what my favorite part of this preview is! Ze puppeh that turns into a badass german shepherd. A boy's idea of comaraderie is war. Mine is surviving apocalypse with a dog at my side.

Or writing a book at a deserted farmhouse with a pack of wild dogs to roam with, which is what Thomas Harris did while writing Red Dragon...

"In the fall of 1979, I returned home to the Mississippi Delta and remained there eighteen months. I was working on Red Dragon. My neighbor...kindly gave me the use of a shotgun house in the center of a vast cotton field, and there I worked....Sometimes at night I would leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I looked back from a distance, the house looked like a boat at sea, and all around me the vast Delta night.
I soon became acquainted with the semi-feral dogs who roamed free across the fields in what was more or less a pack. Some of them had casual arrangements with the families of farm workers, but much of the time they had to forage for themselves. In the hard winter months with the ground frozen and dry, I started giving them dog food and soon they were going through fifty pounds of dog food a week. They followed me around, and they were a lot of company--tall dogs, short ones, relatively friendly dogs and big rough ones you could not touch. They walked with me in the fields at night and when I couldn't see them, I could hear them all around me, breathing and snuffling along in the dark. When I was working in the cabin, they waited on the front porch, and when the moon was full they would sing."
from "Foreward to a Fatal Interview" Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

Lately, I have been totally obsessed with cuteoverload.com. I was going to make some self-deprecating comment here, but you know what? If Jason Schwartzman (who is undeniably, a dude) can like it, so can I.
Really, try it out. Soon, you too will be obsessed. In fact, I envy you. Because as of now, you have not even begun to delve into the many many pages of archives of cuteoverload, and I am almost halfway done with them, and after I am done, I will only have the daily uploads to look forward to.

Lately, I have been making a lot of meals at home with Aaron. Really eccentric meals, like pancakes and tuna fish sandwiches. And then we make them twice in a row, for lunch and dinner, because they are so good they need to be repeated. It's all because of Bisquick, the all purpose baking stuff. I first got it because someone gave us a waffle maker for the wedding, and then realized it can be used for so many things--baked chicken, biscuits, waffles, pancakes. So simple! So easy!

Ok, cuteoverload has totally invaded my brain. There's this whole language that the girl who runs the site uses--and the rhythm has invaded my thinking and everything I write sounds like her!

Soft kronsche to you, my friends!

Ack! I just found out a friend might be moving to Dallas soon! I don't make friends easily so I just have to wait till ones from the past reappear in whatever city I live in.

Here is a video of Dwight being scared of a statue. There are certain things that are uncanny to all species--terra cotta statues of little old men that are just slightly shorter than a normal human is one of them, disembodied legs coming in and out of the wall of a strip club on Bourbon St. is another (but that's another story).