I have just discovered Napoleon Bonaparte's love letters to his wife Josephine. Here is one he apparently wrote when he woke up, to tell her he would see her later in the day.

Dec. 29, 1795

I awake all filled with you. Your image and the intoxicating pleasures of last night, allow my senses no rest.

Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strangely you work upon my heart.

Are you angry with me? Are you unhappy? Are you upset?

My soul is broken with grief and my love for you forbids repose. But how can I rest any more, when I yield to the feeling that masters my inmost self, when I quaff from your lips and from your heart a scorching flame?

Yes! One night has taught me how far your portrait falls short of yourself!

You start at midday: in three hours I shall see you again.

Till then, a thousand kisses, mio dolce amor! but give me none back for they set my blood on fire.

In another one of his letters, he apparently tells her to stop bathing five days before his arrival because he found her body odor sexy. Now that's love.

From cuteoverload.com, for you people who do not check it religiously, is a bebeh who is dreaming of nursing.


And...a howling pup.


In other news, I've decided that I'm going balls to the walls this next year for school, and treat it like a full time job. All the better to get it over and done with, with no possibilities of wasting more time. And maybe I won't hate it as much if I'm not constantly trying to get out of doing stuff. Three more years of laying down with the devil, and then hopefully an increased ability to get a cushy textbook job that could eventually become stay-at-home or something....I just don't think I'm cut out for the work force.
I feel like a lot of the reason I got burned out of school is because I ended up losing sight of what I wanted out of it. It's really hard to remember that I want an M.D. degree for reasons other than practicing medicine, when everyone else is there bragging about how badly they want to start working with 'real' patients, and profs are starting to groom you for ward work.

This past weekend, Jimmy & his fiance Kendra came up to visit for Aaron's birthday. We went to the jfk museum, ate out a lot, Aaron showed Jimmy GTA4, and on Sat night we went to the midnight movie at the Inwood theater, which was the 2nd Mad Max. I think Kendra quite disliked it, though we agreed that the feral kid was an amazing character. When the credits in the beginning showed 'feral kid' and the name of the kid who played him, I assumed it was just a nickname for an adult, but I still elbowed Aaron. Then, when I saw the real feral kid for the first time, it was totally amazing, and I was surprised that it took me 24 years to discover Mad Max. Of course, the Australian cattle dog that rode w/ him didn't hurt either.

Life is pretty boring right now, I need to work on getting Aaron and I passports before the school years starts, and am waiting for a cell phone repair from Sony Ericsson. But I'm looking forward to getting cheesecake tonight w/ a friend, and the Breaking Dawn release party on Friday at Borders. I will be up all night reading it, too...me and all the other 14 year old girls in Dallas. I am definitely more excited about this than the last Harry Potter.

Aaron insists that I have terrible taste in women...but right now I have such a crush on Maggie Gyllenhaal after Dark Knight, and...I don't think I'm wrong.
Maggie, if loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right.



and...I guess your brother is not too bad either.

nothing to do in Dallas after 9 pm. so bored. suffocating and panicked.
help!

I just got Jordan's "dear jennifer" post, so I suppose I will try to squeeze one out. ; ) a blog, i mean, of course!
Today I had to brave the UT Southwestern campus to return the key to my carrel which was due about a month and a half ago. But it totally slipped my mind because I finished a month earlier than everyone else in my year, cleaned out my carrel, and then apparently blocked out any and all further obligations to that hellhole. So today I had to ruin the pristine slate of my summer and go to campus to turn it in. I tried to make it bearable, though, by wearing my most revealing summer dress (which used to be my sister's of course) and my ultra chic gladiator sandals.
Oh! by the way, I guess I never told you that I did end up getting some that I love even more than the $200 Matt Bernson ones. At Old Navy. Ridiculous!

Anyway, so that chore is done, so I can enjoy what's left of the summer, at least. I desperately want to go on a cruise with Aaron, but they are expensive, and I cannot find anyone I would trust Dwight with for a week and a half, that would be willing to dogsit. Grr. I need to make more dog-lover friends.

Speaking of Dwight, he has been quite a turd lately. I think he is feeling spoiled. So I must re-institute my NILIF regimen, as well as increase his exercise allotment. His limp has gotten better, which is a good thing, but I am still getting used to the resulting increase in hyper-ness.

Well, in other news, Aaron has some friends coming this weekend to celebrate his birthday with him, and I am working on cleaning the spare room. I have done quite a good job already if I do say so myself, and I have gone in there just to admire my work at least twice in the last 24 hours.

On the list of other things I am proud of, I stayed up late one night last week when I was feeling especially restless, and figured out how to put the rear derailleur back onto my bike. Aaron and I had taken apart this bike last year while I was still in school, to re-paint it, but we got distracted by other projects, and ended up with pieces of bike all over the house. But while I was in Houston having my wisdom teeth surgery, Aaron finished painting the bike for me, and put it mostly together, leaving the front and back derailleurs for me to do. And I did it!
So I will have a good bike to ride to school next year. Hopefully it will be easier and faster than my Hoffman bike, which was never really meant for distance riding.



Don't you think it looks like a tube sock?

list of other things coming up...
1. alkaline trio concert tomorrow night
2. waiting for a book I ordered from amazon to get here
3. waiting for Aaron's Vans purchase to get here
4. August 2nd, Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn gala at the bookstore!

I've been pretty lucky w/ money lately...I have three instances as evidence.
1. I may have mentioned this before, but I've always like those dog beds with the walls, and I wanted to get Dwight one. But they're typically really expensive. Well, we finally found on at Target on sale for $26, I think, but when we brought it up to the cash register, it rung up as $6.
2. I recently went to Urban Outfitters and saw a purse I liked. It was on sale for $29.99, which I felt was still pretty expensive for a purse. So I decided I would buy it for now, take it home and try it on with some clothes to see if I really liked it. But, when I brought it up to the register, it rung up as $10.
3. Today, me and Aaron went to Petsmart to return some glucosamine tablets that we had bought for Dwight. They were $46.99 when we bought them. When the lady was making the refund, for some reason it rung up as $54.99. I told her she was refunding us too much, but she didn't seem to care. So we made $10 out of nothing! Score.

That is $50 worth of profit there. Not to sound like Uncle Moneybags.

I'm back in Dallas after a long stint in Houston. The worst thing about going back to Houston now is the extremely stressful necessity to be political and tactful about dealing with everyone's family in an acceptable way. Planning when to see who and where is like executing a battle plan. For me, it's not stressful to worry about when to hang out with my family as much as it is stressful to worry about who's going to get offended on Aaron's side if they don't get enough time with him/us.
Grr.
So I am having a much needed break from social interaction, and am spending my time downloading ebooks illegally. Oh dear, now that I've said that the government will be breaking down my door in exactly five minutes after I publish this post.
I am in the middle of the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, and it is riveting.

School starts August 11. I've decided to go back and finish up (if three more years could be called finishing up), and the countdown to dread starts now.

Ahh, the internet. I have missed you during my 3 days of absence. I will relate to you what I have done in those three days.

On Thursday, we left Dallas late, at 5:30, late of course, and headed to Houston to pick up Aaron's cousin Becca. Once we picked her up, we took her on a midnight run to Taco Cabana. We were in trouble when we got to Aaron's grandparents' beach house, since we took too long to get there.
Then, after everyone went to bed (around 2:30 am), we took Becca and Dwight on a late night trip to the beach to introduce Dwight to the ocean for the first time. He was very brave, and didn't mind the ocean too much, even though it got his feet wet, and he hates that. He was actually very brave about many new things this trip, and didn't balk too much about stairs and bridges.
Then, the next morning we got up early, took Dwight to the beach again on the golf cart so I could see his reaction to it in the daytime, and then hurried back to decorate the golf cart for the 4th of July parade. Becca did not entirely appreciate her granddad's involvement in the decorations...but we made it to the parade anyway, and it was fun. I got to drive very slowly to Stewart's mansion, where we got watermelon and hot dogs and sodas.
Then, we went back to the beach house, and me and Aaron headed for the beach, right as it started raining. We got in the ocean anyways, and it was really surreal to feel the warm salt water around us, and the cold painful raindrops from above. We ran back to the house and took a hot shower in the outside shower thing. Aaron said my back was all red from the raindrops hitting it.
That night, we went back to Houston, and picked up my mom to meet my sister and Jordan and Tyler and Lauren (Jordan's siblings) at the fireworks thing at Eleanor Tinsley park around 7:30. We saw a frog as we were walking down to where they were sitting, and we were worried about it getting squished by the crowd, so Aaron and I saved it! I caught it (my first time touching a frog) and we put it in a plastic bag and let it go outside of the fence, where it started hopping towards the river.
After the fireworks, we went to Whataburger.

The rest of the weekend was a lot of juggling and politics about who gets to spend time with who when. Which is always quite tiring. So I am glad to be back at home with my family.

Oh, one last thing, is that poor Dwight got bit by a tiny little schnauzer. It was quite a spectacle, I'm sure, since there were three schnauzers running around him, and one latched onto his armpit and was viciously shaking his head while his teeth were attached to Dwight's skin (so I'm told). I couldn't tell what was going on, and didn't notice Dwight was being bit but heard a lot of growling, and assumed unfairly that it was Dwight growling at the other dogs, and so I picked him up by the collar and was shouting "No, Dwight, NO!" After I realized Romeo (the schnauzer) was the growler and attacker, I felt quite guilty. This was made worse once I saw the sad bruise on his armpit later. Thankfully, he didn't attack back, since he would've done a lot more damage to them than Romeo did to him. I'm actually surprised he didn't because I've read that most pits, even if they are not aggressive, are reactive, and will fight if pushed. So I guess now we know that Dwight is the saddest pit in the world. Hopefully he won't be afraid of dogs now, but I don't think he was too traumatized, because he started playing immediately after we put him in the backyard.
I met Romeo the next morning, and he was very sweet, he laid next to me on the couch for a long time. Apparently he is the lowest dog in the pack at Seth and Jared's house. His nickname is Lonely-O. And he was probably determined not to be submissive to this new dog that was coming into the house. Traitorously, I thought he was very cute and sweet, and cuddled with him a bit.

This video was on cuteoverload.com and it made me tear up. It is also fashionably 70s. Or unfashionably. You decide.

So, here is a link to my sister's post about our trip to galveston, as promised.
Well, it is now 5 1/2 days since my wisdom teeth removal, and I still have to take pain pills! I am quite worried there may be something wrong, but perhaps I am just a wuss when it comes to discomfort. Quite possible.

Back in Dallas for the time being, and petsitting for Andi and Jeff's (Aaron's former housemates') cat, Zilla. She is that gray kitten we found a while back that they took in, and it is very interesting to be able to see the cat she's turned into. When we found her, one side of her whiskers were singed, and she was covered in car grease, and left kitten-sized black streaks all over our walls, some of which are still there. It is a little odd, actually, to see her walk by those streaks, totally unknowing that they were caused by her, some months back. Anyways, keeping my fingers crossed, but I don't seem to be having any allergy troubles with her. It is nice having a cat lounging in our sink and cuddling with me, I've always dreamed of such.