Ok, so I LOVE doing this, especially just as I’m getting back into the blogging world, but I’m going to do it to the three of you who still read this anyway.
I’m moving to Tumblr. It just looks compact and concise enough to let me post the occasional long-winded rambling (like REAL BLOGS USED TO BE, UPHILL BOTH WAYS IN THE SNOW), with plenty of Blingees and Lolcats and internet memes thrown in.
Join me over there, won’t you?
Am I the only person who finds Patrick Fugit to be quite the cute guy?
Oh hi, blog. You’re still around? Do people still read you? Do people still even blog?
No matter. I’ve decied that a last-minute 2012 resolution is to make it a point to put some thoughts to digital paper at least 2-3 times a week. I feel the need to document, document, document, even if it’s, “oh hi. I ate an apple today.”
I so vastly admire people who are witty, smart, intellectual, and above all, good writers, that I hold some small hope that simply typing a lot of junk onto this blog will somehow improve my own skills. Who knows? Perhaps it will. And perhaps you, if you stumble by here, will find something interesting to which to respond, or mock, or share with a friend.
I hope you all have had a healthy and wonderful start to the year, and I will see you here.
hehe. oh, blog, I always remember you at the worst time for writing, but since I won’t be riding the subway for a long time soon, this is a rare chance to fire off a mobile post again.
That’s the big news since my post: we’re moving. We’re headed down from the heights and into the middle of the city. it’s very exciting. I can walk to work and so can the BF. The only downside I see to this arrangement right now is that I’ll be reading less without my long commute.
We’ve been painting the new apartment and I am so tired of it! fumes, headaches, and a color that, while beautiful, is taking way too many coats to get on the wall.
But the apartment! It makes me happy. We have a dishwasher and the space for a small washer and dryer. I’m dying at the thought of not havingto drag my laundry to the corner every week and fight for an open machine. Those of you stuck in city life know what I mean.
I stepped back onstage for the first time in forever. It was a short musical in a festival, but I had a ball and I’m excited to do more again soon. Cabaret upcoming, moving in a couple of weeks…it’s a busy time!
The pic is of the living room.
How dare I go away from the blog for so long, especially after leaving you (my twos of readers) with such a downer of a blog post!
I’m sitting, at midnight, in an office in an outer borough of New York, working. I could die. I could honestly die. It’s not just that I’m so afraid some Republican coworker is going to spot me reading gay Gawker, out me, and then lynch me in the parking lot, it’s also that I’m here. Working. At midnight. With about 7 hours to go.
Why exactly did I take this job?
Oh, yeah. The pay. The glorious pay. I’m not sure it’s worth the stress, but buying nice toys and having money to blow in Manhattan has its advantages.
Oh, yeah, that last post. The Boogs. He’s doing well. I should’ve gotten that out there into the universe sooner. He’s by no means the same dog he was when he had sight. Gone is tug-of-war, anything he ever did resembling fetch, and appearing is a slower-moving, clumsier (if that’s possible) still-adorable fat pug. He runs into things all the time. Very rarely is he moving fast enough to possibly hurt himself, but I have to admit, even the scary collisions are kind of funny. He makes a little dinging sound as he bumps into my office chair (the one thing that pretty much is never in the same place for his memory map), so it’s constant comedy as he gets tangled in the legs and hits them with his forehead.
He’s still my adorably insane little bear, just with ten times the near-death experiences.
We still go for walks, and he even accompanies me on my 15 minute walk to the coffee shop or the farmer’s market on weekends. It takes a little more time than it used to, and it’s absolutely hysterical to experience when he gets a bug up his butt, just KNOWING which is the actual way we should be going, and how adamant he is that I stop trying to pull him in one direction and let him go the “right” way. Which is, you know, straight off the sidewalk and into the street.
Oh well. Even with sight he was always cuter than he was smart. I will leave you with that as I drift off into insanity here. Those of you who are praying folk, say a prayer for my sanity…
I should’ve known something was up.
My dog, always a little clumsy on the best of days, was really on a tear this time. He had just collided with a nice girl on the street as we were out for his evening post-dinner walk. She laughed it off, he seemed to barely notice. Hey, he’s a natural comedian, so it fit his personality.
But then I took him to his Dogfather for Christmas keeping and he walked into the glass front door. Twice.
Ok, I thought. He just couldn’t see the really clean glass. Again, comedy!
Then a few weeks ago, I noticed a little brown in the white of his eyes. Aging, spots, he’s a pug! These things happen.
Last week, I tried to give him a treat. Normally, I make him sit, look up at the hand holding the treat, then slowly lower it to and leave it on the floor. I’ll make him sit and wait in anticipation, his eyes locked to the biscuit on the floor, just waiting for me to shout, “Go!” so he can snatch it up in his mouth and take it back to his bed for a little victory munch.
But his eyes stayed up near my face as I began to lower my hand to the floor.
Well, that’s not normal.
Then he acted extremely odd on his walk that night, seeming to shy away from things as if he didn’t notice they were there.
And then the kicker. I walked into the bathroom and, like a good little shadow, he followed me. Followed right into me, to be exact.
This was no good. I made the call to the vet and got an appointment. In we went after a disastrous walk where my poor puppy could clearly not see where he was going. He was taking steps one at a time, feeling out for them, he was tugging to head towards things that weren’t even there and trying to avoid other, also not there. My heart was breaking.
It didn’t take the vet long to make the declaration I already had in my mind: “your dog is blind.”
What happened? Did I miss a clear sign that something was happening and he could have been helped in time? Off to the eye specialist we went (hey, what’s a savings account?). Odder and odder. His eyes are perfectly fine. Good pressure, they’re healthy.
It’s SARDS. That would be Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome. Hits your eyes like a ton of bricks, causing you to go blind in a few short months or even weeks. In fact, it happens so fast the physical evidence won’t show up on your eyes for a few months after that! To see his eyes, everything’s ok now. In a few months, the degeneration will be evident.
But my doggie will be blind either way.
Just to be sure, we had a procedure done yesterday. After all, he’d been sick for so long, there’s a chance he could have inflammation blocking his vision behind his eye. I crossed every finger for the inflammation diagnosis. Cheap to cure; emphasis on curable.
No luck. SARDS it is, SARDS it will be. There are new treatments, but nothing is indeed a cure, or even more than experimental at this point.
Have I mentioned my broken heart? It is. I never thought I’d be that crazy pet person, the one who speaks to their pet like they’re human, who treats them like a child…and here I am. Destroyed over the idea that this is somehow something I could have fixed, that my poor dog (just shy of his 6th birthday) might live 10 more years unable to see.
I’m determined to be positive, though. There’s a wonderful little website, blinddogs.com, that is filled with tips, hints, anecdotes and people whose pets are living a wonderful life with one sense gone.
I want my silly pug back. The one who spins in circles waiting for me to open the door when I come home, who goes downward dog in front of me, then into a full rollover so I can get at his belly while he nips and growls and stretches, and who moves like a hoover vacuum across the street looking for “treats” (yeah, it’s gross, but I already miss it). With a few changes, my goal is not to change his routine at all. I’m racing home tonight to take him on one of our special long walks through the park and up to get coffee. My hope is we can actually complete the trip, but I’ll be happy however far we can get.
He’s my obsession. I guess he has been for a while! Who couldn’t love a wonderful fella who loves you, plays with you, and then hops in bed at night and keeps your feet warm?
My little booger…
for Christmas, I got a KitchenAid stand mixer. I know. how Suzy Homemaker of me.
I finally busted it out and used it yesterday. The recipe? Paula Deen’s red velvet cupcakes. The result? pretty decent. I have to get better about the batter, but the frosting was insanely good.
I’m vegetarian, so it’s highly unlikely I’ll be grabbing choice animals and slicing them up. I can barely squash a bug without feeling a little upset (Even a roach, and, where I’m from, roach killing is pretty much a state sport). I’m also not much of a fetishist, so I doubt I’ll be into hot wax any time soon. I am, however, something of a food admirer, so it is with great glee that I present my new turn to cooking more often at home, courtesy of cookbooks, a patient BF, and a Christmas gift!
Last week, I picked up “How It All Vegan!”, a lovely vegan cookbook thanks to the recommendation of Mikeypod. It’s a great cookbook, one I especially like because it’s geared towards a person with my lifestyle: after 8-12 hours at work daily, plus an hour commute to and from work, plus 20-40 minutes feeding and walking the dog when I return home, I’m not really in the mood to spend three hours in the kitchen prepping and cooking. I want to eat!
I started off making a couple of the easy “Salad” recipes: the “chicken” salad and “tuna.” Omg yum! The Chicken is made with tempeh, and the tuna comes from frozen (and thawed) tofu. The Bf seems to have preferred the tuna, while I’m leaning towards the chicken just now. At any rate, slap it on an english muffin and enter vegetarian heaven for a few minutes.
Thanks to another friend, I found Smitten Kitchen as well. Oh, the love. I used Saturday afternoon as the snow began to fall to try out her modified-by-way-of-Ina-Garten recipe for granola bars. WOWSA! I spaced and forgot to take pictures of the process and I wish I had. They turned out amazing well. I can’t wait to make them again (this round, the fruit included raisins, apricots and cranberries. Will try others next time!).
Last night, due to the parting of the ways the BF and I will be undergoing as we head off to celebrate Christmas in different parts of the country, we opened Christmas gifts. I have become Suzy Homemaker and my gift reflected that! I got a Kitchenaid mixer, one I’m VERY excited to have gotten. I’m always obsessed with looking up bread and baked goods recipes, anticipating cupcakes, breads, pizza doughs…I’m very much ready to go nuts!
That’s all I got. Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa (I forget if it’s over or just about to begin!) and also Happy just-ended Hanukkah!
I’m trying so very hard to be more diligent about writing on this here newfangled bloggy thingy. I’m hoping that a little surge of inspiration will be forthcoming and that something brilliant will spill out of my fingertips, onto the screen, into your lives and then into the hands of a publisher, who will option a book that is then made into a suck-cessful Hollywood fillum that will make me oodles of cashola.
Until then, I blog. As much as I can make myself.
That’s the first kind of trying.
The second kind of trying is wearing me down! Work is just circling the drain on a daily basis. I’ve never seen people who should be so thankful to have such well-paying jobs (for the work required) sink into such bitter, jaded little pools of ire. That’s what’s happened here, though. Rather than just be content and happy with their lives and a relatively easy job, they’ve set their sights on being disruptive, problematic, and plain ol’ jerkish. Get over it! We should all be here to do our jobs as best we can and then go home. I don’t need you to be my friend, I certainly don’t want to be YOUR friend, and there’s nothing anyone here is doing that should rile you up so much.
And yet. AND YET!
There’s no third trying. I just think things sound better in threes. Don’t you?
September?!?! I can’t believe it’s been that long since I blogged.
Work has been insane, though, so I suppose I can excuse myself. Can you?
So what’s happened since I last blogged? Dog’s gotten bigger (I swear he’s secretly got some giant or titan in his family somewhere), work has gotten more stressful in some ways, better in some others, the BF got hired (after contracting at a company for about 4 years!), we decided we absolutely MUST move…what else?
I’m trying to cook more. TO that end, I’ve picked up a few cookbooks. Yesterday, I bought “How It All Vegan,” Kindle edition, and made the “chicken salad.” omggood. I am going to try the “tuna salad” tonight. I’m a big fan of stuff I can make and then have over a few days. As I was telling someone else, I really don’t mind cooking, and actually usually prefer food made at home, but I just hate an hour commute to work, 8-12 hours at work, another hour home, 30-40 minutes feeding/walking the dog, THEN cooking, and finally breaking for the evening. There’s no day left for me! HIAV seems to have a lot of easy prep, no-to-low-cook time items and that excites me.
I’m also insane about soup right now. Does anyone else have this little quirk? The weather takes a downward turn on the thermometer and all I want is a bowl of steaming liquid (eww). I’ve been fixated. Yesterday was three lentil chili from Hale and Hearty. I could’ve eaten three bowls.
So. There’s my life. How’s yours?
