bye ought seven

so i'm totally blazing my way through this auster book. it's enigmatic and interesting. i like his page-by-page writing quite a lot, and he's keeping the mystery at the forefront, though i have an idea regarding where he might be going with it. i'm hoping i'm wrong; i don't want to have guessed correctly. the book is only about 140 pages long and i'm on page 120 or so (yeah - a quick read); i hope i'm surprised. i should finish it today or tomorrow.

it struck me that during each of the last few januaries i have been influenced by the writing of paul auster. (i checked the historical document that is this blog. would i have noticed the pattern without it? doubtful. BLUE FANCIES is finally proving useful!) strange? if i get an auster hankering, we must be in the neighborhood of january. i'm just a wee bit premature this year.

and i finished the carl sagan book a few days ago. i think it was friday. i didn't write about it much here while i was reading it, not as i did with the stripper book, though it was no less enlightening and enriching. dr sagan was quite a brilliant and kindly fellow. i highly recommend the book (varieties of scientific experience), which touches on evolution, creationism, nuclear holocaust, god, life on other planets, extinction, etc, etc, etc. i should read more of him. anyone out there read pale blue dot?

anyway. it's new year's eve. how about that? the end of 2007. i'm going to work in a little bit, but i have tomorrow off. it turns out kara doesn't get new year's day off this year. i would prefer to spend the day with her tomorrow than not, but it's not as if her working tomorrow puts much of a damper on tonight's festivities. i think last year we turned in by 10. i got some mini bottles of faux champagne and i'll drink one tonight and one tomorrow morning (with orange juice - yummy mimosa) (she'll probably drink both of hers tonight), and that'll pretty much be that. just another day, what? ah, the arbitrariness of the western calendar.

oh, and i finished a draft of my story yesterday, finally, though i'm not sure i'm satisfied with it. i'll bring a hard copy to work today and make some notes, but i'm already starting to think about the next one, which i believe i might start writing as early as this weekend. i took too long with this last one, too many breaks, and it resulted in a fairly scattered piece. in my opinion. but i'll give it a read anyway, and include it in my collection of stories about this circle of characters.

here's to more and better writing in 2008. and a new job for kara, one that satisfies. and splendid good health for all of us, including sniffly-nosed yellow.

total bender

i have a problem. i have a weakness for products like the bender ball and the total gym. i want them! i know chuck norris is beyond ridiculous and it's not as if i want to be like him or i like any of his movies or tv shows. (no offense, chuck - don't come kick my ass!) and it's not like i don't want to work out in a legitimate sort of way (or is it? maybe it is) - maybe it's that i haven't found the type of exercise that agrees with me. i used to work out all the time, ages ago, in north carolina, and i was a member of gold's gym and worked out several times a week. now time feels like a factor, though that's kind of silly for me to say because i waste so much time here on the internet and in front of the television. maybe a total gym would work for me, though? (of course, it might very well be a total piece of crap equipment - no offense, chuck - don't kick my ass!) i could store it upstairs here and work out in the comfort of my home. (we have a treadmill and a weight set in the garage, which adds to the nuttiness of these desires, though it's very chilly in the garage this time of year.) perhaps someone needs to sit me down and give me a good talking to. or else i might buy me a bender ball.

3 toys

i returned to the lucky dog outfitters yesterday for some of these and it's hard to walk out of that place without some toys for the dogs. i like the store a lot but it's dangerous there. so far, of these three, we've only given them this yellow monkey/man thing (we're hoarding the others for now), and they seem to really like it. they tugged it back and forth and carried it around the house and chewed off its left ear. i also got a rubber ball, perhaps made out of boots or tires, with a rope threaded through it. they do like rope. and there's a tough ring with squeakers inside it. the yellow monkey/man has a squeaker or two in him as well.

(kara says i must love the dogs if i keep getting them toys, but really i'm just trying to keep them occupied so they won't bug me. though often the toys are pretty cool.)

i also got a little bag of treats for the cats, because it doesn't seem fair to only give the dogs presents, but they're not going for it. yellow (the cat, not the monkey/man) doesn't like wet food. he doesn't even like catnip! he's a freak. eliot likes catnip just fine and he eats wet food and most of the treats i give him, but these treats i got yesterday neither of them care for. oh well.

almost done

my current story is about 8 pages long now; i think i should be able to finish a draft, at long last, today or tomorrow. i'm not sure how it's going to end yet, but that's all right. i'll probably go to the mandolin this morning, shortly, and read over what i've written so far, over coffee and bagel. it's verging on autobiographical, this story, stemming from the time when i was working at the bookstore north of seattle and a stripper acquaintance visited me a couple of times at work, after i'd visited her at work a couple of times. (i rather thought she wanted to date me, and that was kind of thrilling, as she had a fabulous body and fabulous tattoos and was a stripper, but in the end i asked kara to see pt anderson's magnolia with me and the rest is history.) the story is fiction, of course, but that event from the end of 1999/beginning of 2000 - the tail end, if you will, of that era of strip club visits - seems to have become the springboard for this story. i don't think there's anything wrong with that. i'll be glad to see the back of this story, though, and move on to the next one. another 2 or 3 pages and i should have it.

i don't yet know what the next one will be.

kara and i are talking about hitting such a club here in tacoma, and of course there are some in seattle worth visiting. so there could be a resurgence, though not really a resurgence, because we'll probably only go to maybe 3 places total (1 here and 2 in seattle) and not make a habit of it. and who knows if this will really even happen? a couple of days ago i was actually feeling kinda strippered-out, pooped of the whole scene, after reading that book and thinking about the topic ad nauseam, but then a friend of mine a couple of days ago went to those 2 places in seattle with her husband and she says she had quite a time. quite a time indeed. she talks about making a habit of it and i remember well that desire. so my interest is again rekindled. kindled (at least) a 3rd time.

anyway. who knows? we have no specific plans for anything as of this moment. kara has lots of schoolwork to do over the coming week and a half, so it won't be immediately. but we have a week off work together in the middle of january, and depending on other circumstances, maybe we'll manage a trip to seattle during that period of time. lots of unknowns here.

but the main point is, this story is probably almost finally done. so i'm glad.

on stephen's day in the morning

well we made it through another christmas. it went well. the weather was clear, rainy, and snowy. we gave the dogs a plaid stuffed bear and they eviscerated it swiftly, coating the wood floor with clouds of fluff. we had a fire in the woodstove and opened gifts from each other, my parents in maryland, my sister and brother-in-law in ohio, my aunt and uncle in north carolina; thank you all. we ate chicken and potatoes and stuffing and beans. and cole slaw. and pie and ice cream. and starting today i'm counting calories! next year kara wants to be pagan and celebrate on the solstice rather than on christmas, and i'm down with that. it don't make me no nevermind; it's not as if we reveled yesterday in the birth of christ. we just had the day off from work and gave each other presents.

christmas eve eve

i have to work today. and tomorrow. and then again on wednesday and thursday. kara and i only get the actual holidays off, christmas day and new year's day, but i guess that's what comes from working in healthcare. people are hospitalized as i write this, and they are being seen by doctors and nurses and physician's assistants, perhaps even undergoing surgeries, and the reports dictated about those encounters have to be typed up. am i wrong? but my sister and brother-in-law are educators so they get a week and more off. they've already been with my parents in maryland for a few days, already celebrating the holiday. but i'm not bitter.

i'm getting old - i changed out the two jane's addiction cds for a lucinda williams and a dwight yoakam. poor dwight yoakam - we saw him perform in the benaroya hall in seattle just 3 or 4 years ago, and now he's playing the emerald queen casino. i feel bad; i like dwight.

on friday evening kara and i went back to the six olives, ostensibly a martini bar. the proprietress, eve, knows her scotch and kara likes her scotch. and by the time we got there, before 4:30, it seemed eve had already downed a few. she spent virtually the whole evening with us, giving us scotch samples and explaining the regions and whatnot. she was energetic in expressing her feelings about liquor sales reps who don't know their liquor, who want to hide the taste of their liquor with mixers, and who steal her drink ideas. and she had her load on, big time.

kara likes the lowlands and the isles, the peaty taste with serious bite. i'm more of a highlands man, and enjoy a smoother drink. so it goes. we had a good time, and some good scotch. eve left us alone after a while and we had a little something to eat.

should i go for a master's in library science? this idea has been in the back of my mind for 10 years or so. i might do a little research into it.

21

i probably shouldn't post this photo, in case i ever decide to run for office or anything, but so be it. i toss caution windward. this is me at age 21, a solid 15 years ago. i was kinda pretty, no? i suppose i had my moments. but don't know that anyone who knows me now would recognize this girl here as me.

i've been going through old photos this week (we have boxes filled with envelopes filled with photos, mostly unlabeled), scanning them onto the computer, desiring some sort of organization, looking at lots of images of skinnier alexes, all clavicles and jawlines and cheekbones. perhaps i was too skinny then, but now i've gone the other way. i look at my apartments in rockville, md, and carrboro, nc - not great apartments by any standard, but i look at the stuff i had on the walls and remember what was important then. what my life was like - not better than now, not hardly, just different. i was lonely and sad and confused for much of my 20s, actually. i wasn't connected to anything and i didn't know what i wanted. now, at least, i'm connected; i'm not lonely.

there are a lot more photos, mostly from age 22 to 25 or so, that i want to scan. one good thing about those photos of the old me: they drive me to eat a bit better and get down to a bona fide exercise regimen.

ahem. anyway. in other news, the writing has been going fairly well this week, actually. i'm just as surprised as you are.

and i took fountains of wayne and kris delmhorst out of my cd player this week after very long tenures (they're so good), in favor of two jane's addiction cds. i haven't listened to them in a long long time, but "classic girl," "been caught stealing," and "jane says" remain favorite songs of mine from that distant era.

yes - i've definitely been living through my 20s again in the last couple of weeks - thinking of strip clubs, revisiting these photos, listening to this music.

wednesday

i've been up for about an hour, messing around, paying bills, weeding through my spammy emails, procrastinating writing. but it's time to get at it. after i go and get a bowl of cereal. readingwise, i'm staying with nonfiction but moving from the world of strippers to that of science/religion with carl sagan (after whom we named one of our dearly departed dogs). christmas is just under a week away, though it feels like it should be over and done with already. the packages i sent east have reportedly reached their destination. there's actually a thing or two i'd like to get for kara yet, but i have friday for that. okay. cereal, then writing, then work.

this struck me

... when i read it this morning on page 156 of bare by elisabeth eaves (seal press, 2002, 2004, isbn 1-58005-121-9):

... Brian was not your usual customer. The most obvious difference between him and his peers was that he kept his hands either planted in his pockets or visible on the windowsill while watching the show. He was an admirer, and that's all he was. He preferred to think of his visits in sensual rather than sexual terms. He wanted to stare at women, but he saw himself as a nice guy, which meant he couldn't just ogle strangers on the street. So he went where he could gaze guilt-free. At the Lusty he could stare without invading personal space or causing offense - quite the reverse, they would be offended if he didn't look at them! He smiled and stared, stared and smiled, hands often on the edge of the window to display his innocence. They got paid, and he was sure that at least some of them, some of the time, had fun, too. It was a win-win situation. His strange behavior stood out, and the women started calling him "Nice Guy Bri." It came to the point where several of them even spoke to him, offering little bits of small talk and flirtation through the glass.

... is he fooling himself? and would i be fooling myself if i thought of myself in nearly precisely the same way when i visited such illicit places? tell the truth.

graduated dags

due to circumstances at least partly beyond our control, dagmar was unable to attend his graduation from puppy school last week. but he did graduate, and here are his credentials. we got them (it) in the mail yesterday. now he and steve are both perfect dogs. ha! not really. steve sometimes still doesn't come when we call her, as she's easily distracted, but dagmar usually does, so if we call dagmar, steve tends to follow. i kinda think steve's cuter, with her coloring and the daintiness of her little head, but dagmar tends to mind better. he might be the brighter dog. they're still eating the floor; we can't quite get them to stop doing that. and there's a patch on the wall in the living room that dagmar likes to chew on sometimes too. hm. and they still chase the cats. so they're hardly perfect. but he's a very enthusiastic kisser; he seems to go into a trance once his tongue gets into my ear. interesting little boy.

in the next few weeks we'll be scheduling both of them for the big snip.

early on 12 12

i had a couple of interesting dreams last night. at 11:30, after about 2 hours of sleep, i woke after a dream about a tsunami. i was on the beach and i saw the wave coming. i turned my back on the wave and saw a building, and knew the wave would be throwing me splat against that building in a matter of seconds. i woke up and peed. then at 1:30 i woke up after dreaming about tom hanks. i was behind a bar, where i wasn't working, and trying to find a glass that wasn't broken or dirty so i could pour him the drink he wanted. he was a bit impatient. then i woke up again at about 4 because eliot was being a nudge, and here i am. there was a lot more to both dreams but i didn't write them down at the time, unfortunately, and they're pretty much gone now.

recently i read this new yorker article about icu care (and shared it with my fellow [can i say "fellow" if all but 2 of them are women?] transcriptionists) and this one about diary writing (though mostly diary writing by famous folks), which made me think of my blogging and also of reading pepys, which my dad has read or at least has been reading. there's a lot of pepys.

and i'm still reading bare and it's still fascinating to me. it's a good book; ms eaves is intelligent and thoughtful. there are a lot of conflicting thoughts in my head about strip clubs and it's a bit weird to be thinking of them again so much after so many years. when i was a senior in college i did my sociology thesis on a small-town bar (that's the only kind of bar they had in the small town where my college was) but if i had it to do over again i'd do it on strip clubs. it's strange and confusing while also exhilarating, that world. i still want to know more about it, to understand it, if possible.

my job is still mostly good, though kara's increasingly frustrated with hers. she wants out bad and her hope is at a low. the management where she is seems to be floundering. the management where i am runs hot and cold and the interpersonal skills often leave a lot to be desired - though what can one expect from those in a job where you wear headphones all the time?

abigail w

change of gears - have i mentioned that my family and i knew abby washburn and her family when she was small? we went to the same church in rockvlle, maryland, if you can believe that. and now she's this talented and gorgeous musician and singer. i love her music. and i love her views on the idea of the global citizen. hey, check out this 2-1/2-minute video, okay? (and feel free to ignore the preceding advertisement - i'm sorry that's even there.)

i'm very impressed.

bare naked truth stripping

this is perhaps a hair premature, as i still have 15 or so pages of red badge yet to read, but i'm thinking of reading this here book bare next. a friend and i have been talking over the past several days about the concept of strip clubs, about voyeurism and men and women, looking, being looked at, and these are issues i've long had something of an obsession with. i have been reliving, in a sense, the chapter in my life in which i visited such places regularly - that chapter opened wide in april 1995. i've been rereading my journal from that period, and it was a heady time. i'm not altogether proud of the feelings thrust forth but neither am i thoroughly ashamed. they're real and i can't help that. for a number of years, while living in the dc area and then while living in north carolina, and even in seattle, i went to such places with some regularity. strippers have long populated my stories; and i think an element of that life is what version 3 of story 2 needs. (okay, so the writing's not going so well yet, but i'm still on it!) anyway. i haven't been to a strip club in maybe 6 or 7 years, and sometimes i still get the hankering to visit one again, though i'm not desperate or anything. maybe we'll at least go to the lusty lady in seattle sometime relatively soon. i know there are places in tacoma and the immediate environs, but i've been to none of them. (apparently right here in tacoma there are drive-through cafes where the baristas wear naught but lingerie, and that's certainly curious, and of course there's hooters, but hooters is, to me, far more disturbing than a strip club, as it purports to be a family restaurant; parents take their kids there and i do think there's something wrong with that.) bare has been on my shelf for a good while now, and i have been thinking it's time for me to read some nonfiction. i'd been thinking about picking up the recent carl sagan, but at present, given my recent train of thought, i'm leaning toward the stripper. so! when i finish the war novel today, i'll then read the first pages of bare and see where i am. any questions?

our good cars

we've had the mazda for about 18 months now (if you can believe that) and it has fewer than 3800 miles on it. but yesterday when kara took dagmar to school she noticed there were nails in the right rear tire. so she called me and i drove the hyundai to the doggie school and then followed her to sears. it was the first service the car has undergone, a tire replacement, save a single oil change a month or so ago. and the day before i had to get a new battery for the hyundai, so it's been a weekend of dealing with car issues. i do believe, however, that all's swell now. we hope.

rabbit rabbit

i finished reading what is the what relatively late last night (at about 10:30 - actually very late for me to be awake), while kara was snoring, and then i turned out the light. and i dreamt of dark-skinned human bodies bursting apart by bullets, disease, and postmortem decomposition. grisly dreams. i wonder if it's interesting that i didn't dream such things while i was reading the book, but only after i was finished. or perhaps it was just that i was reading it immediately prior to turning out the light. anyway, i survived the dreams and (spoiler alert!) valentino survived too. it's a remarkable book, terrifying and beautiful. for info regarding the lost boys and how to help, look here.

so much for keeping things light, huh? why do i do this to myself? and up next is the red badge of courage, which i've been wanting to read for a while. i'm sure it'll be chipper too.

and to continue in the vein of death and misery, it was one year ago tonight that our sweet rumble unexpectedly died. she was a good kid and i miss her. catwise, we still have her common-law brother, yellow, as well as little eliot (pictured), who arrived on the scene in 2002. he was cleaned and shaved yesterday and is obviously much happier for it. he's a fine little man. but yellow seems to have the perpetual sniffles, and often sneezes out copious mucus, which is fairly nasty, especially when he then slurps it back into himself.

but anyway. at the moment i feel good, in spite of everything. it might snow today, which might affect our plans to drive to seattle this evening. i think i'll do a bit of writing this morning and later i'll try to put those contacts in again (i feel rather the fool for having such troubles, a grown man such as myself).

rabbit rabbit.

heavy lidded

well, i got my contacts today, but i couldn't put them in. i was there in the optometrist's office for half an hour, the left lens on the tip of my left index finger, trying with my right hand to hold my left upper lid up long enough to get the lens onto my eyeball. no dice. no dice at all. the optometrist assistant lady finally put the left one in, but then i couldn't put the right one in. then i couldn't take the left one out. so she took that one out for me and i fled. i got new glasses too, so it wasn't a total washout. i have the contacts too, of course, a single pair, and i will work more on getting them in, but not today, or at least not for a few hours, because my eye is quite irritated right now and so, actually, is the rest of me.

up, after putting food down for the cats

i got up to pee about an hour ago. usually lately i can fall asleep again quickly after a small-hours urination but this morning i was thinking not only about plan c for story #2 (plan b hasn't been panning out), which i will attempt to put into effect momentarily, but also when a convenient time to bring my hyundai to the shop will be. this weekend? next? how long do we want to be a one-car family? (kara's truck hasn't moved in quite a while; it probably just needs a jump, and its tags are way out of date.) i hope there's nothing seriously wrong with my car. so in thinking about these things i was unable to fall asleep again, so here i be.

so far my favorite story in the best american short stories 2007 (which i'm reading during breaks on days i work in the office; i've left my copy there) is called "findings & impressions" and it's by a woman called stellar kim. it's about a radiologist, and parts were reminiscent of the reports i type every day (even though i don't type radiology reports). i was hoping to find a link to the story for y'all, but i haven't found one. it was originally published in the iowa review. so nip out to the closest bookstore or library and find that journal or the (probably more easily findable) best american collection and open it up to this story.

tomorrow we're having eliot bathed and shaved, and we're all happy about that. eliot probably won't enjoy the process, but when he's home again he'll be happy. at the moment he's not real pleasant to the touch, otherwise sweet though he may be.

and tangentially to an email conversation about boobs and panties with a friend yesterday, i was thinking about how i used to love to go dancing. when i was in college i went dancing almost every weekend. i loved moving to the music, and being full of beer didn't hurt, usually. i might have looked the total dork, skinny white boy dancing to "you spin me round" and "just like heaven" and "personal jesus" and "tainted love," but i enjoyed myself and that's the point. i haven't been dancing in a long long time, and i'm considerably more self-conscious now, which is too bad.

it's almost december. it's raining. i'm going to try a bit of writing; i have about 2 hours before i need to start working.

whoops

yesterday kara got in the mail her lab results from her recent checkup. unfortunately, the assistant or whoever screwed up big-time and also included the lab results of 2 other patients. we were wondering why the envelope was so thick! this is a serious mistake, and it's kind of funny that it was made on kara's doorstep, as she works the release-of-information desk at the hospital. someone's going to get a phone call over this one.

this is way worse than when i called last week to make a dentist appointment and the receptionist, without prompting, asked me (1) if i was kara's husband, (2) if i had the same insurance she did, naming the insurance, and (3) if i had a sore tooth too. though of course that's quite bad too.

full

in spite of my moody musings early yesterday, we had a good thanksgiving. after breakfast kara took the dogs to a dog park. while she was out i stayed by the fire and read from the dave eggers book, which is engrossing in its horrors in sudan, ethiopia, and here. when she got back the dogs were pretty well pooped. we prepared food, drank wine, listened to and sang with arlo and then the dixie chicks, ate food, and drank wine. we have leftovers, and not all the dishes fit in the dishwasher. we are living a life of bounty.

turkey talk

so it was 44 years ago today that jfk was killed. i read the mailer book about it and i read the delillo book about it. not recently, but i read them. (i know those are novels, but novels are how i get most of my information about the world. stupid?) i continue to be interested in the story, the mystery. perhaps i'm ignorant and naive but i mark that event as the beginning of the downfall of the integrity of this country. (when did this become a political blog? it's not, not hardly. i hope my myriad readers know i rarely know what i'm talking about - it's just a knee-jerk and morbid attempt at deipnosophism.) or maybe the collapse began before this, but assassinations and coverups, i suppose, received big-time press starting about that time. maybe. television and all of that. correct me if i'm wrong, someone, anyone. help me out. i wasn't actually alive 44 years ago today (kara was, and she was even in texas, but i don't think she could be implicated in any conspiracy, if there was one; she'll be 45 in 2 months 1 day), but i think about how different the world might be today if kennedy had not been killed and did the things he said he wanted to do.

just thoughts, making me a little sad.

and actress/director adrienne shelly's last film comes out on dvd this week (or at least the last one she directed & acted in; imdb tells me a screenplay she wrote is currently in preproduction, and i'll be watching for that). her murder, just over a year ago now, makes me sad too. i don't put it on a level with jfk's murder - though why not? she was a person, he was a person. murder is murder, isn't it? an unthinkable waste.

on the other hand, it's thanksgiving today. happy thanksgiving. let's not even talk about the indians and the origins of this holiday. please? i'm so sorry. let's try and be thankful. i do have plenty of good things in my life now, in spite of all the crimes going on globally, to my shame. i'm even doing some christmas shopping online this morning before attempting plan b of the 2nd story in my heroic story cycle. kara's sleeping and the dogs are still crated. we'll have cinnamon rolls when kara gets up and we'll start a fire. it'll be a good day.

stuffing

a friend of kara's from work is here and she brought her dog to play with our dogs for a short while, so i have excused myself. dagmar and steve got on my nerves a bit today i must admit. the cats, too, were a bit troublesome, wanting my attention and sitting between me and the computer screen while i was trying to work. sheesh.

it's thanksgiving tomorrow here in the states. it'll be just me and kara, as per usual for holidays. we're eating chicken, corn, peas, and stuffing. we have wine and dessert. the weather should be cold, and we're looking forward to a fire in our woodstove. she'll also be working on her resume and looking for a job that doesn't annoy the shit out of her, and i'll be reading and writing. we'll probably listen to "alice's restaurant" yet again, per tradition.

story #2 turned out to be a bust, but i'm going to attack it again from a different angle, starting tomorrow morning probably. in all likelihood i'll be up and about before kara is. she'll be up to get the dogs out in the morning but then she'll return to bed and i'll probably be awake. i still like the short story ideas i have, and it doesn't really bother me that this attempt failed. it didn't have the energy it needed. i have an inkling of how to go about it differently, and so we'll see.

otherwise there isn't a whole lot going on. next weekend we're going to seattle to see stuart mclean do the "vinyl cafe" live, and we're looking forward to that. it'll be a little canadian experience for us.

not my favorite puppy habit

okay, so the dogs are eating the house. or, they're at least chewing on the floor. and i'm not sure how to stop this. they already have chew toys aplenty. we have bad-smelling stuff to spray on the places we don't want them to chew, and we use it. yet they continue to chew the floor. i broke down this morning and gave them a bona fide stick retrieved from the great outdoors; perhaps that will satisfy their wood craving. humph.

i got kara a nifty electric sander thing a couple of years ago, and now she's found a use for it. she might attempt to smooth the chewed areas over the weekend.

vision

i've been thinking the last few days of getting contact lenses. i've been a wearer of glasses as long as i've been in need of corrective lenses, and i guess it's been about 10 years. well, maybe not as long as that. i'm not sure, i don't keep track of things like that, though i probably should, but really it's been a while. i've been wary about contacts because i'm squeamish about the concept as well as the reality of touching my own eyeballs. i do think that's something i'll get over, though, with a bit of practice.

see, dagmar regularly smears my glasses with his tongue and i think his and steve's roughhousing have made my current frames a bit wonky. on top of all this, kara says she thinks i'll see better with contacts than with glasses. so i think i'm going to call an optometrist today and see if i can make an appointment for friday. and get rid of these eyesores!

stevie jay

congratulations go out to our own stevie jay for completing her first obediance-type class (aka household manners 1)! she was told (via kara) by those who matter that she showed marked improvement over the course of the 8 or so weeks and we're quite proud. she's not just pretty; she's smart and talented too! how about them apples? dagmar has a class or 2 yet to go, but he's doing well as well. kara has designs on further schooling for the pups, including perhaps some agility training. steve hops around a lot, boxing me and dagmar in, just like the herder she is.

now i'm going to make my lunch and eat my breakfast and go to work. it's tuesday.

oh and hey - it's my half-birthday today! i'm 36.5 today, i think. yeah, that's right. 36 years 6 months. astonishing. it's impressive to have reached such an age, and so quickly! i don't know where the time has gone.

squeak

these are chew toys for the pups, if you can believe that. cute, eh? i actually might like them more than the dogs do. a faceless green cat and a faceless red dog. they're squeaky toys too, hence lots of fun. and they bounce a little if you drop them from a height.

if you click the picture, you can see tooth marks on the anterior aspect of the dog's head, a sign that it's seen some action. when they fall over i like to stand them up on their 4 feet again with my shoe.

it's veterans' day today. happy veterans' day, veterans. let there be no more war and no more new veterans.

sick

not that i take in everything this michael moore character says without at least a grain of salt, but kara and i did see his newest film (sicko) last night. it did make us weep a little, and it doesn't make canada sound at all bad. we are also of course considering england, france, and cuba.

universal healthcare? hello? why not us? kara and i are mostly healthy and we can't complain about that, but over the summer, with her finger injury and subsequent surgery and my colonoscopy, we racked up some medical bills and have paid a fair amount of those out-of-pocket.

what's wrong with this country? anyone?

kara has been looking on the net for jobs in canada and things look promising. the sites are very encouraging. i emailed my uncle, who moved to canada in 1981 and hasn't looked back, for tips and tricks for expatriating.

of course a downside of our moving to canada that it takes us ever further away from my sister and brother-in-law (in ohio) and parents (in maryland). no argument that that's a downside. and of course my parents want us to move to baltimore. but hey - won't they love visiting us in canada?

anyway. this is still a futuristic dream we're having.

in the meantime, here's an incidental snap of steve and dagmar that kara took yesterday, and maybe it's something about their tilting aspects that reminds me of that old comic strip "bloom county," may it rest in peace.

idealism

as i'm still here, and will be a year from now, i just took this little select-your-presidential-candidate quiz thingie, at least partially as a tool for procrastination from writing. apparently i quite like dennis kucinich. (chris dodd is a close second.) kara and i saw the democratic debate a few weeks ago; i liked kucinich's ideas but found him to be a little shrill. though perhaps the shrillness stemmed from frustration, because he wasn't allowed as much time to speak as he wanted. (and i really don't care about the ufo thing; if anything, i admire him for his openness, even if it makes him sound a tad flaky.) yes, i like his ideas by and large but some of them are perhaps unrealistic, at least in the short term. plus, i don't think he's at all electable. which is of course sad. so, do i vote for him? or do i vote for someone who i think can win?

expat

one of my colleagues in the transcription department recently relocated to new orleans, and kept her tacoma-based job. this is an exciting concept. i wonder if kara and i could swing moving to canada, with me keeping my american job. and i wonder if kara could get a job there, with her masters in criminial justice. is there any crime in canada? there's got to be some. british columbia is better than portland, better even than seattle; it's outside the united states. (plus what i've read so far of the best american short stories 2007 isn't really rocking my world; we should totally get out of here.) it would be great if we could make that happen. it feels like a bit of a pipe dream, especially given all the work we are going to have to do around this house to make it ready to be put on the market. plus the housing market's rather bad still, isn't it? okay, so maybe there's no sense of immediacy here, but it's an idea that warms me.

having written

did i mention i finished a draft of my story? well, i did, on saturday. it was only 7 pages, but that's totally okay. the ending came before i expected it to, but when that last sentence was typed, i knew it was the last sentence. it feels fantastic. i'm still working with the story, editing and elaborating, and now it's 8 pages long (3012 words). it could still grow. i like it. i don't know if it's good, of course; only distance from it will tell me that, but at present i am very happy.

i want to write another one this weekend, with at least some of the same characters. i have a couple of ideas already; i just have to choose which one to write first. whee!

on the downside, i'm still sneezing, and getting a little tired of that.

buoyancy

i woke early this morning, sneezing, but i took some allergy medicine and i'm all right now. i think my cold is kicked. still, i was awake, so i came upstairs before 6 and worked some more on my story. the writing is going all right (despite my frequent internet distractions), which i admit is surprising to me. the plot is maybe a tad melodramatic, but overall i'm pleased. revision is always a possibility. i've got 4 pages (almost 1500 words) and i'm envisioning a story of 8 or 10 pages. kara's got a bunch of schoolwork to do today, so i might even get a draft done. how about that?

to be honest, i only wrote about a page yesterday, but this morning i'm doing better. i have an ambitious vision of a cycle of stories surrounding the characters i was planning on writing a novel about over the summer, but i'm trying not to get ahead of myself. nor am i going to limit myself to these few characters if i want to write something different in the months to come. my ideas are almost always bigger than what turns out to be plausible, so i'm attempting to keep my ambition in check. still, though, i'm happy about this current story. for now, i'll leave it at that.

the weather was crisply autumnal yesterday, clear, temperature in the 50s. it was gorgeous. i ran my errands efficiently and then spent some time outside with the dogs. they didn't annoy me at all, though i think the weather and my generally buoyant mood had something to do with that. yesterday they were good dogs. i wrote a bit more in the afternoon and did some cleaning around the house.

kara came home from work a bit before 5. we made a simple dinner and relaxed for the evening. as i say, today i think i'll keep on writing for a while, while kara writes her essays for school. when she gets out of bed she'll make us some eggs. i'm not planning on leaving the house, and i like days like this. it's cooler this morning, and a bit foggy. tomorrow i have to work but, again, without leaving the house.

fidelity

i just came back from breakfast; i went on my own (kara's at work) to a place across the street that i like. i had a spinach and mushroom skillet, with eggs of course, and feta cheese. i brought with me a notebook to sketch out some ideas for a story, and i think i might have something. when i'm done here, i'll start working on that.

there were 2 young women at a table near mine, younger than i, obviously students, with binders and 3 x 5 cards and such. what i overheard of their conversation touched on anemia, hemoglobin, iron, thalassemia. they might well have been medical students preparing for an exam. i was sitting there, eating my breakfast and thinking it might not be wholly unreasonable for me to strike up a conversation with them. i could mention my current line of work and we might get to talking. of course i didn't do any such thing, and this comes with some regret.

because i noted that the women were attractive, there was guilt accompanying my desire to speak with them. it's not as if i wanted anything more than conversation, but perhaps my conception of infidelity is a little sensitive. anyway. i sort of wished i'd talked with them.

at the same time, i don't know how to start a conversation with strangers like that. "say, forgive me, but i couldn't help but overhear you talking about hemoglobin ..." ridiculous.

anyway. i ate my breakfast, wrote in my notebook, drank my coffee, and left the place. i talked to no one. i am home now. the dogs are downstairs and the cats are up here. i'm going to work on this new story.

another steve and other things

i'm feeling quite a bit better, as of yesterday. i still have some soreness of the throat in the mornings and some sniffling throughout the day, but there has been a marked improvement. kara's much better too. yay.

here's an interesting article about the f-bomb by one of steve's namesakes. it's not short, but it's worthwhile, in my opinion.

i've decided not to do the novel-writing marathon this year after all. i just don't feel like it. so for those of you who've received a spiral-bound rough chunk of my fiction the last 2 christmases, i have to say that you're out of luck this year. sorry.

i've been reading these murakami short stories, and while the stories themselves aren't really much to talk about (they're quite flimsy), in his introduction to the collection the author writes rather engagingly about his writing habits, how he goes from novels to nonfiction to short stories and back.

i'm going to focus my reading, at least in the immediate future, on short stories. i'm going to reread some raymond carver first, because he was inspirational when i started writing fiction in college (and i recently read an article somewhere about an unedited edition of what we talk about when we talk about love appearing in bookstores in the coming months). and there's jean thompson and lee abbott, neither of whom i've read yet, but who i want to read, and oh my - lots more. so i've been feeling excited about that as an idea.

of course i haven't acted on it yet, i mean in terms of writing, but that i currently blame on my now-resolving illness. probably by friday, my next day off work, i will be altogether out of excuses not to write. so by christmas 2008, with due diligence, there might be a collection of my short works spreading around the place.

still cold

ahh. i do like a nyquil-assisted sleep. the dreams are amazing. the downside is, i wake up coughing. i don't know why that is, but the cough definitely waits in there for my consciousness to emerge. my symptoms and kara's seem to have reached a level. for the past 4 or 5 days i've had intermittent headache, coughing/sore throat, and rhinorrhea. sometimes i feel all right. sometimes i get all 3 symptoms at once. let it be known that the rhinorrhea, when it comes, is copious. it was 9 days ago that all this started for me, and maybe 7 days ago that it started for kara. as i say, no change in the past 4 or 5 days. it just keeps going on, as do i. i'm working from home today, and kara is home to take care of the dogs (though she has a bunch of schoolwork to do), and i'm glad about that.

it can't last much longer. it just can't. can it?

puppy honeymoon

it was 2 weeks ago tomorrow, sunday october 7, that, for me, the puppy honeymoon ended. i just woke up that morning in a foul state. i don't know if i slept badly or had nightmares or what, but i woke up flat-out frustrated with the dogs. the build-up had reached the top of the dam, i guess. my patience was at an end, as far as their following me when i cross a room, their being underfoot, their jumping up when i come home, their pissing and shitting in the house, their not coming when i call, their trapping the cats upstairs, everything. the floor is littered with their toys, the house is a disaster. that day, i just didn't want anything to do with them. at all. ever. i have since calmed down a bit. kara has taken up the slack; she knows the dogs are pretty much hers. she knows i would be happy without them. again, it's a wonderful thing that we don't have kids, because i know i would have zero tolerance for kids too. i would be such a rotten parent. i feel bad regarding for my feelings toward these dogs. doesn't everyone love dogs? and i admit that sometimes the dogs are fine, sometimes i like them. generally when they're lying down and quiet, i like them. i like a sleepy dog. most of the time i just want to let kara deal with them. i'm sorry, but that's pretty much how it is. am i a bad person? perhaps. a bad parent, certainly; i accept that readily. on that bad day, the 7th, kara feared i would be asking her to get rid of them, but that's not the situation.

kara just left with dagmar, for his 2nd day of school. steve's in the crate, because i don't trust her. yesterday afternooon we took them to the vet again. dagmar is 30 pounds (and his paws are still enormous; he's going to be huge) and steve is 26. they got their first rabies shots. they get the big snip in 2 months, a bit of a christmas present.

infectious

i have infected kara. that's the worst of it. i felt better as yesterday went on, and work was fine. however, i was up several times last night coughing. i'm up early today because i'm going to a drugstore before work to pick up some of this and perhaps the nighttime version as well. kara doesn't like the nighttime version but i do. i was on it that night in lynnwood when yellow brought a large live rat into our home and i was on it when i whacked that rat with a broom down the stairs and out the front door of our duplex. anyway. kara might have it worse than i did on saturday. she's all coughing and achy and miserable. she doesn't have the aforementioned bad habit that i do, so she's taking today off work. but i, as i said, am going to the office after picking up some medicine at an all-night drug store. i like all-night stores, the slow-moving and dense atmosphere of such a place in the small hours of the morning. of course, it's almost 6, hardly the small hours any more. all the same. i feel terrible for having gotten kara sick. i'm glad she's able to take the day.

plus we just watched the zombie movie 28 weeks later via netflix, so we definitely know how bad infections can be.

comeuppance

one of my bad habits is taking mental-health days off work; that is, calling in sick when i'm not physically ill but just don't feel like working. i don't know if it's the hesitant subversive in me or what. i'm a just wage slave and maybe part of me is occasionally bitter about that; i have so many hours of paid sick time due me, and i might as well use it. regardless, i got in a bit of trouble for it a couple of weeks ago, as i'd taken more days off in a 12-month period than the powers-that-be deem justifiable. so, obviously this means i can't call in sick for a good while to come (even though i still have the hours stored), or else i'll be written up a second time.

so what happens friday afternoon while i'm at work, and facing a one-day weekend (after my three-dayer last weekend)? a little tickle in my throat. this evolved into full-blown debilitating head and chest congestion as the evening wore on, and yesterday, saturday, i was in bed all day with this as well as general aches and malaise. bona fide malaise, not fictional. i've fibbed about illness so many times before, so i don't expect anyone to believe me now when i say i'm actually sick, but, really, i am. and today i have to work.

actually, granted, i feel a tad better today than i did yesterday, but my nose is running and i have a pretty good headache and i'm coughing and stuff. i would recover more rapidly if i spent another day on my back, but that is something i cannot do. doubtless this is deserved, no?

no glove no love

i think the most interesting report i typed today was a summary of a surgical repair of a penile fracture. and i'm no physician, i just type the reports, but i'm guessing that the term "fracture" is used loosely here, or at least not the way i ordinarily think of it; because, oh, i'm pretty darn sure there aren't any bones in the human penis. of course there's cartilage and vessels and i don't know what all else, and i suppose that stuff can be fractured, at least in a sense, especially when the fucker is engorged - er, i mean, when an erection is present.

anyway, this particular 40-something-year-old gent was apparently privy to some vigorous sex and sustained a bit of trauma. details of the event are unavailable at this point, so our imaginations will have to suffice. the procedure he subsequently underwent consisted simply of degloving the shaft (which the dictating surgeon kept calling the "penile phallus," though if that's not redundant i don't know what would be), draining a hematoma, repairing a small tear in the tunica albuginea, and stitching the member up again.

there's something about the word "deglove" that sends chills all through me. kara listened to a stephen king book on tape a year or 2 ago, the one in which a woman is left handcuffed to a bed after her lover dies or something. i hope you'll forgive the spoiler but, per kara's description, the woman ends up freeing herself from the cuffs by slowly and i'm sure painfully pulling one of her hands through the metal manacle about her wrist, effectively degloving her hand. that's just horrible; i don't think i'll be able to read or listen to that book, ever.

anuria

the good news is that before coming to work yesterday morning, the 2nd, i located the source of the cat waste odor. there was a bunched-up throw rug in a distant corner of the room. when i gingerly picked it up it was damp, and it adhered to the floor slightly. the wood floor beneath it was stained black, and that was stupid nasty. and the stench was abominable, to be sure. i threw the rug into the wash and scrubbed the floor a bit with 409. in the evening, after returning home from the office, i scrubbed the floor again, with bleach and a brush. then i sprayed pureayre liberally. kara was home yesterday, after working the weekend, and she put the rug through the wash multiple times, but it might be a lost cause. however, this morning the stench upstairs was all but gone. i am pleased. (i did put an extra litter box in the vicinity, in case of emergencies.) all the same, this victory does not change my weekend plans of putting the jumble of the upstairs room into some semblance of order.

urea

one of the cats has peed somewhere upstairs, perhaps multiple times, but i know not where. i believe it was eliot, although i have only circumstantial evidence against him; he is markedly more wigged by the dogs than is yellow. the sharp pungent odor does permeate, making our eyes water. the large upstairs room is full of clutter and there are myriad nooks and hollows among our scattered belongings where a timid and perhaps angry cat might choose to relieve himself. over the weekend, which is rather a long way off i admit, i will endeavor to organize the clutter, a task that certainly should have been done some 24 months ago when we moved into this house. the upstairs, aside from my office, has been used only for storage so far and it is the cats' refuge. i will find the source of the odor and i will eliminate it utterly.

pre-october update

first off, i'm pleased to say i'm on page 3 of a new story. it's happenening slowly, the writing, but it's happenening again. the richard rhodes book on writing that i'm reading is comforting. he says near the beginning that if you write a page a day, you write a book a year. that's a kind way to think about it, isn't it? i want to get a good draft of this story done before the start of the november race.

last week i typed an emergency department note for a patient whose mother was concerned because the toddler had a bluish discoloration around his mouth. on the way to the emergency department, she recalled that she had just given the boy some grape juice to drink, and realized that this was the likely cause of the discoloration. yet she continued with him to the hospital, waited probably several hours in triage, and saw finally a physician. because the kid drank grape juice! this would be truly hilarious if my tax dollars weren't paying for the hospital visit. by the time she actually saw a doctor, the discoloration had of course disappeared.

kara and i took the dogs to pet stores yesterday. we were looking for toys that we can put food and treats into, so they're sort of puzzles for them, working out how to reach the food. ideally, this will occupy the dogs for long periods of time. we got stuff by this company and this one. (we also got a tried-and-true kong.) many thanks to the good people at lucky dog outfitters for their advice and assistance. dagmar was amazingly well behaved on this excursion, though steve was a little bit spastic and peed several times out of excitement.

steve's first day of school is monday, and dagmar's is 2 weeks from today.

it's saturday and kara's working this weekend. i'm about to hop on the treadmill for a spell. i might do a bit more writing today, though i've already written a page and a half this morning, so i might not. i have to go to the grocery store, of course, and determine what we might eat this week. i'm watching and fascinated by the new ken burns film the war, which i am recording on tivo. it's not cheery or anything, no, not hardly, but it's good stuff.

i'm still going to the office 2 or 3 days a week to do quality assurance stuff, filling blanks, appropriately attaching disparate fragments of reports, and administrativy things. i like doing this; at first it was just a welcome reprive from sitting at home all day typing, but i'm growing to enjoy the troubleshooting aspects that come up. the days that i am home just transcribing reports seem to stretch quite long.

increased mass

the dogs saw the vet yesterday and got some more shots. they've both doubled in size since we've had them. dagmar weighs 21 pounds and steve 18. they're giants. the vet and the tech marveled at the size of dagmar's paws. yikes. they have classes starting this week, obedience, training, what have you. i think kara resisted the notion of outside classes at first, thinking we could train them ourselves, but we simply don't have the time or the energy. (this is why i like cats! you put them in your house and you're done.) the pups are creeping up on bona fide 3 months of age. these days they like digging in our backyard and coming back into the house filthy. but they're good kids. (i haven't put many pictures of them up because in all our pictures of them they look more or less like this.)

library thing

my friend jim, in whose house we're living (oops - i mean whose house we bought fair & square and are living in currently) and who is going for an enviable degree in lib'ary science, clued me in to this. i'm only starting out with it, and will probably mostly only add books slowly, as i read them, rather than sit and enter my entire inventory in one or three goes. though i might enter a couple more, right about now, because it's fun for me. although, really, there are other things i might be doing with the stretch of hours before me today. but it's certainly intriguing. check it out, hey? so - thanks jim. my best to mark and bryce.

and another jim - my one and only father - had a birthday yesterday. happy birthday yesterday, dad. it's conceivable that you too wouldd be interested in this library thing, if only as a concept.

lighten up

eliot's getting better. he's still restless, especially at night; he hasn't been outside in weeks. but he's spending more time downstairs among the dogs. he hisses and growls when they get too close, but he doesn't run away all the time. baby steps, eh?

kara and i saw the film away from her last night. it's based on an alice munro story and it was written and directed by sarah polley. julie christie has alzheimer disease and gordon pinsent is her husband. it was gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, and of course terribly sad. we were just in tears from 5 minutes in. everyone in it is wonderful. that it's the first feature written or directed (let alone both) by young ms polley is astonishing.

but, maybe someone can recommend a nice comedy? something light? maybe not on the level of blades of glory, but something, you know, good? i look at our netflix queue and it's all horror, thriller, drama, documentary. those are the sort of things we like, yes, but maybe we need to ease up up a tad now and again. life is short.

the book i'm reading now is a novel about a 27-year-old man who was in a car accident and suffered head trauma. now he can't recognize his sister as his sister; he sees her as an impostor and wonders where his real sister is. it's a fascinating book, well written, and i like it, but it's not exactly upbeat.

thinking back on what i've read and watched lately, i see fiction and nonfiction about the holocaust, september 11, people with memory loss or psychoses, murder, governmental conspiracies, childhood abuse. what's with this? i look around at my bookshelves, anticipating what i'll read next, and the spines i give second glances to are of books about obituary writing, found suicide notes, aids, 1968, alcoholism, autopsies. sigh.

at the same time, i am happy to report that dagmar and steve are 11 weeks 1 day old today. yesterday we took them for a walk; they're getting used to the leashes. steve had the pee scared out of her by a yipping pomeranian in a shop window.

plate

errands were run today. i had to get the hyundai's emissions tested, and it's a good car; it passed. then i went to get new tags, and i didn't know i'd be getting whole new plates. exciting! my new plate number-letter combo feels like it fits me better than the old one. (670 reminds me of my bookselling days because one of penguin books' isbn prefixes is 0-670. so how big a dork does that make me? and i like the x and the a because they're in my first name! so there's that.) don't ask me what the old plate said; i don't remember. then i went to costco for the first time in a few months. i bought some things, important things. things to drink and things to wear. then to goodwill for some cheap plush toys for steve and dagmar to rip to shreds. then to target for some more items. now i'm home.

i'm just in from doing a bit of yard work, which of course in my case involves more killing and mutilating than growing and cultivating. one of these days we'll turn that around. and i've had my shower and i smell fine.

i woke up at about 11:30 last night, having fallen asleep before 9. it took me several hours to get back to sleep because i was internally debating doing nanowrimo again this year. i think i will. because of the dog days of this past summer, and because of my own general laziness and lameness, writing has not really happened in 2007 the way i had hoped. maybe the whirlwind novel(la) thing will get me back into focus and suggest realistic goals. i'm not proud of myself, when it comes to writing. this year has been basically a bust. again. (please refer to 2006, 2005, 2004 ...) so i was up and thinking about all of that and then i read a bit more of the richard powers book i'm reading now, which is quite good. then i slept a bit more, after about 2:30 or so.

anyway. so i'm thinking of another writing race the month after next and then, in 2008, more regular short stories, likely one a month. this is what i think. remind me not to talk myself into a novel next year, okay? it'll only end in tears. stories in 2008, work on the skills, and maybe - maybe - a novel in 2009. don't let me forget.

job perks

i typed a report for this patient last week but i keep thinking about it. a teenage girl went to a party in a friend's apartment. she says she knew and trusted all the people there. she was drinking and she lost some time. when she got home she had a headache and she had trouble sleeping. in the morning her headache persisted, so she was taken to the emergency room. (ordinarily i would think a persistent headache after drinking doesn't quite constitute an emergency, but read on.) a ct scan revealed evidence of bullet fragments in the back of her head. that's right - evidently someone at the party had shot this girl in the head! and she didn't even know it. i wonder what the story there is. that's just freaky.

still, maybe not quite as freaky as the guy in the state pen who some weeks back inserted a jar of jalapeno sauce into his rectum. (i don't know if it was a sexual experiment or if he was smuggling the stuff in.) he lost his grip on the jar and then he couldn't retrieve it. he used a hanger to try to get it out, with no success. he was brought to the hospital and taken to the operating room. they found the jar in his sigmoid colon and had to remove a chunk of intestine along with the jar. a note was made that the jar was mostly full and that the cap was secure. imagine of any of the product had spilled while inside him. talk about ouch!

kara's side

kara and i drove up to seattle yesterday to meet her nephew jon and his wife robin. i'd never met them, and kara and jon hadn't seen each other in something like 15 years. that's a long time. he's in town for a few days for a conference. he's a financial advisor and robin's a cpa. they're about my age but they've been married twice as long as kara and i, and they have 2 kids in addition to 2 dogs and 2 cats. they live in texas.

jon is kara's brother tommy's son from his 2nd of 3 marriages. he's the only child from that marriage (tommy's 3rd marriage produced several offspring) and apparently after the divorce jon's mother spirited him away from the rest of the family. that's likely at least part of the reason jon grew up into a responsible and thoughtful person, as opposed to most of the rest of the family, at least to hear kara tell it.

i'm going to have to get kara to draw me a map, a tree, of her family. i get lost easily. lots of marriages and divorces, lots of great gaps of years between siblings, it's hard to keep track of who's related to whom and how.

i was a bit anxious about the get-together, as i generally am when meeting new folks and feeling pressure to maintain conversation and be interesting, but the afternoon was relaxed and i enjoyed it. we walked around capitol hill a bit and went into the back room of a bar called charlie's. we talked about the family some. jon and kara have that history, of course, and it tends to be more colorful than not. we also talked about christopher guest, u2, electric cars, real housewives, maggie may's in austin, and other things. robin and jon seemed to like seattle, and kept saying how different it is, in just walking around, from where they live. it went well. it was good. i like them. i hope we do keep in touch.

while we were gone, dagmar and steve survived their longest stretch in the crate without a pee break. they did fine.

fodder

yesterday afternoon i decided to walk home via residental streets, as opposed to the more direct route via division and 6th. i went serpentine, just north of 6th.

in front of a corner house was parked a white van with the city's seal on the door. under the seal it read forensic services. a girl of 8 or 10 was on the lawn, a large cat in her arms. it hung between her wrists like a hammock and it watched me. the girl tried out a smile but it didn't quite work. standing on the path to the door of the house was a woman on a cell phone. into the phone she was saying, "no, it's okay. i can hold. wait? what? well, when should i call back?" after i passed this woman i heard the door of the van slam closed. i turned and a man in a uniform said, "were you scared?"

we went to bed early because the night before we hadn't slept much. kara fell asleep at maybe 7:15 and i at perhaps 7:45. the puppies woke us at 10 and 2, like hands on a steering wheel. the cats, especially eliot, were restless through the night, requiring comfort and distraction. between these wakings, i slept hard and heavily, with many vivid dreams.

at about midnight i heard a man muttering. i opened my eyes a little bit and in the darkness i saw him standing near the foot of our bed, holding a collapsible ladder. he wore a plaid shirt and seemed angry. i was still partially asleep and when i tried to move my arm to wake kara, i couldn't. the man walked past me and out of the room, deeper into the house. i struggled to move my arm, to touch kara, to speak, but i was too heavy. i could not move.

more than dogs

hi. kara and i saw the movie year of the dog last evening. i do recommend it. it was interesting how much of herself kara saw in the molly shannon character, in terms of molly's relationship with her dog, pencil. it was a sweet movie, very funny, but with a dark side. it certainly reminded us of our dog-related events of this summer, so there was some crying going on, but it also made us laugh. (i think 2 weeks ago would have been too soon to see it.) plus peter sarsgaard's in it, and kara's probably a little bit in love with him. i like him too, so it's totally okay.

dagmar and steve are 9 weeks old today. i got them a woolly apple at a fancy pet store in the plaza where eliot got shaved yesterday, and they love it. they're tearing it apart. we might have to get them some more fruit.

sorry this blog has been so much about dogs lately. i imagine it's getting a bit boring for my legion of regular readers (all 4 of you!). other things actually are going on in our lives. kara's doing extremely well in school and she's thinking of applying for a job with the city. the job seems to be basically the same as what she's doing now, but it pays something like $6 more an hour, so it would be great if she got that. her current job is still mostly okay, but the management in her department is often a source of stress.

her fingernail is growing back fast. it'll be all the way back way before christmas. it looks really good.

i'm enjoying my new role as part-time filler of blanks and corrector of flagged jobs in the transcription department. (it's less temporary now; even though the person i was filling in for is back, the other person has decided she doesn't want to do it any more.) i like the troubleshooting aspect of the job, and a small part of me actually likes being around people again. the woman who works where i got my coffee almost daily until a year ago (when i started working from home) remembered me immediately when i started going back a few weeks ago, and that was nice. and it's still only 2 or 3 days a week that i have to go to the office. the variety is welcome.

and of course i'm reading (but not enough), watching movies and tv (too much), not doing much exercising (though i've been walking to and from the office, so that's a small something), and not writing. so some things need to change soon. it's day 2 of a 4-day weekend for me (day 1 of a 3-dayer for kara), and there's some yard stuff i'm going to do today. we'll walk the dogs (whoops! i said the d word) probably today and monday and work with them on their potty training and other things. dagmar's a bit rough with steve sometimes with their play, and i'm not sure what the right thing to do about that is.

eliot clearly feels better, happier, shorn. he's more active and social. all that hair just weighed him down. he's a sweet boy.

eliot (pre & post shave)

yellow

stevie

dags

dogs n cats n us

the cats seem to be coming around. for the last several evenings, yellow has been coming downstairs and communing a little bit with the dogs. they sniff each other and if steve or dagmar get too close, yellow hisses and they immediately back off. so it seems to be going well.

and last night eliot, perhaps because he so badly wants to go outside, ventured downstairs too while the dogs were out of their crate. there was a bit of sniffing and hissing. eliot went from me to under a chair and there was some circling, but all in all it was good. eliot gets shaved today (he needs it!) and i think that will make him more comfortable in general.

dagmar is growing fast and soon he might not be able to fit under the front gate (at the moment we have makeshift barricades across gaps in the fence and under the gate). at that point, we might start allowing eliot outside access.

still, though, the dogs are getting kara up between 12 and 2 in the morning for a pee and/or a poo, and again at about 4. sometimes i wake up for the midnight relieving but i always wake up with the 4 o'clock one. so neither of us has gotten a full night's sleep in about 2 weeks, though kara's suffering more.

i think the dogs are learning their names. kara's taught them to sit and to lie down. they respond quickly to no. they're being okay about potty training but not fantastic. there have definitely been accidents. we're going to take them for walks with their leashes over the weekend.

kara wishes they would hang out with us on the bed more while we're watching tv and stuff, but they don't. they come up for a few minutes for a scritch and then they jump down. they flop on the floor near the bed or under the dining table and sack out. i'll say this for them: they're good at sacking out. i do like a tired dog.

ashbery on mtv?!

okay. this seems totally weird to me. but i might follow this story and see what they do with it.

(addendum: this is what it is. it's not as off-the-wall as i had imagined. okay then.)

kennedy

kara and i watched the movie bobby over the weekend. it's a fictionalized account of the lives of those in the hotel in which robert kennedy was assassinated on the day he was assassinated. i'd read some mixed stuff about the movie but was quite surprised by it, in a mostly positive way. i think it is a well-made film. it achieves what i think its main goal was, which was to raise the big "what if" question. no one in politics now talks the way this guy did. no one is saying the things he said. maybe people are afraid to say such things, because of what happened to him? or has the bar just dropped phenomenally since 1968? i came away from this movie nostalgic for an america from before i was born and more frustrated than ever about where we are now.

hyundai scare

kara and i took the puppies to see the vet today. they got some shots and were generally admired by the staff. we used the hyundai to get there because it's older and already kinda smells like animals. the mazda is still almost pristine. the grocery store is just across the street from the vet, so kara stayed outside with the dogs while i did a bit of shopping. when i came back out, the car wouldn't start. it just made a crazy awful grinding sort of noise and wasn't even thinking of turning over. it wasn't the battery, because the radio and the a/c came on, and the windows rolled up and down. something with the starter? i don't know anything about cars. but there was a friendly man in the parking lot and he actually gave me a ride to our house so i could get our other car. so thank you, stranger. (again, kara stayed behind with the dogs.) he and his family were about to head out for a weekend of camping. i hope they have a good time. anyway. i got into the house, grabbed the key to the mazda, and drove back to the store. we got ourselves, the dogs, and the groceries back to the house using the mazda, and kara made grilled cheese sandwiches. yummy. then she got the jumper cables from the truck (which she noticed also needs a jump) and we returned to the grocery store. just connecting the batteries of the two cars with the cables allowed the hyundai to start right away; kara didn't even have to power up the mazda. so i guess things are all right. for now. all the cars are here. but i suppose i should get the hyundai looked at, shouldn't i?

eliot scare

approximately 28 hours ago, eliot was chillin' under our back porch. he seems to like it there. kara came home for lunch to let the puppies out of their crate and do their business. steve, as she is wont to do, wandered under the porch. (she likes it there too.) she apparently startled eliot and he apparently swatted at her. he dashed away somewhere and she emerged from beneath the porch, perhaps a little befuddled but not really hurt. the thing was, eliot was apparently quite frightened by steve indeed and he dove deeper into our neighborhood than he had been before. this is, of course, speculation, but the point is that he did not come home for hours. kara returned from work again in the afternoon and then i returned from work. no eliot. kara was worried. probably compartmentalizing (as i am wont to do), i figured he would come home when he was ready, but then i wasn't sure. then kara heard him meowing and found him in our neighbor's back yard, on the other side of the fence. we couldn't reach him and he couldn't jump over. he was obviously one terrified and confused cat. kara went around and met the neighbor, who quickly came to the back yard in a well-meant attempt to retrieve eliot, but she only frightened him off again. of course i should have just hopped the fence and grabbed him, but i was concerned about violating our neighbors' space, especially as we hadn't even met. eliot was gone again. kara searched the neighborhood and i searched the neighborhood. (kara all the time was thinking of her cat wingo, a heck of a good cat, who as she aged became an indoor cat. when i entered the picture, i brought yellow with me, and he was a bit rough with wingo; perhaps because of her fear of him wingo went outside one night and was killed by some other animal [probably not yellow]. kara last evening was very stressed and worried about losing yet another pet.) between the general area where kara thought eliot might be and our house there were several dogs in the yards, and we knew eliot would be frightened of them too and not try to return on his own. finally she spotted him under a house halfway down the block, but he wouldn't come out for her. he was still freaked out. i went and saw him, but he wouldn't come out for me either, until i brought a can of his food with me. i put some in a bowl and he finally came out. while he was eating i grabbed him and he struggled. he struggled, still terrified, while i carried him home. he can be slippery, but i held onto him. he fought me so much, he'd been resistant to our calls, and he'd been gone for so long that i actually thought he didn't want to live with us and be our cat any more. but he's still our cat, and things turned out well. all the animals are okay. still, it was scary for a bit there. we're going to keep the cats indoors for a while, until they get more used to the dogs. i hope that doesn't take very long.