This dog is hilarious and cute. One night, she actually was over 3/4 of the way underneath the bed.
she likes to sleep with her head under the bed
Aug 20th, 2009 by Meetzorp
Another thing I am glad I photographed`
Aug 15th, 2009 by Meetzorp
I’m not entirely sure what this little guy is. It has a face a little bit like an octopus, but ram’s horns and tiny bat wings, and with the pinkness and the crosshatching, it also reminds me a bit of a spiced ham with cloves pressed into it.
In any event, I admired it regularly on my ride home, and one night I had the presence of mind to snap a picture of it.
Three days later, he and other random doodles on this wall were gone, victims of a power-washing.
I'm glad I took a picture of that
Aug 14th, 2009 by Meetzorp
I most generally take a lot of pictures. Sometimes I see something just totally random and awesome, and so I have to stop and whip out the camera and record it for posterity:
I mean, would you otherwise have believed me if I told you that I saw GOATS in an empty lot on my way to work one winter day? Probably not, I should think!
I’m glad I took this picture so many years ago because 1) houses with towers are awesome and 2) this house was torn down not so very long after I took this picture (7-18-04).
In the same vein I am glad for my own particular reasons that I took the following picture this past winter:
That is because The Skillet Licker is no more, and the stereotypical hillbilly-and-hound duo have gone the way of the window-washer. A new eatery is slated to debut…The Big Grill.
Similarly, I took a whole series of pictures of “the Strawberries of Strawberry Hill,” evidently just in the nick of time, because the formerly iconic strawberry-bedecked fire-hydrants in our neighborhood have recently been restored to shiny and standard red.
I’ve been in the process of backing up all of my pictures on my computer lately, since my old external hard-drive died, and I didn’t have them ALL copied anywhere else. Now, every last stinkin’ one of them is burned on to CD, and a good 1/3 of them are also located on Flickr or my old Gallery site. I think there are some that I have come across in my backup process that should be put up on Flickr, and probably will soon. I may write entries around some of my favorites, just because.
Wanderlust…
Aug 14th, 2009 by Meetzorp
Man, I’ve been just plain itching to go somewhere! Preferably on my bicycle, with all my necessary gear stuffed into panniers and/or bunjied on to a rack. What really kicked it into gear was meeting up with and hanging out with Jacquie Phelan & the 42-Below North team (and subsequently reading her blog and some of the other participants’ stories). I spent a fair bit of time chatting with Dan, who was from Florida and had a fair bit of bicycle touring (supported and unsupported) behind him, and we swapped stories about the cool shit you learn from being on the road. How to keep sanitary, what’s good to eat to keep yourself going, and the joys of finding a really good spot to relieve yourself!
Given financial and time-constraint considerations, that’s not happening this year, but I am holding on to the hope that we can do a little touring up in Wisconsin’s extensive state parks system next fall (come on 2010!).
So, we’re not going to be doing anything particularly epic, but we do have a number of fun minibreaks planned for, as well as the typical roster of excellent autumnal activities.
As far as traveling goes, we’re starting off by heading up to Omaha this weekend-ish to visit my sister and her family and help Max ring in his second birthday (which was Wednesday, actually) I scored a big ol’ tub of Duplo blocks which are surefire kid-pleasers and can be integrated in with the regular Lego stash after he gets old enough to be trusted with choking hazards.
Here’s my Mom and the little guy groovin’ on some bubbles from the last time they were down in KC visiting.
I know Chasm & ChrisGo, under the umbrella of Team Frank Stallone are planning another guerrilla urban cyclocross race, tentatively slated for 9-9-09. If the last TFS urban cyclocross race is anything to go by, this ought to be a damn good time!
I’ve got another event brewing, scheduled for 10-3-09, the Tour De Tetanus. I’m not 100% sure of the format of this “race” but I can assure you that it will be a mixed-media scavenger hunt, alley-crawl, and dumpster dive. Scoring will be determined by the time in which you complete the race, the number of items from the list collected, and how abjectly filthy you return. There may also be a photographic proof component. We shall see. The only think I can guarantee is that the prizes will be absolutely fabulous.
Then of course, there’s the traditional cyclocross season, which tends to be a lot of fun. I’m still not convinced that I need to actually do cyclocross. Not when I can be one of the many dog-bringing, coffee-sipping, photo-snapping CX spectators! I’m also keeping my fingers crossed for extreme silliness at the Halloween ‘cross race. I don’t know what Joel will cook up to do, but I am sure it will be pretty silly.
For my own self, plans continue apace for my Minnie Pearl costume. I’ve got a good-sized length of green-and-white floral calico for the dress, and another length of pea-green organdie for the petticoats. I’m looking around for a smallish straw hat which I can then load down with artificial flowers (of which I have a decent stash) and of course the iconic $1.98 paper tag. I reckon I will probably wear character shoes, adapted for street use by the addition of rubber half-soles and heel caps in place of metal taps.
But before there in Halloween, there’s Bonktoberfest, and AFAIK, we’re going to manage to go this year. Last year we were busy crossing Tennessee while the Earthriders were camping, riding, and whooping-it-up down in Arkansas, but I think we will be camping, riding, and whooping with the best of ’em this year. They’ve moved the destination from Syllamo to Ouachita this year, and I’m pretty stoked. Syllamo is idyllic, to say the least, but Ouachita is no less lovely, and the location offers two different trail systems, the Ouachita and the Womble, and from all accounts, the Womble is much more beginner friendly than anything available out at Syllamo. I continue to be a mediocre-trending-toward-shitty mountain biker, so the allure of beginner friendly trails certainly piques my interest.
The river and the surrounding countryside are a draw in and of themselves. In years past, when we’ve gone to Ouachita for the Ouachita Challenge, while Joel was out hammering it home on the trails, I was out cruising the back-roads and digging on the gorgeous scenery.
Later on, after Halloween, but before Thanksgiving, we’re planning another long weekend, this time up to the wilds of Northwestern Nebraska, to visit my folks. We’ve been trying to coordinate a visit up to their house, but their schedules and our finances had long conspired against us. But by early November, Mom & Dad don’t have any traveling or major obligations in sight and we should be able to eke out the time and fundage to get out of town and go see them.
So yeah, no big crazy trips this year, but we’ll be getting out of town on three different weekends (two of them “long weekends”) and doing plenty of fun stuff around town.
I think this winter we’re going to be aiming at getting more good low-budget fun going on once more. Look for more gravity races, another chariot race, and maybe, just maybe, another incarnation of the Drag Races. And of course, there’ll most likely be the return of Street Cred sometime in February. It almost reconciles me to the inevitability of winter.
In the summer of 1995
Aug 11th, 2009 by Meetzorp
I was, as my dad puts it, “wound up like an 8-day clock.”
I felt like a can of cheap beer at a party, all shook up and ready to explode sparkling fizz all over the place. The Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun” echoed in my head as I bounced around like a superball, all pent up, but sensing a release ahead. Highschool and the worst of adolescence was behind me and I was ready to go full-steam ahead.
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bOD2Yp0fI4]
I had a cool old car that I thought I could use as an “in” for meeting boys.
I’d gotten it in 1993, and by the ’94-95 school year, I had it running. It hadn’t helped me pull yet that year, but I held on to the hope that some boy would eventually be suitably impressed by a girl who could pull off a first, second, and third gear scratch with a 53hp car.
I had installed a Sony tape deck in place of the old 6-volt A.M. Telefunken radio and had copied a bunch of my parents’ 1960s and 70s rock albums onto audio cassette. Edgar Winter, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Big Brother & The Holding Company were in heavy rotation. The car was so noisy and lacking in sound-deadening and my speakers were so cheap that you couldn’t hear a single hiss, pop, or dead spot in the recordings over the muted flatulence of the mighty 1600cc single-port.
In a way that only a music-obsessed teenager can, I drew parallels between the old Rolling Stones album “Sticky Fingers” and the (then) new Black Crowes album “Three Snakes and A Charm.” I made a tape (one of those extended-play audio cassettes) with the whole “Sticky Fingers” album on one side and “Three Snakes” on the other, and would listen to the two albums back to back regularly. I still believe that the Crowes were consciously mirroring “Sticky Fingers” in that release.
Earlier on in the ’94-95 school year, I’d developed a raucous enthusiasm for The Meat Puppets. I’d been turned on to them by my friend Eli who had probably been exposed to them via Nirvana, as most of the kids in our age & geographical range had been. He had introduced me to a lot of other music, most notably The Dead Kennedys whose songs still carried relevance some 12-14 years after their initial release dates (hell, are STILL relevant some 20-odd years later). The Meat Puppets for some reason struck a particular chord with me. Maybe it was because Curt Kirkwood’s voice was so rough that I could howl, holler, and squall along comfortably in the privacy of my car.
In fact, Lake Of Fire was playing on the Sony the day that my sister and I were literally blown off the road on the way to school.
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd4cRXmWt3o]
There was black ice on the road, a strong crosswind, and I drove a car that could be push-started by a single anorexic teenager. It was a bad combination of factors, but I manged to keep it together. Sure, we got blown into the ditch, but I kept the car heading in a decent line, and so we hit the ditch at a long angle, as opposed to head on, which could have endo-ed us, or straight sideways, which probably would have rolled it over on its side. I drove out the mishap, only to get the car stuck in Delsing’s pasture!
I guess my senior year of highschool kicked off with Green Day’s big commercial hit, Basket Case.
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hitMpM-P-Bs]
I guess it made a pretty big damn hit with a lot of us kids who were just simmering in adolescent awkwardness, lack of sexual success, and, well, paranoia. After three years of steady unpleasantness, I frequently second-guessed myself to the point of really understanding the notion of “giving myself the creeps.” I loved it because it sounded all upbeat, but it was all about being a dysfunctional misfit. If that isn’t the sum and total of adolescence, I would like to know what is. Some people look out over a bunch of goofy teenagers and think “those kids are having the best time of their life,” but each and every one of those kids is to a greater or lesser extent, completely freaking out inside.
Most of the rest of the year, I was stewing in my parents’ old record collection and the punk-ish stuff I’d picked up from Eli, though my good buddy Justin got me hooked on Primus and I did spend a fair amount of time “Sailing The Seas of Cheese.” By graduation, though, I think we all just got really freakin’ silly. I recall the Deadeye Dick song, “New Age Girl” getting a lot of play, both on the radio and on my friends’ car stereos.
After graduation, I spent a pretty idyllic summer basically just screwing off. I had a part-time job cleaning motel rooms which left me with long afternoons free to ride my bike out to the Dam and aimlessly cruise around, seeing if any of my buddies were also out there screwing off. Friday or Saturday nights often saw me in Hemingford, cruising the ‘Butte with whomever else happened to be at loose ends and knocking around. Or else in Levi’s basement, listening to him and his band jam. Sundays were dedicated to stock-car racing. Dad was running winning #48 in the mini-stock class and I was still way into my pit-crew role. I’d also volunteered my way into a sort of very informal internship with the local paper to cover the stock car races (in fact, it was popular enough that the Scottsbluff & Alliance papers picked it up, too, so I was sort of syndicated!) I saved my dad the cost of my pit-pass by talking the stock-car club into granting me a press pass into the pits! I’d do short interviews with winning racers, or with anybody who’d had a particularly impressive wreck that week. My dream at that point in time, was to become a journalist working for Rod & Custom or some similar glossy hot-rod and racing mag.
I was college-bound, but deeply dubious about it. Earlier on in my highschool career, I’d hit a lot of roadblocks; undiagnosed and untreated depression led me to debilitating doubt about my future. When people would ask me what I was planning to do post-highschool, I’d just make up some bullshit and tell them I’d be selling encyclopedias or polishing septic tanks…anything to kill the conversation and get off the hot-seat. Our highschool guidance counselor sat my whole class down one day and told us that 89% of us would flunk out of college (god knows where he got the figures…probably out of his butt…or why he felt the need to tell us something like that even if it were true). Not being one of the star students of my class, I assumed that would be ME, so why even try to get into college in the first place? Anyway, I wasn’t really feeling my future in the spring of ’95. I kind of wanted to go the the University of Nebraska at Omaha, but I didn’t think I could afford it. I applied to one school; Chadron State College. On a whim and basically as a joke, I applied into their Honors Program. Based on ACT scores, grades, activities, and an entrance essay, the Honors Program gave accepted students a boost by bypassing some of the “requireds.” It also entitled you to stay in the egghead dorm, Brooks Hall (at the time, the only dorm with Internet access!), and granted participants a half-tuition waiver scholarship. Elimination of some of the required courses and the scholarship were the big draw for me. I planned to stay in the Freshman Girls’ dorm, Edna Work Hall, as my friend Kerri had done. It seemed like a more friendly transition into college than to be thrown in with a whole cadre of Smart Kids! Anyway, on a smartassed whim, I applied, and nobody could have been more surprised than I was that I got accepted.
As summer rolled on, I learned about my room and roommate assignment, and wrote a few letters back and forth with Hope Mills, a total stranger from Colorado. I was getting terribly excited and terribly nervous. Holy shit! This was IT. College. Dorms. A roommate.
Mom and I made a major Target spree. It was the first time in my memory that I didn’t drag my feet and moan about back-to-school shopping. I’d bought an indian-batik bedspread from a head-shop, so I co-ordinated the rest of my dormroom accessories around its turquoise, coral, lime-green, and black print. I had a coral colored trash-can, lime green and turquoise sheets, and a little black mini-fridge. Hope had written to let me know that she’d bring a microwave, so we’d be quite comfortably set up. I also had a couple of the then-trendy fractal/tie-dye computer-generated posters, and Hope had a Magic Eye, as well as some less-trendy and frankly more tasteful artwork. I also had my signature Endangered Species poster.
Anyway, once I was there and settled in, I started to figure out what was what, who was who, and a little bit of what to do with myself. I quickly discovered that my assigned roommate and I had little in common. Sure she was a nice enough girl, but we came from different planets; she was religious and into country and western. I was not and not. She liked to drink and flirt; at that point in my life, I was a celibate stoner. I did find, in the girls across the hall, two kindred spirits.
Jeanne and Jenni were my across-the-way neigbors and a total blast. Jenni was a small-town Iowa girl, a former cheerleader, homecoming court member, and general all-American girl. Jeanne was a Californian neo-hippie with hair longer than mine (and mine was to waist length back then) and a no-holds-barred sexy wardrobe. I was the nerdy third, but somehow we all clicked. We’d hole up in their room watching Beavis & Butthead and guzzling Mountain Dew and pixie-stix, then we’d run up and down the halls of the dorm with our shirts pulled up over the backs of our heads, loudly declaring ourselves to be “The Great Cornholio”
Jeanne, in the grand tradition of Freshman co-eds everywhere, was maintaining a tumultuous (and doomed) long-distance-relationship with her highschool boyfriend. While they were still dating, she considered TLC’s Waterfalls to be “their song” and would occasionally leave him tender voicemail messages with that song blasting in the background to remind him to be faithful.
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-n-jZJhpT4]
When they inevitably fell apart, Room 211 wasa total Alanisfest and we all ought to know what that’s like! Also, before the Big Breakup, she had repeatedly averred that Alanis’s Head Over Feet described her feelings for him to a T. When you’re 18, it’s almost easier to let the pop and rock stars do your talking for you. You can earnestly and unironically live in cliches; hell, it’s practically expected!
On the whole, the lot of us mostly just hung out and goofed off in our spare time. We watched a lot of MTV for our favorite songs and videos. 1995 was on the cusp of the Death Of Video on MTV. The Real World had begun to take root, and there were other stupid “reality” shows beginning…Road Rules, Jenny McCarthy’s dating show, and some other crap. I was there for the videos, an of course for Beavis & Butthead (an idiotic comedy duo who STILL tickle my funny bone, even though I am ostensibly a mature adult).
Anyway, besides getting my first dose of my sublimely ridiculous college education, I got my first dose of MTV. My folks lived way out in the country, so in the 80s and 90s, wehn MTV was the principal arbiter of youth culture in the US, I was clueless, out in the cold, and living under a rock. With typical scared Freshman, overachiever exuberance, I threw myself into college life and activities. Before I knew it, I was volunteering on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at Head Start, which was being run by my 8th grade teacher. I was spending afternoons in the darkroom for the campus newspaper. I was spending evenings in the bowels of the theater department, hemming ladies-in-waiting skirts, or tacking plastic bugs on to Cobweb’s costume. I was maintaining an ultimately unsuccessful romance, going to parties, and though it beggared every ounce of my own belief, getting on the Dean’s list. In the whirl of all this relentless overachieving, I was wearing myself down to a nub. I lost a pretty shocking amount of weight, and when I went home for Christmas Break, I slept for two solid days. But I must say that on the whole, I was enjoying myself in a wholehearted, two-fisted fashion that I have never experienced before or since. It was, it its hectic way, a pretty magical time for me.
And now, back to the music that rocked me that fateful, fantastic year. Whenever I hear any one of these songs, I am instantly transported back to one dorm room or another, and get just a little charge of that fizzy feeling that dominated my psyche back in the mid-to-late 1990s, when I was throwing myself into College and all of the awesomeness and awfulness that implies.
Shaggy – Mr Boombastic (no embedding, but click the link to enjoy!)
Jenni & Jeanne and I used to practice trying to “dance sexy” to this song. I am sure it was hysterical, and I am eternally grateful that we didn’t have Flip-Cams and YouTube back then!
Oasis – Wonderwall
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hzrDeceEKc]
This song was so ridiculous ubiquitous, but somehow…I dunno. I never really got sick of it. I don’t care how naff it is to like Oasis; I still do! I think it’s probably because I can’t help but relate them to a particularly exciting, enjoyable period of my life. And because they wrote really, really catchy songs.
Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet With Butterfly Wings (no embedding, so click the link to enjoy the video)
This is another one that was all over MTV, constantly, for quite a while, and I never stopped liking it. Frankly, I just always dug Smashing Pumpkins. They’re the first band I ever saw live, too, in 1997, on the Mellon Collie tour. The venue was the Rapid City Civic Center, a site with the worst possible acoustics in the history of history. You couldn’t hear a goddamn thing but squall and static; you couldn’t tell one song from the next, but you know, I was so freakin’ stoked to be there that I just pretended that I knew what was going on and had myself a mighty fine time.
Coolio – Gangster’s Paradise
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxF-ImXaUdE]
It scored a Weird Al parody, and if that isn’t a harbinger of success, then I don’t know what is.
Nine Inch Nails – Head Like A Hole (no embedding, so click the link to see the video)
I had some friends who claimed to like to get it on to this song. I didn’t really question that too closely. I can hardly think of a less erotic song, but whatever floats your horny boat, I guess. Apparently, Closer is also a gothic gettin-it-on song.
POTUS – Peaches
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvcohzJvviQ]
This was one of those really, really irritating songs that we all not only put up with, but ultimately embraced, though why, nobody ever could say for sure.
Deep Blue Something – Breakfast At Tiffany’s (no embedding, but click the link to enjoy!)
Another song that was supremely annoying – a total earworm. A song about a doomed relationship being extended by blind hope and tenuous connections. At least if you’re a bit of a cynic. They’re on the verge of a breakup, and they decide that a shared “both kinda liked it” attitude toward Audrey Hepburn’s iconic movie was grounds enough to give the relationship another shot. What. Ever. But it was one of those songs that for better or worse will always remind me of a phase of my Freshman year of college. And the failing relationship I cycled through with all of the appropriate melodrama.
Skee-Lo – I Wish (I was a little bit taller)(no embedding, but click the link to enjoy!)
The last gasp of the genre of kid-friendly, radio-friendly rap ushered in earlier in the decade by “The Fresh Prince” Will Smith and Young MC, this was a fun song about being a bit of a loser but still having a good time.
Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun
[youtube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiSkyEyBczU]
And shifting gears almost violently, we segue into one of the absolute creepiest videos that I can ever think of. Soundgarden is one of the big sounds of the 1990s, though, and this song was one of those songs I was hearing all the time, at the time. And I loved it, and I loved the forboding, threatening, Stepford Gone Devil video. Something about it made me think Coupland, nihilism, and drugs. I don’t think this video could have been made “with a straight face” in any other point in time. It is perfect for when and what it was.
As disparate as all this stuff was, I took it in wholesale, with the typical freshman attitude of “hey, it’s here, it’s cool…obviously somebody thinks it’s important or good.” I think I was generally in a mood to enjoy whatever came my way, uncritically and enthusiastically. (Okay, so I did think “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” was a pretty stupid song, but I was about to break up with my boyfriend at the time that it was popular and just didn’t have a lot of patience for a song about extending the misery of a mismatched relationship over such a nebulous connection.) (gosh, was that a long parenthetical thought or what?) Anyway, all this was is a little trip down memory lane, of very mainstream circa 1995 hits and the significance they had for me during a particularly exciting-to-me time in my life.
summer signifiers
Aug 6th, 2009 by Meetzorp
A couple of weeks ago, I started thinking that the Sturgis Rally was coming up, and that the Box Butte County Fair would be next on the agenda. Mom had told me about some friends stopping in on their way up to Chadron for Fur Trade Days, and that made me think that in terms of a school year, summer’s past its peak and getting ready to wind down.
When I was a little kid, the County Fair (Box Butte) was the high-point of excitement for the summer…and the bittersweet harbinger of the forthcoming schoolyear. Shortly after the Fair, we’d be dragged into a tedious weekend of back-to-school shopping where countless pair of ugly and uncomfortable jeans would be tried on until the least offensive could be chosen. Boring shirts, sweaters, and skirts would be selected. New socks and underpants. Blah, pencils, blah, notebooks, blah, erasers. Fresh crayons, colored pencils, and glue helped reconcile me to my back-to-school fate.
But before the foot-dragging “can we just be done” rounds of back-to-school shopping cast a pall on my childhood summers, there were all of the earlier-summer rituals. Swimming-lessons began in mid-June (at which I sucked) and led to afternoons of horsing around in the Hemingford public pool. The dam would be let out in early July for irrigation, and then you can go tubing down the Niobrara. After the river started to get too low for good tubing, the local festivals would begin. Fur Trade Days in Chadron, Heritage Days in Alliance. Then, Highway 385 would flow with rumbling motorcycles as bikers from all over the country poured into Sturgis, SD, temporarily making it the largest city in South Dakota.
From summer-to-summer all of my friends who were in 4-H worked on their projects for the next Fair. In the spring, when lambing and calving took place, they’d get their “4-H project” lamb or calf. Kids whose families didn’t keep livestock might show a dog or a chicken, or participate in the various arts and crafts competitions. Photography, baking, woodworking, and sewing were all well represented. My longtime friend Amy was an ace seamstress even as a young girl and she’s always have something really fabulous in the sewing competition. I remember when we were Juniors, she’d made this plaid bomber jacket trimmed with Ultrasuede for the Make It With Wool category. Bomber jackets made of many materials were quite the thing that year; I had a similar one from Woolrich, but certainly couldn’t claim the cool-points from having made it.
When I was little, I thought the carnival was the main point of going to the fair. Scarred merry-go-rounds, tilt-a-whirls, a Ferris Wheel, and the Hammer (which I never went on) along with other attractions (Gravitron, Scrambler, centrifugal swings, enormous bounce castle), basically all the trimmings! Plus there were all sorts of exciting events and shows. Demolition derby! Square Dancing! Concerts! And that’s besides the main events, the stock-shows, the rodeo events, and the various judging competitions. It was best to go toward the end of the week, so that most entries would have been judged and you could see how well everyone had done. Scrupulously groomed sheep, sleek goats, and cattle with the ends of their tails frizzled into a cannon-ball-sized pompon were arranged in stalls so you could admire their finer points.
As I got older, not only were checking out the displays a big draw, there was the hope of catching up with school friends and other kids I knew and finding out what they’d been up to, and if any fun could be expected. I’d see girlfriends I had hardly seen all summer, and we’d dish about what was liable to be cool and popular for the upcoming school year (2 different color converse, and you have to wear 2 scrunchies that co-ordinate!)
Mom and Dad would catch up with friends they saw infrequently, too, and Dad would get wound up BS-ing with someone or another while Audrey and I bounced around like impatient superballs, champing at the bit in the direction of the rides.
Down here, a harbinger of summer’s end is the Air Show. I saw a billboard for it just recently and realized that very soon my little world is going to be very noisy for about a week as all of the stunt planes, the Blue Angels, and vintage aircraft of all description start to descend upon the old Downtown airport and then start showing off hotdog maneuvers above the West Bottoms.
Going back to the nostalgia kick from above, I was so fascinated by planes when I was a little kid. I think a lot of that stemmed from the beautiful red-and-white 1950 Navion that my grandpa owned and flew back then. Grandpa’s plane was much like the one <a href="http://www.trade-a-plane.com/clsfdspecs/820245"<in this link. My grandparents flew out from California to Alliance several times in my childhood and once flew my mom, sister, and me to Baltimore to visit Grandma’s brother, my great-uncle Mike. When jets flew high overhead, or cropdusters buzzed so low it didn’t seem possible, I was riveted! Much later on, as a highschool girl, I found myself courted heavily by Air-Force recruiters after the results of my ASVABs rolled in. As a gearhead and a reasonably good student, I appeared to be a good candidate for becoming an aviation mechanic. Sometimes, I regret not having gone for it. Sure my crappy eyesight would probably have kept me from actually getting to fly, but the money sure would have been good, and I expect I’d have largely been working with a lot of pretty interesting characters.
The cats had no idea what was in store for them!
A year ago, we decided to keep a stray pup that had shown up on our back step.
She was sickly, ridden with vermin, and ever so pathetic, but she came around well:
For a while, her snoot was kind of too big for her head (or the rest of her)
But as a probable collie-mix, it makes sense.
She grew up to be very, very furry. More than we’d at first guessed she’d be.
This became
this
Our dog has a pretty active social life.
Since puppyhood she’s adored Justin’s famous dog, Emit.
Nieve has also been one of Ruby’s mentors in how-to-be-a-dog.
Sometimes, she administers a necessary smackdown.
This past spring, our friends James & Dalia got a Pyrenees puppy they called Bagheera.
At first, Bagheera didn’t quite “get” the concept of Wrestlemania.
But as you can see, he was a quick study.
But as Bagheera has grown, he’s become more prone to accidents and injury, so he and Roo have to take the playdates easy. Enter our next-door-neighbors’ puppy Connor.
This homely little cuss is a personable pit-bull mix who LOVES to run. His favorite game is to be chased, and Ruby’s favorite game is to chase others, so as you can guess, they’re pretty good buddies. Connor can be kind of pesty, and certainly presses Ruby’s buttons, but on the whole, they’re good for each other.
This first year of having a dog has been pretty great. She’s a good little buddy who gives me an excuse to wander around the neighborhood aimlessly. She’s so cute and personable that she makes meeting the neighbors easier.
She has her issues – she’s slow to warm to company at home (a little too committed to protecting the home-front), but on the other hand, away from home she’s generally pretty outgoing and she’s great with kids and generally very good with other dogs. She doesn’t know a lot (any) tricks, but she is pretty good with general obedience and her natural manners are surprisingly good. She has destroyed surprisingly little property during her time with us…one book, one shoe, one bedsheet, and one plastic flower pot that I can think of and those were all crimes of opportunity. If we keep things generally well tidied, she doesn’t go looking for problems.
I hope to report many, many more years of awesomeness with our little varmint-feathers.
The mealtime mambo
Jul 22nd, 2009 by Meetzorp
About a year-and-a-half ago, we put the cats on a diet.
Predictably, mealtime drama ramped up to incredible proportions. In fact, Grizzo will begin his campaigns for breakfast or dinner up to three hours before it is actually time for whichever meal. He’d always been food-oriented, even before the diet, but the diet has flipped some sort of circuit breaker in his tiny little brain and it’s constantly shorting out now, with especial surges when anybody makes the mistake of walking near or in the direction of the food canister.
The diet has been a success, however. The cats are now comfortably within the weight ranges our veterinarian suggested and I must say that the both of them (and especially Minnie) do look much healthier and better proportioned than ever. They don’t act much different than ever, being cats and all. They sleep a lot, when they are not awake and actively wrecking something. Griswald still has his unfortunate territorial urinating compulsions, and Minnie still “plays with gravity” or scratches on things when she wants attention.
We’ve tried positive reinforcement, we’ve tried negative reinforcement, we’ve tried to eliminate likely triggers, yet the cats tend to stay a step ahead of us and find something to befoul or destroy. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s pretty much impossible to train a cat out of a bad behavior, and you just basically have to wait until they finally give up and die and cats live for a very, very long time.
Anyway, the whole point to today’s entry was that I’ve had to instate yet another step in feeding the beastlies because Griswald, and to a lesser extent, Ruby were running Minnie off from her meals.
Minnie is by far the oldest of the lot of critters here. She’s somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years old and has slowed down a little bit, especially in the area of appetite. She will eat her portion of food in entirety, but she doesn’t gobble it down like Griswald or inhale it like Ruby does. So Minnie will still be nibbling away long after Griz has snarfed his portion, so he not-so-subtly will move in on her. He’ll stick his whole head in her dish and shoulder her over. She’ll settle back on her haunches, looking intensely peeved, but not doing anything to reclaim her rightful meal. She might pause for a hiss or a growl when he moves in, but doesn’t really back up her words. Then Ruby will pick up on the excitement and hover over the cats, poised to pounce on whichever cat moves first. This, of course, drives Minnie even further away from her meal, which by that point has probably been entirely polished off by Griswald.
So, to combat this recent development, I’ve taken to putting Minnie’s dish on top of her crate, Griswald’s on the floor, and Ruby’s on the other side of the room. When Roo finishes her dinner, I call her into the other room so that she cannot loom over and menace the cats.
Having multiple pets can be incredibly labor intensive, and each time I think I have these little varmints figured out, they throw in a new complication. And I feel like such a loser for feeling all triumphant about outsmarting a pair of cats. Each time I crack one of their pesty capers, I’m all like, “hah I WIN!” and then I realize that I have been celebrating outwitting a cat, and the glory tarnishes just that little bit.
Eeeeeewww! Boy Cooties mini re-cap
Jul 19th, 2009 by Meetzorp
Until my computer is back up and running, I can’t give you a proper recap of the event, with pictures, but I’ll hit a few highlights:
- Christi winning in high style with about a ten-minute gap on Jenny, the second-place finisher
- Nikki bringing up DFL, just behind Caitlin, who wins an honorable mention for racing so hard (and drinking so much espresso) that she puked.
- Getting free soda from Grinders, ’cause the waiter thought Melissa was cute
- Having precisely as many door prizes as participants (9)
- Victor’s disco dancing (caught on video)
- Vanessa & Katie rocking the almost-matching hairbows
- Chasm’s chest-brows
- puddle-splashing water-fights (so far I’ve organized 2 events and it has rained for both of them – I wonder if Tetanus will be a muddy mess, too…I kind of hope so!)
- The wine-bag(s)…oh how they fueled the most sophomoric, raunchy humor.
- [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BSChjiU24]
I invented a new dance to this song – and was told that I looked like Olive Oyle while flinging my limbs along to what may be my new most favorite song. I was wearing a red dress and my ubiquitous big boots, so I can kind of see it….kind of. - beer-chugging wheelies & foldsie bar-spins
- furry bear-legs and penis-antennae
- We’re doin’ it again next year, but with a cooler of Freez-E-Pops at the end!
Not such a quiet night in
Jul 17th, 2009 by Meetzorp
So yesterday evening, Joel was off to Kung Fu class, and I was considering my options of leftovers from the fridge, maybe re-watching one of our DVDs, and finishing up cutting out this suit jacket I’ll be working on one of these days. As I was just about to have a rummage around the fridge, the phone rang, and it was Sarah Gibson of ACME calling, urging me to “pedal my little butt on down to the Plaza,” ’cause there was going to be some sort of bike event going on with maybe some of the guys from the Minnesota Cold Sprints and…Jacquie Phelan!
Now I know not everyone here is a follower of mountain-bike stuff or women’s sports, so that name might not mean much to everyone who checks in here, so I’ll tell you. Jacquie Phelan is one of the first women to really get out there and kick some ass on a mountain bike. She’s the originator of Wombats, a women’s mountain-biking and social club. She’s also an avid dumpster-diver, a charismatic chatterer, giddy, exuberant, wildly-dressed, and a total hoot. I had a big ol’ fun time shooting the breeze with her and Sarah at the Grand Saloon down on the Plaza, where she buzzed around like a happy bumblebee with one of my tulle helmet crests worn like a ruff around her neck, until she switched up and tied it over her cascade of dredlocks like a postmodern fontage.
She was traveling with the We Like Bike crew, a group of cyclists hired to promote 42 Below Vodka. I’m not exactly sure how or why vodka and bicycling are related, but the folks who were riding in this coast-to-coast tour seemed like a super-nice and fun crew. A lot of art students doing an impressive “What I Did on my Summer Vacation.” Likewise a few bike-shop mechanics taking a little sabbatical. Talked for quite a while with a fellow named Jonathan who’s got quite a bit of bike touring behind him and got to hear a bit about some of his pre-We-Like-Bike adventures. Chatted a little about cyclocross with some of the rest of the crew. I can’t say that I know much about 42Below, but I can say that they did a good job getting together a pretty representative cross section of bike nuts to go out and spread the good word.
A couple of the guys had bought some of my hats from ACME, and I made further arrangements to meet up today with Jonathan to show him the rest of my wares and sold yet another hat…ace for me! Once my computer is fixed, I’ll be putting up a few pictures of Jonathan and his new As You Like It Designs hat, and Jacquie, rockin’ the helmet-fluff headdress.
Also going to be adding her blog(s) to my must-read list. She’s got a colorful written voice that’s pretty true to her manner of speech. Moreover, she seems to have lots of adventures (even in her own back yard) and adventures make for good reading.