Ruminating Slav

From such great heights

First things first. I checked out my sitemeter today and someone had checked out some random old post of mine, so I clicked on it and ended up reading a couple of months' worth of posts leading up to Baxter's birth only to reach the conclusion that a) I used to have a lot more to say and b) I used to be a lot funnier when I said it. How to remedy my apparent lameocity? Why, spend Friday night watching multiple Angel episodes, that's how!

BK is out playing poker with The Guys tonight. I need to hook up with some elderly Chinese and/or Jewish women so I can go out and play Mah Jong with The Ladies on alternate weekends. No?

More adventures with the MacBook Pro! Now the light on my power adapter no longer works so I can't tell if the battery's fully charged when the laptop's shut. Go go gadget AppleCare, right? So I make my way to the Apple store to demand satisfaction only to have one of the Geniuses plug it into one of their MacBooks and whaddya know, it lights up! Great! I guess this is the part where I start ignoring the problem until my computer explodes (holy shit!).

Isn't he just a fancypants?

stained glass, originally uploaded by *Karo*.

Check this out -- BK had some art all commissioned and shit for his office. Apparently he even designed it himself -- what can't the man do?

Not even 10 months old and already scarred by his mother

I just put Baxter to bed, and after I laid him down in his crib and told him good night I heard, "Mom?"

"Yes, Baxter?"

"Mom, is it true that you signed up for MySpace today?"

"Uh ... yeah. Why?"

"Mom! God! That is so embarassing! Just don't talk about it to any of my friends, ok?"

"Fine. Whatever. Jesus."

Living off the public nickel

I know I've discussed my love affair with the public library before, but I really feel the need to re-emphasize just how sweet of a deal this is. I can't remember the last time my tax dollars at work gave me so much satisfaction. Perhaps while cruising down a particularly smooth stretch of the interstate highway system (happy 50^th!)?

Lately I've been on a television soundtrack kick -- Veronica Mars, Grey's Anatomy, The O.C., and Six Feet Under all get thumbs up. My music selection has gotten decidedly granny-esque of late, so I figured this would be a good way to brush up on What the Kids Are Listening To. A very spendy endeavor were I to actually buy each album, but the library, it is freeeee!!! And it also has books! So if I hear about a book somewhere and want to try it, I just hop online and throw it on my request list, and they send a copy to the branch right by my house. Genius! So then I try it and if I don't like it (get this, this is amazing), I just return it! Really! For FREE. Another plus is that the taxpayers of Dallas don't appear to be so big on the reading, so there's almost never new requests made for the books I have, so I can just renew online, like, indefinitely. I have books that have been sitting in my house for longer than Baxter's been alive. Is that bad? Am I depriving other patrons of the Dallas Public Library of reading material that they'd get by browsing instead of requesting? Oh God! I'm an anti-browsite!

Now I wish we'd eaten there and had some oysters

Last night BK and I had a Hott Date -- first we ate some sushi in the presence of Dallas' beautiful people (none of whom have anything as pedestrian as a baby, I'm sure) and concluded that the beautiful people like it way too loud in their restaurants. On the way to the movie theatre we realized neither of us was particularly excited to see Clerks II (although Kevin Smith ripping Joel Siegal a new one on his MySpace page is pretty funny) so we ended up at The Oceanaire for drinks and dessert. The dessert was monstrous -- a couple of those bad boys would fix Lebanon's current humanitarian crisis right up. Well, just the food shortage aspect. It was big, but not big enough to provide shelter from Iraqi bombs.

Right!

Anyway. When we first got to the restaurant we ran into some coworkers of BK's, one of whom was all palsy with the bartender and gave him strict instructions to treat us right. Next thing we know we've got two glasses of champagne sitting in front of us, and when that's all gone we order more cause, you know, champagne. It's good like that. Thank god treating us right consisted of comping those first two glasses, though, cause we done drank $80 worth of champagne, people. Sweet fancy moses! It wasn't even the good stuff.

Anyone who has three grand burning a hole in their pocket, feel free to buy me this.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Hey look! Happy baby!

And here's the very same baby, five minutes later. I was not giving him my full, undivided attention, if you can believe I'd be capable of such cruelty.

St. Karo, Harvester of Poo

You might think, given the title of the post, that it's about the baby. You'd be wrong.

This morning Baxter woke up around 5:45, so I fed him and put him back in his crib so he could sleep a little longer. I then shuffled into the kitchen to feed the cat in hopes of heading off the imminent incessant meowing.

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Squish.

"Oh, nasty," I think to myself. I stepped in a hairball. I turn on the light and hike my leg up into the sink. As I'm washing my foot off, I look back at the hairball, but there is no hairball. There is instead big pile of dog diarrhea. Bloody dog diarrhea.

I stepped in bloody dog shit.

See, Buster reacts to stress in a GI-tractual fashion, so he's been off his kibble and loose-poopin' ever since we picked him up from the kennel. Apparently last night he puked in his crate so BK let him out, and I guess he had to go. GOOD DOG, BUSTER, for going in the kitchen -- can you imagine trying to clean bloody dog poop out of cream-coloured* carpeting?

We went to the vet this morning (with a zip-locked "sample" in hand!) to rule out things like worms and cancer, and Buster was given the all-clear. Now all we have to do is just never go anywhere again, and we're set!

(Joshua Wanat, meanwhile, seems to have dropped his normal Fuck All Y'all attitude in favor of needy stress, the result being his normal glossy coat has become increasingly nasty and matted. He got a bath yesterday and today, and I swear there shouldn't be any Joshua Wanat left because half of him went down the drain both times.

Never. Going. Anywhere. Again.)

* Shout-out to my Queen's English peeps!

All bow before BK, god of cookery

Just in case you weren't 100% sure that I married the most amazing man, like, ever, here are the eggrolls he whipped up today for lunch. From scratch. Really! God almighty, were they ever good. Pork-filled delights!

eggrolls on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

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The highs and lows of the Redneck Riviera

First there was the flight to Mobile. Super.



Then there was the Hurricane Katrina damage to the I-10 bridge in Pensacola. Not so super. Also not so super was the Mobile Bay tunnel traffic and the getting lost once we got to Panama City. Nothing super about a 3½ hour car trip turning into six hours.



Then there were real-life alligators! Right next to the Hampton Inn parking lot where we stopped to feed Baxter. Super, as well as potentially unsafe!



Look! More unsuper traffic!



Then there was the beach! Super!



Then there was my child's reaction to the beach. Not so super.



Then there was hanging out with mom and dad -- super!

Then there was making eye contact or physical contact with anyone who was not mom or dad. Definitely. Not. Super.