the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
IN RANDOM ORDER 1. Confession: I suck at dirty talking. It is the only time I am ever at a loss for words. In theory, I agree that a certain amount of bedroom patter can be hot, but when it comes down to it I am usually like "um." Describing the action seems weird, because I am here and you are here, and you know what I am doing to you and vice versa. Right? We really shouldn't need a lecture or a PowerPoint presentation. Giving orders sort of works, although if your sex is any good at all the orders are quickly carried out and then you are right back to describing the action. And there is not much point to asking rhetorical questions ("you like that, don't you"), particularly when your partner is in no position to answer. 2. I have to be pretty damn bored to watch Law and Order, but sometimes TiVo has used its tiny little free will to record one and there I am, bored. Besides the confessing on the stand thing, the other Law and Order tropes that bug the shit out of me are (a) the Yoda-like district attorney who hangs out in the inner sanctum and then makes weird cryptic pronouncements whenever the ADAs get into an ethical jam; and (b) the way that every single ordinary citizen, questioned on the street as a possible witness, mouths off to the cops. A detective asks, "Hey, were you working last night?" Law and Order walk-on-role guy says, "Maybe I was and maybe I wasn't. What's it to you?� Who behaves like that? 3. The vegetable in my office building's cafeteria today was "Oriental Blend," and I spent some time wondering about that: the broccoli/onion/mushroom combination from the exotic East; yummy, healthy colonialism; odalisques lolling around on carpets, smoking hookahs and languidly eating institutional stir-fry; In Xanadu Did Kubla Kahn A Frozen Vegetable Decree; where is the Occidental Blend? Holy shit! Check out the many vegetable blends in this school menu---Oriental, Malibu, Caribbean, Italian, Normandy (?), Californian (different from Malibu!), and Sicilian (different from Italian!) Institute of Technology at West Virginia University, you are truly a citizen of the world! I am similarly un-encouraged by the week 3 Friday lunch slot, although out of all the horrible choices there I might just go ahead and try my luck with the ????? ANIMAL BEHAVIOR 1. Sometimes at lunch I like to sit outside in my office building's dreary corporate gray-granite "plaza," just to breathe some regular dirty city air instead of the drowsy-making Conformity Gas that gets pumped into my workspace. Among all the other drones who had the same idea as me, there is often a surprising amount of wildlife: pigeons, skateboarders (there are signs saying "don't do it" but our security guards usually look the other way), a pair of ducks that didn't make it south and seem determined to summer in the fountain, homeless guys snoozing on the benches, itty bitty dogs being walked by high-rise dwellers, nannies parking expensive strollers in the shade of the rather puny trees. But yesterday's outing just icked me, because there was a brain-damaged pigeon out there spinning in circles and pecking at nothing. All the other pigeons were avoiding him and making pigeon faces like dude, what's with that guy. 2. Sunday the whole family rode our bikes (well, Nora just sat on her ass in the seat wearing her cool ocean-creatures helmet) (why can't I have one like that?) to Indian Boundary Park and witnessed a squirrel drinking from the water fountain. I thought that Nora would find it charming, in an America's Funniest Home Videos kind of way, but she just worried out loud about germs. That's my girl. 3. At Indian Boundary Park, we saw a goat that had these weird things hanging from his neck that looked exactly like testicles. Furry goat testicles, one on either side of his face. Scroll down for a photo. I had never seen anything like it before, but when I got home and went to pray to the great god Google, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for search terms. GOAT NECK NADS got me nowhere. I eventually found out that they are called wattles, just like the things on a turkey (duh, I should have thought of that), but not before finding lots of other good goat stuff. Like this opening sentence: I call dibs on the last method! Also, stomach tubing a goat is a "learned" art. I am not sure why this sentence was written. Maybe so when you fuck up on your first goat stomach tubing, you won't feel so bad that you did not have a natural talent for it. 4. I have written before about my cat's "spells" relating to her general elderly-ness and her enlarged heart and the clots in her blood. I can't write about it very much without crying, but we took her to the vet today, and the vet gave her a one-week supply of Lasix and sort of gently suggested that we do not need more than that. And now I have the number of someone who will euthanize the cat at home if we decide to do that, and I have to ramp up the already-frequent mentions of how the cat is "old" and "very sick" and how "the doctors can't make her better" in order to vaguely prepare Nora, and I have to stop fucking crying at work because is there anything worse than crying at work? The self-consciousness, the runny eye makeup, the awful congested headache that lasts all day? I think not. Intellectually, I know the cat had a good long run. But damn it, I like her. She is fat and affectionate, albeit in that "I demand petting from you this instant" manner, which is what most cat owners mean when they use that term. She is entirely too lazy to jump on the counters or destroy any furniture. She put up with a lot of crap from baby Nora. ---mimi smartypants and her bottle of Aleve.
Back to Diaryland
2006-05-23 ... 12:18 p.m.The botanical composition of diets consumed by free-ranging herbivores is commonly determined using micro-histological analysis of oesophageal extrusa, micro-histological analysis of faeces or by counting bites by direct observation (Gordon, 1995).
And now she is very sick. Panting, weak-back-legs, not-eating-much sick. She peed on herself during the last blood-clot crisis, and after it was all over you could tell she was totally grossed out. I know what we have to do. And it makes me cry at work.