incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

After working relatively late on Wednesday, we headed to Chad's parents to spend the holiday. (Spreading holiday celebrations over two weekends is hard on the dog, but driving ten hours in one weekend is harder on us.) Had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with Chad's parents and grandmother; some neighbors came over for dessert later. Spent a while working on the 1500-piece jigsaw Christmas puzzle that gets brought every year out on Thanksgiving, thoroughly kinking my neck in the process—not so smart. (I poked at it a bit from time to time after, with somewhat bad effects on my shoulders at the end, but I couldn't stop then!)

On Friday, Chad and I made the rounds of local bookstores, and to my sadness I discovered that it is, in fact, possible to have too many books. The Book Barn of the Finger Lakes is literally a barn; its upstairs (where the genre fiction is) is very poorly lit and not heated at all, and books are double-shelved, piled on top of each other, and stacked precariously all over the place. I could feel myself developing a fine case of claustrophobia to go with the despair that there might be the One Book I needed somewhere in all that, but it was too cold/dark/crowded for me to find it.

It would probably be a lovely place to visit in the spring or fall, possibly with the addition of a flashlight. (Not really the place to look for bargains, though.)

Acquisitions: Gambit by Rex Stout for rysmiel, one of Dunnett's mysteries (I have two from the middle, now, and really should read one of them to make sure I like them before I acquire more), and The Cardinal of the Kremlin as urged by booklog commenters.

After lunch, we stopped in at the Fat Cat in Johnson City, which is still a worthy sf store though it's focusing more on gaming and space for gaming (I can't speak to the quality of their comics selection). In a new development, the Fat Cat now has—cats. Acquisition: the second Exordium book, Ruler of Naught, to find a good home for, either as part of a set that I'm collecting or separately (the books are upstairs and I can't be bothered just now to go check whether I already had a spare of it).

Which reminds me—a query to my readers with PDAs: how and why do you use them, and what are the pros and cons? I see that prices for intro-level units are approaching something I'd pay, and depending on the size and weight I might be interested, but I don't know if I'd really update it any more than the paper notebook and calendar I carry around. Thoughts?

Saturday we went sledding (Chad suggested it, and I think from his tone of voice I was expected to vigorously object to the idea). It wasn't great sledding snow, being powdery and not that deep, but we had a lot of fun. Chad's father's dog, a stocky and energetic Lab, had a great time running down the hill just in front of us (well, Chad did run into him once). Pictures, about 200KB each: Kate and dog, Chad and dog.

Today we left in the morning after Chad helped his dad hang a door. Came home to a happy, well-cared-for Emmy (relieving the non-rational part of my brain, as one of my many anxiety dreams this weekend consisted of the dog sitter not coming all weekend), and now I'm watching the Patriots game (down 16-3 to the Chiefs, it's not looking so good) while Chad dozes on the couch. After the game I'll take the dog for a walk and then go restock on groceries, do laundry, all that fun kind of stuff.

I'd taken Monday off to recuperate from vacation, so I spent Tuesday clearing up the backlog at work. It really is amazing how stuff piles up over just a few days. Despite that, my new resolution to deal with things as they come in, rather than accumulating stacks, seems to be holding.

Wednesday was not a good day. I came back to my office after a day of long, fruitful, but exhausting meetings, and glanced briefly at the Washington Post's front web page, where I found: more Katrina horrors; hundreds dead in an Iraq stampede; and the head of women's health issues at the FDA resigning over the political delay in approving Plan B. One glance, and all I wanted to do was crawl into bed, pull the covers up over my head, and not move for quite some time. But then I got home and was greeted by a happy doggie (which always is a mood-lifter), and helped get our bandwidth back, and put up NetHack spoilers that a stranger had updated out of sheer random helpfulness, and smoothly upgraded a (not-yet-public) MovableType installation, and felt much better for being productive. I later resolved to filter my news and blog reading a lot more heavily, because I need to be able to function and I just wasn't when I was keeping a close eye on the news.

We watched a bunch of Homicide DVDs in the later part of the week, and the show surprised me quite considerably by ( spoilers for season 3 )

Took the dog to the vet on Friday afternoon for yet another urinary system infection. If she's not doing better after a week of antibiotics, she's going to get X-rays for kidney stones. She seems to be doing better, though not as dramatically so as last time she was on antibiotics (a different kind). Her energy levels are entirely unaffected (says the human who's spent far too much of today fending her off), so it's probably not too serious.

This weekend we ran a bunch of errands and did a bunch of work, occasionally enjoying the nice weather while we were at it, and I re-watched a bunch of Fullmetal Alchemist episodes (as previously noted). Terribly exciting, I know. And now, back to work.

Okay, one last thing—the server hosting steelypips.org went down last night, and so in the very unlikely event you need to contact one of us urgently, comment here or send e-mail to the address on my userinfo page.

Here's one of the perils of pet ownership they don't tell you about: what if your pet loves someone else better, and that someone else is out of town?

Well, just now at Chateau Steelypips, Emmy is lying stretched out on her side, head down on the floor, looking as abject as possible, and MOANING over and over.

I call her over to be petted and she ignores me. She'd rather just lie there and moan, as though that would magically produce Chad from across state lines.

(Since typing the initial words of this post, I have made the grave error, from a long-term perspective, of giving her some treats in a Kong—not to reward her, but just to occupy her, not that she'll know that.)

Arrrrgh.

( football neep )

Not such a good week. Too much time working (including one e-filing at 11:30 p.m., which I never want to do again), caused in part by computer issues (whee, involuntary upgrade to XP on a machine with 256MB of memory!), and getting sick at the end of the week, meaning staying home Friday and basically no work done then or this weekend (very bad).

I did manage to do my own research on digital cameras, confirming the recommendation of montoya that the Canon PowerShot A95 was best for us. Best Buy and Amazon had it online for $310 or $315, so that's what I had in mind when we decided yesterday to go buy it.

Well, we went to several different places closer than Best Buy, all of which were selling it for $350 (or didn't have it in stock), and because I'm cheap, we headed for Best Buy. Except, Best Buy doesn't have the same prices online as in its physical stores! You guessed it, $350. Well, I was exhausted and strung out and furious, the last enough so that I agreed to Chad's suggestion to not give them any of our money. Of course, the next place we went didn't have it in stock, but did have cheap memory, and eventually we bought our camera.

After we got back, we put up the tree we'd also bought that afternoon, while playing with the camera (some of these aren't that great, but we're still practicing):

• The undecorated tree
• The ornaments we made at the Corning Museum of Glass, propped up on some tissue paper
• The decorated tree
• A hand-painted porcelain ornament that I really like
• Two little soldier guys, part of a set from Chad's childhood

And, of course, we took some pictures of the otherwise-neglected dog:

• Looking up at her name
• Sad and curled up
• Reproachful

Today, I did more shopping—I think I'm basically done except for cards and some gift certificates, which is not bad—then fended off the nudgy dog, who was upset that Chad had left her for the day to go help his folks with some heavy lifting. Right now there's a truly cheesy movie on TNT, The Librarian and the Quest for Plot Tokens (or something), which has been so cheesy as I crop images and type this up that I'm actually going to have to stay up for the last twenty minutes to see what depths it descends to at the end. Really, it's amazing.

A precious work-free night, and I'm dashing this off very quickly before bed, sweet bed. Though it went and got long on me, so I'll cut the whole thing.

We got back from Worldcon late Monday night, after stopping to have dinner with my mom. Picked up the dog Tuesday; she and I spent a sleepy day out in the backyard, her keeping vigil against those sneaky squirrels, me attempting to do work, write up Worldcon, and stay awake.

That's really my week in a nutshell: attempting to do work, write up Worldcon, and stay awake. Not so much success with any of them, really, either.

Yesterday, we did take the dog to our local park, to give her some better associations with the car, and also to tire her out, as she'd been really hyper since coming back from the boarder's. I think we may have walked her too much, as today she's really been favoring her bad paw, and has been sacked out on the floor for the last half-hour, which is early for her to be this hard asleep. There isn't anything obviously wrong with the paw, so we took a short walk tonight and will keep an eye on it. (She was certainly well enough today to keep the yard free of the very active neighborhood squirrels; if she ever doesn't chase a squirrel, I think we will go straight to the vet.)

Oh, and while outside yesterday, something (probably a mosquito, judging by the initial reaction) bit me just above the point of my right elbow. My elbow now itches fiercely every time I move my arm (of course, I am right-handed), and is twice its usual size, bright red, and noticeably warmer to the touch than the surrounding skin. I hate insects.

Link of the week: my mom spent two weeks this summer working in Romania with orphans for Children on the Edge. She's put up her speech about the experience, and a downloadable presentation, on the web (note: you might not be able to access this link behind a proxy). Hearing about the conditions and the stories from Mom was very depressing, but when I first went through her pictures, I was really struck by the children's smiles.

My mom is a pretty amazing person.

Quickie post to update on the last week and a half, because Friday morning we're going to San Francisco, returning late Tuesday with probably no Internet access in-between.

Chad put up a corner of stockade fence last week, replacing the ugly chickenwire that had been keeping the dog in the yard in that area, and hopefully giving her less visual stimulation to bark at in the process. We were more than a little surprised to find, through a note on our door from the building inspector, that we were supposed to get a permit to put up the fence. I dropped off our application this morning and don't anticipate it will be a problem.

In other domestic-ish news, lbmango came over mid-week to test-drive my Prius and stayed a while to chat. And a number of the summer research students in the Physics came over for, of course, Spiedies and chocolate-chip cookies. Other than that, last week was work work work.

This week has been work work work too, but in-between was a rather busy weekend. Friday night I drove out to Massachusetts for a bridal shower Saturday afternoon. The shower was very nice, though the only people I particularly knew were the bride-to-be and her immediate family. The favors included a plant—okay, I'm told bamboo is basically unkillable, but I still think giving live things out as gifts is a bad idea, especially at a shower, because I'd take it as an obscure ill-omen on the marriage if I did manage to kill the thing. (I have a black thumb. I couldn't even take care of silk plants as a kid.)

Sunday we went to see John Mayer at SPAC (the Saratoga Performing Arts Center). We had lawn seats and arrived half-way through the second opening act, because I was trying to get some work done that afternoon. (That was Maroon Five, the "Harder to Breathe" group. The lead singer has deeply annoying stage patter.) It was actually very relaxing being so far in the back; we spread out the blanket, I laid down and tried to remember my constellations, the music was at a bearable volume for me, and we felt we could chat occasionally, not strain to see the stage, that kind of thing. (Okay, there were the stoned Fran Dreschers behind us, but they came and went.) It's not like one goes to see Mayer for the stage show, at least not if one is over 15. He is, by the way, a better guitarist than I'd expected; he did a Clapton cover and while he's not Clapton, he didn't suck either. He also did all the radio hits before the encore, so by the time we left (during the last song of the encore), getting out of the park was a breeze.

Dog tip of the week: if someone says hey, your dog is running around loose and could you please call it because our dog feels very threatened by other dogs, well, please at least try to appear that you care. Your dog might be the nicest thing in the world, but our dog doesn't know that and might growl, bare her teeth, or worse under the perceived harassment.

(A big dog running full-tilt at you, after you thought you'd gotten safely past, is quite the scary sight. Fortunately my "you will obey me" voice at full volume caused the dog to retreat, but that's just not the kind of adrenaline I need.)

Random bits:

• This comic is exactly how I feel about text-adventure games.
• deleting_my_lj is a good idea.
• Chad and I have both been playing with our iPods; he's blogged his random thoughts, and separately I've been thinking about really, really small musical genres, to wit:
  • Lesbian country songs sung by a man.
  • Football ballads.
  • Songs addressed to a cat.
  • Songs from the point of view of a cat.

  I told Chad the first two of these and it only took him a moment to identify the bands I'd put in a playlist. Anyone else want to take a stab at it, or have their own suggestions?

Oh, and "you really must see X in the San Francisco area" comments are welcomed.

Out to Massachusetts this weekend for a family holiday barbeque. We had to take the dog, because all the local boarders were full, but it went better than we feared—she does not like other dogs, but when outdoors and a reasonable distance away from the other two dogs (my parents' and my cousins') and kept company by at least one person, she was pretty calm. She didn't sleep in our room this time, and yelped for about ten minutes intermittently when she was put to bed, but after that she was okay. The barbeque itself was very nice. We met my new first cousin once removed, who is four months old and looks extremely concerned all the time; apparently he's the spitting image of his dad at that age, so he won't necessarily grow up to be a horrible pessimist just because he looks that way now.

We saw Spiderman 2 yesterday. ( 'I want arms like that, only not evil.' Indiscriminate spoilers. )

I suppose, while we're talking about superhero movies, I should drop in this ( personality quiz result )

Today we went furniture shopping, and found a TV stand that should let us save some space and remove the stereo equipment from its current rickety shelving. Finding the right piece was surprisingly easy; figuring out the best place to put it is surprisingly hard, but will probably be apparent once we get the thing and try out the various options. Oh, and we bought books, of course. And early this week Chad's new computer will be delivered, and I'll attempt to connect it to his old one and transfer his files over. Wish me luck . . .

(I have already had more computer luck than I expected this week. I had to upgrade Eudora because 3.0.6 doesn't support SMTP authentication—go figure—which I hadn't wanted to do because a 4.x or 5.x that I'd tried had saved my mailboxes in HTML (  all over the place, like that) for no apparent reason. Eudora 6.1, I am pleased to say, does no such thing. I don't known whether this means I'm on a roll with computers or I'm out of luck.)

Theoretically I ought to review the week at this point, but really I can't think of anything worth expending the effort or electrons on here. I'm fine, honest, no concerned noises needed, just a little spacey and wanting to go to bed. It'll be an odd motivational tool: must make this coming week worthy of reporting!

Oh, I suppose I can say that we have the cutest dog ever, who would be a much better pirate than Orlando Bloom as Will Turner. They're both puppy-ish and express all their emotions by wrinkling their brows, but Emmy can't spout terrible dialogue, plus she's got that bum leg and a casual attitude towards other people's property . . .