When I woke up with a headache last week, I was tired and grumpy and felt like I had a hangover. I’m almost always tired and grumpy, so I didn’t care about that part, but the headache and hangover were new and undoubtedly caused by spending the previous few days playing in a rock band.
Or rather, not just any rock band, but Rock Band.
Yes, I have finally jumped on the video game bandwagon.
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by Elizabeth Knox
ONE-LINE SUMMARY: Laura is a dreamhunter; someone who can step into the mysterious Place to catch dreams to be later broadcast to others, and must use her skills to complete her father’s mission.
I vaguely remember a time when books just had titles and not series titles. The series title might eventually show up around the time that the 2nd sequel came out, but nowadays it seems like every book has a series name from the beginning. The “Dreamhunter Duet” is one of the first series names I’ve heard that only involved two books, but once I read them, I realized why they belonged together.
Book one, Dreamhunter, does have an ending and not one that leaves you hanging mid-action, but I was glad I had checked out both books at once because I needed to start book two immediately.
Dreamhunter sets up the world — an early 1900s version of this one, with the exception of the Place. The Place exists outside of normal boundaries and only a certain few can enter, and even fewer can “catch” dreams which they bring out to the regular world to perform, so that others can experience them.
Dreamquake begins a bit slowly, though it starts right where Dreamhunter ended. But by the time the book ended, it had gone in a direction I hadn’t expected at all, and found satisfactorily fulfilling.
I wouldn’t mind reading more books set in this world, but the Dreamhunter Duet pretty much covered everything. Highly recommended.
I don’t know if Mina ate something that disagreed with her, or if she slept too much during the day, but yesterday night after dinner she was asking to go outside every hour.
“I think this is one of those nights where she’s going to bark at us in the middle of the night to make us take her out,” Chris remarked gloomily.
Sure enough, at about 2 AM, Mina began to bark. I was asleep and dreaming about a dog barking when I suddenly woke up mid-bark and realized the noise was coming from a real dog.
I lay on the bed, feigning sleep, and hoping that Mina would either stop barking or that she would bark just loud enough to wake Chris up. Neither of those events occurred, so I got out of bed and headed down to the dog room.
When I opened the door, Mina was sitting upright on the blue chair that she likes to sleep in, staring at me. Most mornings we have to dig in the blanket and pull her, cross and sleepy, out of the warm nest she’s created. If we put her on the floor, she will scramble to get back into the closest bed, so we usually have to carry her all the way outside to pee while she hangs limply from our arms pretending to be dead. At 2 AM, she had no problems walking outside by herself.
As soon as she got outside, Mina rushed to the edge of our chicken wire fence and started barking. She’s been doing this a lot lately, because the rabbits have become bolder and will hop just far enough out of range so that they can watch Mina fume at her inability to chase them away.
So I glanced up, expecting to see the usual white flash of a rabbit tail as a rabbit bounded away from our fence, and instead I saw three giant gray shapes at the edge of our yard.
I nearly screamed, and for some reason, my first thought was that these were coyotes. I had never seen a coyote but I knew there were some in the neighborhood. I was terrified that one of them was going to run toward us, leap the chicken wire, and try to snatch Mina away as an appetizer, and here I was in my pajamas and fake Crocs. As coyote-fighting gear, it left a lot to be desired.
Meanwhile, Chris would undoubtedly continue to snooze peacefully away upstairs while the fight went on, just like that time when I’d called him about twenty times to pick me up and he slept through all of the phone calls, and eventually I had to call the dogsitter and instruct her to run to our house and bang on the door to disturb the dogs so that they would bark, and that she had to keep banging on the door until Chris got up. Chris actually tried to just ignore the noise, but the dogsitter, determined to earn the $5 I’d promised her for this task, was a real trouper and didn’t give up until he staggered to the door, at which point she said, “Jane wants you to call her,” and left.
Then one of the shapes moved, and I saw that it was a deer.
Two of the deer were standing motionless, staring at Mina. They didn’t move even when I stepped out of the doorway to make sure Mina couldn’t get out of the fenced area. I had thought deer would run as soon as they heard a noise, but these deer seemed both terrified and mesmerized by Mina. The third deer was apparently accustomed to distractions while foraging in the suburbs, and completely ignored us as it bent down to nibble at something on the ground.
Mina was incensed by their continued presence. Though just one deer’s head was as large as Mina’s entire body, she was ready to take on all three of them. While she barked, she kept glancing over to me. “Just let me out to take care of them! Are you stupid, woman?”
The third deer kept eating. And possibly pooping; I saw the tail lift up a few times although I couldn’t see if it actually pooped.
Eventually, the third deer had enough to eat, and moved through the trees at the back of our yard and into the yard of the house behind us. Clearly, this deer was the leader (certainly in pooping prowess), because the other two sprang into motion and crashed through the branches of the trees to follow it.
Mina was still barking so I picked her up and brought her inside. Good thing we were moving soon — I was pretty sure my neighbors didn’t appreciate her deer alerts at this late hour, but I’d been so surprised by the deer that I had just stood and stared at them the whole time Mina had been barking.
We went back to the dog room, and Mina immediately got into bed. It was hard work, protecting our territory.
by Daniel McGinn
ONE-LINE SUMMARY: America is obsessed with square footage, renovations, House Hunters, and flipping houses.
After three houses in nine years and a realtor with a fondness for embezzlement, my lust for housing had begun to wane. Sure, I still checked ZipRealty daily, had registered for various MLS alert notifications under numerous aliases, and knew sale prices for every house in our neighborhood that had gone on the market during our time here, but my heart wasn’t really into it. (Yes, you should see me when my heart really IS into something…just stay out of my path of destruction, is all I can say.)
The hideousness of our last real estate transaction had pretty much beaten out what little optimism I’d had in life, and I had just about resigned myself to merely making catty comments about housing ads and pictures (”You think your living room looks best with your giant dog sprawled on the couch? Really?”) when I read this book, and immediately all my lust was back.
On nearly every page, I came across something interesting that I saved to tell Chris later. (I’m sure Chris appreciated my thoughtfulness.) The book is well-written and enjoyable. Best of all, it made me realize that I am not alone in my obsessive need to look at housing.
If this book had photos, I would have immediately shelled out the $24.95 ($16.47 on Amazon) to buy it. Those of you who are less obsessed can find it in a library.
We went on our first walk of the year today.
For normal people with normal dogs, a walk is an event to celebrate; an occasion to be marked by joyous barking. For our family, we go on walks because that is what people with dogs do, and not because any of us particularly enjoy it. Mina hates her harness, Stanley is afraid of his collar, and Paco simply does not walk. And Chris and I have to walk so far apart that we might as well be on separate walks.
Chris is usually in front with Mina. Although she will stand frozen when we put her harness on her in the house, she becomes an entirely different animal once we get outside. Suddenly she is a speedwalker; legs moving rapidly and hips swinging from side to side. And if she sees a squirrel? Flo-Jo, baby.
Sometimes Chris lets her off-leash so she can chase a squirrel. She has never been able to catch one, but we prefer not to crush her dreams. Once she loses sight of the squirrel, she circles nearby trees and stares expectantly up into the branches until Chris convinces her that she has successfully made the squirrel disappear and can resume speedwalking.
Then we have Stanley, who keeps a consistent pace and distance exactly halfway between me and Chris when I’m holding his leash. Because Paco almost always trails behind me and will stop at the slightest tug on the leash, I end up falling more behind Chris as the walk continues, and Stanley walks further ahead of me in an effort to catch up with Chris.
Paco was so slow today that I had to give Stanley’s leash to Chris so that my arm wouldn’t be stretched out with Stan walking so far ahead of me. While Chris and the two dogs gradually lengthened the distance between us, I started talking smaller and smaller steps in an effort to avoid getting so far ahead of Paco that he would stop moving altogether.
“It’s more tiring to walk this slowly than at a regular pace,” I complained, during one of the few moments when we caught up with Chris because Mina and Stanley were busily marking every available blade of grass.
“Well, he doesn’t like walking,” Chris said. “He does this every time.”
“But he’s usually not this slow. I mean, this is REALLY slow. Do you think there’s something wrong with him?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him! He’s just lazy,” Chris said.
I kept worrying. One of Pedro’s symptoms when he first got sick was that he would sit down during walks and refuse to continue walking. We hadn’t known anything was wrong, and I had pulled him with the leash to get him to walk. Then I found out he was suffering muscle weakness, and then he was dead. Since then, I had refused to pull on any dog’s leash.
Paco had tested negative for Pedro’s disease, so I knew he wasn’t walking slowly because of the same problem, but maybe there was something else wrong with him. Maybe the diet he’d been on for two years had been too strict and now he was faint with hunger and unable to walk. Maybe the winter had weakened his legs. Maybe he had some kind of tapeworm.
We turned onto our street. If there are no dogs visible, we sometimes take Paco off his leash and run with him to our house. This is the only time during a walk when Paco gets ahead of the other dogs because he knows that he’s heading home.
“Try running with him,” Chris said.
I took Paco’s leash off and tried to get him to run, but he still slowed to a walk after a short attempt at running.
Once we were all gathered in front of our house, Chris and I checked the dogs for ticks.
“Take off his harness,” I said to Chris, as he looked over Paco. “It’ll be easier to check.”
Chris began to remove the harness, and then stopped suddenly.
“How did you do this, woman?” he bellowed.
“Do what?”
Chris showed me Paco’s harness. One loop of it was wrapped firmly and tightly around his leg. We couldn’t even pull it off easily because of how tight it was on. Every step must have pulled fiercely at his leg.
“You stuck the neck hole around his leg,” Chris said, working on the harness.
“So where did I stick his neck?” I wondered.
“No, I mean you stuck the neck AND the leg into the same hole.”
My first thought was horror, that I had subjected Paco to this pain and blamed him for his slowness. My second thought was pride — the DIET HAD WORKED! He was so thin now that his neck AND leg could fit into the neck hole!!!!!!!!!!!!
Of course, I felt so guilty that I gave him lots of treats once we made it into the house. Subconsciously, I may have been trying to fatten him up so that I wouldn’t make this mistake ever again.
I tried to watch an episode of Oprah a few years ago and had to turn off the TV when I became too disturbed by the cheering and whooping of the audience. They were all, “You go, girl!” and I was all, “Shut up so I can hear how to buy bras!”
Today, Oprah will have a story on puppy mills.
If anyone can get the average person aware of what it takes to get that puppy into the pet store, Oprah can.
You go, girl, indeed.
One of our windows spontaneously cracked about an hour ago.
At first I thought a neighbor’s kid had hit the window with a baseball or something, because of the loud noise, but by the time I got downstairs and saw the damage, there was no one around outside.
The window is mostly still in the frame, but it is just barely hanging together and totally destroyed. You can tell where the crack started and then spread out.
Upon further investigation, I realized the window was cracked ONLY ON THE INSIDE. The outer pane of glass was completely fine.
It is not possible for the dogs to have done it. There is no way for them to climb up to that window, and even if the three of them simultaneously flung their bodies against the window somehow, their combined weight would still not be enough to create a crack this large.
The buyers of our house are coming tomorrow for their home inspection.
Conclusions:
- We have a ghost in our house.
- The people who renovated this house did a crappy ass crappy job, and the window buckled under pressure from a poor installation.
- We are the unluckiest people in the whole world, and God is telling us we should really consider renting.
A station wagon in front of me today had three bumper stickers on it.
The first two:
Re-elect Gore 2008
and
Draft Al Gore 2008 for a Change in Climate
People, I’m as upset as you are about the last 8 years; possibly even more upset given that we’ve lost like $130,000* in our house value if we sell, and then another $50,000 in the saga known as the Realtor Who Stole Our Money To Buy Victoria’s Secret Lingerie And Yet This Is Not A Crime From The Viewpoint Of Massachusetts Judges.**
But these bumper stickers are SO 2004. At some point, you gotta let Al Gore go. Al Gore is not running for president. Al Gore has a Nobel Peace Prize, and he’s not bringing it to the White House. We have new people running now; people who will be vastly better than the current administration, regardless of their political parties***.
Bumper sticker number three:
Nobody Died When Clinton Lied
All right, I’ll give you that one. Where do I buy one of these stickers?
*Number not inflated for dramatic purposes. Unfortunately.
**Thanks, Massachusetts judges, for teaching us that criminals can commit crimes without penalty, and that we should be committing crimes right now if we want to stay on top of our debts!
***This statement not verified on candidates named Ralph Nader.
10:30 pm: I turn on the Tivo and cue up tonight’s episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” Just as I hit play, someone calls Chris on Skype.
10:32 pm: I stop to put on headphones. I can still hear Chris talking to his friend about some computer game.
10:33 pm: I hit pause on the Tivo, and realize that blogging a half-hour tv show will take me hours, if I have to hit pause every few minutes to write down something on the computer. I decide to switch to AIM and IM Chris my very deep thoughts so that I can simply copy my chat history. Lest you think I am being an unkind wife, I warn him ahead of time to ignore everything I type during this half-hour.
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Today I have been busy reading Stuff White People Like and have sadly come to the conclusion that I am a White Person*.
*For those of you who don’t know me, this may be a good time to point out my baby picture on the upper right.
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