October 2003 Archives

Two nights ago, I got a ticket. I won't go into the details of why or how, because a) it's hard to describe and boring and b) thinking about it pisses me off. It wasn't for speeding though. What a waste, eh?

More driving stuff. I've always said I'm not the most alert driver. I tend to kind of go on autopilot. So last night I'm driving up to Berkeley from work, which is a loooong drive. My route is to take 280 up to 92, and take the San Mateo bridge over to 880. So I'm driving along on 92, and I hit a wall of traffic. Bored, I call Marc up from my cell phone. I said, "Honey, this sucks, there's traffic on the bridge, I think there's an accident." So Marc gets on the Caltrans page to check the traffic incident reports. Nothing on the bridge. I'm like, "are you sure? Because it's definitely backed up. I mean, usually it doesn't back up until AFTER the bridge, near 880, and I'm not even to the bridge yet, and it's moving really slow." Marc checks one of the news station's web page. Nothing for 92 or the bridge. Oh well. We hang up. A couple minutes later, I'm still driving along in traffic, when it dawns on me. I ALREADY WENT OVER THE BRIDGE.

THE BRIDGE IS 9 MILES LONG.

Time to rant a bit. I discovered a new annoyance yesterday in class. There's this one girl in my class who is the biggest ass-kisser ever. So yesterday, for 3 hours I'm watching this girl sit in class and listen to lecture as if the professor was talking to her, and to her only. You know what I mean? She would sit there, with this big smile on her face, and nod at everything the professor would say. Sometimes she'd look all suprised and at awe about something. And every once in a while, she'd interject a "oh!" or "uh huh" or "hmm..." or "really!" I was seriously about to cross the room and strangle her. She also asked a lot of stupid questions. I think the girl sitting in front of me was annoyed too, because I heard her mocking her during break. Since I didn't have anyone I knew in class to mock to, I called Marc to vent. I don't know what I'm going to do next class. I may pull out my hair.

I have another thing to rant about, but Marc wants to do a demonstration of it, so it'll have to wait until next time.

Geek Alert! So last night I spent the better part of the evening playing with my shiny new toy, Trials of Atlantis, which is the expansion pack for for Dark Age of Camelot. Dark Age of Camelot is the PC game that I've been playing now for about 2 years. Marc really, really hates it. ;)

DAoC is an MMORPG game, which stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. It's a lot like games like Diablo, except that it's played entirely online, with thousands of other people in real time. Everquest is a similar game, and probably the one most people have heard about. It's a really addicting genre, and the games are pretty huge time sinks. But it's FUN.

Because I was so excited about playing my new game, I slacked a little and just let Bandit into the backyard when he got antsy. This got me a tongue-lashing from Marc, since I've given him numerous tongue-lashings for doing the same thing. I guess I should back up a bit. Bandit, as far as we can tell, is STILL not potty trained. It's pretty embarrassing for us, since he's nearly 8 months old now. The problem is that we did a lousy job when he was a little pup, mostly due to us disagreeing on how to use the crate to train him. And now the little bugger is older now, and can hold it longer, so there aren't a lot of opportunities for us to "catch him in the act," since we're both gone at work most of the day. So I've been trying to get us to be more diligent about going with him outside when he needs to go so that we can praise him for doing the right thing, rather than just letting him outside alone.

So last night, as Marc and I were taking Bandit for a walk, we got to talking about the wildfires in San Diego, and how horrible it was how a lot of people had lost their homes and everything. So Marc decided that we should have a "Fire Box," where we'd keep all our important documents and pictures and keepsakes. That way, in the event of a fire, we could just grab one box before leaving the house. When I pointed out to him that "Fire Box" sounds a little bit like an oxymoron, since it kind of implies that the box is going to go up in flames (and it would), he decided to rename it the "Fire Safe Box." But then I pointed out that it wasn't really a fire-safe box, since it was going to be cardboard, and wasn't fire-safe at all. I then suggested that we call it the "Fire Contingency Box," but Marc thought that was too long, so we decided to call it the FCB. There's no fun like coming up with dorky acronyms.

During that same conversation, we also outlined a plan for if we should ever have the evacuate the house. Marc would grab the FCB, and I would be in charge of getting the pets to safety. Seeing as how we have three pets, I brought up the point that three would be a lot for one person to handle in a moment of panic. I'd had experience with this before. More on that later. So it was decided that Snuggles would be given last priority, since she's our smelly, less personable cat. Oh come on! Every parent has a favorite! Okay, I'm just kidding about the Snuggles bit, kinda.

I don't think I mentioned Snuggles' little problem in my bio for her. You see, she has a stinky butt. She's been like this since she was a kitten. We suspect it's because she never learned how to properly clean herself, you know, down there. Stubby tries to pick up the slack, but I suspect you can only lick someone else's butt for so long before it gets old. Now we have Bandit helping as well, so things are a little better. At least the farting has seemed to stop. Of course, Bandit has also picked up the slack on that as well. That dog can seriously clear a room.

Back to my experience with trying to evacuate pets. It wasn't even three pets at the time, it was just the two cats. We were living at our apartment still, and I had decided to take a Friday off from work. So Friday morning I'm still sleeping, when I'm woken up by the loudest sounding alarms ever. "BWOOP! BWOOP! BWOOP!" I thought I was in the middle of a bombing raid. Thinking the world was coming to an end, I sprang out of bed, put my glasses on, and ran around the apartment looking for the cats. I found them totally freaked out, and grabbed a backpack, picked up Snuggles, stuck her in the bag, and grabbed Stubby. While I was on my way out the door (in all my pajama and glasses and bad hair glory), Snuggles squeezed out of the bag and ran back into the bedroom and hid under the bed. After putting down Stubby and trying in vain to grab Snuggles, I said, "Screw it" and decided to go find out what was really going on, since the apartment appeared to still be standing. After all that, it turned out it was just a drill, which they didn't think to notify us about. I grumbled my way back into bed while the cats gave me dirty looks.

There was something else I wanted to talk about, but I can't remember what.

I totally forgot to mention the Furry Friends Dogwalk in yesterday's update. We got to Central Park just before 10 am, got registered, put the cute purple bandana they gave us on Bandit, pinned up our number, and started our walk around Lake Elizabeth. I think it only took us a half hour to finish, and the costume contest wasn't until 1 pm, so we went and had tri-tip sandwiches from Raley's for lunch. Yummy!

For the costume contest, I'd gotten Bandit a cowboy costume from Petco. We entered him in the cutest costume category, and although he got a lot of laughs from the judges, he didn't win. Marc and I cried. Actually, we just went home.

Last night Marc decided to go to Barnes and Noble out of the blue. He got some book, The End of Detroit, I think it was. It's supposed to be about the failures of the American auto industry over the past 25 years. He surprised me by bringing home a cute WWF Polar Bears calendar for me. It's got pictures of baby polar bears and stuff. Tee hee. He also got me a copy of Al Franken's new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which, so far, is hilarious.

One last thing - if you have cats, and wear contacts, a word of warning. Don't leave your lens cases lying around. Our cats (and I suspect the culprit is Snuggles) apparently think they make good toys.

Why do my parents hate me???

Ah, back from vacation. I took Monday and Tuesday off this week for a four-day weekend, since Marc is taking this whole week off, the lucky bastard. Sucks to be back at work. On the bright side, I get a short week.

For the most part, we were happily unproductive this weekend. On Friday night, we went to see "Kill Bill," which I'd been dying to see. Uma Thurman wakes up from an assassination attempt- induced coma to exact her revenge with a Samuri sword? Kickass. :) Marc hated it. But he also hated Lord of the Rings and X2, so you gotta question his taste. ;)

I also took Bandit to obedience class this weekend (while Marc was up at the Niners game - I swear, I'm a single parent), where we worked on the "go to bed" command, which basically means that you point to the dog's bed and they're supposed to go to it and lie down on it until you tell them "okay" to release them. He did really well, as I was pretty much able to stand 10 feet away from the bed and tell him to "go to bed." The cute part though, was that he wouldn't just go to bed, he'd pounce on it and slide half-way across the training area with it. One of the other dog owners commented on how smart he looked. It was a proud parenting day indeed!

My back has been bothering me pretty much daily for a while now - it's mostly muscle soreness which sitting at the computer for hours at work and at home probably doesn't help. Marc's been graciously giving me back rubs, but yesterday he took me to a spa to get a 30-minute deep tissue massage. It cost $55 + tip, but he said it was worth it if it meant that HE didn't have to do it for "just one night!" :)

We also went to see "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" last night, which was, ohmigod, gross. I'm probably going to take a break from horror flicks after this one. It was pretty freakin' disturbing, and just nasty.

Yesterday was the first day of the Developmental Biology class that I'm taking up at UC Extension in Berkeley. Mondays and Thursdays, for 3 friggin' hours! Somehow, I managed to stay awake for the whole class. The beautiful thing about this class is that there are no tests. NO TESTS! I almost cried when I read the syllabus.

It's interesting being back at Berkeley again - Sproul Plaza still looks like a hurricane goes through there daily, dumping useless fliers of all sorts all over the ground. I was saddened to see that Happy guy is indeed, no longer there. I miss Happy guy. If you don't know who Happy guy was, he was this old Chinese guy who used to stand just outside Sproul Plaza, and hold up a sign with all kinds of nonsense written on it, and he'd say things like, "Monica and Clinton, happy happy happy." Everything ended with "happy happy happy." Hence, Happy guy. On the bright side, travelling up to Berkeley again means that I get to indulge in plenty of Fat Slice pizza. Mmmmm.