worthless, skunks are

So tonight my dog Gus was sprayed for the second time in as many weeks by a skunk. I let him outside in the backyard after dark and ba-boom, it's suddenly this absolutely horrible eye-watering stench that permeates the entire house. It's not even that "stinky" smell that most folks associate with skunks, this is kind of a stomach-turning burnt-rubber that makes your eye water smell. I'm not sure I can think of anything worse.

The first incident, I tried the tomato product rinse. This was moderately effective, the true ripeness was removed, though you were still instantly aware whenever he would enter the room for the next few days. I made a comment about it on my facebook account and a college friend of mine gave me the MAGICAL recipe:

32 oz. hydrogen peroxide
1/4 cup baking soda
1 Tbsp Dawn degreasing dish soap (the original "regular" or concentrated formula)

Mix and pour over, or use in a spray bottle, or even dump in your afflicted laundry. You can also spray it on indoor or outdoor surfaces that may have also been savaged by the skunk ick.

Seriously, this recipe saved my life. Oh, and did I mention that on the way to the store I hit a deer? I wouldn't even really consider it an accident, my car wasn't damaged too much, though the deer didn't make it through. Ugh. Just another bit of stress, right? It's enough damage that I will have to file an insurance claim on it. Damnit.

What a crazy night. Oh yeah. This all happened between 1:30 and 2:30 am.

islam, best producer of granola bars?

Has anyone tried the absolutely delectable granola bars produced by the 2nd largest US non-franchise coffee chain Caribou Coffee? If you haven't, you might want to try them, seriously, they're amazing. I believe the flavors are Mocha, Vanilla Latte, and Mocha Mint. Vanilla Latte is my fav, closely followed by Mocha Mint. They have virtually no caffeine, similar to decaf coffee (which does actually contain a very small, if useless, amount of caffeine).

The funny bit? I just found a news article that said the Caribou Coffee company had a majority portion sold to the First Islamic Investment Bank in 2000. So, one of our favorite and "natural" American granola bar snacks is really funded and supported by Islam? Crazy shakes. Either way, the bars are damned yummy and I will continue to eat them. :-)

cancelled, amy winehouse

So I had tickets to see the Amy Winehouse concert on 9/25 in Seattle. On Wednesday it was announced that her North American tour has been canceled. Grrrrrrrrrrrr. This will definitely make things a lot easier, since I will not need to take off time from work at a really inconvenient time....but I was really really really wanting to go. And, I'll get a refund for the outrageous amount I had dished out for the tix.

Damn Amy Winehouse. Well, I guess not damn her, it appears thats she has legitimate health concerns, in which case I hope she gets to feeling better. I'm still a little disappointed though.

stupid, cell phones being

Cell phones really are stupid. This morning I found out that my grandmother passed away and that my mom was unable to reach my sister. Her cell service gave a dumb message saying she could not be reached, but did not offer to allow me to leave a voicemail. Damn technology.

Right now I'm not really sure what to do. My parents are on their way home to get some rest after being up all night. If I go in to work I probably won't get anything done except just sit around with my mind wandering. I don't feel particularly sad or upset which irritates me. I feel like the appropriate thing to do is get emotional, but I just don't feel like it. So what, do I watch a movie now? Who knows. Maybe I'll go and get good and liquored up, I have a good excuse at any rate.

Once it's a little later I'm going to mow my lawn. I don't want to be that jerk that mows it first thing in the morning and wakes people up. I've hated that jerk for years. At my new place I'm completely responsible for yard care, ugh, that's something new to me. :-)

scared, rain: nothing of which to be

We've been having really unusual weather here in Oregon. Typically we have a rain-free summer with at least a few weeks in the high 90s/low 100s. About a month ago we had a week of rain and beginning yesterday, rain again! Temperatures have also been quite mild, only a few days of low 90s and that's all.

Does this imply an extremely wet and harsh winter? I hope not. Well, and by harsh I mean maybe 6 inches of snow in the valley and temperatures actually dipping below freezing for more than 2 days at a time.

I picked up Gus from the kennel this morning (I had class in Portland for the weekend) and when we got home he guzzled a ton of water. A few hours later I was leaving for work, and since I moved, I won't be going home on my lunch breaks to let him out. I tried to get him to go out and go potty, but he would not stray from the dry safety right beside the house. I even attempted pushing him out into the rain and he reacted by glaring at me, then running behind me where it was dry. When I get home we'll see if he was able to hold a whole bowl of water for 9 hours...

building announcements, worrisome

Our building manager just sent out a brief list of general housekeeping stuff. You know, cleaning out the staff lounge, don't leave your food in the refrigerator for months so it can rot. Oh, and to beware of the rats and cats in the landscaping! Yes, rats and cats. Apparently the rats really enjoy our landscaping and some neighboring buildings have some adopted outdoor cats who do their part in reducing the pest population. Now that I'm aware of this, I will attempt not to be alarmed as rats scurry beneath my feet. Eeeeeeeeeek!

god, message from

To: People of Earth
From: God
Date: 08/13/2007
Subject: stop

knock it off, all of you

seriously, what the hell?

-- God


I received this as a MySpace bulletin and it made me laugh really hard. I had to share. I'd say I'm about halfway done moving. All of the furniture and heavy stuff is moved. I still need to do my kitchen and clothes and random stuff that has been shoved in closets... Nearly there! Gus absolutely ADORES the backyard, whee! We played ball twice this morning already. :-)

Rogue beer, yumminess of

Last night I took a little detour to downtown Corvallis and had a good night of beer drinking with my friend Markis, an art major friend from WOU that I haven't seen in... about a year. It doesn't seem like it has been nearly so long.

I kept myself to drinking Rogue Brewery beer for the evening. For those of you who are not from the Pacific Northwest, I highly recommend you track down some of this goodness and give it a try. They specialize in ales and do a bit of everything, from the lighter side to the very dark.

Needless to say, I got a bit drunk and had a very good time. :-) This morning... not quite such a good time, but I'm at least functional. Is it me or does tolerance to alcohol continue to take a dip as you age? 5 years ago I would've laughed at my now self.

good day, having a

I don't specifically have anything to write about today, but I just woke up feeling really really good. This hasn't happened in just about forever so is definitely cause for jubilation.

A quirky thought for the day. I just got out of a meeting with some librarians regarding a project we're collaborating on. A few of them are very much "theory" thinkers and put together this gigantic mind map to be the architecture of our project. When I received it in e-mail I couldn't even figure out how to read the darned thing. What turned out to be an excel document of 12 printed pages would have taken me all of 8 lines to write down. God I love librarians. :-)

writing, missing my

I just finished looking at the date of my last entry. June 9, 2007. I've been on hiatus for nearly two months. I refuse to let this blog die, I will stick with it to the end. I promise.

You might ask why I've been on hiatus? Good question. If you haven't asked, well, you'll find out anyway.

There's this little thing called work and school and life. I've been having a more active social life which has greatly impacted my virtual presence. Who knew, right? School has been busy, but that's been done for about a week now, so there is no excuse there any longer.

Mostly, I just didn't feel like writing. The more I am away from it, the harder it was to bring myself to get into it again. Why are people always so scared to get back into any sort of groove? Be it piano practicing or dieting or working out or focused reading... whatever it is, we do it.

I'm staying home from work today. I don't think I'm sick, but I'm not at the top of my game either. I haven't taken a sick day in quite awhile, so figure just staying home and doing some cleaning and whatnot might be a good mental health day. Speaking of mental health, I axed the happy pills and have been great ever since. I've found that I actually feel pretty good when I make a point to eat full servings of fruits/vegetables on a daily and regular basis. Amazing, eh?

Time to get busy...but, for those of you who still check in on this blog now and again, thanks for reading and I promise to be much more regular for awhile.

too, bless you

And thanks to the super cute guy sitting beside me at Starbucks who said "bless you" to me after I sneezed. Sadly, I saw you blow your nose into a cloth hanky and put it back into your pocket. You aren't very cute anymore. Ewww.

overrated, sleep is

So this is a class weekend, my one and only class weekend for "Global Information Infrastructure"--whatever the hell that means. I've only done about half of the required readings and was definitely feeling it last night in class. Perhaps they'll talk about something today that I feel I might be able to positively contribute to in class discussion.

Anyone notice this is being posted BEFORE 8 am? Yes, I've already been up for hours. I went to bed at around midnight, hoping for a lovely 7 hours of sleep. My body said "NO WAY!" and loudly woke me up at 3 am with a "I'm not tired at all, oh, and I'm hungry." Normally I go to bed around 3 am... so this probably had something to do with it. So I got up, watched Ritchie Rich (yes, the Mcaulay Culkin (however you spell his name) one), played some online games, read some for class, and at about 5 am tried going back to sleep. Nope, not gonna work.

On top of that, my knees feel really weird. You know if you kneel on the floor, on your knees, for a long time and your knees can get kind of sore? The feeling is like that, but I didn't do anything like that at all. I suspect some sort of faulty sleep position as the culprit. It's almost like there is fluid on my knees, how the heck would that happen? I took an 800 iu ibuprofin just to be sure, not to mention, my ears could probably use a little of that anti-inflammatory goodness anyway.

Speaking of the ears, they are doing really good today. I managed to mostly sleep on my back last night and not irritate them any, huzzah! I'm going to let them go for a few days before I "do" anything to them (i.e. antibacterial soap washing in the shower, seasalt soaks, etc.). I really really really like them at this size. Scratch that. I heart them.

For once I am finally using up the space at Starbucks that I pay for with every drink I've ever purchased. I figure they probably owe me a week or two of free loitering at this point. Luckily, I'm close enough to the PSU campus to steal wireless internet from them, even though it IS a smidgen spotty. For free, I can live with that.

Piercing pictures!

Masterful, yes?

The ears are redone!

This afternoon I went in to have my ears repierced. It's been about two months since I took the plugs out and I was ready to have it done again. First I want to say GOOD FREAKING LORD IT HURT this time. I kind of liked it, but damn it hurt SO much more than the first time. It doesn't help that I got them pierced a LOT bigger to start out too, a 4 gauge this time. It's been a bit over an hour and they're still throbbing like crazy. I want to take a nap.

This commemorates the beginning of another semester. At the beginning of grad school I decided that I would treat myself to a piercing or tattoo for each semester finished. Though I've already had my ears done once, I still count this as "new."

I'll throw up some pictures in a few days.. I got black glass plugs to start with. At the end of Summer semester I'll squeeze into a 2g, then at the end of Fall I'll squeeze into a 0. Then... it'll be time for some tattoos. ;-)

model, my friend the

A friend of mine is in a competition to become a model for Smashbox Cosmetics. She has to stay in the top 25 to keep in the running and she's currently hovering around 23/24. Please take a moment and vote for her. All you have to do is click on her picture, then go to a webpage that will make you enter a number to verify you're a real person. Thanks!!!

sweatpants, appeal of?

Since I came to work at my current place of employment -- (a PAC-10 major research university) I have noticed one peculiar form of dress for the men. Can anyone say sweatpants? For several days I've been trying to decide what the appeal is. There are definitely two factions: the jock, and the geeky guy who would've worn sweatpants even if they weren't en vogue. I've come up with two scenarios:

1) Practicality/comfort - Sweatpants are easy to put on, they have an elastic waist, they don't really get "wrinkled" so don't require ironing or a "refresher" in the dryer. Typically they're made from cotton so clean easily too. While these are fairly convincing reasons, please read on.

2) Appeal (could it be?) - Initially this didn't even come to mind. Sweatpants always seem like they're bulky and shapeless and really just .. well, unattractive. But then, I started to pay attention to detail. These things can reveal more than the tightest jeans in your dresser. I didn't think I'd ever see such well-defined packages anywhere other than underwear models in catalogs. I'm wrong! You also get some pretty amazing definition of the rear-end too. The different types of sweatpants come into play here, the lightweight and somewhat "clingy" fabric, all the way to the thick and bulky fabric.

It's definitely not just athletes that are wearing them, all types of guys are wearing them...some with more success than others. An interesting phenomena, I wonder how much longer it will last before this crop of men try to assimilate into the girl jean fad.

blog usage statistics, eye opening!

I recently got curious about who my blog readers were and signed up with http://www.statcounter.com to monitor my usage. Don't get worried, there isn't any personally identifable information provided to me. Just general stuff, like your ISP, general region, or if you clicked a link to get to my page, where that link was located.

I had a most interesting one. If your search comes up in a search engine, it will include the search terms used. I really wanted to post this one, it made me laugh so hard! Here is the exact search "which ear do girls get their cartilage pierce and not be consider gay" Definitely something I hadn't thought about. It resulted in this posting of mine that made #21 in Google's results. Is it wrong that I feel a little pride over that? ;-)

roofing

This morning I woke up at about 8 am to the sound of roofers using several nail guns at the same time. Bear in mind, I work until 1 am and didn't end up going to bed until around 4 am. Really, is this necessary? Couldn't they have waited until this summer and I had moved out? Honestly. Around 10 am I tried going back to sleep, only to just doze off and then have Gus start whining at me from the couch. So I had to get up and go in to the living room and keep him company. Good lord he's needy. I suppose it has something to do with him not feeling well (still not doing so great..) but gee whiz.

Now it's 10:30 pm and I'm tired and a little crabby. Can you believe it, I'm actually crabby? My customer service isn't at its best today. Tomorrow I get to drive down to my parents house so I can see my physician for the 1-month follow-up for my happy pills. Wheee! I'm getting tired of driving so much.

i hate blonde valley girls

Are they even called valley girls anymore? Well, if not, you can understand the type of girl I am describing. I had a run-in tonight with one of my favorites. She is the most selfish and self-centered individual I have ever met. She truly believes that the rest of the world is there to provide for her convenience. Tonight she walks up to the ref desk, slams down her assignment, points to a numbered bullet and says "You need to find this for me" then proceeds to make a call on her cell phone while acting impatient. I sit calmly and wait for her to end her call, since I'll be darned if I do her work for her while she's on the phone. The least she can do is pay attention and possibly learn something. Then she tells me that she doesn't have all night and that I'm wasting her time. I responded that I am here to instruct, as well as assist and will be more than happy to teach her how to find what she needs. She then gives a half-laugh and responds "whatever, just get me my article, okay?" To which I respond "I'll be happy to show you how to find it." Then she gets a phone call, lets out a big sigh, then just walks away. I'm crossing my fingers that she won't come back...or that cell phones really do cause brain cancer...

observed, stranger things

Earlier today I took my dog, Gus, for a walk and saw a bit of a contradiction. There was a middle-aged woman running toward us on the sidewalk and she kept making weird hand motions. At first I thought she was trying to wave Gus and I off of the sidewalk. Once she got close enough so I could see what she was doing it became evident that she was smoking a cigarette. Yes, puffing away on a cigarette while running. iPod nano attached to her upper arm, spandex runner garb. She was in great shape...but smoking. I've never seen anyone do this.

Also related to smoking, I've seen a couple young university guys smoking while skateboarding. This is a bit easier to reconcile with, but still.

And lastly. Just a few minutes ago while I was sitting at the ref desk, bored out of my mind, I watched a guy walk up behind a girl working on a computer. This girl was working at a bank of computers that are elevated and have tall stools to sit on. So the guy walks up quietly and then proceeds to squeeze the girl's butt. Not once, but three times. She was startled at first, then realized it was him, and was back to her typing by second squeeze. Hmmm... inappropriate anyone?