my own brand of dorkiness

visual perception is cool. check it out. if i wanted to think a little bit, i could tell you why that happens. it’s too bad i don’t feel like thinking today

wow

Merkel Elected as Germany’s First Female Chancellor

reason #592348 why i love my dog

last night we get into bed. chris is reading a book, and i am dozing off after a long weekend at a dog training seminar (which was pretty interesting, by the way). sometimes we let the dogs onto the bed with us for a few minutes at night or in the morning when we wake up. if harley had it her way, she’d sleep the entire time up there with us, but our queen-sized bed is just not big enough. pretty often, harley will come up to the side of the bed and beg to be let up. last night, she was begging chris, and he noticed that it looked like she was breathing funny. she kind of had her mouth open a little bit and was going “whoo. whoo.” she didn’t seem to have any trouble breathing – it was just that she was kind of doing it in a funny way, with her mouth open. picture a woman in labor doing that lamaze huffing and puffing – something like that. so he lets her up into bed, and she lays down between the two of us, still breathing with her mouth puckered open. chris and i look at each other. he says that he thinks she has something in her mouth. i sort of doubt this, because it’s not like she’s a little puppy anymore. she doesn’t go around picking up and eating weird things. i am more worried that she somehow got hurt while we were training at the seminar. but, i reach into her mouth anyway, to see if she has anything. and what do i find………………….but a peanut!! a whole peanut, shell and everything. she was just walking around, holding a peanut in her mouth. where did she find that, you ask? i have absolutely NO idea. the last time i even saw a peanut in a shell was about 3 months ago at a restaurant. we have never had them in the house. it was so unexpected, and so NOT what i would have ever guessed that she would have had……..i laughed until i cried for about 20 minutes. harley is just hilarious.

the ATL

today i miss living in atlanta. i miss the warm winter and the colorful leaves that last for months and months, without falling on the ground. i miss the buzz of the city and people going about their business. i miss zooming through traffic with the windows down. i miss eating at Moe’s. i miss going to Taco Mac with Jos & Mike. i miss walking with chris and harley down by the chattahoochie river. for the most part i haven’t missed living there too much – but today, i do.

now i feel…

…like i am going to spontaneously combust!! i am working on about a billion things for work this week. whenever i start to get into something, someone asks me to do something else *right now*. my list is huge, and i feel like i am not making progress. on top of that, i am getting emails about how i am going to do things for the thanksgiving that we are hosting at our house……..AWERIJASDF;OIAS;DFA;SIFA!!!!!!!! (that is frustration, in case you couldn’t tell)

lonely sometimes

i really don’t have any really good friends that i talk to a lot (not including Chris – he is fabulous – but i should have other friends too, you know?). i know a lot of this is probably my fault – i am uncomfortable about calling people on the phone, so i usually don’t, and they don’t really call me much either. it’s not that i don’t want to talk to people – that is the furthest thing from the truth – i just always feel like i am inconveniencing people by calling them. i don’t know why. my colleagues at work basically resemble my dad – 40 or 50-something-year-old engineers – so no luck there. i do have a few “dog” friends, but we really don’t get together outside of training. and there, again, most of my “friends” are older women – i am one of the youngest (if not THE youngest) people in my dog training groups. all of my faithful readers here are my friends, of course, but i really don’t see or talk to most of you very much – certainly not as much as i used to. i have two girls who i would consider my “best friends” – but i don’t think that either one would call me their “best friend”. i think that role has already been filled by other people in their lives.

i am just not very good at making close friends, i guess. it really doesn’t bother me all that much or all that often – but today is a day when it does.

they’ll be glad to see me go…

as you can probably guess, I was at another dog show this weekend. It went really well — harley won on Friday, got second place on Saturday, and then won again today. There are only so many people who show dogs, so it ends up to be basically the same crowd of people every weekend. I have really gotten to know a lot of the people, and that has been a lot of fun. Everyone has unique perspectives, and everyone has successes and failures with their dogs. It has been fun to see people from week to week, and cheer them on, wait anxiously to see if their dog is over whatever problem it had last week, and then talk to them and find out what they tried to do to solve the problem. I’d say that Harley’s successes have earned us a good deal of attention from the more experienced and pretigious crowd — several people complimented me and said “I heard you had a great weekend…” etc. I have also gotten to know a lot of the people at my level, and that has been fun too. I try really hard not to be the irritating person who wins all the time, and I think I do pretty well. People go out of their way to talk with me, or tell me that Harley did well. But for as much as they like me…..I think they will all be glad when my time runs out and I am forced to move up to a higher level in a few weeks.