The half remembered wild interior of an animal life

tikva has all kinds of great horrible stories about things her dog did that humiliated her and in a perverse way, this makes me want a dog so I can share.

I do however have a cat and I have not talked about him yet this blogathon. I got Samuel T Fuzzbutt the 3rd Esq. in June of 2002. He was a gift from my then partner. I didn't choose him, he chose me. In the past 7 years I have reached the point where cleaning the litter box ALMOST doesn't bother me. However there have been a few... incidents.

A few months ago I got a terrible respiratory infection which went away came back went away and came back again. While I was at home missing work for several days, Sam glued himself to my side and kept me warm. He cuddled with me when I napped and looked all concerned when I had a hacking coughing fit. Eventually I went back to work, not because I was well but because I ran out of sick days. It was a LONG day. I got home looking forward to doing nothing except laying back down in my bed and sleeping till the next day of work....

... to find that my cat had pooped all over the carpet and puked all over the kitchen. This is, so far as I can tell, the way that cats express their displeasure with their people leaving the house. Exhausted, barely breathing, I had to stoop down and scrub the carpet with carpet cleaner foam and mop the kitchen floor.

Sam, its a good thing you're cute cause otherwise you would have been DEAD that day.

http://www.blogathon.org/pledge.php?blogid=69 to pledge me and push me over the $500 mark!

It is terrible that I keep just blogging about what's going on in this room but it really is rather entertaining. Phrases that have been uttered in the last half hour include:

-"how do you rape a car?" regarding Night Rider fanfic which apparently exists oh dear god.
_"she's totally kicking your ass tikva" regarding the fact that I got my post up 2 minutes before her

and the following conversation regarding the GDF guide puppy breeding program:

"I'm buying equipment for the production of pupsicles" (frozen dog sperm)
"You can produce that!"
"What?"
"You have several partners, I'm sure you can get sperm!"
"NOT DOG SPERM!"
"I don't think J can mate with a dog."
"I don't think he wants to!"

There is nothing I can come up with even in my fertile imagination which can compare with that for sheer absurdity.

We are up to $476! Can we make it to $500 by morning! http://www.blogathon.org/pledge.php?blogid=69

I'm not gonna blog about the game anymore. I am going to tell you that we have investigated 1 am dinner order options quite thoroughly. We've got someone here working on a paper as well who does not seem to happy about this. Something about how the research takes more time than actually reading and writing the paper. I remember those days in undergrad and grad school. The professor would say things like "must have at least 7 articles on your topic" and I'd pick a topic and then it would take me 3 days buried in the basement of the library just to FIND the damn articles. Reading them and writing about them was the easy part. The money I spent printing off microfilm microfiche psychinfo and god knows what all could buy me a house by now. But I got my BS and I got my MA and I even remember some stuff from all that school!

Also it is hot in the room. Damn AC isn't doing much with so many people in the room.

Oooh we won the game! Oh crap, I just blogged about baseball again.

If you pledge I PROMISE to stop. http://www.blogathon.org/pledge.php?blogid=69

I am now at $466. THe site says its $516 but that's wrong cause I messed up a proxy pledge.

We have finally figured out how to shut down the DVR and are watching the baseball game. Boston leading 5 to 2, we're in the 7th inning. And look big papi is up and Jason Bay is on base and so is JD Drew woo!

Crap I looked away for a minute and now there's a commercial. That probably means Papi struck out. Sad.

In the midst of this we are desperately trying to get DOg number 1 on tie down so she will stop harassing dogs number 2 and 3. We appear to be playing a game of guide dog, collect the whole set.

Yup, Baltimore is up. Top of the 8th. Lester is pitching. He kicks ass. Dammit some dude got onto second. Might be time to take Lester out as he is at pitch number 109.

I am totally cheating by live blogging the game.

Bottom of the 8th, the red sox retire the side yay!

And that was a hit!!! Go Mike Lowell!!!! Or as my companion says "yay eyebrow man"

7 to 2! 2 run homer!!

Holy shit, the opposition has a submarine pitcher. Those are rare!

I'm still at $416 and the total for the entire event is just shy of 35k. Pledge pledge pledge away and let's get those totals moving! http://www.blogathon.org/pledge.php?blogid=69

So in early 2002 I started dating the person who is now my ex-husband. We were together for about 6 years all told, living together for a good chunk of that time. He is a rabid dyed in wool born in MA Red Sox fan. In 2003 we attempted to watch the playoffs together. I kept quiet about which team I was rooting for, in part because I could not decide. While Red Sox fans are trained from birth to hate the Yankees, the reverse is not true. I understand the whole sentimental favorite thing quite well. On the other hand, the Yankees were my childhood team. THe Yankees won that year and my ex refused to talk to me or anyone else. I was pretty irritated with him. I didn't watch the World Series that year because he would have probably KILLED me if I put it on in our house. What 2003 did was hook me back into baseball.

The 2004 season rolled around and once again it looked like the sox were going to contend for the championship. My partner and I watched all the playoffs including the now famous comeback from a 3 games to none deficit. Then it was time for the world series. I confess, I fell asleep during the final minutes of the final game. It was late, I was tired. MY partner woke me to tell me the sox had won. For the next few years I followed the baseball season including the 2007 World Series victory. I started an infamous poll at my office: choose one red sox player to marry, one for a one night stand.

Then a terrible tragic thing happened. Red sox games moved off FOX onto NESN. I only have very basic cable which does not include NESN. 2008 was a sad sad summer.

THis year I've been coming to Local 50 to watch games about once a week which keeps me in the loop enough for my purposes. This coming September I have tickets to my first live baseball game in close to 20 years.

When I was 6 years old my parents took me to my first baseball game at Yankee Stadium (yes I know all you Bostonian types! I grew up in New York and I was a yankee fan for many years. I'll get to the hell that is playoff season later). I don't remember much about the experience but what I have is fond memory. Popcorn, plastic cups with "milkshakes" in them, lots of jumping up and down like idiots. They lost the game and I recall being personally offended that they had lost at MY FIRST GAME. I got over it. The next game we went to was hat day or bat day or something like that. They played against the Mariners who were apparently stinking it up that year. My dad said he'd be shocked if they lost. THey won that time. I remember a spring training game down in Florida at my grandparents place where I got... I think it was Don Mattingly's autograph. One year we went to see the Yankees vs Montreal. I took one of my Garfield books with me. I know this because inside one of my Garfield books (I still have them all) are written, in my 10 year old scrawl "Go Yankees! Beat Montrel!" I never was much of a speller.

In 1986 the Mets had a shockingly good season. I watched every game up to and including the World Series. I'm sure I had to go to bed to early to see the results for a lot of those game. My parents kept complaining because "baseball on tv is so boring!" but I insisted on watching.

I'm not sure when it was really that I drifted away from baseball but I know that by the time I got to high school i almost never watched a game. My family and I no longer got along well enough for me to want to go see a game with them either. Then came college and graduate school. All in all I probably took about 11-12 years off from watching the game. In the midst of that I moved from New York to Pittsburgh to New York and then finally to Boston. Now remember, historically, I was a Yankees fan. I moved straight into the midst of enemy territory. Then I got involved romantically with a rabid Red Sox fan.

I'll leave you off there for now. Part 2 still to come.

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The DVR is recording a couple of shows until 8 so we can't put on the game yet. Instead we're watching NCIS. Every time I see this show I am shocked by the sheer level of innuendo. If I had to guess I would say that every man on this show is sleeping with every woman on this show, every woman on this show is sleeping with every woman on this show, every man on this show is sleeping with every man on the show AND once a month they have orgies in the office for everyone. I only hope they do not involve any of the bodies the medical examiner has been working on.

I do wonder, i hear all these rumours about intra-office relationships but as I work in a largely single gender field (primarily populated by heterosexual women) I've never been around such things. To me it seems like it would be seriously awkward. Anyone wanna weigh in on the topic?

Appropos of nothing I just ate a sundae out of one of those plastic baseball cap dishes they sell ice cream in at the ball park. Ahhhhh nostalgia! Next post I'll talk a bit about me and baseball.

Status report on Bloggers Union Local 50:

One of our support crew is on their way with ice cream sundae makings. Two more friends with guide dogs will be coming over bringing this from a one dog thon to a three dog thon. One of my friends has finally recovered from an injury enough to go out and is heading over. There is a spinich lasagna on the table which will be heated soon for nomificating (also known as eating). The baseball game is about to come on. This blog will likely become much more red soxy than it has been thus far as the sox invade my brain. I had hoped to get a picture of the pup wearing her red sox bandanna but apparently its lost somewhere in the (fairly large) house and we just don't have time to go looking for it.

Every time I look at the blogathon main page the total raised has gone up and it warms my heart.

The dog is refusing to pee. ALL DAY. I wish my bladder had that kind of capacity. You all needed to know that I'm sure.

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I asked a friend what I should write about next and he said "Pants." Moral of the story is don't ask your friends for ideas because they want to make your life difficult. Fortunately I have things to say about pants.

For a long time I was a skirt person. I preferred the way skirts looked and found them more comfortable. However I have in the past couple of years discovered the joy of wearing a well fitting pair of pants. I have a few of those and I have to say that if I could afford to have a lot more pants that fit me well, I'd probably never wear a skirt again. Skirts LOOK cool, but they get caught in things. I step on them going up stairs. And let's not get into the wind problem. No one needs to see my undies thanks. Pants avoid all those problems. Plus pants go better with my stompy BFBs (that's big fucking boots.)

And yet I am still a sucker for pretty dresses. I buy them all the time, leaving little room in my budget for more pants. Most of the pants that i have were paid for by my mother and sent to me as gifts. Every time I think "I have some money, I'll get a good pair of pants" I end up buying something else.

Somewhere deep down some part of me just doesn't want to be a pants person.

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Life in the settlements is a work in progress. A lot of them are built in the shells of surviving older structures. In more barren areas, a few intrepid souls have begun building their own living spaces. For a while building materials were difficult to find but now the trees are growing back and the outsiders have perfected a building technique that creates walls akin to concrete sheets without requiring anything to be purchased from inside the domes (the primary component is, well, dirt.) Large central settlements ("centrals") manage distribution of anything that comes from inside. The culture in the centrals is substantially more structured than in the outlying areas with a hierarchy similar to the 20th century US military. In the smaller settlements its all farming and production. So far the exchange between the two is peaceful but some folk fear that the centrals will become just as dictatorial as the government inside the dome.

Education is an issue. The current system allows children to learn until around age 13 or 14 while still living with their families but if a child wants an education beyond basic reading and math and they live in a smaller settlement, they will have to go to the nearest central to receive further instruction. Currently the head honchos in the centrals are trying to train at least one student from each outlying area sufficiently to provide advanced education to the nearby population. The smaller settlements do have electricity and communications akin to the early 21st century internet so hopes are high that this will be achieved in the next 15 years.

http://www.blogathon.org/pledge.php?blogid=69 to make my carpal tunnel more worthwhile!