OK ... he's not mine exactly. He's my mom's, my sister's and my niece's. But he is the sweetest and most loving dog ever, and when you're at my folks' house you can't help but feel that he's adopted you. In fact, there's no way you can NOT pet Bailey. He'll just nudge and poke at you until you do.
He's also the "miracle dog" that my family almost just lost because he ate a sock and got it stuck in his intestinal track. Much surgery and stress later, he's back to normal. So I'm extra glad he's here to have these moments.
To all the Vox Moms out there!
I'm not a mom myself. But last night, I got a glimpse of what the whole parenthood thing means. My mom, sister and I went to see my niece in a dance recital. The recital was at a local high school, and was primarily numbers from the high school dance company. My niece is in elementary school, and her dance teacher happens to be the same woman who runs the high school company. So the elementary schoolers got to come in and do one number, at the end of the show.
All the elementary school moms I was with sat lovingly through the entire show to see their little ones on stage for maybe 5 minutes. The rest of it was the high schoolers strutting their stuff. Which, while entertaining, was not what a large number of those moms had planned on seeing this particular night.
See, Kenny Chesney was in town yesterday, doing a show at a nearby concert pavilion. Most of the moms, including my sister, are HUGE Kenny fans. And many had sold or given up their Kenny tickets (again, including my sis), when the dance recital got scheduled for the same night. They all joked about how they could be there now, instead of spending two hours watching a bunch of high school girls twist and turn and bounce so that they could witness their own kiddos' five minutes on stage. But the bottom line was they did it lovingly and without regret, because their children had worked so hard for this moment and were so excited about getting on that stage.
And that to me pretty much sums up what moms are all about.
My niece, by the way, rocked. I may not be a mom, but I am a very proud aunt.
I brought the camera to take some pictures at the recital, only to find out that cameras weren't allowed. But since I had it with me, I took some pictures of my little brother instead. I never mentioned a brother? Oh, well. That's because he's ugly. So ugly that he's cute, and my mom even named him Otis Ugly:
I love this little dog. My parents have had him for years. He snorts and grunts and flies through the yard trying to bite the other dogs' tails, and never stops barking, and gives all sorts of attitude. When I house-sit for my parents, he crawls on top of me when I'm sleeping and stares down in my face, and I wake up thinking I'm looking at an alien or a very large bug. But he's precious just the same.
Of course, the little brother thing is a joke, but my mother always proudly said that she tries to treat her dogs just like her kids. Our family photo albums have just as many pictures of the various dogs that grew up with my sister and I as they do of us ourselves. Since for whatever reason my parents always had male dogs, I've always joked about having four-legged brothers.
That's one of the things I love the most about my own mom - her love of animals and the way we always had pets in our family and how the joy of critters was instilled in me and my sister pretty much from birth. I can't imagine life in a family that didn't have pets.
I mean, LOOK at him? What would the world be like without Otis Uglies?
Happy Mother's Day to all!
Show us one of your plants.
Well, actually this one will be my mom's as of tomorrow ... it is one of her Mother's Day gifts. But I love the colors in this Scotch Broom, and want to go back and get one for me!
Between Vinnie and Sylvie (Lee decided her name should be spelled with a "W," and I'm OK with that), our house is full of intrepid explorers. Nothing is sacred. My underwear could end up anyplace.
When you are faced with all that furball energy and curiousity, the only thing to do is to try to use it to your advantage. The ferret owners of the old days used to use them to catch mice and rats. They'd carry them around in their pants legs and peddle their services at nearby farms. They were the first exterminators.
Me, I'm far too squeamish to market Vin's services as a mouser. But a weasel has to earn his keep. So I decided to put his "ferreting" skills to the test and send him on Mission Impossible: Figure out where all the damn socks go and why they never make it out of the laundry in pairs.
He gave it his best shot, really:
Anybody in there?
But eventually, we had to concede that even Vin Weasel, Ace Detective, was no match for the ever-elusive Sock Thief.
Better luck next time, Vin.
Editor's Note: The above is pure fiction. Sure, Vin explored the dryer. But he didn't give a weasel's butt about my missing socks. In fact, if he'd found them, he probably would have just hidden them better, because that's what weasels do. His real job is simply to be cute.
Happy Weekending!
So, one of the things I dislike most about work is the whole notion of being "stuck" at a particular place for a defined period of time. I'm not lazy - I just like to do things accordingly to my own schedule. Let me figure out the whens and wheres sometimes and you'll get 12 hours of work out of me. Put me in a box and I tend to be climbing walls after 8.
It goes back to that whole P-ness thing I wrote about a few days ago. I'm a critter who thrives on flexibility. I just ran into an old friend who told me he's gotten his employer to let him work at home 2 days a week now, and I was practically drooling with jealousy while we talked.
All that is just to say that yesterday was a beautiful spring day here in Baltimore. It was warm and sunny with clear blue skies and a very slight breeze that made the trees sway just a bit. It was short sleeves and no jacket and you'll be warm, but not roasting, kind of weather. We get far too few of those days around here - maybe a few week's worth in April and May and then again in October and November. The rest tend to be hot, cold or rainy.
So I got to work and I realized the thought of spending this entire rare, gorgeous day at my desk was making me downright sad. Up on deck first thing in the morning was a 2-hour meeting with a small group of us from the project. I'd scheduled this particular session, and I THOUGHT I'd booked us a conference room, but I'd forgotten. I swear, I didn't plan it that way. There were too many of us to meet in the project office I share with someone else, unless we wanted to sit on each other's laps, and the rooms had all been taken by people who were smart enough to schedule them. So we got creative and decided to meet outside.
We found an open outdoor table near the little cafe where I grab my coffee in the morning. Our meeting was to go through descriptions of over 100 reports we use and determine the best way to re-create them in the new system we're bringing up. I seriously underbooked our time when I thought we could do this in 2 hours. We ended up needing 4. But miraculously, none of us had anything else scheduled until later in the afternoon, so we just stayed there, stopping now and then to grab coffees or food.
The sun gradually rose in the sky. The day grew brighter and the air warmer. There were no walls or flourescent lights. We heard snippets of funny conversations as students or other staff strolled by. We looked up now and then at a canopy of leaves and we breathed in fresh air. And still, we worked our bums off.
It was wonderful.
One of the guys who was in this meeting is a consultant from Florida. He commutes to Maryland and stays here 4 days a week to be on our project. He has told me over and over again that "our weather sucks." He's used to heat and sunshine and surfing. He chuckles over what the rest of us consider "warm."
At one point, he laughed as he looked around yesterday. This kind of weather brings out lots of arms and legs that have been buried under cold-weather clothes for a long time. He said "Man, ya'll have the whitest white people I've ever seen!" I looked down at my own pale arms, knowing I was one of them.
Fast-forward to late afternoon. He and I were standing in our lobby with another co-worker, waiting for the elevator. I was chatting with the other co-worker when suddenly he burst out laughing. I looked down, and saw that the way I was carrying my meeting materials had pushed the sleeve of my left arm a bit - just enough so that you could see the glaring line where the sunburn I'd managed to get from our day of working outdoors ended.
I looked like I spent the day driving to the beach with one arm hanging out the window. The other is still perfectly pale, because I was sitting in a spot that was half in the sun and half in the shade. I'm a human checkerboard, or maybe a tie-dye shirt. Usually I try to even myself out when I sit outdoors, but you don't really think about that kind of stuff when you're in "work-mode." And you definitely don't remember to bring sunscreen to a day-drone office job.
"Damn," I joked. "I'm always telling my boyfriend and my family how friggin' hard my job is. How am I going to get them to believe me if I leave work all pale and come home with a sunburn?"
But today, as I sit here looking down at my one sun-kissed arm, which is already turning from red to brown, it makes me happy. Office drones aren't supposed to get a tan until they get a long sunny weekend or a beach vacation. We're supposed to be pale, flourescent-lit, bleary-eyed lab rats who blink when we step outside. That's the price we pay for a paycheck.
And we all know I just LOVE bucking the system, even if all I have to show for it is a lopsided tan.
What fictional character do you relate to most and why?
Amazingly enough, after all the reading I've done over the years my answer hasn't changed since I was a teenage girl. That answer would be Jo March, from Little Women.
Just a few of the reasons I still feel close to this age-old heroine:
- Jo loved writing, more than doing anything else. She could sit in her attic and scribble the day away without thinking about it.
- Jo was a tomboy, not a girly girl, and she was rather proud of it.
- Jo could be bumbling and awkward at times.
- Jo wanted something different from life than most other women in her time period, and she chased after it.
- Eventually, Jo realized she also wanted pieces of the life other women had, and she chased after those too.
- Jo was fiercely loyal to those she loved.
- She tried to be tough, but she ended up crying and breaking her own heart a lot, too.
- Jo hated "see and be seen" gatherings and events, and felt lost and bored when she was dragged to them. She preferred rowdy good times outdoors to stuffing herself in a gown and going to a ball or formal affair.
- In love and in friendship, Jo looked far beneath the surface. She connected to people because of what was on the inside, not out.
- Jo got frustrated about what she couldn't do and threw temper tantrums now and then.
- She was incredibly impulsive.
- She was terribly undomestic.
- Her best friend was a boy.
- Jo was convinced that her "one beauty" was her hair.
Writing this made me want to dig out my copy of Little Women and reread it for probably the 10th time!
I'm totally struggling for a good attitude this morning. Maybe this will help.
Things I'm loving:
- Springtime weather
- Looking up at the trees and the sky while sitting in the park:
- Finding Silvie asleep in the clothes hamper
- Good books
- Friends who understand my quirks and sometimes off-kilter attitude on life and myself
- Three day weekends
- daydreams of financial freedom, which for me translates not into more stuff, but just into "freedom."
Things I'm Loathing
- When 3-day weekends end and you find out that because you had the audacity to be off one day, people schedule so much into the rest of the week that you may as well not have taken off at all ... at least as far as the de-stressing part goes.
- Knots in my stomach because of work, which mean not being able to drink coffee, which means I will be stupid all day.
Birthday Boy:
All in all, it was a weekend long celebration, complete with presents, a steak dinner, time at the pub, and a sleepy-headed late afternoon relaxing at a local park.
This is that time of year that I tend to slack on reading, only because there's so much to do. Spring cleaning, yard stuff, and enjoying bright, blue-sky sunny days before they give way to the humidity of summertime take the spotlight, and curling up with books sits on the backburner, waiting for that time of year when I take up weekend poolside reading at my parents' house.
Even so, I did recently finish reading Charles Baxter's Saul and Patsy:
I hadn't read Baxter before, although he's written several novels. After reading this, I'll definitely be looking for more of his writing.
The story is of a young couple who move to the Midwest and start a life and a family in a place that is remarkable perhaps only in its flatness and conformity. It is strip malls, old farmhouses, trailer parks and the day-to-day life of people who live in a rural version of suburbia.
It is mostly a love story, and what drew me in was the way Baxter manages to make such an ordinary yet extraordinary love interesting. I was never much on romance novels, but read enough of them to know that what makes them entertaining is that rush of first encounters and attraction, the conflicts and struggles the couple go through in order to end up together. Once the author mates them, and they move into the "status quo" stage, the novel ends. After all, that's supposed to be the mundane and boring part of life, and romance novels are about looking back on the thrill of new loves past or dreaming of some infatuated, all-consuming romantic future. They aren't doing dishes and paying bills and going to work, that's for sure.
But the beauty of Saul and Patsy is that they've already hit the status quo phase before the reader even comes into their lives, and their relationship is still delightful and frustrating and interesting. Saul is no knight in shining armor - he's idealistic and moody and a chronic worrier who obsesses so much about his place in the world that sometimes, if I were Patsy, I'd have told him that if he wanted to know where he was, he should grab his own butt cheeks, look over his shoulder, and there he would be. Patsy is pretty and smart and kind, but she's also so practical and day-to-day that sometimes you wonder why Saul is still so in love with her. She is sometimes wonderful and sometimes drab in her ordinariness. The beauty of the book is that as they live their cookie-cutter lives, as they bicker and laugh and play Scrabble and watch their daughter grow, you really come to understand that it is all the little flaws that drive them crazy that also leave them helplessly and permanently in love with each other.
In their relationship, Baxter makes the normal beautiful. The book also describes itself as part comedy and part horror story, and there is that, too. A Jewish teacher in a town full of predjudice, Saul finds his heritage turned against him by the students whose lives he tries to improve. He learns that sometimes the minds he tries to open would prefer to stay closed. His students are tragic, heartbreaking, terrible and yet somewhat frightenly endearing, as are many others in their narrow-minded community. There is an undercurrent of violence, ugliness and destruction that comes to the forefront in spite of all the everyday ordinariness going on.
And in the background of it all, there are the subplots of many other struggling and sometimes comic characters - Saul's midlife-crisis enmeshed mother, his ridiculously handsome and successful brother, Patsy's cynical but kind co-workers at the bank, an elderly and somewhat demented neighbor who makes them cookies both to be neighborly and because she's not sure Jewish men eat them and would like to find out, and the guardian of one of Saul's students, who wins a big-screen TV at a fair and has the door of her trailer temporarily removed so she can get the thing indoors, then accepts the fact that her idiot box leaves her with no "living room" in her living room.
All in all, it is a wonderful read, filled with various slices of life, funny and frightening and everyday, coming together to create a dysfunctional but somehow functioning community. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about the ending, as there were loose ends and promises of both horrible and good things to come, but no way of being sure which would happen. But I think Baxter intended it to end that way, because the whole novel was a look at real life, and that's how real life is.
What personality trait has gotten you in the most trouble?
Professionally, that would be my P-ness.
Yes, you read that correctly.
I've taken the MBTI Personality Type Indicator several times over the years, both the various "unofficial" online versions and the real deal. I used to work in a career counseling office and one of my jobs was actually scoring the tests.
Anyway, I'm an INFP. The "P" stands for "perceiving." The other side of the scale is "J," or "judging."
Those terminologies really make no sense to me. Because basically, the breakdown is this:
J's like and need order, structure and being planful. They like decisions to be made.
P's like and need flexibility, spontaneousness, and the ability to do things their own way. They like things to be open-ended.
Extreme Js find Ps frustrating, because they come across to them as wishy-washy, flaky, unreliable procrastinators. Extreme P's (like me) find Js equally frustrating, finding them militantly structured, inflexible, rigid and too quick to lock something down without leaving room for creativity and exploring all the options.
Thus, my extremely large P-ness gets me in trouble in the work place. Since my job is working on a project that requires structure, order, schedules and firm decision making, you can see why it would. If you want a taskmaster, you need a J. The Ps do their part when things don't go as hoped in spite of all the structure and planning in the world, because we can look over the situation and go "no biggie - let's just do it this way instead" and actually be excited by the prospect.
I like my P-ness. But sometimes, because I have to live in a very J world, I wish it would go through a bit of shrinkage.
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Recent Comments
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Princesskasren said:
That is so much prettier than the stuff we have growing wild around here. It is yellow and pretty ugly... read more
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shellakers said:
[this is good]Awwwww..... What a sweet puppy! I know how dangerous it is when they decide to eat socks (ot other clothing).... read more
on Me and My Bailey
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on They Don't Call Them "Ferrets" For Nothing