We began the morning by bringing Miss Cleo to the vet. While bringing Zorro to the vet is often sad, because he’s so sick, bringing Miss Cleo to the vet is always mortifying because she thinks vets and vet techs are tasty treats meant just for her.

But she was due for her heartworm test and kennel cough shot, and she’s got a couple of cysts we needed to have a vet look at, and she’s a month away from turning eight which means she’s a senior dog.

Even if SHE still thinks she’s a puppy.

Our vets are pretty flexible, really. They left us in the exam room and took her into the back, muzzled her long enough to deal with the needles, and let her out of the muzzle as soon as she was calm (ish), and when I apologized for her behavior they assured us it’s all part of the job.

Still.

We’ve gone through obedience training, agility classes, and she’s even managed to earn her CGC certificate and whatever we do, she freaks at the vet, and it doesn’t make sense because we’ve had her since she was eight weeks old and no vet has ever harmed her.

In any case, the cycts are benign lipomas, and she’s otherwise healthy, we just need to put her on senior food (do they make senior dog food in small bites?) and make sure she exercises.

Zorro is not on senior food because he is rapidly running out of teeth, and can’t manage crunchies. The rolled food we feed him at least makes him chew a little.

And canned stuff is just gross.

We had both of them on a BARF diet for the longest time, but Zorro can’t really do bones any more, and I was tired of dealing with raw meat.

Still, whenever there are bunnies on the lawn, Miss Cleo watches them with a predatory gleam in her eye, and growls under her breath, and I know she’s thinking “Mom, lunch is getting away.”

Today was not quite her worst vet visit ever, but she did manage to freak out enough that her eyes bled. So now we have ointment for that. Because drugging one of our animals every day isn’t enough.

At least the vet trip tired her out.
Which is good, because *I’m* too tired for walkies.

Do you ever feel like you’re so out of sync that what you’re doing completely doesn’t match up with the imaginary closed captioning says you’re doing. Or saying?

I’ve felt like that for the past two weeks, and while most of that is due to flu and assorted medications which eased the symptoms of flu, I need to take some drastic measures to find ME again.

Today I woke up energizes and smiling, and I greeted the sun with fond wishes.
I had a lovely chat with my mother on the phone, and a lovely online chat with a friend who is embracing her own positive changes.

Then I made a banana and peach smoothie, and drank it while doing the little bit of work that needed to be done today.

I took both dogs out for walkies in the crisp sunshine, even Zorro who still has a cough. I let him set the pace, and he was fine, and didn’t cough at all til we were back at home. (I now wonder how much of his coughing is real and how much is a pathetic plea for attention.)

I came home and had a lovely chat with AT&T nee Cingular, about condensing my plan, and they saved me $30 instantly, and in May I can drop the second line, and upgrade to the Blackjack II (in RED), and then in July I can cancel or downgrade the data card plan.

I ate leftover Pad Thai for lunch with a bottle of cool water, and then went upstairs and did a dance warmup (isolations and stretches) and lifted weights (just one set of each, at thirty pounds, because my chest is still congested, and after two weeks of doing nothing that was enough to make me sweat.)

I did a bunch of crunches and more stretching and am drinking another bottle of water.

And tonight we’re going to the bookstore where I am buying the Martha’s Vinyard Detox book and on Sunday I will begin a 21 day juice-and-pureed veggies detox fast, because I feel like I’m laden with chemicals, and it’s not good.

Chemicals on hair, okay. Chemicals in body, not okay.

On the 15th we are bleaching my hair all the way out and dying it entirely Atomic Pink with nothing to ground it, and I may cut it as well.

I am very excited.

And energized.

And change is good.

Appetizer
If you could be any current celebrity for one whole week, who would you want to be?

Michelle Pfeiffer or Jodie Foster.

Soup
On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being highest), how much do you enjoy talking on the phone?

10 if it’s a friend or family. 1 if it’s a telemarketer.

Salad
Name a charitable organization to which you have donated (or would like to).
I’m a big supporter of Habitat for Humanity.

Main Course
What is a food you like so much you could eat it every single day for a month?

Sushi. I could totally live on it. Or Pad Thai if I wanted something warm.

Dessert
Have you or anyone in your family had the flu this year?

My husband and I both just got over a particularly nasty strain. It’s been nearly two weeks, and today is the first day I feel really WELL.

Friends,

As some of you know, some friends and I have spent the last few months blogging Project Runway over at Electric Tangerine. Now that the PR season is over, it’s time for the new season of TC – Top Chef – so we’re flipping the site over to blog our other favorite Bravo obsession.

If you’re a foodie, or want to be, or just a fan of the show, you’re invited to join the fun and the snark.

New prompts have been posted at Cafe Writing. Have at it.

CenterFire at LiveJournal gets the credit for introducing me to this, and even though my only knowledge of WoW comes from friends who play, I still found it hilarious:

To compare, the original Ma Na Ma Na is also offered. Because sometimes the classics are good, too.

I don’t know yet if there will be any Mustang events at the auto show in Fort Worth next weekend, but I do know that muscle cars are now on my horizon when they never were before because of the job I’ve been doing for the last year, but also because my cousin S. is talking about having NASCAR fantasies again.

I have to confess, I’ve never been able to sit through more than a lap or two of any auto race, but when we lived in Colorado when I was a kid, I did enjoy my one visit to the auto rallies on the ice of the Georgetown reservoir. My impressions of the day are choppy: cold weather, revving engines, cars that looked impossibly fast and impossibly flimsy, at once. I suppose there was also beer, but as a seven-year-old that wouldn’t have caught my attention.

Still, I smile at the memory I do have. And when I see old muscle cars for sale, like the mustang I wrote about several weeks ago, that was a tempting buy, if completely impractical, I get kind of wistful, and wonder if maybe I’m channeling S. Because I don’t like cars. No really, I don’t.

At any rate, Fuzzy and I are going to the auto show. I suspect he’s only agreeing because it will mean yet another weekend in which he will not have to paint the kitchen, and because I told him that the Humane Society will be there. “Cute puppies and cool cars,” I IM’d him, in my pitch. I have a hair appointment that Saturday, so I guess we’ll go on Sunday. The last day of the show. Oh well. It’ll still be fun.

…that I’m out of my house before eight in the morning any more. Hell, it’s not often that I’m out of BED before eight any more, but today is the Texas primary, and since we slept through early voting (Texas has this thing where you can do early voting for about two weeks before the actual election, but the number of polling places is reduced.) We had to be up. Technically, because Texas is weird, we’re supposed to RETURN to a polling place after the polls are closed to participate in caucus, but I doubt that will happen, because of our schedules, though I kind of think it would be fun. Just as voting on the actual day is more fun.

In any case, there is some irony (and it shows you how relatively new our neighborhood is) in the fact that the Democratic primary was at Ronald Reagan Middle School. It seems a lovely school, though granted, we only saw the outside and the gym. (Fuzzy lives on Planet SoDak where apparently strange adults can walk through schools during classes to get to places like the gym, and seemed much put out when we had to move the car once we found out where we were supposed to go.) I mentioned to the election volunteers that having a sign that was larger and more prominent than the lawn signs for Obama, Clinton, and “Stretch” might be a wise idea, since the lawn signs were on BOTH sides of the driveway, not just on the driveway that leads to the gym. (The Republican primary was at a different school in the neighborhood – one that hosted the election in 2004 –

While we were there, the morning announcements, including the pledge, were broadcast over the PA system. (Apparently no one thought to turn it off in the gym), making it my first experience at hearing the entire Texas pledge, which really does boil down to “Fuck All Y’all.” (Actually, that’s kind of a joke, the entire text is “Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.” Just as “under God” was added to the US pledge after the fact, so too was it added after the fact to the Texas pledge – last year, to be exact.) Still during the US pledge there was a gym-ful of adults looking around for a flag to salute – habits are so ingrained – which was comical in one respect, and somehow appropriate in another.

The voting was with pen and ScanTron sheets (Fuzzy complained about the size of the bubbles – they were huge bubbles), and then we fed the sheets into the scanner which fed into a locked box.

And so I have my sticker and it’s 9:26, and I have an article due today, but I don’t want to write. I want to sip coffee and read the paper.

Guess that means I should actually make some coffee.

I haven’t had any in ten days.

Be afraid.

It was a day of cold grayness, but since I’m feeling better, persistent cough notwithstanding, and since the furnace is working, I worked in the living room and watched Cleo watching bunnies scamper across the front yard, and every so often I joined her at the window to see if it had started snowing yet. Sadly, the rain didn’t turn into fluffy white stuff until after sunset, but we have about half an inch on our deck, which, for Texas in March, is more than enough.

I found myself thinking about making a fire (but never got to it) and humming S-N-O-W from White Christmas, because really, what is inclement weather without a cheesy musical adding to the fun?

I spend a good hour researching computer mice, because both my laptops are having mouse issues. No, that’s not true. My PinkBook is fine, I just don’t like the faux right-click that I’ve had to embrace, and while I did buy a cute external mouse for that machine, the rolltop desk downstairs really has zero mousespace whatsoever.

My Vaio, on the other hand, is approaching the two year point, and I know the mouse issues are because I let it overheat one too many times, and most of the time it’s fine, but even my cute ring mouse is beginning to fade, when I remember that I have it and plug it in at all.

And on that note, I need to get some sleep, as we have an early day tomorrow.

Finally, I need to replace the trackball on my desktop machine, which currently has one of Fuzzy’s old mice attached to it. I’m not a fan of mice that require movement – the trackball and I got along so much better – but I killed my last trackball during a period when money was excruciatingly tight and never got around to replacing it, and now I’m at the point where I really have no idea what I want.

Suggestions are welcome.

In other news, tomorrow is the Texas primary, and since we were tucked up sick in bed during the entire week of early voting, we actually are doing our thing on the actual day. I learned tonight that the democratic and republican primaries in our precinct are in separate locations.

Texas confused me when we moved here four years ago because I’d never encountered voter registration that didn’t require you to declare a party before; here you don’t declare when you register, but your vote in the first election of any year determines what you’re listed at for the rest of the year. Or at least, your vote in the primary does.

I have my humidifier turned off and the windows open, because rain finally arrived a few hours ago, after promising to arrive all day, like a good friend who is never on time, and I want to hear the wind and the chimes, and the choppy water in the pool.

I find the sound of storms to be both restful and inspiring. Yes, the two should be somewhat contradictory. Somehow, however, they are not.

I’ve spent the vast majority of the last two days, and indeed, as much of the past week as possible, asleep. There were vivid dreams and fever dreams, and some were the same, but not all. There was also a desperate wish for a breeze, but it was unusually warm, and when there was wind it was blowing across the window rather than in.

Tonight it is blowing in, and while I should be closing the blinds against the too-early morning arrival of the Pool Guy (the pool is just outside our bedroom window), I cannot bear to seal myself off from moist air.

I watched Becoming Jane earlier, and quite liked it.
I am watching Dedication now, but I do not understand, have never understood, why people think it’s arty to live in bleak surroundings. I find the sets depressing, and am having a difficult time moving past them to the actual story.

I want to spend a week writing in a lighthouse.

I should go to bed now.