Adventures in dog ownership

Saturday, Ty and I got back from running errands very eager to make sandwiches out of some challah he bought from our favorite bakery while on his morning walk with Bugsy. I asked where the bread was -- we keep it on the counter but he sometimes freezes it -- and he insisted it was there. That's when we saw the empty bread bag on the living room floor. At first, it was just annoying that he cost us $4 and we didn't get to eat any of the delicious bread, and the bakery was closed by then.

Over the next 24 hours, we had other reasons to be concerned. Bugsy began to show signs of intestinal distress, including gas so horrendous it could be used to make biological weapons. He looked bloated and was clearly uncomfortable, breathing more deeply and panting more often than normal. So, we made an appointment at the one vet in town open 7 days a week. He got an x-ray to make sure his intestine wasn't completely blocked and $150 later, we brought him home with some pain pills to just wait for it all to come out. By the time we woke up today (Monday), he seemed back to his old self ... except for one thing. My first thought when I saw him this morning was, "why is he orange?"




Ty left for work before I woke up, but he wrote a note explaining the dog's new fur color. An empty container of paprika and a white leather chair tinted the same orange as the dog's fur.

I called the vet and was told to just wait for it all to pass.

The closing line of Ty's note?

"We may need to rethink how we organize the kitchen."

50 book update

I'm barely hanging on for the 50-book challenge. But I do have two more to add to the list.

1. Game change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. This is an "insider" book about the 2008 presidential campaigns. It's mostly unsourced, so it's hard to tell how much is really accurate, but a lot of the stuff about the Obama campaign is information I've read in other books. A lot of the book is dedicated to the Democratic primary and is about how much Hilary Clinton really thought she was going to win. There are lots of details about how the Edwards campaign imploded and how Obama's success surprised the other candidates. Then there's a section on the McCain campaign and the lack of vetting and preparation before choosing Sarah Palin as VP. I realize you have to take unsourced books with a grain of salt, but it's pretty entertaining and I've read multiple chapters in single sittings.

2. Conversations with Myself by Nelson Mandela . This is a collection of letters, journal entries, autobiography transcripts, and transcripts of conversations that Mandela wrote/had during his time in prison. It's fascinating. I'm finding it hard to piece together Mandella's real story from the little fragments, but it's quite interesting to read about his mindset as recorded during the actual prison stay. I plan on reading his actual autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," later in the year. Don't be fooled by the fact that Amazon is listing this as by Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. Obama wrote a very short prologue and definitely should not be listed as a coauthor.

New Year's Resolution

Things have been pretty normal around here. Not much to blog about, really.

This year I resolved to take on the 50-book challenge again. I've done it a few times before, but never while holding a full-time job. But, it's something I'm trying because the piles of unread books in my house are growing at an exponential rate. Neither Ty or I can resist a bookstore, and if there's a sale at Borders, we wind up adding to the pile and subtracting from our bank accounts. He's trying it too, and at the moment, while I should be working on book #3, he's sitting next to me making an admirable attempt at reading "Walden."

I'm cheating a tiny bit by including books that I started toward the end of 2010 in my total. So, here are my first two:

1. "Obama's Wars" by Bob Woodward. I love Woodward and have read most of his books since the Bush administration. He tends to just present a ton of information with no real point-of-view, so his style can be a bit tedious. But I liked this book, which is about the differing opinions within the military and administration on the war in Afghanistan. It's as much about the "war" of opinion than the actual war. Worth a read if you like politics but don't want to read obviously biased books.

2. "The Girl Who Played With Fire," by Stieg Larsson. I decided to read this after working for months on "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" last year. The main problem I have with these books is the strange syntax. It's very obvious that they're translations and I'm not sure if the problem is the translator or that Swedish itself is hard to translate to English. But Ty read an article last year about Larson that said his syntax is strange even in the native language. He starts off slow -- I've found that the first 100 pages or so of both his books were pretty boring -- but the pace picks up throughout the book. After reading at most 50 pages or so at a time, I read the last 200 without stopping. There's a nice twist at the end and there's some more mystery added (and explained) to the story of the main character. It's good enough to make me want to read the final book in the triology. Also, Larsson has an obsession with mentioning full brand and model names of products on every reference. It's like he's being paid for product placement. It would be like if instead of just referring to my phone as a phone, I referred to it as my "red Blackberry flip from T-Mobile" but called it that EVERY TIME I mention it.

3. "The Big Burn" by Timothy Eagan. Technically, I haven't finished this yet, but I'm more than halfway done and have two days off work without plans, so I will probably finish today. This one is about devastating forest fires in the Northwest at the start of the 20th Century and how they shaped the people and the land. It's also about the early days of the Forest service. It's just a good story. Eagan has a talent for making non-fiction read like a novel. I'm not liking this one as much as I liked "The Worst Hard Time," but it's definitely a good read.

Next up: "Conversations with Myself" by Nelson Mandela, "Ford County: Stories," by John Grisham (I know, I know. I like the type of pointless airplane books Grisham writes. I like something I can read in one night and not have to think about); "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, and "World War Z" by Max Brooks.

My friends

The only good thing about having been sick? Every time I came home early or stayed home all together, my cats slept right next to me, keeping me company. Tonight we're all doing well, but I'm still enjoying the purring and cuddling.

The summer

I keep telling myself I'll blog more, but I never do. I recently wrote in a real journal for the first time in years and told myself I would start doing that more often. But I didn't. I've been missing writing lately and need to start trying to get in the habit again. It's hard when I have to be careful about political commentary and don't really like writing fiction.

The arrival of cool weather seems to be signaling that summer is over. I have slept with my windows closed for the last week and it doesn't seem like I'll need to open them again. We had some warm weather, but it certainly seems to have been a mild year. Summer was fun, though. After some of our mutual friends moved, "Kansas" became the default host of all parties, since he owns a house in the neighborhood most of our friends/coworkers live in. There were lots of barbecues (Meaning, I spent a lot of time eating nuked boca burgers while everyone else declared whatever meat our friend Terry had cooked to be "his best barbecue ever"), and lots of games of Apples to Apples. Kansas and I did some traveling together and are hoping to take another short trip the weekend of my birthday. I'm really happy with the way things are going with the relationship and while there's still new territory, I'm excited to see where it goes. It's been just about a year now and I'm so grateful to have someone so awesome.

The past few weeks have been tough -- I caught some type of bug and for two weeks had virtually no appetite, lots of trouble sleeping, and pretty bad nausea. After two trips to the doctor and two blood tests, one of which I have not heard back on, I still don't know what was wrong, except that I had a slightly elevated white blood cell count, but today I'm feeling really well. I started to feel a bit better Sunday but today was the first day I had some energy and ate three real meals. I'm knocking on wood hoping it continues, but I think whatever it was is out of my system now. I called in sick to work or left early several days and was tired of not working.

This weekend, a bunch of us are going to an area fair, which should be a lot of fun. After that, I have a week and a half of work before taking a few days off for my birthday trip and then another week of work before I get an entire week off. Kansas' parents are going to be in town the first few days of my vacation, and I'm getting nervous about meeting them. I've never met a boyfriend's parents before, so I'm trying to stay relaxed about it. Should be an interesting time.

Tofu's big adventure

So this weekend was interesting. Saturday was a day that started out very sad and ended very happy. In between, I discovered how awesome it is to have a boyfriend who will give up half of his weekend to do something nice for me/my family.

On Saturday morning, I was out running errands with Kansas and generally having a pretty good day when my mom called to tell me our dog (a 7-pound mini dachshund named Tofu Smart Dog) got out of the yard and was MIA. She'd driven around the neighborhood looking for him and a few people she saw out on the street had seen him, but no luck. The Humane Society had already closed for the weekend.

Kansas and I went home and walked around the neighborhood, which includes quite a few steep hills, for about an hour handing out our phone number to people who were outside and asked them to look for him. We didn't find him and came home. My mom was really devastated about losing the dog (the gate somehow was left open). Kansas and I went out again for a while before coming back to help hand out fliers. Mom and dad and two of their friends divied up the neighborhood with us and we walked around knocking on every door to hand out fliers. We put them up on posts and in paper boxes and on car windshields. A few people had seen him, but the reports of just where he had been seen were varied and indicated he'd run up on the mountain behind the neighborhood. He'd been gone for about 9 hours. At this point, it was dark and cold and we couldn't do anything. Dad bought us pizza and Kansas and I, both completely exhausted, promised to get up in the morning and hike up the mountain to look for Tofu. I was pretty confident he'd be all right and that if he wasn't in someone's house, he'd be able to find his way home and that he knew I feed the cat on the porch late at night (he likes to lick out the cans).

Kansas went home and my very sad parents went to bed. I was about to turn off my TV and go to sleep when I heard a far-off, quiet, familiar bark. I was watching a show with a dog in it at the time, so I wasn't sure if I'd really heard anything. I got up and went out into the main room, where the doggie door is, and called the dog's name. He didn't come, but I heard a bark again. I decided to look in the front yard, and as soon as I opened the door, a VERY tired, limping little dachshund ran into the house. His paw pads were scraped up and he was starving, but he was home. My parents were of course overjoyed. I sent Kansas a text message (that he didn't get until the next morning) and we stayed up for a bit with the doggie, who ate about half his body weight before passing out on my dad's lap.

Sunday, I drove around the neighborhood with my odometer set and if Tofu was really seen everywhere people told us he was, he covered about 3 miles on those teeny little legs. Even I wouldn't have wanted to make that walk up those hills.

What I wouldn't give to know what he really did that day.

Life is good

Winter in Klamath Falls is awful. Snowy mountain passes make leaving town a treacherous prospect and the sense of isolation can be stifling (I just want a decent place to shop. But it's not worth a 2 hour + drive through snow to get to Medford).

This year's not so bad. There's no snow yet, which makes it possible to leave town (although the lack of more than one consecutive day off puts a damper on things). But I remembered something. This town is ugly in the winter. It's brown and drab and while the sun is usually out — a nice change from the Willamette Valley — everything at eye level is just boring. A few feet of sparkly white snow helps things. So I'm missing the snow. And it's only a little bit because of the $400 snow tires I bought that won't be paid off until after the legal date to remove them.

The tediousness of winter aside, things are good here. I don't make much money, but I still love my job and am in the profession I want to be in. The job itself is stable. I'm lucky.

Things are going well with my new relationship with "Kansas," (the nickname a friend came up with for my boyfriend). Having technically been single my entire life, referring to someone as "my boyfriend" still feels foreign, but it's definitely a great thing. The relationship is at a place that's very comfortable for me now. Trying to work spending time together around our very different work schedudules is difficult, but I think sometimes that makes the time we do have better. Tonight is one of the nights when I wish we could be together. We won't have any time away from work until this weekend (fortunately, a long one for me), and I can't wait.

The other day, Kansas and I were in the store and somehow the topic of astrological signs came up. When I explained my very amateur analysis of the differences between Libras (me) and Virgos (him), he said, "How do we get along?" I can't think of any ways we don't. We still have much to learn about each other, but there's nothing yet that I'd describe as a negative. There are things we disagree on, and things each of us finds weird about the other, but it's all good for now. The things I'm still learning make me more interested. Lately, the little things are making me the happiest. It's a feeling I'm still not quite used to, but one that makes my day better. I'm in danger of becoming one of the happy people I used to hate, and I'm a little flummoxed by the fact that I'm this happy in Klamath Falls, the place I spent my life trying to escape.

Three months.

Three months since my last post and the high school reunion, which now seems so far off. Three months past the end of my first 90 days of work. And just a week or so until my six-month anniversary at said job. Maybe I'll update more often.

When I moved back to Klamath Falls, it was supposed to be a very temporary situation. I was going to find another job and crash rent free to save up my unemployment. I never expected the paper here to hire me, seeing as how they had JUST hired a reporter and copy editor and I knew the budget was tight. Then somehow, there was an opening. So I started work less than a week after learning about existence of the position. Thing 1 that wasn't supposed to happen here.

Around the time of the reunion and my last post on here, I started spending time outside of the group setting with a coworker I'll call Kansas (nickname courtesy of a Facebook friend who remembered nothing I told him about Kansas except his home state/alma mater). By my birthday in late September, we were dating. While we've never really had an official "what are we doing" conversation, it's definitely been a relationship for about two months now and a few days ago changed our Facebook statuses, which apparently makes it "official." It makes me feel about 13 years old to get all excited about Facebook, but I suppose changing your relationship status is the easy way to tell all your friends you're officially off the market. The LAST thing I would ever have expected was to move home and find a boyfriend. After so many years of being single in Eugene, I come back home and find a great guy. Weird how things work out.

Being in a relationship is a new thing for me, and while I'm happy and excited about it, it's a strange adjustment after so many years of being single. I'm quite comfortable and am interested and excited to see where things go from here.

Other than that, there's not much to report. Between work and time with Kansas, there's not much time for anything else. Living with my parents has a few stresses, but financially it's the best option as long as I can stand it. They're not at all controlling and my dad is a good enough cook to make up for about 99 percent of the things that irritate me.

10 years

On Friday night, I went to my 10-year high school reunion. I'd been debating since high school whether I'd really be willing to go but when I found out that it was this summer and I knew I'd be living back in my home town, I decided to go.

It really was a far better experience than I'd expected (I must say, I think I look far better than I ever did in high school and a few people commented, so I had a somewhat shallow boost of self-esteem). The turnout was small, but I liked (or at least got along with) all but two of the people who came. I enjoyed chatting with everyone and it was interesting to hear what people are up to. I am in contact with a few people from Facebook or MySpace, so I knew what some of them have been doing, but had a good time talking to those I hadn't been in contact with. Some of the guys in particular are doing things completely unexpected. One guy is a stay-at-home dad with a young daughter — the absolute last thing I'd have predicted for him 10 years ago. It's amazing how many people from my class now have multiple children, but it seems that parenthood changed people for the better. One guy's wife was going around apologizing to people for what a jerk her husband was in high school, (He really, really was. In fact, he was the one person who on the day of the reunion I thought about and hoped he wouldn't be there) and when I talked to his wife for a minute she mentioned how being a dad made him a much nicer person. And told me something about him that I won't repeat here but that made me smile more than just about any news I've heard all year.

One of the girls I was kind of friends with back then but haven't seen since gathered up some liquid courage and told the guy who'd tormented her in high school about how awful he was. He was rather inebriated and didn't seem to believe he'd been THAT big of a jerk, but he did apologize to her. The conversation was entertaining to watch and I was glad that she did it. It probably felt good to get that off her chest after so long.

Saturday, we had a family picnic and while only about 10 people showed up, all with their kids, I did enjoy seeing the people I talked to there. I'd been wondering about this reunion for years and of course wasn't as wealthy or skinny as I'd hoped to be, but the people I really wanted to stick it to weren't there anyway and I realized how little any of that really matters now. In a discussion with some other classmates about who we disliked, no one even remembered the person I'd had the most trouble with, which oddly made me feel better. The 10 years went by so quickly but the reunion was a reminder of how long it has been. Going to the reunion did bring a sense of closure and I'm happy that I went.

The routine

I'm settling into my routine, such as it is, at the new job. I have split days off and work strange hours, so it's hard to find time to fit in other activities. Fortunately, my coworkers are all great and we hang out together a lot, so my social life revolves around other people who understand the weird schedule.

A week ago, my best friend Kim and I went to Crater Lake. She'd never been there, so the original plan involved hiking down to the shore to take the boat tour. Because I didn't pay enough attention to know which side of the lake to go to to purchase tickets, we missed out on the tour, but thought we would hike down anyway. I'd never seen it from the shore. "The hike can't be THAT bad," I thought. "I'll take it easy on the way up and my legs will hurt tomorrow, but it'll be OK."

The downhill part of the hike went well. It's a gorgeous hike and the weather was cooperative. The lake definitely looks different from that perspective and it's interesting that the deep blue color is just as intense from the shore.

The hike back up did not go as well. I'm out of shape and knew I'd have to stop a lot walking back up the hill (a mile-long STEEP trail that is a 1,000-foot change in elevation, or, according to the sign at the top of the hill, the equivalent of 150 flights of stairs), but I had a strong reaction to the altitude. The shore is at 6,100 feet or so and the top of the trail is about 7,100. Almost immediately after starting the hike my pulse was far faster than it's ever been and I thought I was going to pass out. I even got a bloody nose, which has never happened at all. I found myself hoping that if I did collapse, the next person to walk by would be capable of running up or down to get me medical help. They aren't kidding when they say it's strenuous. Of course I realize this means that I need to do much more cardio work at the gym, but I was amazed at how difficult it was. It's really quite unfortunate because the view from the shore is amazing, but I don't know if I'd ever want to do it again without training specifically for that activity for a long time.

I did get some great photos.