Most of you probably didn't know this, but I've been puppy-sitting for my parents (as they live on the other side of town) this weekend. It's only Saturday evening, and I'm at work, but my sanity is already in mortal peril. You see, when they were picked up, they were "crate trained."
Housebroken? Not so much.
It doesn't help that all the times that I've been over to see the puppies before this weekend, I've gone to play with the puppies, not pick up after them. So I don't think they know how to act around me; they keep expecting me to play with them when I want them to do their business. Maybe that one time was a sympathy piddle.
Also, with work this weekend (which helped to deep-six plans to head out to Rockingham with my cousin-in-law to check out some drag racing; something I'd never been to so was interested in checking out), I haven't had a good opportunity to sit down and play with the pups like I'm used to. And don't think they haven't noticed; they kept me up most of the night with their insistent whining.
The puppies are adorable and lovable, don't get me wrong, but I will be very happy when I can head back to my own place tomorrow, where I don't have anything crawling underfoot and I don't have to mop the kitchen floor every twelve hours in an attempt to get what crap and piss I couldn't pick up with toilet paper.
Since it's too late for me to go back and earn my Dog Care merit badge, I guess the moral to this story is if I ever get a dog, make sure that the animal's been housebroken first.
For the past several months, I've noticed that the average spam message that gets through the filters tends to have a subject containing several random words. The past couple of days I've noticed that this trend has begun to spill over to the sender's name field. It's probably some simple algorithm to produce {random word | random initial | random word} and format it as if it were an actual name. Anyway, the two funniest I've seen so far have been Writhe K. Encroach and Vicar G. Heartrending.
If you've seen this type of spam in your email, what have been the funniest names?
Ow, my head hurts.
First of all, let me mention that I've submitted "Flechette" to BlogSkins. It's a very orange skin, done partially in response to a slightly tongue-in-cheek proclamation that orange is the new black. So I decided to see if that was right. It's not a bright orange, so you won't go blind by looking at the page...honest! Actually, I felt the need to do something simple after working on what I want to do for nakaithus.net. If I put everything in that I've jotted down over the past few days, the site will be Byzantine in comparison to what I've done before—so I'll have to work to either keep everything and keep the site easy for the end user to grok or pare things off my list until the site becomes easy. It's a lot a work for a relative neophyte like myself, hence the need for something simple.
Now, back to my head. I was puppy-sitting today and needed to wrangle the pups outside to get them to do their business out in the lawn. Since they're so small right now the easiest way to do this is to pick one up in each hand. Doing this, I navigated out to the 3-season porch and over to the sliding door. The sliding screen door in front of the glass door was open.
Just in case you don't know where this is headed, let me explain something about the glass door. This thing hasn't been cleaned in 3 months, after the third time a bird tried to fly in, snapping its neck and perishing on my parents' deck. It hasn't helped; while the birds aren't diving headlong into the door anymore (I'm guessing word got around), the door still looks immaculate.
Which brings the action back to me. I was walking toward the door and noticed that the screen door is open. I actually thought to myself "I wonder why they left the porch wide open", then looked down as the puppies started to squirm in my arms.
*Crack*
I walked hard enough that I had to stop (of course) and regain my bearings. Thankfully, I never lost my grip on the dogs. For their part, they stopped squirming and looked up at me with this "what was that for" look.
The upshot of this is that they did their business on the back lawn.
I wanted to think of something deep and witty to put together here to try and get to posting every day here. However, since I've decided to help my parents out and puppysit for an hour or two before I go to work over the next couple weeks, I've not only had to adjust my schedule but also have an hour or two a day to get completely worn out by the two puppies. In other words, I'm pooped.
However, I do not come empty-handed. In the oldest tradition of weblogs, I bring you two links that I find interesting.
First is this travelogue of a day trip by a Russian girl on her Kawasaki Ninja. What makes it simultaneously fascinating and devastating is her travel plan: straight through the "dead zone" at Chernobyl.
On a lighter and more mock-religious note, some long-forgotten saints of graphic design have been rediscovered. Come check out which patron saint is most appropriate to you...
There's nothing like a gratuitous picture of adorable puppies to get people to visit!
Okay, maybe it's not so gratuitous (I'll stand by the adorable statement, though). Yesterday, my parents went and picked up two Miniature Schnauzers. They're seven weeks old, from the same litter (naturally), and have been named Sassy and Heidi. Sassy is the one looking at the camera.
First off you may be wondering, weren't my parents set on getting a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel? Yes, yes they were. That is, until they discovered that the going price for one Cav was around $1600. Sassy and Heidi, on the other hand, were I believe $300 apiece. Then they learned that the Miniature Schnauzers were on the whole healthier dogs than the Cavs. From there, the choice was simple.
I was fortunate enough to tag along with my parents to pick them up at the breeding kennel/farm in Bear Creek. It was a nice-sized kennel out in the middle of nowhere that serves as a sidebar and moneymaker for the owner's true animal love: exotics. Apparently this guy operates a petting zoo at the NC State Fair stocked with camels and zebra (No lions, though. They're only in Kenya.). That might be an excuse to actually go to the fair this year...
But back to the pups. They were out in a pen set up in the owner's back yard—which was their first exposure to grass. They didn't seem too frightened to leave the kennel, either. I mean, they were shaking when we started the trip back, but they relaxed after maybe five minutes and slept the majority of the trip.
The picture up at the top of the post was taken earlier today. I had followed my parents home after my semi-annual church visit (it is Easter, you know), choosing to play for the puppies for a little while rather than take a nap that I desperately needed. For this shot, they were sitting at my dad's feet and I was trying to get them both to look into the camera. I'm happier with what I did get, however.
Once I get around to getting my own space (rather than taking up more space than I need over at Photobucket.com I'll probably get some more of those photos up. Ah, just one more thing to add to the nakaithus.net concept...
My entire body is sore right now, but I survived the annual personal Hell that is Mulch Weekend.
What is Mulch Weekend, you ask? Well, every year around this time, my parents buy a large amount of mulch to refresh or tweak the landscaping around their house. Every year, the amount of mulch they get grows larger. And every year, since I only live on the other side of town, I end up helping out. And as I have progessively falled further out of shape, the work has just as progressively gotten tougher to deal with after it's all over.
This year, over two days, 15 cubic yards of mulch was spread, two mulched areas (that I know of) were extended, 4 rotted yet still extremely heavy railroad ties were moved, and we had just enough mulch to cover everything, although the last bit was spread mighty thin. Also, there was much standing around rubbing mulch grain out of the eyes due to the high winds; we quickly learned to stand upwind of the mulch pile(s) and whatever mulch we were pitching. Still, there were a couple of times during the weekend where I wished that my parents had one of those eye wash machines that are installed at my workplace (the ones you go to in case you get chemicals in the eye).
Today I woke up extremely sore and have been sore for most of the day. But I am glad that the mulching is done. For this year, anyway.
Just so you can all take me to task when I don't finish everything, here's the list of what I want to accomplish this week:
- Actually put together 2500 words of non-blog material this week (I knew I was likely to fall behind Review Boy and the Machine but ~300 words is ridiculous, even for me).
- Finish up a design to submit to BlogSkins. I've been dipping into the DOM and a little Javascript for the first time to figure out color and font-size switching, so that's why it's taking longer than normal to produce. Besides, I don't like to churn out skins in bulk like I've seen others do there lately.
- Finish with "Remembering the Hiragana". I've had the book for a couple of months, and I've only gotten through the first two lessons. I know I only agreed to borrow the book on a whim ("Do you want to borrow this book?" "Sure, why not?"), but it's time I get cracking, since I know that the owner wants to let other people borrow it. Or I could go out and buy my own copy. Hmm...
- Start working on nakaithus.net: design, structure (and I don't just mean the (X)HTML, and hosting. I'll probably take Francey's advice and get hosting through SiteFlip, but it never hurts to take a good look around at what's available.
So, let's see if I can actually finish everything on the list!