Monday, March 19, 2007

What I Pack for Conferences

  • black shoes (2 pair)
  • black pants (2 pair)
  • black turtleneck
  • black non-turtleneck
  • black coat
  • black socks
  • black jacket
  • non-black jacket with black trim
  • black gym clothes
  • black-trimmed sneakers
  • something brightly colored that I toss into my suitcase at the last minute and often don't wear
  • a roll of masking tape for removing my all-black-dogs' strangely-only-partially-black hairs from all of the above

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Spring Haiku 1

The neighbor's blossoms
drift into my garden--
blanket my napping dog

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Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Domino or Pepper or Grizzle?

Oh My.

I just completed my pet insurance applications and for each dog I was asked to identify his/her color. I was about to type "black" when I encountered a drop-down menu with these choices:

Apricot
Beige
Biscuit
Black
Blenheim (red & white) <-- they defined this one
Blonde
Blue
Blue-Black
Blue merle
Boston
Brindle
Brown
Buff
Cafe-au-lait
Caramel <-- What? No soy macchiato?
Champagne
Charcoal
Chestnut
Chocolate
Cinnamon
Copper
Cream
Dapple
Deadgrass
Dilute
Domino
Fawn
Golden
Grey
Grizzle
Harlequin
Honey
Landseer
Lavendar
Lemon
Liver
Mackerel
Mahogany
Merle
Mink
Mouse
Mustard
Orange
Parti
Pepper
Pinto
Red
Red merle
Roan
Rust
Sable
Salt & pepper
Sandy
Silve
Silver black
Smoke
Spotted leopard
Tan
Taupe
Tawny
Tick
Tri-color
Wheaten
White
Wild boar
Wolf
Yellow

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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

The Dog Ate My Gradebook

OK, not entirely. But darn close.

My dining room is in transition (a polite way of saying I can't afford decent furniture) into what I'd like to be a study where I can do most of my work on a table that could also serve as a dining table during those, like, 3 times a year when people eat in this room. (Snacking while I google doesn't count.)

Anyhoo, in an effort to organize all the paperwork I've brought home from my office I made tidy stacks on the floor and meant to spend an afternoon listening to 'This American Life' archives and sorting all the stuff into some sort of system that would fit on a table in the corner.

You see where this is going, of course.

The dogs never touched the piles.

Til just now, when they made it the site of a spirited wrestling match--sloshing the papers everywhere, probably enjoying the added excitement of a slippery texture beneath them--and then B-dog snagged a page from my gradebook and chomped through Pei Lin C. to Geraldine L.

I can appreciate that this sort of thing would horrify a non-dog-person (NDP), but all I can say is "Yeah, I left the piles on the floor" and appreciate this spectacular mess.

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