cleolinda | Entries tagged with scout

So. Much of my online life takes place on Twitter these days because I am often accessing the internet while away from my computer, and it is near impossible to tap out an entry on a phone. This is because, as I have mentioned, Sam is now mostly (but not entirely) blind and deaf, and he requires more care (help getting outside, to the water bowl, back to his blanket-bed) these days. He's happy, but he needs a lot of attention--and now that Scout has gotten really jealous and can't understand why Sam keeps bumping into him and reads it as aggression, he's started snapping at Sam. It's only gotten bad this last week, once Sam stopped sleeping most of the day and got active again. In fact, he rambles around way more than he did when he could see. So theere's a lot of watching and refereeing and wrangling that goes on if all three dogs are in the same room, and we're still working out how to handle that. We're to the point where I'm going to have to crate Scout and Shelby for a few hours sometimes, let Sam ramble around, and then tuck Sam away in the bedroom and let the big dogs out. If they can all doze peacefully in the same room, that's great. If they can all chill on the deck in dogly harmony, awesome. But if they can't, I'm going to have to put one or the other up somewhere, because I'm unable to get anything done and I'm near the point of hysteria from trying to micromanage them for eight hours at a stretch. Even my mother said, "You cannot sacrifice your life to these dogs."

( But I can totally take pictures of them! Plus a few other things to mention )

Meanwhile, the two links of greatest interest:

@SmartBitches: Have a look: think it's Poe fiction plagiarism? http://is.gd/5iV31Q http://is.gd/l2qlAB http://is.gd/bk3BIM

@McDougallSophia: @cleolinda could you maybe link to Genre for Japan charity auction? Proceeds to BRC Tsunami appeal http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/

So! Titans are clashing very slowly for a number of reasons, one of them being that I keep getting air pressure headaches from the changeable weather, because apparently I'm one of those Old Folks who creeps around complaining about how their knee's tellin' 'em it's gonna rain. But it rained LIKE HELL last night--so hard it actually woke me up--so that ought to be settled, and also, all the pollen washed away! This is a good thing. Seriously, I walked outside yesterday morning, and the entire deck was a charming shade of yellow. Do not want.

I have pets conspiring to keep me from working, but I'm doing my best to reclaim the couch.

SOMEBODY doesn't want me to start working. on Twitpic

While we're here, I feel like we should document the current state of Sam's fluff before he gets his summer cut this weekend.

Let us document Sam before he gets his summer cut this weekend on Twitpic

Yesterday on Tumblr I had a general blue theme, and today is mostly vampires with a little general goth thrown in. Tomorrow will be a steampunk aesthetic, I think. (While you can use Tumblr for a number of things, my current explanation for it is "Picspam: The Website.")

Meanwhile, I seem to be a nominee for a thing! Specifically, the Author Blog Awards at Completely Novel.

I am pretty sure Cleolilnda and Cleoloinda, Destroyer of Lulz, are going to go conspire against me in an evil lair somewhere (but Cleolilnda will eventually come down with a bad case of remorse and switch sides in penitence). And I hope to lose things to Neil Gaiman for many, many years to come.

So all the snow was supposed to come yesterday, and it was nice and swirly but the temperature was above freezing so it didn't stick, and it was kind of lame and nothing really happened.

Then I looked up from my computer this morning sometime after 8 am, and we've got a minor blizzard going.

Snowfari 2010, featuring Scout and Shelby:

( Read more... )

... on THAT OF WHICH WE DO NOT SPEAK:

I went on another photo safari (this seems to be a new Saturday morning tradition), this time at Hobby Lobby, a terrifyingly huge artsy-craftsy emporium. (The reason the photo safaris happen on Twitter is because you can take a picture on your phone and email it straight to TwitPic from there, which then appears automatically on your Twitter feed.) I mean, I spent fifteen minutes in that thing and I am ready to craft THE SHIT out of something. You take TLE there, he'll think he's died (again) and gone to heaven. Note on photos: we did not even get into any of the vertical aisles at the store. This is simply the shallow end of the pool.( Read more... )

Back to work. Apparently the best part of the movie (minus John Cusack's best line) is online completely legally. Enjoy.

(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

I know people for whom Friday the 13ths are actually lucky; I am not one of them. But--knock on wood--so far, things are going pretty well.

( SPARKLEMAS COMES EARLY THIS YEAR )

BREAKING NEWS: SHIRT-ALLERGIC JACOB KEN DOLL. ARE YOU FOR REAL. WHAT IS THIS. I DON'T EVEN. FUHHHHHH.

(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

( that's a really low branch are we sure it's dead )

( Look, I will sell my blood plasma to pay you NOT to bring that home and give it to me )

So, to recap from Monday:

@cleolinda: Diagnosis: twenty year old house, never had any plumbing repairs. Thus, $1500. $800 of it today. I just don't even bat an eyelash anymore.

( Pics of our terrifying new dishwasher )

Current Mood: tired

Okay, the new Poufwa Exchange podcast I'm on is up--you can get it at iTunes or at www.poufwaexchange.com. I don't have preview snippets of this one, but these are the fine people who previously brought you the Twilight Sex Education "I think he did a lot of reading... maybe he scrapbooked it afterwards" discussion last year. I'd have to go through it again to give you specific times, but we do talk about the Russet Noon fanfic fiasco (ETA: okay, that starts around the 50-minute mark), pseuicide ("He couldn't even stay dead for 24 hours!"), Twitter, American Idol, and--for a good long time--The Secret Life of Dolls.

Meanwhile, I did find my bottle of BPAL's High John the Conqueror and am now judiciously daubed with it. Mmm, grapey herbs.

(Still footnoting. Not much else to report, except that Scout got worse, in that "Aaaand now it's all out of his system... and on our carpet" way, and now he is better.)

1) House rules: Don't fight on my journal. Don't. Disagree, discuss, that's great. But you will be civil and non-snippy to me and each other on my own journal. Take it somewhere else if you can't.

2) My stepfather decided to buzzcut the Angry Jasmine again. The jasmine then got so much angrier, in fact, that it disgorged a swarm of yellowjackets that stung him upside the head several times. I'm not even making this up.

3) Yesterday, I opened the front door to take Scout outside on his leash, and there's a dead bird toes up on the doorstep. A fairly large bird, too--you know, the size of a pigeon, rather than a sparrow. We have no idea what it was doing there, because it was under the little porch overhang fairly close to the door, so it couldn't have just fallen out of the sky or something.

( Linkspam )

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Garbage - Push It

1. The new Made of Fail episode is up, wherein we have a Very Deep Discussion about Watchmen. (It's also the origin of Tiny Rorschach's Journal, although I don't know if that part of the discussion actually made it in.) I've just started listening to it, so I don't know if I've made a fool of myself yet.

And yes, they do ask me about the Secret Life of Dolls, by listener request.

2. My dog is a very strange dog.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Divinyls - Back To The Wall

As ~~threatened~~ promised. And yeah, it did make me feel a little better.

( Dogs included )

The rest of the pictures are under the "march2009" tag; I won't burden you with them here. There's a few pictures of my cat and random things around the house, nothing terribly exciting. Although our faux-French clock is nice.

Current Mood: lazy

Taken from my kitchen window:

Scout likes to chase the snowflakes (he tries to eat them), and once he got bored with that, he flopped out in the snow and started rolling around like he was making snow angels. And then he came inside and we made pancakes. Later, I will probably make hot chocolate. Right now, I am getting back in bed to watch the snow from my window.

Current Mood: snow!
Current Music: SNOW!

Fact: February is the beginning of spring in Alabama.

Evidence: Pictures I took in my backyard earlier this week. ( Spring has sprung )

Bonus: Sunday morning at the Jones house. Apparently my dogs went on a bender last night or something. And now you know why Shelby's nickname is Right-Angle Dog.

Current Music: Kylie Minogue - Stars

Let's do a picspam before I try to catch up on two days of links:

( EVIL CAT IS EVIL )

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: U2 - Stay (Faraway, So Close!)

So I get up this morning to discover that Scout has thrown up all over the kitchen--and I do mean all over--because he managed to eat a napkin or something last night. How's your Friday the 13th?

Friday 13th not more unlucky, study shows.

NBC's Tim Russert dies of apparent heart attack. And yet somehow, Bill O'Reilly is allowed to continue walking the earth. Which is a terrible thing to say, and I stand by it completely.

( More linkspam )

Current Mood: beleaguered
Current Music: Divinyls, "Back to the Wall"

Arghhh. It was 17 F this morning (we finally got up to a high of 40 by late this afternoon), and may I remind you, I live in Alabama. I couldn't let the dogs play outside very long, so they spent most of the day driving me crazy. Thanks for all the get-well wishes for Mom, by the way; she's weak and a little feverish, but she seems a lot better, and hasn't thrown up since about five this morning. She spent the day either in bed or sacked out in the recliner in the den watching The DaVinci Code, which would have been fine except that she kept asking who this was and what was he doing and did they know who she was. I wouldn't have found this annoying, except that I was trying to read one of my Black Ribbon books, and I wouldn't have found it odd, except that she's already seen the movie three times. But, you know--after all the years she took care of us when we were deathly snerfy, taking care of her was the least I could do. I think it would have been all right if the dogs could have played outside; as it was, they were constantly fighting or barking or chewing or bodyslamming the back door to get in or out, and there was a point where I just ate lunch standing up, plate in hand, because it was just easier to deal with them that way. So, because I was downstairs early to look after Mom, and because George seems to be coming home later than usual this week, it was a very long day, and I felt very tired afterwards. Do you ever feel tired from not getting to do things? I don't mean the the sluggishness from being lazy; I mean the frustrated weariness of trying to do something all day and being continually interrupted. It's the tiredness of sitting in a waiting room all day, or waiting in a line, I guess.

But I did finish Virginia Rounding's Grandes Horizontales, which is something. I need to write up some book reports, as it were, but I'm too tired just now.

Meanwhile, at Snopes: The Webkinz Murderer? ( Read more... )

Oh my God, I am so tired. (Yes, I am going to begin every entry with "I am so tired" until I stop being tired.) We now have two puppies, for a total of four dogs and one Bad Cat, and I ended up not getting today off from ~~Witchfinder~~ Dogsitter General duty. (Mulch this, okay?) Fortunately, Shelby (who spent most of the week pitifully thin with a stomach bug) and Scout (who somehow managed to emerge fat and sassy from parvo quarantine at the vet) immediately fell to wrestling. Shelby is the Sunny Baudelaire of puppies, to the point where she will actually bite the air if she can't find anything else, and while Scout is more of a licker than a biter, they both enjoy chewing on each other's faces. Sam and Meko, meanwhile, were getting baths at the vet and were somewhat nonplussed to come home and find that Shelby had doubled. Sam, in fact, was getting a little stressed out--he actually had little seizures the summer we had the deck rebuilt, because his pomeranian nerves couldn't handle the noise--but once I was released from duty, he got to go upstairs with me to the Fortress of Solitude with the working AC and the absence of puppies.

Which is also to say that our air conditioner downstairs is broken, and it was over 70 degrees this afternoon. I was trying to hold on to winter in hopes that we'd get another cold snap, but, sorry to say, I think spring has officially sprung--the buttercups are in the front yard and the bumblebees are in the back. I mean, that's great for puppies, but not so great for someone whose wardrobe is mostly long-sleeved at this point.

That said, I'm almost in the mood for spring because Thursday and Friday's Morning DVD Commentary was POTC2--no, I still hadn't watched the extras after three months--and after umpteen hours of watching fluorescent turquoise water and sugarbowl beaches, I was kind of ready for a trip to the beach myself. I have a feeling that most readers around here haven't bothered to listen to the ~~only~~ writers' commentary (which you really should), else y'all would have immediately run and told me that they 1) confirm the Tia Dalma Theory and 2) mention that the production finally built an entire free-standing Black Pearl. Where did they build it? Alabama, the center of the universe, of course.

After a week of trying to acclimate to constant puppysitting (and getting the three DVDs I wanted to watch out of the way), I'm thinking of what I want to do with my mornings as this settles into a routine. Which is to say, I've already decided, and don't want to jinx it by actually saying it out loud--I'm worried enough about actually following through and being productive as it is. Also, I've been online for all of half an hour today and I've already managed to make an ass of myself twice, so I think I'm calling it a night just now.

( A little linkspam )

So tired. Last night Shelby started throwing up and then couldn't stop, and we were all running around in terror ("OH MY GOD SHE HAS THE PARVO!!" ) and my mother stayed up all night with her. We got her to the vet when they first opened and found out that... it wasn't parvo. It was just some random little stomach bug, and the vet gave her some medicine and told us to give her Gatorade, water, and no food. (Trufax: Dogs do not like citrus flavors, even Gatorade "citrus" flavors. Shelby would drink the orange Gatorade we had on hand if we eyedroppered it into her mouth, but if we put her in front of the dish, she'd put her head down and curl up around it as if to say, "Sweet water, why hast thou forsaken me? I will wait here until you return! [paw to forehead]," whereas grape Gatorade [on a tip from Diego Zanzibar at Snarkfest] was a huge hit this evening. [According to Diego, cherry would have worked as well.] More trufax: apparently real grapes and raisins--as opposed to "grape" Gatorade--are potentially fatal to dogs. Just so you know.) And my mother was also able to check on Scout through a window, and apparently he's doing a lot better and will be able to come home this weekend.

Today was therefore pretty quiet because Shelby was too sick to do much but sleep, which meant that in turn Meko settled down and did some napping herself, and Sam stayed outside on the deck, basking in the breeze and watching the yard. It was a lot less hectic than yesterday, granted, but I only got an hour's break at noon to wash my hair and check my email, and then it was back to dogwatching and eyedroppering and racing with drippy puppy to the yard, and then no one was able to take over for me until six o'clock, which meant that I was on dogsitting duty for about ten or eleven hours. I listened to the commentary on The Illusionist (at least The Illusionist HAS ONE, PRESTIGE), read an Entertainment Weekly, watched a couple of hours of Spongebob, mopped the kitchen floor and did a load of laundry, the latter necessitated by the fact that I sat down on a mysterious, invisible wet patch in the carpet. This was my day.

I thought tomorrow might be better, since Sister Girl would be getting off work at one (as usual) but wouldn't have a night class for a change and could just take over the dogwatching shift, but it turns out that she may have to go to the doctor because her tongue is (and has been for about a week) covered in weird bumps. I don't know, y'all.

Linkspam, before I get buried by a backlog. It's a bit quantity over quality, but I'm thisclose to falling down into a coma where I stand, so... ( Read more... )