Adventures of Autumn the Wonder Poodle

The Wife had a major scare this AM. The phone rang and a woman said "Do you have a dog named Autumn?" and the wife said "Yeeeees?" and the reply was "I have her." OH SHIT! The Wife, as is their routine, let the dog out to run (in our large FENCED IN yard) when she got up this morning (I always take Autumn out for a morning wee before I leave for work and then she gets a run when The Wife gets up.) Apparently a landscaper stopped by yesterday to take a look around in order to give us a quote for a clean up and regular lawn mowing and the dumbass didn't properly close the gate. Thanks, Butt Munch. If we hadn't already selected someone else because you've been too slow to give us a quote, this would pretty much seal your fate. The woman brought Autumn home (and when The Wife went out to get the dog from the woman's car, Autumn was sitting very nicely in the back seat.) In the confusion The Wife forgot to get the woman's full name or address or anything. She said she had a dog and she would want someone to do the same thing. The only good thing is that Autumn loves to ride in the car so I'm sure she jumped right in when the woman opened her car door.

The Wife has gone off to the hardware store to get a "Beware of Dog" sign and some hardware to make the gate hard to open from the outside. We have to replace the fence anyway (there go the nice hardwood floors we had been planning to install) so this is certainly the impetus to get it done sooner rather than later.

Even though I wasn't there the retelling of the story certainly gave me a good jolt of adrenaline this morning. On a final note, Thanks to Anna, the woman from Bucks County who brought my dog home safely.

D.V.R.

We finally joined the DVR generation yesterday and, of course, now I say "what the hell took us so long?" We don't often watch shows that start at 10 PM because I'm too tired the next day so we miss "Gray's Anatomy" among other things. Last night we got involved in an episode of "Law and Order: SVU" and at 10:30 we looked at each other and said "hit record." We are such geeks. I'm quite psyched that we can watch "Out of Practice" then the 2nd half of SVU and finally, my favorite show "Mythbusters." Oh I am pathetic. but content.

I'm a blog slacker, I'm a blog slacker

First you must sing the title of this entry to the Wheel of Fortune ditty from who knows how many years ago. As I mentioned in a previous entry I am trying to eat better, exercise (I can't say more as I was pretty much a couch spud before), and lose weight. How is it going, you ask? Eh, I say. I'm losing weight, I'm not always hungry, and the wife suggested that I exercise before we have dinner so that I can relax afterwards (and it's dark after dinner right now in our neighborhood without street lights and sidewalks) so what is my problem? Gas, horribly painful gas is my problem. I feel like crap (no pun intended) right now. Normally I fart with abandon (I even won the Super Bowl farting contest one year at Sarah's ) but right now the gas doesn't make it to my ass. It's an incredibly uncomfortable feeling. I guess it is because I have increased my fiber intake over the past month but it isn't like I went from nothing to 30 grams. I hope it gets better soon.

Praise for the DMV and The Butt Swab Study

Today The Wife and I went to the DMV to renew our licenses. In PA you send in a form with your check and they send you a "camera card" which you present at the DMV (in fact we both paid over the internet). We walked in around 11:30 AM today, got a number, sat down for all of 5 minutes, got called one after the other, and had our licenses within 15-20 minutes. It was amazing. This is a huge improvement over the NJ DMV where everyone has to stand in the same line regardless of why you are there. It can take 30 minutes just to get to the counter. This was absolutely painless. Kudos, PA DMV.

On a completely unrelated topic, The Wife recently came home from a week's stay in the hospital. While there she proudly participated in what we will call "The Butt Swab Study." Yes, someone came in and asked her to consent to having her butt swabbed for resistant E. coli bacteria. If she has resistant E. coli bacteria around her bunghole they will pay her $10 per poop sample (every 2 weeks for up to a year). She gets to deliver the poop samples via a nationally known next-day air courier. Pay for poop. Hehehehe.

Phila Food Police

I have been meaning to blog about this since I read it in the paper over a week ago. The Philadelphia School District is going to allow parents to become the Food Police for school lunches. Parents will be able to make certain foods off limits and then the cashier will be responsible for not selling forbidden foods to kids who still try to buy them (not fair to dump this on the cashiers.) I think this is a horrible idea for many reasons. First of all kids have to learn to make their own decisions about food at some point. The earlier they learn to do it the better. I think it is great (and very necessary) for parents to talk about and MODEL good nutrition and good eating habits but in the end it is up to each individual to select what goes in their mouth. I also think that it is a bad idea for certain foods to be forbidden for kids (unless there is allergy or religion involved.) I have a very personal reason for thinking institutionalized Food Police are a bad idea. My mother was the food police and remains so to this day. She hid food (we all knew where it was but she thought she was being discrete) that was meant for my father's lunch alone. Things like pudding cups, fruit cups, granola bars, stuff like that. She also bought sugarless gum for my sister and me and Juicy Fruit for my brother. Certain cereals (Captain Crunch comes to mind) were for my brother's consumption only. She said things like "If you only ate the food we see you eat you wouldn't have a weight problem." She sent me to school with peanut butter and jelly on Pepperidge Farm Diet White Bread. The kids made fun of me. She sent me a care package at camp full of sugarless dietetic candy. It was humiliating. She also hid food in her dresser so we wouldn't see her eat it. She still does that now and only she and my dad live in the house. I know she does it because when I was home this year for the holidays I found an empty pound box of chocolates in the desk drawer in "my" room. Snacks for us were pretty taboo but my father permitted them (mom wasn't usually in the TV room at night but off doing crosswords in bed). She was death on all pork products because of the fat content (her father died at 66 of a heart attack). Even now she is paranoid about fat and has bizarre eating habits. She also did not encourage us to exercise beyond yelling at me to stop reading and go outside (although most of my memories of that statement are tied up with my grandmother as she was the one who was around after school because my mom was working.) She never once came to my baseball games and I played for 3 seasons at least. She did come to some of my basketball games but never came when I was in the marching band. She came to every (indoor) concert and play. As you can see she talked up a storm but she modeled bad behavior. My siblings and I all have poor relationships with food. My sister and I both became obese in college (and I'm not sure we were actually overweight as kids) and remained so afterwards. I am very proud that my sister has been able to lose over 100 lbs recently. She also walks half marathons, swims, and does yoga. My brother has my mother's relationship with food and takes it to extremes. I am certain that he was bulimic at one time (the toilet in the "kids'" bathroom at my parents' house didn't flush properly and I shared the bathroom with him when we were all home for holidays.) Now he is the food police with his wife (who generally blows him off and eats what she wants). He runs too. I am, once again, trying to lose weight and change my eating habits. I don't blame my mother for my current weight, she didn't force feed me or strap me to a chair to keep me from exercising. However, I think that parents who are the food police (and the Phila School District for enabling it) do the exact opposite of what they are trying to do. Teach your kids to think and to make decisions and the first place to start is with the food they eat when they are out of sight.

Finding time to Blog

Lately I've been struggling to find time to blog. I don't want to blog from work, even at lunch, because that seems like it is just inviting disaster. I should figure out how to carve out 30 minutes a day to devote to this because I'm frequently ready to spew about something but have no one (except The Wife and she's tired of hearing it) to discuss it with.

I am happy to report that The Wife and I are getting involved in local politics. The Wife was a volunteer during the 2004 campaign season and last year some acquaintances ran for local office and won. We supported those campaigns and met lots of people on election night and then we had a house party for Patrick Murphy who is running for Congress in the 8th District of Pennsylvania against Mike Fitzpatrick (well he needs to win the primary first). Yesterday we heard Larry Glick, candidate for PA house in the 143rd district, speak at an event. I also got a chance to actually talk with some of the people who I met on election night. I'm excited to be getting involved in local Democratic politics. We've been feeling a little lost out here because we've been here almost 4 years and we haven't made too many new friends. Part of the problem is because we don't have kids. For some reason, many people with kids don't even think to include us in anything. We like kids, really we do, we just couldn't have them (or adopt them or foster them...we've considered all the angles, health reasons prohibit us from being parents). We do things with our friends who have kids but we knew them before they had kids. Of course, in my paranoid days I wonder if people with kids don't invite us because we're gay and they don't want to expose their kids to us. This thought simultaneously makes me angry and profoundly sad. Anyway my hope as we get involved in local politics more and meet more people is that we'll make some local friends who we can go to dinner or the movies with, who we can have over for dinner or football or cards, and that we can meet some people who we can travel with. We like to travel but it's always just us. Sometimes it would be nice to have people to travel with because The Wife and I don't always want to see the same things. If we were in a small group we could split up sometimes and both of us could see the thing(s) that interested us most.

Time to load more tunes on the iPod.

Coming home to snow

I'm having trouble believing that the Super Bowl was only a week ago (and I'm bummed I never had the opportunity to blog about it or really enjoy the fact that the Steelers won.) I had to get ready to leave on a business trip to Spain on Tuesday that would be followed by 3 days vacation in London (The Wife was going to join me in London). It's been a hectic week. The business trip was generally fine as business trips go - no major hassles and we accomplished what we went there to accomplish.

London was expensive. I made the mistake of booking The Wife on a bus from the airport (then booked myself two days later on the same bus). It took FOREVER - traffic was tremendous and it was the middle of the morning. I can't even imagine what rush hour must be like. I had The Wife's best interest at heart when I booked it - I didn't want her to have to haul her luggage on and off the train and then drag it through the station to find a cab. We took a cab and the Heathrow Express train on the way back and it was painless and barrier-free (and took less than an hour door-to-door).

We saw an old friend (who will be referred to as the Italian former boyfriend who is gay...TIFB) who was a wonderful companion (along with his husband) for the wife when she first arrived and who spent Friday and Saturday evening with us. It was his 39th birthday on Saturday and he hosted a fab party in a gay bar. MMMMMM, BEEEER. We had a good time with the "Hi, I'm TIFB's former girlfriend" angle - unfortunately The Wife picked up a nasty cold in London so she was back at the hotel and this caused some confusion among the attendees. Apparently two of them were arguing about whether or not I'm gay. HA. TIFB's husband (after several mojitos) was asking all kinds of amusing questions which I, tongue well loosened with Hoegaarden beer (there's something really wrong about a lesbian drinking something called HO garden) was indiscreet in answering.

I will now say something that may surprise you - we had good food in London... It was Indian food, not "English" food but wow, was it good. We don't have an Indian restaurant near us now and I really miss Indian food. I ate it all the time when I was in grad school. I also had a "pasty" filled with steak, stilton cheese, onion, potato, and maybe turnip. It was good.

I had the opportunity to interact with my English counterpart - The Chemist (aka the pharmacist). The Wife woke up with a cold on Saturday morning so I went to "Boots, The Chemist" to get some things for her. Unlike here where I could stand in the cough and cold aisle and browse (and read ingredients etc ) in the UK some of the non-prescription items are behind the counter so you have to ask for them. Not knowing what anything was called or what it contained I had to ask the Chemist. I also had to lie through my teeth to the Chemist (is she taking any other medications? Just some Tylenol...).

To be continued...