I had no idea that Siri was prejudiced against states, but she is.
I recently sold some stock; not a lot, but just enough to feel a little loosening of the fiscal belt. Enough to book a trip to St. Maarten and buy our bee hives and apiary equipment.
I texted Matt to let him know that I was off to deposit the check from the sale.
I said “taxes”, but Siri wanted to ensure Texas didn’t get any of the money.
I don’t know what Texas ever did to her, but I find it a delightful state. The opinions if my Siri do not reflect the opinions of me.
I just read something that I think is pretty silly.
As background, this is what has been taking up a lot of my time for the last two months:
Louie
Louie was my Christmas present to myself. He’s a little ball of love. And a little ball of work. My schedule has changed, I had to hire a dog trainer to come to the house to help with housebreaking, we’re visiting a doggie day care tomorrow to see about him staying there two times a week so that I don’t have to get up and leave meetings every day of the week to go and let him out….
He’s worth it.
One of his little idiosyncracies is that he shakes a lot. As in starts at the head and shakes all the way down (I would say from his head to his tail but French bulldogs don’t have tails).
So, I did what anyone would do: I looked up “Why do dogs shake?” on Google.
The first article that came back was from Modern Dog magazine. The article proposes that dogs shake because humans are showing them love in ways that their canine brains can’t process.
Emotion is energy-in-motion, which is why the more emotional we feel the more animated we become and want to move. And as energy emotion has an internal dynamic of movement that works quite like the tides in that there is a rising and an ebbing effect. When emotion sweeps over us, we can feel it surge as if we’re a tidal basin being flooded with a wave, and then these effects slowly subside and in fact can linger for a very long time. So in the animal mind, when there is an input of love that falls outside this natural rhythm, the canine mind doesn’t necessarily process it as love, but rather as social pressure, which to a dog is equivalent to pain and since the emotional circuitry piggybacks on the most basic systems of physiology, the dog shakes it off.
WTF? The dog mind can’t process love, but it can process social pressure? PUH-LEEZE! Glad I haven’t subscribed to Modern Dog.
Then I went to the other most visited site for information: YouTube.
Another WTF moment. There has actually been scientific work on dog shaking water off its coat.
If you have time to watch this video — DO! The scientists involved actually videoed (in slow-mo, no less) a rat shaking so that you and I can see its skeleton during the process.
Conclusion:
AWESOME.
And I still don’t know why Louie shakes except that he just feels like it. Good enough.
A table made from stale baguettes! I thought it was pretty cool looking. I shared it with my roommate from college, who was also my main partner in crime during a semester abroad in Dijon, France, when we were young. I posted it to Facebook and got the following comments:
Betsy’s comment is quite accurate and I thought to myself “When faced with a baguette, who wouldn’t eat it?” Then, I started to think, “When faced with a baguette, who wouldn’t eat it?” What if you did have this piece of furniture and had to look at it daily and couldn’t eat it? Having baguettes in your face all the time with no ability to scarf them!! That, I thought, would be hell.
I use “that would be hell” as a figure of speech, but…I always have to take things to the next level. So, I thought, what if Hell (the place, and yes, I do believe in capital H, e, double l) were made of punishments like this? You know, little things that just frustrate the crap out of you? What ifyYour existence was limited to always being in a perpetual state of pissed off, or uncomfortable, or irked. I’m being very tongue in cheek with this, because I don’t really believe this is what Hell is, but I have developed a list of things that if I had to spend Eternity enduring, it would definitely be punishing.
If I Had to Spend Eternity Doing This, I Would Be in Hell:
Shopping for groceries at Wal-Mart
Driving behind a slow car in the left hand lane on the interstate
Finding a chin hair but not being able to find any tweezers
Having an unlimited supply of Raisin Nut Bran cereal but no milk
Squatting over public toilets
Prepping for a colonoscopy (drinking that nasty shit) (hey, just realized what a pun the use of “shit” was) (hey, just realized that’s two bathroom related hell-tasks in a row)
Meetings
On hold with the Time Warner Customer Representative / Billing Department at the hospital
Wearing a white shirt with a big, wet coffee stain down the front
Having baguettes in front of me but not being able to eat them (and you can add about a gazillion other foods, as well, except for peas)
I drove Matt to the airport the other morning, so we had the opportunity to share a morning drive. We started to talk about our new hobby of beekeeping and how there doesn’t seem to be a lot of young people involved.
me: You know if people would involve young people when they were taking care of their bees, I bet there would be more young people who wanted to keep bees. When I was younger, we were always warned away from the hives. “Stay away!” “Don’t go near there!” We were scared to go near the hives. Doesn’t that sound like a Sheets family response? “Danger! Danger! Stay away!”
Matt: Sounds so like your family. When I was growing up, I was taught that guns were just another tool. They’re dangerous, so you have to be careful. You have to learn how to handle them properly. But you were never around guns so now you’re very apprehensive about guns.
me: Yes, and other things.
Matt: Like what?
me: Penises.
Matt: Yeah, you were taught that if you got around a penis you would end up a homeless crack whore, with no job and no family.
me: With no one to love me.
*pause*
me: I should have been taught that they are just another tool.
Matt: That they can be dangerous but they can be good in other cases.
Then we got distracted by this boy waiting for the school bus that wears shorts every day regardless of the weather (that morning it was in the high 30s but with a biting wind). Matt didn’t think that was weird because he said his legs never got cold when he was that age. Which led me to tell him the story of the time in high school when we couldn’t wear shorts but the girls could wear mini skirts, so two boys protested by wearing mini skirts to school.
This led to a discussion of whether there is a disproportionate amount of assholes attracted to school jobs or if your perspective is skewed as a child/teenager.
An attempt to understand the world of current events, finance and the economy on a level that allows me to teach it. I'm a journalist. Oh and the occasional post about family, life and kids!
my mama always said 