What vacations would you most like to take in the next five years?
Presented by Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow.All I can think about lately is how badly I want to go on a big vacation and how I am so severely behind on big trips in my life due to falling in love with somebody who grew up thousands of miles away from me. Too much time and money has been spent on traveling to the same frigging state over and over (and over) again and not seeing the world like I promised myself I would.
Where do I begin? In no particular order:
Australia and New Zealand
Thailand and Cambodia
Costa Rica
Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina
Japan
China, just about all of it
Alaska
Vancouver and the rest of British Columbia
Vermont and New Hampshire during the autumn
South Africa
Some sort of African safari
Various "-nesias" like Polynesia, Indonesia, etc
Bavaria (western Austria and southern Germany, etc)
Ireland
New York City
Boston and the rest of New England
Dang, I better get cracking.
1. The Washingtonienne - Jessica Cutler
2. The Rift - Walter Jon Williams
3. Windfalls - Jean Hegland
4. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
5. Petaluma's Poultry Pioneers - Thea S. Lowry
6. Wizard's First Rule - Terry Goodkind
7. Sea of Glass - Barry B. Longyear
8. Map of the World - Jane Hamilton
9. Rebel Angels - Libba Bray
10. The Far Euphrates - Aryeh Lev Stollman
11. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street - Michael Davis
12. Prairie Tale - Melissa Gilbert
13. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
14. Marcelo in the Real World - Francisco X. Stork
15. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
16. The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland - Jim DeFede
17. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate - Jacqueline Kelly
18. Reading - Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
19. Reading - I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
Italicized titles are re-views.
Be Kind Rewind **
Breaking the Waves ***
Little Miss Sunshine *****
Mulan ***
Double Happiness **
Chaos Theory ***
Super High Me **
Art School Confidential ***
X-Men: The Last Stand ***
Speed (Riffed) ****
The Lake House ****
Rambo *
Horton Hears a Who **
The Tale of Despereaux ***
Must Love Dogs ***
Hot Fuzz ***
The Shop Around the Corner ****
Die Hard (Riffed) ****
Little Lord Fauntleroy ***
Flannel Pajamas ***
Tron (Riffed) *
Twilight Zone: The Movie *
Broadcast News ***
Pineapple Express ***
In Between Days ***
The Fall ***
Paris, je t'aime **
My Super Ex-Girlfriend **
The Clone Wars *
Jaws (Riffed) ***
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone *****
Underdog **
Aqua Teen Hunger Force **
The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement **
Kung Fu Panda ***
Return to Me ****
Pygmalion ****
Monsters vs. Aliens ***
Space Buddies **
Jumper ****
Just Friends **
Women in Love **
Shopgirl ***
Disaster Movie *
Meet The Spartans *
The Bank Job ***
Slumdog Millionaire *****
Get Smart **
Zach and Miri Make a Porno ****
The More the Merrier **
Seven Pounds ***
Minority Report (Riffed) ***
The Secret Life of Bees ****
Beverly Hills Chihuahua *
Five Children and It **
Star Trek *****
Heidi (2005) ***
Madeline **
National Treasure: Book of Secrets **
The Adventures of Milo and Otis **
The Jane Austen Book Club ***
Love in the Time of Cholera **
Cashback ****
Penelope ***
LolliLove * (just couldn't finish it)
Role Models ****
Fat Head ***
Ice Age ***
Henry Poole is Here ***
The Puffy Chair ****
WALL-E ****
Smart People ***
Dumb and Dumberer **
Word Wars ***
Wedding Crashers **
Ice Age 3 ***
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ****
Up ****
is my wedding date. This date was chosen very carefully. First we decided to get married in October because the wedding is in Georgia and we didn't want it to be too hot. Then we decided to have the wedding in 2010 so that I would be able to do this long drawn out makeover for myself before starting the next chapter in our lives. When looking at dates in October of 2010, we found that we could hold the wedding on 10-10-10 and that is cool for so many reasons.
Rufus was found by my friends Kim & Charles in 2000, wandering around in Bellevue on the North Side of Richmond. He was so covered in fleas and ticks that when they put Frontline on him, his face turned black from all the fleeing bugs. When they took him to the vet, he was diagnosed with heartworms and every intestinal parasite the vet had seen. The vet actually said, "I have never seen this many parasites in a living animal before." But Kim & Charles were getting married and going on their honeymoon, and they didn't have the resources to keep him, so they asked me if I'd foster him and take him to the AARF adoption stands on Sundays. So I did that. He had never seen stairs before, so I had to teach him how to walk up and down my apartment stairs to get in and out of the house. He immediately walked off a leash and knew how to sit and shake. He never barked, begged or got up in anybody's grill about anything. He was instantly the best dog I'd ever known, and he did it all on his own. He didn't get adopted at the adoption stands, because he was older---the vet said between 5 & 8 years old. Nobody wanted an older dog. But he fit so well into my lifestyle that I just finally adopted him and that arrangement worked great for both of us.
That was 8 years ago. We've had a million adventures, a ton of car rides, camping trips, dog park visits, walks with friends, thousands of bowls of kibble, hundreds of chewey treats, and an immeasurable amount of love. Everybody who meets Rufus loves him instantly. He is just a really fantastic dog.
Over the last 8 years, he has slowly gotten more arthritic. He got cataracts and lost his sight, and then his hearing started to fail. He slowed down more and more, and finally one day about 2 years ago on a walk, he had a series of strokes, and we had to stop going on long walks. Within the last year, he stopped letting me trim his nails---he would YALP any time I got near him with nail clippers, even though I'd only nipped him once, many years ago. So between his arthritis and his dracula nails, he has a hard time getting up to a standing position on hardwood floors. And within the last few months, he has stopped being able to negotiate the front steps, four concrete steps up to the door. More recently, he is having trouble with the back steps, only 2 steps up. And then he started to have accidents in the house, which he's never done. He had more and more trouble getting into the car, until finally we would have to pick him up and put him in the back seat. And then two weeks ago, he couldn't get out of the car, he fell out and smashed his face on the curb and bit his tongue. That was the end of the car rides.
It's been hard watching my best friend lose the ability to get around. He's got a growth on his side that started off the size of an egg, and it's now about twice the size of a softball. Like a cereal bowl growing under his fur. The vet said he was too old to biopsy it, and anyway, what are we going to do, chemo? she joked. No, she's right, no chemo. He started getting skin growths everywhere. One on his eyelid growing in towards his eye that is about the size of my pinkie nail, that constantly grows and bleeds and causes an infection. We have to clean his eye constantly, wiping the scabs out of his fur and keeping the infection down. The cataract in that eye has gotten much worse because of the constant irritation, I think. He's got another bleeding growth on his head, and a sore on his back just above his tail that bleeds and heals, bleeds and heals.
So last week I asked my mom to get her neighbor with the backhoe to dig us a spot at the farm, and I made an appointment with the vet for Monday morning at 9:15. I'm not sure you can ever be "ready" for losing a friend like this, even when it's so obvious that they are suffering and having a hard time. But I think about how close he was to death when my friends found him, 8 years ago, and how much Roof and I have been through together... He's a great dog. He's a once-in-a-lifetime dog, a legendary dog. We'll tell stories about him until we die. He's that kind of dog. That good. That smart. That funny.
I love you, Roof. You're my best buddy. I hope I did right by you.
Rufus: ? -- Nov. 24, 2008
I haven't posted here in ages. I have been a bad little vox-er.
Hi! Well, we are one week away from Thanksgiving. Tonight is the pre-Thanksgiving for the folks in my Mom's family who won't otherwise be in town next week. We will be convening over at my Grandma's apartment, it should be interesting.
;o)
Tonight for dinner, I made Aloo Gobi and Garlic Naan. I highly recommend both of these recipes:
Aloo Gobi
Garlic Naan
It was DELICIOUS. I served the Aloo Gobi over jasmine rice, and after mixing together all the ingredients in the Aloo Gobi, I let it stew in the crock pot for an hour to really blend the flavors and soften up the veggies.
It was SO GOOD. We are super psyched to have leftovers. We froze the extra naan so that we can toss it in the toaster and heat it up again quickly, brush with fresh butter. YUM.
I just spent an hour in the attic. It's hot in the attic, and dirty, and dusty, and dark. There's one bare bulb in the middle of the 700 square foot space, and it's only 60 watts. Even at 9am, with the sun up and shining, there are only four small windows. It's dim, at best. And hot.
The attic is sort of our only storage space. It's seven hundred square feet of junk storage right now. Don't know what to do with something? Cram it in the attic. We've been doing this for years, so it's understandably ... messy up there. Messy is an understatement, actually. It's piles of junk. Teetering towers of trash. Lamps, a bed frame, a rug, two broken vacuum cleaners, christmas lights, all my sewing equipment, all of our tools, cans of paint, boxes that we moved from Allen's old apartment and never unpacked, shoe boxes stuffed with bank statements, piles of magazines, three full sleeves of R-30 fiberglass insulation, holloween costumes, all the boxes from every electronic anything we've ever bought, ever.
It's a lot of stuff.
I just spent an hour in the attic. I rolled up the rug neatly and taped it into the rolled form. I started a huge YARD SALE pile. I threw out a giant box filled with garbage, stuff that's broken or useless or that we're never going to use. I put things away in groups: suitcases here, pet stuff over there, yard sale pile here, tools there, paint supplies over there, holiday stuff in bins over here. Trying to wrap my head around the madness. I was finally able to see the floor, and I thought, holy fuck. We need to have a yard sale, STAT. I'm just going to put my foot down about some of the chaos. It's too much. It's too much STORAGE. We don't need that much stuff. We aren't using it, so why are we keeping it? We need to call Clean House to come do the "keep, toss, sell" treatment to our own house. I think I need to stage an intervention on my soon-to-be husband, before the junk overwhelms us and the ceiling collapses on our heads.
