Happy Halloween

… and now I can finally start playing around with my blog’s wallpaper to my heart’s content.

My blog is like my new hobby, and when you get a new hobby you get all into it. I’ve wanted to change my wallpaper, colors etc nearly every single day since I started. Just to play. But I’ve refrained, to let my happy halloween banner live out it’s life contently.

I am still nervous about my dentist appointment tonight. Like I said, I’m nervous I have a cavity. Do my teeth hurt? No. Do I have reason to believe I have a cavity other than sheer paranoia? No. But here’s where it get’s tricky: I have never had a cavity! No, not one. Once upon a time my dentist (who I’ve been seeing since I was small) thought he saw one, but it was on a baby tooth and it fell out before it became a problem. So really, I’m just worried that my cavity-free time is up! That’ it’s my turn for a cavity… and for that, I am paranoid. My parents both have terrible teeth so I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time before all my good-teeth-fortune wears off. My only hope is that when we went to Chicago a few months ago to visit my uncle and two cousins (age ~34 & ~30) They both told me they had never had a cavity either! Maybe it’s a generation thing? Hope so.

The other item weighing on my mind at the moment is I feel like I *might* be getting a migraine. I don’t want one tonight. I’m going to the dentist, then I’m going to my parents house to help pass out candy and then spending the night there. My mother, who I love, irritates me when I have a migraine because she can’t stop asking me to rate how bad it is or hypothesize about why it started. Let me make this perfectly clear: If I knew WHY I got migraines, do you think I would still be GETTING THEM?
Answer= No

I just whipped a protein bar out of my drawer, hopefully that will help ward it off. Whenever I start thinking about my migraines or what causes them… I can’t help but think of BF Skinner, the famous behavioral psychologist who essentially trained pigeons to be superstitious by delivering food at predetermined time intervals. The pigeons began repeating whatever random behavior they had be doing just before the reward in an attempt to get another reward faster, thus developing complex rituals to try and get food. I feel the same way about migraines, I’ve developed all sorts of complex rituals to try and prevent them and there’s no proof anything I’m doing has any consequence or whether I would be receiving a respite regardless of my efforts.

*****Update
No Cavities! Wahoooooooooo! Towards the end my dentist says, “oh, we’re going to need to do a root canal on this one” tapping one of my incisors. I say, “why?” he says, “ehh, it’d be fun. It’s halloween!” stupid comedian dentist! Not funny AT ALL!

A lil crabby

I had a wonderful weekend. So much fun stuff happened. I had fun at the reptile contest and a LOT of fun at the Halloween party we went to. (Despite the fact that I was DD). I skipped real breakfast this morning so that I would have an excuse to walk to the sub place down the street since it’s supposed to be in the 60s today and I am most definately looking forward to that. So really I don’t have a whole lot to complain about, but I’m going to anyway…

There are a few things I am crabby about today:

1. That I had to get up for work at all today (though I was appreciative of the time change making it light outside for my drive to work)
2. At least 5 things going on at work right now that I am *really* irritated about but don’t want to complain about in a public forum for fear of firing. (Wasn’t that the purpose of me not using my real name in the first place? so I could speak freely?)
3. That I have not yet received all the checks from my friends for a group gift purchased 3 weeks ago.
4. That I have to go to the dentist afterwork on Halloween… really I’m just nervous I’m going to have a cavity.
5. That I can’t seem to change the email address my blog is associated with… I want to pick a new one

I have decided because so much is bothering me at work right this minute, and writing is theraputic for me, I’m going to start keeping a word document of entries I’d like to post but can’t. Then some day down the line once I start my new job I’ll post them.

Gotta Represent

Last night was a big night around here. The big chain petstore near us was having a reptile contest! I don’t know if I’ve talked whole lot specifically about our unusual pets thus far even though I have a whole label category devoted entirely to them “tegu-licious”. We have two tegus. We have an Argentinian black and white tegu, “Miss Thang”, and we have a blue tegu “Princess”. -not their real names, they’ve asked me to protect their privacy as they are concerned about identity theft in today’s world.

We have been looking forward to last night for probably two weeks. It’s not every day people “want” to look at or hear about your reptile. We packed Miss Thang up in a cardboard box with few towels to lounge on. It was cold and rainy, not ideal weather to be taking your reptiles out of doors. I’m curious about why they didn’t have the reptile contest in July? In a season a bit more hospitable to reptiles?

About 20 people showed up, most brought their pet snakes, there were a few little kids who brought their bearded dragons. The categories were “Largest Snake” “Largest Lizard” “Most Colorful Reptile” “Most Unique Reptile” and “Best Reptile Photo”… Miss Thang won Largest Lizard by a large margin. Had the contest not been designed to be fair to the little kids she would probably have also won Most Unique Reptile since all the other lizards there could be purchased in a pet store.

We were quite proud of her. She was a perfect angel all night. She sat on our shoulders (climbed on my head) and hung out in our arms all night. She let little kids pet her, and she let one little obnoxious boy poke her in the head repeatedly. I was really pleased because we always claim she’s tame, but she’s never been tested by anyone other than the two of us who are used to handling her. So we never really had proof. (And she’s got teeth and packs enough power that she could easily give you a need for stitches or break a little finger bone if she really wanted to.)

I’m posting this with a picture of her scaling the cat-trees at the pet store. We got some really horrified looks from a woman wearing high heels. The funniest part of the night was after she won her prize my husband took her over to see how she would react to the mouse tank. She went from motivation level 2 to motivation level 10 in a hurry. You could tell she was looking at them thinking “Forget my prize, can I have one of those instead?!!! Vanilla or Chocolate?!”

No, to answer your question, I am not a reptile person persay. I had a cat growing up and given my choice I would have a cat now too. But my choice came down to my husband or a cat, and I chose him. Between the two of us we are allergic to everything with fur. And when it really comes right down to it, though I may fantasize about having a dog from time to time, I just don’t really like dogs a whole lot. My husband on the other hand really likes reptiles and has had them from the time he was small.

My husband got Miss Thang about 6 months before I met him. She’s about 2 now. And she was 30 inches long the last time we measured. Heyyyy, that’s a big lizard! She’s quite tame, though her size took me a while to get used to and I am glad I met her when she was smaller than she is now. Princess is sort of supposed to be “my” tegu. She’s about 1 now and was, I think, about 20 inches the last time we measured. She is significantly more daring than Miss Thang and will leap from your hands and take the 3 foot drop like a man if it means she might get a chance a freedom.

Challenged

I’ve challenged myself to the National Blog Posting Month challenge over at Fussy.org.

Since I’m new to all this html business, I don’t know how to make the picture on my right margin into a link yet, so this entry is my link.

To play along I need to post something every day for the month of November. I figured since I started doing this in order to write every day (among other reasons), and because I have quite a few good entries already planned that I’ve been working on, this is the perfect challenge!

So starting Nov 1st, GAMES ON!

Fact

The first time I ever had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I was a senior in college. I liked it. I had never had one before and didn’t know why, I always had plain peanut butter sandwiches instead. I was relating this story to my mother and said “I don’t know why I’ve only ever eaten peanut butter, I wonder if I had a traumatic food experience at some point?” she said, “no, it always grossed me out so I never gave it to you”….

And all this time I was thinking I didn’t like peanut butter with jelly. Really it was just a learned neuroses.

Attic Jihad

Well, we were right. We had at least 1 squirrel that was planning to winter in our attic. The rat poison hadn’t been working too well so I persuaded my husband to quit trying to rid our yard of squirrels and to try his luck in the attic. Last night I was laying in bed and heard something in the attic. I thought my husband may have gone to check his squirrel trap… then I realized he had already taken his evening shower (our attic is *very* unfinished)so there was no way he would be going up there. Tonight he went up to check the trap and we got one! (they apparently like peanut butter way better than rat poison, go figure. We put peanut butter on a plate made of foil for bait)I feel a little guilty because it is a baby squirrel who has clearly spent a lot of time collecting buckeyes in our attic for the winter and now has to start over from scratch in the park down the road. But, it’s not my fault they chose our house.

Overheard during rodent extraction:
H “He is definitely not in his happy place right now”

H “We got one, and boy did he have fun with this foil”
SSFB “Fun as in he ate it or fun as in origami?”

Expectations & Preparedness

In honor of the first flurries of the season this week I’d like to give my opinion on something: Southerners and Winter.

I went to a Super Small Southern School for college, while it was almost a full day’s drive south for me it was a big move north for some of my co-eds. A lot of people I met from FL, TX, LA had to buy their first ever winter coat to come to college. My freshmen year the first inch of snow we got I had people stopping me and crying out “How do you COPE with this?!”

I had to actively dispel a common misconception among them: Northerners are not immune to cold or snow. When it is 35 degrees out, I feel just as cold as you do. (And yes some of them thought that because I was from the north I wouldn’t feel as cold as they did) After living there for 4 years my conclusion is handling winter all comes down to expectations and preparedness.

The difference between northerners and southerners when it comes to winter is that northerners expect weeks of 30 degree weather. When it’s February, we expect to be cold. We expect it to snow and we expect to need things like hats, scarves, gloves and boots. Just like people in buffalo NY expect it to snow feet at a time every year, no one there bats an eye when this happens.

People from the north mock people from the south because when they get an inch of snow everything shuts down. While living there I learned this: This is not their fault and they’re not over-reacting. When it snows an inch in the south it is the equivalent of it snowing 6+ inches up here. They don’t have salt or snow plows to remove it from the streets so everyone can go about their business. That I think surprised me the most about living there. The county had 1 snow plow. That’s it, just 1, and no salt. So with just an inch of snow, driving became hazardous because it just stayed on the roads and froze.

Really the reason I was inspired to write this is because a friend of mine has moved here for graduate school from Charleston SC and came prepared with a fall-type jacket and was proudly declaring he was going to live with just a small space heater for the winter. He’s in shock that we’ve had flurries in October and has already turned on his heater
…………………..
And this reminds me of another funny story. Freshmen year of college one of my good friends from New Orleans had to be corrected because he thought we didn’t get snow on the roads in the north because we had heated streets. Yes, heated streets. Ahhh the magic of salt and snow plows.

Old Name:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 18 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

… and there are incidentally 4470 others with my old last name…

New Name:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 95 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

…I have now joined a last name clan with 23997 others.

Ooooo, my very own?

I don’t precisely recall the date I decided it might be a good idea to marry my husband… not at all. However I think we’ve turned out to be a very good match. One reason for this is we both have a deep love for high-tech-electronics. Mine has been engrained in me from a very young age a la father.

I know it’s cliche but I’ve married my father.

My nursing school orientation is at the beginning of November but in anticipation I was checking out my community college’s website to see what nights a week I *might* have class and by george they have posted the class schedules for the spring. I was telling my cute-husband about this over dinner last night, and over looking all other possible implications he queries if I will need access to a computer for this class as it is web-enhanced. Indeed I shall.

We have a computer, a super-computer really. My husband is so adorably-geeky that he builds his own computers to the latest specifications for games/graphics and whatnot. Last year when I cornered the title of “Best Fiance EVER” for buying him an XBOX 360 I also unwittingly blocked him from making his yearly computer updates. The games/graphics on the XBOX were so much better he was unable to justify spending money to upgrade the computer. Since then he has been searching for excuses to build us a new computer. (“I could make it work like a tivo” was the best one I’ve heard.) Even offering to build my father a new computer just so he could get the need to build one out of his system.

He works on our computer nightly to prepare for work the next day and it’s not often available. Worst case scenario I was thinking I would print the pages I needed while I was at work, but as previously stated I love computers/electronics too so it’s hard for me to produce arguments against what would ultimately end with me having my own computer…..

I cried last night

I was watching TV last night, I guess I was in an emotional mood to begin with, but they were putting a dog to sleep (acting). Tears just starting pouring down my face. The poor dog looked so scared and was trying to get up and fight them. My husband tried to assure me later that it was because it was just a TV show and they were acting and the dog didn’t know what was going on. It was almost a year ago that we had to put my cat Mittens to sleep. He was 18 and had been sick for a while. He had been losing weight and having bloody diarrhea. We tried a couple things with the vet, rehydrating him and giving him some steroids but it just wasn’t helping. I was visiting my parents one night and bent down to give him a kiss good-bye and I could hear his belly just churning and I knew how painful it must be to make that noise. The next morning I decided I would call my parents and tell them that I was ok with putting him to sleep, that they didn’t have to be afraid to ask me, or waiting on me anymore.

I couldn’t get ahold of my dad that morning, he was late getting to his office. He sent me an email about two hours after I called telling me that he took it upon himself to take Mittens to the vet without telling me or my mother beforehand to have him put to sleep. He assured me Mittens wasn’t scared and it was very peaceful and he just went to sleep while my dad was petting him. My cat was never very cuddly, from the time he was a kitten he was always feisty and never wanted to be touched or held if it wasn’t totally on his terms. He did always worship my father though, he loved that my dad played rough with him and would wrestle with him on the floor and toss him around. So I know it didn’t matter to him that I wasn’t there. But I can’t help but feel guilty that I didn’t go with my father, that I wasn’t the one petting him.

He was my first pet, we got him when I was 6 just before I started 1st grade. I still miss him, I still expect to see him when I go to my parents house, and if I go at night I sometimes mistake the plant on the front porch for him outside waiting. He wasn’t at all the cuddly lap cat I had wanted when I was begging my parents for a kitten. But I loved him as though he was, even if I had to fight him for every hug. Without fail after I would lay still at night he would creep into my room and curl up with me.