I have jury duty tomorrow.  Part of me says, “ugh!”  However, there is another part of me almost giddy about it.  There are two reasons for this excitement.

1) I don’t have to go to work.  I seriously hate my job.  I hate my industry.  I hate everything about it.  Seriously.  It’s a soul sucking, hateful place to be and I’ve been at it much too long.  The only thing bearable are the ladies I work with.  Them and the fact that Ava is my boss.  Every single day I instant message her my resignation.  Every single day she refuses it.  I’m only sort of kidding.

“Please let this message serve as notice of my resignation.”  That’s what I’ll type or some variation on that theme.

“Nope,” is all I’ll get back.

2) Some people hate jury duty because it’s hours and hours of sitting and potential boredom.  I’m looking upon this as an opportunity of hours and hours of potential writing time.  I’m taking my laptop and probably my iPod to tune out the other people and I plan to write like a maniac.  I hope to complete, at minimum, one entire chapter.  MY AGENT (yes, I still think of her in all caps) has suggested something for book 2 that I think will be a great addition so I need to write that from scratch.  I’ve had ideas for it running around in my head for weeks and it’s time to push them out onto the paper.

At the very bare minimum, there will certainly be plenty of people-watching for me to report back to you in my own special, snarky way.  Stay tuned…

Oh my god, the dog is making me insane.  He’s clearly feeling better and at this point, My Honey and I are force feeding him pain meds just to calm him down.  I’m going to have a dog addicted to narcotics and I don’t even care. 

I spent perfectly good money on his surgery, and of course, I don’t want anything to happen to him for real.  But if a cartoon anvil should happen to fall on his head, I’d be totally OK with that. 

Because I don’t want to be the cause of anything happening to the dog, he’s still wearing the cone on his head to keep him from licking his incision.  What it means now that he’s feeling better is that nothing is safe.  He’s barreling around the house with his usual mania, only his head is eighteen inches wider than he’s expecting it to be.  He nearly took out the open dishwasher this evening after dinner.  Not to mention my knees.  At one point he careened past the table while we were eating and literally shoved Sassy’s chair several feet using the cone as a plow.  All of this to chase the cat.

And the cat is doing it on purpose. 

This cat of ours hasn’t been this active in years.  Usually he only comes out during potential feeding opportunities or to keep me company at night.    But for the last several days he has taken a great deal of fun in appearing behind some innocuous obstacle, taunting grin on his smug, feline face, all with the intent of enticing the dog to do his doggie best.  That’s why I have miscellaneous furniture strewn about my house.

And in another exciting development, a doorbell rang on the television tonight.  Roscoe came hauling ass down the hall and baying as threateningly as possible when one is a cartoon.  Only now, he has his very own amplification device.  If Ava and Kelli thought my house was loud before….  Deep sigh.

I’ll bet the Coyote’s ACME Anvil Company has free shipping this time of year.

Roscoe and The Bandit

The Idiot Dog was fixed on Saturday.  I’m here to tell you, you’ve never seen a more pitiful thing in your life than a bloodhound after surgery.  They sent him home with the cone around his head and, if we thought he was droopy before, well he’s reached a whole new level of droopy pathetic-ness the likes rarely seen before.

My Honey and I took him to the vet first thing in the morning.  He was all excited to get in the car and he watched out the window with glee.  My Honey kept apologizing to him in advance – clearly it’s a guy thing we women just don’t understand.  I guess after your fourth annual pelvic exam, your sense of pity is seriously diminished.

We arrived and, when the vet tech came out to collect Roscoe, the dog seemed a little wary of this change in circumstance.  However, when she gave him a reach around his opinion rapidly improved. 

She said all matter-of-factly, “I’m just going to check to see if he has both…”

I swear to God, Roscoe looked right at his dad with both eyebrows high as if to say, “Hey, I’ve heard about these massage parlors!”

The poor, misinformed dog blithely trotted after his new lady-love to have his naivete crushed under the tennis shoe of a woman in puppy dog scrubs.

Many hours later when we picked him up, the lobby was full of people to see the doctors for more routine reasons.  The Bandit, who’d become completely obsessed with the idea of what Roscoe was losing, continued to ask questions that I didn’t mind answering, but didn’t necessarily want to discuss quite so loudly in a crowded room of strangers.  I tried to keep my blushing to a pale fuschia and explained for the umpteenth time about testicles and doggy birth control.

When the door from the surgery opened, poor Roscoe literally staggered out.  He looked worse than a sailor on a three day drunk.  His ears hung limply down the sides of his plastic cone, his eyes sagged low forming little bloodshot pockets of pity down his cheeks, and his front legs kept crossing as he walked.  I could tell his eyes weren’t really focusing.  The entire room stopped its chatter and as one said en masse, “Ahhhhhhhhh,” with as much feeling as they could muster.

He literally collapsed on the living room floor when we got him home.  He didn’t even have the energy to defend himself when the cat came out and made fun of him.  The cat stuck his head all the way inside the cone to check out the dog and then walked away in disgust.  After all, the cat has been a eunuch for years and I’m sure he was wondering what all the fuss was about.  Roscoe promised to chase him later in the week.

It’s been a day and a half since.  He’s loving his pain meds and he’s sleeping a lot, but when he’s awake, he’s definitely the same Roscoe as last week.  We’re trying to keep him calm, but he took a freedom run, albiet a short one, down the street before he realized he was wearing the ever present cone and came to a stop about a house away, humiliated and chagrined.

The after surgery instructions suggest leaving the cone on for ten days, but I’m actually concerned he’s going to break his damn-fool neck.  You certainly don’t have to concern yourself with him sneaking up on you because you can hear him crashing his way through the house from one end to the next.  He never clears a doorway on his first try and collides with the step every time he tries to come into the kitchen.

My Honey has started calling him Satellite Dish. 

Wouldn’t it just be easier if we made him put on a pair of the Transformer underpants The Bandit refuses to wear?

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Once at a lecture in London titled “Paranoia, the Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx, and Phantoms,” Salvador Dali made a magni ficent entrance, as usual.  Holding two white Russian wolfhounds on a lest in one hand and a billiard cue in the other, he was dressed in an old-fashioned diving suit and helmet topped with a Mercedes radiator cap.  He tried to speak but soon realized that, without a supply of oxygen to the helmet, he was unable to breathe.  The audience blithely watched him struggle for air, thinking it was a part of the act, but finally two friends realized something was amiss.  They frantically attempted to hammer off the bolts on the helmet.  Finally a stage hand arrived with a wrench and released the nearly suffocated Dali.

You know Dali is a weird guy.  That’s his whole thing – being odd.  At least when you hung around him, things were probably never dull.

Can't you see a little bit of Johnny here?

“There’s a girl in my class that doesn’t believe in anything,” he told me. 

The Bandit and I were snuggling in his bottom bunk after I’d read How The Grinch Stole Christmas.  He was warm and smelled wonderful fresh from his shower.  The light from his alligator nightlight gave just enough light to see his eyes twinkling while he was telling me about his day.

“What do you mean, she doesn’t believe in anything?”  I suspected this was about Santa Claus and I was revving up my fairy tale engines to undo any misdeeds done by rotten know-it-all kids.  “What doesn’t she believe in?”

“Anything.  She doesn’t even believe my name is The Bandit,” he told me incredulously.

“Well that’s just crazy talk.  If you name wasn’t Bandit, what would we call you?  George?  Carl?  Bernard?  None of that sounds right.”  I burrowed in and kissed his warm neck.

“That’s exactly why I’m not marrying her.”

This took me aback.  I wasn’t aware he was planning this far ahead.  “Oh.  I guess that’s as good a reason as any.”  Then curiosity got the better of me.  “What does this little girl look like?”

“She has black hair,” he paused and then added, “but she does have very beautiful eyes.”

Oh, this was interesting.  “What color are they?”

“Like mine,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Well, you do have very beautiful eyes.”  I snuggled in closer so I could give him a good hug.  “She sounds very pretty.  Maybe you should reconsider.”

“She’s pretty, that’s for sure, but she’s not smart and pretty’s just not enough for me, Momma.”

If he’s this astute at five, I can’t wait to meet the girl he’s really gonna marry.

This gave me a giggle

We put up the Christmas decorations today.  I can’t decide if that excites me or irritates me.  By Christmas day, I’m so sick of the tree I’m ready to take it down immediately.  It’s huge and hulking and in the way.    At least for now, the tree is lovely and every surface of the house is covered in Christmas bacchanalia. 

We’ve been collecting a Christmas village for the last couple of years.  It started with a Nutcracker scene: 5 large porcelain pieces representing a ballet studio, a theater, a music shop, a bakery and a large castle.  All of the buildings light up and several of them have moving pieces.  For example, in the theater, the Rat King and Clara dance about.

My Honey has added all kinds of people and little vignettes to the village including ice skaters and snowball fights and stuff of that nature.  We have scores of little tiny fir trees covered with snow and adorable snowy animals.  Last year we added a toy store.  There is a white cathedral we inherited from My Honey’s Nanny that fits in nicely as well.  This year he added Frosty’s Tree Lot and a little scene of a deer eating a snowman’s carrot nose right off his snowy little face.  He also replaced the Santa because he was mysteriously broken last year.

So how long do you think it took for the tree lot to be broken?  Did you guess 35 seconds from when it was removed from the wrapping?  Oh, you guessed too long.  Did anyone admit to breaking the sign off?  If you guessed Sassy immediately pointed at her brother, this time you would have guessed correctly.  Of course he insisted it wasn’t him.  Whatever.  Our entire village had to be shored up with super glue before we could put it out. 

My Honey had a conversation with the boy wherein he informed him, in no uncertain terms, that the Nutcracker Village was NOT to be attacked by GI Joes.  The Nutcracker Castle is not COBRA command.  There are to be no aerial assaults, no tunneling under the snow, and no open slaughter of the happy inhabitants of said village.

It is my opinion that next year we see if we can find a scale model of a little Red Cross Hospital to add to the village.

Radar would have seen this coming