Friday, November 30, 2007

Friday Five, An Occasional Series

1. I am rather grumpy that I have to spend my Friday frantically preparing for a week-long training of newbies next week and A. gets to release some Black-Footed ferrets about 50 miles from here. No fair.

In grade school, the Big Red Square State Game and Fish would distribute kiddie newsletters three or four times a year. I distinctly remember the issue with Black-footed ferrets on the cover and the article about the breeding program. The color of that particular newsletter was kind of orangey-brown, something kind of like this:

I WANT TO HELP RE-INTRODUCE THE LITTLE FELLAS TO THEIR NATIVE HABITAT, DAMMIT! Instead, I am preparing presentations for a week-long, painfully dull, dull, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuull training on program procedures. I am having to train myself on this shit; I have NO BUSINESS training the new employees. Hmff.

2. Last night, A. and I, as well as our friends C. and B., and BG, watched the #24 Big Red Square State Cowgirls beat the Montana Lady Grizzlies. It was a big win; Montana beat BRSS during both match ups last season. Go, Cowgirls!

3. Brief update on The Thesis: K. happily agreed to serve on my thesis committee, and gave me more suggestions for my bibliography. I was thrilled that I'd already read many of her recommendations, though I had read those just for fun and not with my Thesis Hat on. (Could I be a bigger nerd?) I am happy to revisit these texts, especially Coming Home to Eat by Gary Nabhan and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I have about 50 pages left in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and I was already planning on, at the conclusion of this reading, flipping to the first page of the book and immediately reading the volume again, regardless that now I need to rescan it with my Thesis Hat on. It is amazing. I'll write a proper review of the book in a bit, but for now, if you are wondering what to read next, I heartily recommend this book. READ IT. (Wow, there are some run on sentences going on.... Eh, whatever. It's Friday!)

Also, my third committee member from outside my department is delighted that I have a new chair. Just saying.

4. Getting myself all hyper and totally wired over a book makes me think of one of my favorite places on the entire planet, the Long Room at the University of Dublin, Trinity College. What an amazing, reverent, secular-holy place. The Book of Kells resides there, too. Holy cow, if I didn't almost cry when I saw it. Also, I was surprised at how much stuff from my art history classes came back to me, and came back full of life, no less.

5. About twenty minutes after A. dropped me off at work, he called to tell me with no amount of pleasure in his voice, that he had just plunked down "a small fortune" on the dogs. What?! Twenty minutes wasn't enough time to drive back out to the house (seven miles north of town), see the pups, ascertain that something was awry, rush them to an emergency vet appointment and empty our checking account. What the hell had happened?

Well, the pups are now seven years old, closing in on their eighth year. So they are senior dogs. *sniff, sniff* And the new "senior" dog food we decided to put the dogs on? $42 a bag. Um, yeah. Granted, this will last a month. However, this food had better make the doggies stay youthful, springy, full of spunk, and happy as all get-out, and! AND! I had better not see any sign of stiff joints for at least, oh, four more years. And I thought it was ridiculous we were spending $32 on a bag of the diet stuff. Sheesh.

Happy Friday to you!

5 comments:

  1. Our dogs eat a 40-lb. bag of Science Diet every 3 weeks or so, so we spend about that too. BAH.

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  2. Sounds like things are going pretty well with you guys. I'm glad you're such good and caring dog owners. And I'm glad that your thesis is going so well and that it's about something you're so interested in to begin with.

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  3. I had been thinking about reading that Kingsolver book. Perhaps I'll have to snag a copy for break. The whole two weeks that I get this year, most of which will be spent frantically reading every anthropology book ever written in preparation for my qualifying exams.

    And Rowen gets the cheap stuff---Purina---mostly because I'm too lazy to drive the 15 minutes to PetSmart to get her the good stuff. Fortunately I no longer have to keep around a bag of the very expensive prescription "gentle" food that she had to eat every time she ingested some foreign object that then blocked her intestines (which was about once a week for the first year and a half of her life). Eventually I accepted that there is exactly one toy that she can't destroy and stopped buying other toys.

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  4. oooh... ouch! My dog is on Hill's Prescription CD Dry due to bladder stones. I swear her food is more expensive than ours.

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  5. My sister's rather large Akita is 11 years old, and has stiff joints and white muzzle, but is still going strong. She can't make it up stairs very well, but she's still a wonderful dog.

    So your "pups" probably still have a ton of time left to them! (Oh, she has a special expensive diet too). You take such good care of your pups.

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