Let's go, Buffalo *clap. clap. clap clap clap*

Dudes. Hockey games are fun. Or maybe it is just that anything is fun when you get enough guys from Buffalo together. It's a strange phenomena that leaves my throat scratchy and my stomach sore from all of the laughing. and after the adventures of gertie, lord knows i could use some laughter.

it was also a very educational weekend. did you know that there are lizard people that enslave and/or eat humans in a 6 story bunker under Denver International Airport? it has something to do with the Mayan Calendar ending in 2012. Denver will become the new US capital and/or New World Capital. Also, the murals in DIA predict a very grim future, and it is all proved true by a part of the mural that depicts the twin towers burning. And this may or may not have something to do with the number 23 and/or the freemasons.

What i find most interesting about the above paragraph is that, with the exception of the lizard people thing and the predictive murals, i could pretty much buy the rest of it. and as much as i recognize the fact that upon reading this, one might decide i am a crazy person, i am not willing to rule out the possibilities of such planning and scheming and building. weirder things have happened. and if you don't believe me, please explain how W ended up being the American President for 2 full terms.

and while i am at it....i also believe in the possibility of bigfoot. if we overlooked 100,000 gorillas in africa for this long, then who is to say that there isn't some kind of North American gorilla that we haven't stumbled across yet? and seriously, if you were bigfoot, wouldn't you do your best to go undetected by humans? have you seen E.T.? Scientists bad!

i am just saying.

we went to an Obama rally but couldn't see a thing....well, except for the other 100,000 people there. To be in a sea of Obama supporters is a powerful thing. It felt good. i think it is that whole "hope" thing. it works for me.

here is something i am not feeling terribly hopeful about: Gertie, who is as high as a kite, wearing an e-collar, and essentially just broken, snuck out of her recovery room the other day. i am the presumabely smarter human who has nothing on her mind other than not letting gertie out and yet she still wins. she actually made it through 2 rooms before i caught her, too. she can hobble incredibly fast. i have no idea how we are going to be able to keep her inside. no idea.

maybe i need to hire some lizard people to work as gertie guards. i have not yet met a human slave who has escaped the DIA bunker. Those lizard people must be much better at this than i am. help.

it's sooo f-ing early in the morning. sun isn't up yet. but i am. i am just too excited to bring gertie home.

her surgery went well, in the sense that it is done. but the surgeon found a lot of hemorrhaging and a few puncture wounds in her diaphragm. also, it is not likely that her ACL was torn. it is more likely that it is just nerve damage. So between her fractured pelvis and the nerve damage, Gertie has a lot of healing to do all on her own. unfortunately, there is no guarantee that any of these things will just fix themselves right up...especially the nerve damage. the good thing is that even with all of her injuries untreated, gertie was still pretty able to get around, use the litterbox etc. granted, she was on kitty morphine....she probably could have done just about anything that crossed her little mind. oh well. we can only wait and see.


al is flying into town tonight. why? for a hockey game, obviously. the buffalo sabres are playing the denver avs tomorrow night and buffalo will be present and accounted for, with a little help from manhattan, raymond, and mill valley. i think there are 10 of us going. oh yikes. i wonder what i have gotten myself into. do hockey fans just punch random girls who don't really care about hocky anyways? let's hope not.

Gertie....part two

it had been 7 days AND it was in the 20's last night. i told neil this morning that i was going to go get her carrier (that she loves) from the neighbor who last saw her's house. he agreed. we both had given up hope. we only partially admitted that to each other but really...how could she make it a week with occasional freezing temperatures? well, she did. so there.

i had forgotten to pick up the can of stinky wet food i had left out for her. and thank god i am such a space case cos at about noon today, she showed up for a snack! i went outside and brought her in. she wasn't using her right rear leg and she was sooooo tired. she just limp/hopped to her favorite chair and gave me her best gravelly meow and she took a little nap like everything is so not a big deal.

she is such a faker.

so it was off to the vet for us. she had lost two of her ten pounds. oh AND she tore her ACL (just like Matilda! yay!). AND she fractured her pelvis. AND a bit of her bowels are squeezing through a hole in her abdominal wall. BUT, with some excessive surgery starting at the butt crack of dawn tomorrow morning, she should be just fine.

Gertie most likely battled it out with a moving vehicle of sorts and she f-ing kicked its a$$. or at least she survived and that most definitely makes her a winner in our book.

She's got the dreaded e-collar on and she has very little control over her back end but she actually seems to be in pretty good spirits. that must be some stellar pain medication she is on!

"don't you dare laugh"

gertie

i am a total a-hole.
gertie did not come home thursday night and she hasn't been home since.

gertie has been spending the entire three years of her life trying to get outside. if i were to estimate, i would say that she has "gotten out" at least 50 times. so we moved here to a very quiet street and i started letting the cats go out during the day. jules sleeps on the back deck. midge stays inside. gertie would explore...but come home when we called her or when we rattled her treats. not thursday, though.

gertie is the reason neil and i decided to move in together. also, she snuggles with moose. midge hates her. i love her.

we put up at least 50 signs and have gotten two calls. one was someone who saw gertie wednesday. oops! had to update the signs on that one. i got my hopes so high and then....boom, crushed. and one was a lady who has a different calico stalking her porch. we put an ad on craigslist and are checking the shelters.

gertie does this thing. when moose chases her, she just scrunches down and lets him lick her on the head when he gets to her. i am hoping she didn't have the same reaction to a fox encounter.

please think good thoughts of her return. we are trying to remain optimistic, but it's hard when she's just so obviously Not Here.

carpet is great!

...for moose to poop on. and i don't mean that in a Triumph the Insult Comic Dog kinda way. Our recent trip back home was Moose's first experience with a house sitter. Moose failed. Mostly he failed on the carpet downstairs, a lot.

So i steam cleaned the entire downstairs. and then i steam cleaned the entire downstairs again. then i had a professional come by and steam clean the entire downstairs. Then i just said "f-it" and we ripped out the carpet entirely.

it was concrete in the main room but alas, my office and our bedroom also had some very attractive asbestos vinyl tile.

i wouldn't say that either of us was particularly thrilled about any of it.

but we got it out of there.
i couldn't move the next day (asbestos related issue or not?...you decide!),
but i still think it was worth it.

this is the proper way to remove toxic material from your home:
break it into a million pieces and be sure to not wear a mask.

Moose protested in his laziest manner.
He really can get his point across with little to no effort.

"i could be sleeping on any of this 600 square feet of concrete
but i choose this 3 by 3 patch of poocarpet instead. i am awesome."

so the grand plan is that we have to have a concrete guy level out the flooring and then we are going to throw down some engineered wood floors. we're going to do it ourselves to save money and to also make sure that at every point in our lives, we will be working on a basement. it is how we are happiest, apparently.

Neil started his job today. Moose has remembered that he is housebroken. and i am still waiting for my license to transfer.

and shane and t's little baby girl arrived yesterday. but why would anyone care about that when i have such exciting poo carpet stories to tell?


When Finney was born, i wanted to go to the place where you look at all the babies through the glass like in the movies. then someone informed me that those don't exist anymore because of all the creepos who ruin it for everyone else. but at this hospital, there is kind of one of those rooms. you can watch them wash the babies and weigh them and also see when they get their little footprints (i so just wanted to type "teensyfootsyprinties", but then you'd throw up, right?) done. So we, and some other random baby onlookers, got to see Camille's first bath, although her mom and dad didn't. that's weird, right?

so, Denver's human population just went up by one, as did Denver's number of employed residents. me? i just kill carpets with the assistance of my toxic dog.

Have you met my ovaries?

 

they rule the school around here.  i like to pretend that this is something new, but really they have been co-bossing my life for quite a while now.  i was never the girl at 22 who knew she wanted kids.  but then i would have a dream where i had twins.  wait....twin squirrels.  seriously.  squirrels, kittens....anything but a human baby.  i am destined to nurture, for sure.  no amount of swearing, denial, and/or multiple other vices is gonna stop that train, no matter how hard i try.

so J and Noelle sheepishly invited us to watch their three year old daughter's soccer "game".  do i have to pay?  can i pay?  seriously, can i just give you some money?  make you guys dinner?  am i allowed to go?  am i worthy?    don't answer that, please.

The Denver Kickers are pretty rad.  The three year old's team consists of anywhere between two and 5 players.  

Most of the time it is girls against boys, because if the girls can't hold hands, they cry.

the boys have clearly done this before.

but the girls still have a move or two to show off, and they are very supportive, 

which is totally f-ing awesome to watch.

and this is just a rad action shot.

the final score was "yay everyone!" to "good game kids!" and we celebrated by checking out the Denver Zoo.  

i now realize that the SF Zoo is groundbreaking.  it qualifies as animal abuse AND child abuse. what a miserable place for the animals to live.  What a miserable place to take your kids to.   hey SF parents, did you know that at other zoos the animals actually walk around?  i'm just saying....

and please let me describe to you the most amazing/sad/inspiring/confusing thing i have ever witnessed at a zoo.   so you know how the animals tend to ignore the humans?  and it seems that the higher the animal is on the intelligence scale, the more they absolutely detest humans?  well, the orangoutangs were in their temporary inside enclosure.  one was moving hay around, trying to make a cozy spot to rest.  the other was doing this:

if this doesn't send chills down your spine, i think you might be dead inside.  sorry about that.  maybe you should go watch ET or Old Yeller or something.  anyways, there were hordes of children looking back at this curious guy.  he was so f-ing aware of being enclosed, being watched.  so he watched back.  i felt terrible.  but then, how many kids got to see this amazing creature and will grow up remembering the experience and do everything they can to preserve wildlife, our environment, the planet?  it's such a double edged sword.

i don't think anyone ever took Sarah Palin to the zoo when she was a kid.  i mean, unless it was a target practice tutorial...

http://www.defendersactionfund.org/newsroom/sarah_palin.html   

tina fey for VP

lord knows she is more educated and qualified than Palin. sheesh.