patrickrhett

…um, hi. This is kinda awkward. I haven’t been around here much recently. First there was Flickr, then there was Facebook, now there’s Facebook on my iPhone. Seriously, that iPhone app is pretty cool. It’s not that I don’t like it here, it’s just that, well, everyone else is over there. And Facebook is really perfect for the little one-off updates. And I haven’t really had any big, blog worthy things to say recently. Or I have but I haven’t had time to post them because… I was probably busy checking Facebook.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I remember Friendster and MySpace – even if no one else does – so there’s no chance I’m going to go putting all my eggs into one social networking site. This is my home, and Facebook is my current bar. And when Facebook closes, or gets lame, I’ll come home. Until I find a new bar.

So it’s the next morning, and I still find myself checking the websites and watching the cable news. Just to make sure.

The Lovely Wife compulsively checking returns.

Election Day should really be a national holiday. I’ve been at work all day, and have not gotten a lot done. I did manage to stop the compulsive eating. Almost time to go…

Today is an historic date, and so far I have celebrated it by shoving a ton of food down my gullet. Four doughnuts, a latte, one ham-filled kolache and a piece of chocolate with a picture of the Louvre on it have yet to bury my anxiety, but they have left me feeling a little ill.

Just a few more hours to go.

The Lovely Wife and I have been saving all the little fake credit cards we’ve gotten in the mail since shortly after moving into our house. She just took them all out of their fishbowl to donate them to an art teacher, so before they left the house I thought I’d see what two years of credit card offers looked like.

There were 97 total cards – 78 MasterCard, 15 Visa and 4 American Express.

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There were 18 distinctly different banks/offers which I’ve documented in this Flickr set.

Hi. Testing my iPhone WordPress app. Because I blog so much that I need to be able to do it from anywhere. And here’s a pic of Ilse that I took on my phone and then inserted into this post. It’s a pretty bad picture…

We went to Ilse’s on the 4th and grilled hamburgers. (grass fed beef is delicious) Sadie and Rosie hung out for the first time, and got along pretty well, until they didn’t. Sadie laid out a pee matrix in Ilse’s yard, so she would never be more than a foot from her own urine, and Rosie followed her around, checking her work. It was all going pretty well until The Lovely Wife tried to take Sadie’s harness off. This covered her head, made her feel vulnerable, and when Rosie came up to sniff her butt she freaked. What followed was 30 seconds of escalating dog war, and Sadie got bit on the face and leg. (To Rosie’s credit, she is a much bigger dog, and totally held back. She could have done some real damage, and didn’t.) Sadie seemed fine, but after a few minutes she started stumbling and her front legs would collapse under her when she tried to walk. We immediately scooped her up and took her to the Emergency Animal Hospital, where, an hour and $90 later, we found out she probably just had a huge surge of adrenaline that made her wobbly as it dissipated. Not a broken leg, or a broken back, or any of the terrible things we were afraid of. Which was great, except by that time my huge surge of adrenaline had worn off, and I was feeling kind of wobbly. So we went home, had a bit of medicinal whiskey, and went to bed.

Now that I am no longer freaked out about my dog’s health, this is what occurred to me as I wrote the paragraph above. I spent $10 on 2 pounds of ground, grass-fed beef and $10 on a six-pack of beer (well, 6 Hoegaarden and a single Sisyphus). We probably spent another $20 on various items too paltry to mention. When my dog appeared to be injured, we didn’t hesitate to drop another $90. We spent a total of $130 in one day on non-essentials (sorry, Sadie) without even thinking about it, and we are not wealthy people. We are solidly middle class.

This doesn’t exactly make me proud to be an American (I can’t really be proud about spending more on my dogs than half the world can spend on their kids), but it does make me extremely grateful for everything I have, and for the country that I was lucky enough to be born into.

Happy 4th of July.

Today is the 45th day of our diet. I started at 192 pounds and am, as of today, down to 176. I don’t really want to lose any more weight (just redistribute some of it) so we added the gym to our routine last week and have been 4 times in the last 8 days.

At some point the diet (a special course of food to which one restricts oneself to lose weight) became our diet (the kinds of food that a person habitually eats). It’s getting easier to make smarter choices, and we are learning to make better meals. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes have been replaced by grilled grass fed beef and ginger sauteed cabbage. That’s not a bad trade.

I have to give The Lovely Wife full credit for all of these changes. She came up with the diet, organized the menus, made shopping lists, cooked most of the food, got us to join the YMCA, dragged me to the gym for the first time in my life, and showed me how to use it. I have grilled what I was told to grill, eaten what I was told to eat, pedaled when I was told to pedal, and tried not to complain too much.

Once again, in a pattern that has been repeating itself for 10 years now, my wife has demonstrated that she is both smarter and way more ambitious than I am. God help me if she ever turns on me.

I created some random header images from my thousands of pictures and installed them above. If you don’t like the header image, hit refresh and something new should pop up. (Except that it’s random, which means the same picture could pop up a few times in a row. If only you could make things more random than random. By which I mean slightly less random. But that is much harder, so just hit refresh an extra couple of times if you have to. Something new will eventually appear.)