Amieable: I was talking to Sable today and I need to get something off of my chest.
Longball, bracing himself: Okay…
Amieable: I haven’t read any of the “Harry Potter” books and I don’t care to.
Longball: Ha, yeah I know.
Amieable: BUT! I consistently lie to people when they ask me if I’ve read them.
Longball, quizzically with his eyebrows raised: …
Amieable: It’s just that I don’t want to have that stupid conversation where people feel sorry for me and tell me I’m missing and then implore me to read them. It’s uncomfortable.
Longball: How do you get away with lying?
Amieable: It’s easy, you just bring up the generalities and throw around the Gandolfs and the flying sweepers and I can totally pass as one of them.
I promised to write more and then our internet went down. People must assume that I am lying since we have a myriad of internet problems here, but this time the actual box was in hysterics and flashing its lights in terror. I have two theories as to what happened. One is that our electrical system shorted the box. We have been having more than a few problems with our electricity in this ancient house including popping lightbulbs every two months, all of our electrical appliances running hot to the touch, cell phones and computer batteries dying, etc. For a whole year we wrote these things off as bad luck and idiocy on our part (I am famously known for not being able to keep a cell phone charged), but in the last few weeks we’ve started doing what we do best and blaming others.
The other likely scenario that caused our internet death this time is of course the feline element. Gladys and Dan are getting along quite famously now and run through our home like a pack of wild dogs. The cord to the wireless was stretched across a portion of the room and it’s likely they closelined themselves in the mad scramble and knocked the whole system onto the floor.
In any case, we’re back up. Since I’m about nine months “behind” on updating, I will rely on two classic blog crutches and provide you with a bullet list AND cat pictures.
I had the entire month of May off from school but filled it by working full-time at my job. My student loan didn’t cover summer semester so I am trying to save up enough money to spend eight weeks of my glorious summer taking Biology 102 with other rejects. Joy. I get to pay people to be annoyed. (It is a prerequisite for a physiopsych class I want to take this Autumn).
I have secured a full-time (9 credit hours) research assistant position in a lab on campus. I took a class this past semester from the Prof who runs the lab, and her graduate student was my TA. My wry comments during lab (coupled with good writing skills) must have impressed him enough because he sought me out to work with them. The lab focuses on perception and motor skills and… When I finish the required reading I will share more.
We planted a garden this summer again and officially have a radish problem. Does anyone have any good ideas what to do with radishes who all ripened at the same time?
I have started running. Most who know me are howling with laughter because I am and have never been an “athletic person.” I’ve always been in okay shape but have never been athletic or kept up with any form of exercise. My friend at work started the Couch to 5K program which slowly takes you to a runner. I am in week four of nine and so far am loving it. Maybe because I never did sports, I really like the sense of accomplishment and competition. By “competition” I mean me against the road or my own inertia. Yesterday I ran for two intervals of five minutes and after I was done I yelled out “I DID IT!”
Oh I know, ho-hum all of this stuff is boring - bring on the cat photos! Operation Cat Merge is going much better than anticipated. Gladys still gets irritated by Dan when he is a total asshole and attacking her (like punching her in the mouth) but for the most part she likes him and they play all the time he is released from his room. They have made up some fun games like “King of the cardboard box that the humans were too lazy to throw away and now it’s ours”:
Other fun games include the perennial and aforementioned “Run Like Mad Dogs” and “Sneaky Under the Bed.” Games that have not gone over well include “Leap From the Highest Peak Onto Sissy’s Back” which usually leads to “Pin Baby Brother on His Back Until the Humans Cry” (Dan never cries).
Eventually though they will tire each other out and lie peacefully in the same room like yin and yang:
I apologize for the quality of the photos. Every time I try to snap a photo he moves. He is squirmy and most the photos I have look like this:
Here’s another blurry one but shows a good shot of his paw:
Whenever we tell people we got a kitten their first question is “how will Gladys handle him?” Our biggest concern in getting a new kitten was the fear that Gladys would eat him. I spent many hours reading online instructions on how to introduce a kitten to a resident cat. None of them said “throw the cats together and hope for the best,” so we instituted a protracted introduction schedule. We let them spy each other under the door, we switched beds and rubbed each of them with towels and switched those, and we also let them spend time in each other’s room.
All of that went okay, but there was really no substitute for seeing how they would interact face to face. My mom came to visit over the weekend and once the humans outnumbered the cats, we decided to let them meet.
Well they didn’t hold paws and mew together, but there also has yet to be any bloodshed. So far there is a lot of hissing (on her part) and a lot of running around and pouncing (his part). She’s not aggressive and only hisses and swats (and hasn’t even actually hit him [yet]) when he ambushes her.
At some point during this past semester I wrote this but never found the time to post it
Some people love being busy not but me - I hate it. Adding six hours a week of research has sent us over the edge. Before I was busy, now I am crazed. Before we kept a delightfully cluttered house that hinted at creativity, now we have yellow police tape and a trail of corpses. Before we were two ships passing in the night but now we are a bullet train in Japan and a dogsled in Alaska. We often can’t even locate the cat - although we never have a problem finding her strategic piles of poop she’s leaving all over the place as a protest to us never being home.
Longball is keeping it all in stride. I call it a “disaster” where he aptly calls it a “scramble.” A scramble alludes to an eventual finish line. But in our case the finish line is years away.
Participation in research is essential to getting into grad school for psychology and so this semester I’m working with a behavior analyst working on collecting data for a behavioral study. I sit at the student rec. center and record people’s behavior. To keep the integrity, I can’t tell you what I’m recording. Longball likes to tell people “she sits at a pool and watches people parade around in bathing suits.” Which is… true but I also watch people swim and make fun of their strokes on the side.
I’m not the only one who’s busy - Longball now works varied shifts throughout the week as he works nights with college kids. He is currently working four ten-hour shifts so we never see each other.
Despite being overextended, I’m still having a ball. My days are varied and I like what I’m studying. While at the pool and at school I get to be around funny college kids. I have an objectivity since I am older that lets me see the humor and let things go.
I finally finished my finals last week and had a few days of peace. And then things got to be too quiet around here so we did this:
Meet Dan Wilson. Named, of course, after the Mariner great. Dan Wilson was a name Longball picked out as a tentative name before we met the kitten. We are both Mariner fans and in fact fell in love over baseball. When we met Dan in person he too had extra claws like Gladys and we knew it was fate. Gladys’ middle name is Eckstein, named after the Angels shortstop. Dan Wilson (the cat) has gigantic paws that look like Dan Wilson’s (the human) catchers glove.
This was actually a “breach in security” since he wasn’t supposed to be on the shelf, but it gave us a great photo op:
So far his athletic prowess seems to be mostly running laps around his bedroom earning him the nickname “Prefontaine” or of course, “Pre” for short. He also likes to stand on his back haunches and box at things. We gave him a stuffed cougar that he likes to beat up:
Now that things have slowed down considerably for me, I hope to resume a more normal posting schedule. I wrote some posts over this past semester and never got a chance to post.
I also want to go back to my idea of sharing cool psych-related facts.
But if you don’t come back for that, at least come back for the kitten photos.
Last week was my first spring break in ten years. I eschewed tequila shots and a girls-gone-wild video appearance to stay home, earn some extra money, catch up on housework and relax.
I know that sounds boring. But oh if my week were only that peaceful! I got sick with a wicked head cold/sinus infection, the Landshark got a urinary tract infection which involved shoving a pill down her gullet twice a day. If you think she takes her medicine like the charming British children in Mary Poppins you are wrong. Mary didn’t need to pin Jane and Michael down between her knees while they bit her and she screamed and cried all while throwing fish treats around the room to lure them back.
My basketball team lost in the NCAA and I got a cold sore.
To top if all off, Longball got too drunk to drive on Friday night so instead of bringing me home Thai take out food, I slogged my sick, snotty self to Safeway and bought myself a frozen dinner and a can of creamed corn. Afterward he said, “you would have had more fun on your spring break if we had gone to Mexico and I had been kidnapped by the drug cartel and beheaded.” It would have been a more efficient way to kill him than making him sleep on the couch for three days, that’s for sure.
The good news is that Spring arrived exactly on time here complete with some sunshine and a rainbow. I have now survived all four seasons in Pullman and have a complete yearly run-down of my year in Pullman to be coming soon.
Happy Spring to all. To celebrate, here is a picture of my niece in her sprightly spring chapeau that I knitted for her.
Well today was our first day back at work after the holidays. It was to be our first day out of the house being productive members of society, practicing our new years resolutions.
We were met with this:
Longball went to all the trouble to brush the foot of snow off our car only to have the car move about three inches in the snow before we were stopped.
Both of our workplaces closed for the day and we went back inside to resume our holiday gluttony and laziness. Our primary goal today was to bake cookies. Because we didn’t eat enough junk over the holiday. We have a salad bowl filled with holiday candy sitting on our coffee table but by god, we need chocolate chip cookies too.
Before we went inside I tried to do a snow angel in the bank of snow. I pretty much just plopped in and was rendered immobile and cold. The drifts in our front yard are three to three and a half feet high.
Since I was stuck indoors all day, I decided now would be a good time for me to catch everyone up on the activities of the last six months. Ha. “Quit procrastinating” should be one of my new years’ resolutions. The truth is that I’ve been relishing living life more offline. When I started the blog I worked at a mind-numbingly boring job and I used the internet to whisk me away from boredom. The job I had after that was also mind-numbingly boring but it required me to be online all the time - even when I wasn’t at work. At that point I hated the internet with a passion and avoided emailing people or updating the blog.
My new life here requires absolutely no emailing or surfing. At school I’m reading - BOOKS. I take notes in longhand. My work is all filing and case-management and working with people. The most “techie” thing I have to do at work is fax. How quaint.
I needed this break to be silent with myself.
But!
I want to keep the blog updated and I enjoy it. So let’s recap. Where were we?
We go from three feet of snow to…sunny and blistering June on the Palouse. We had just moved into our rental and I was starting to get settled in my new town. We started it off right with a gigantic (350+ people), festive farm wedding. Longball’s friend from high school is a farmer in the area and was marrying a woman who grew up in the nearby town of Colfax. Weddings in small towns are affairs because you know everyone in town.
It was a scorching day so we went to a bar on campus for our traditional pre-wedding alcohol. It is the only bar in town that serves Manny’s Pale Ale so I trudged across the melting asphalt in my heels to get some Georgetown beer.
The wedding location was gorgeous - the Groom farms wheat (as well as peas and garbanzo beans) and so he mowed a section of his field and we got to walk across a bridge through the wheat to our seats.
The best part, besides of course two lovely people committing their lives to one another was the flyover. The flyover! The couple was taking communion (I think - I was melting) and I heard a low rumbling sound coming from behind the seats. Longball looks at me and says, “Oh yeah. You’re gonna like this.” Up from over the hill behind us pops a canary yellow crop duster and then dives down into the valley where we are. Old ladies and babies scream and apparently the musician dove for cover in the wheat. Longball and I literally cheered out loud. It was a buzzcut. Longball and I immediately started plotting a Navy flyover for our wedding.
The reception included barbecue and the band on a flatbed truck. It was utterly different and cooler than anything I’ve ever seen.
It was a good way to debut me into the Pullman social scene.
“Hey ladies…do you want to know what I want for Christmas?”
Wasn’t Longball a cutie when he was still Shortball? I especially love the blue corduroy suit and how plump he is in it. And that hair! He has so much luxurious hair, it almost looks like he’s wearing a toupee.
*I know the photo jacks up my page but it was the way it was scanned in - huge. I can’t help it. It’s worth it to me to post the photo in all of its glory.
I finished my last final today (of only two, but still it is a feat). Longball IM’d me shortly after I got home to ask how it went. Unfortunately his inquiry was answered with:
“Well I am afraid that since the test was so easy and it went so fast, I’m afraid that I missed an entire page in my excitement. So I’m, um, writing down all the questions that I can remember and their associate point value so I can see if I took the whole test.”
The Antidote:
Longball replied with, “you were so prepared, it probably seemed really easy. Like, you know, swinging the Fungo.”
A funny, appropriate and sport-themed explanation to quell my fears.
The Random and Joyful:
Now that I’m finished with finals I can eat my chocolate orange. You know those solid chocolate oranges that are shaped like oranges with the individual sections? Back when I was studying for my original degree my mom would always buy me one of those and I would save it as a trophy for when I finished Autumn quarter. My mom sent me one and I got to crack it and eat it today. While watching the Gilmore Girls! While it snows outside! Good things come to those who study hard.
