Also I have had a migraine, on and off, for the past two weeks.

Comps is done. I passed without needing to do any rewrites. Fantastic. Thanks to everyone who said nice things to me; it was very helpful.

Nothing too much else is going on; it's pissing down rain on our heads, and I'm kicking my lab work back into gear now that the six-week shadow of comprehensive exam has lifted. The dog hasn't had any more seizures and appears to be back to his normal routine of eating entire cases of paper towels while I'm at work, and sniffing the cat's asshole. We went to Ann Arbor over the weekend and saw mrfishes's family; they had said it was ok to bring Bucky, but then his mom spent like the whole weekend going on about how allergic she was to dogs and how she liked little terriers and not big dogs. WTF?

If you are allergic to dogs, don't like big dogs, and know that your kid has a 90-lb. retriever mix, why would you unhesitatingly say it was okay to bring the dog to the house???

Oh well. Mr. Dog-dog had a good time anyway; we pretty much spent the whole weekend walking around in the outdoors. I had to get him a "training collar" (aka choke chain) because he has finally figured out that he is much stronger than I am, and that he can drag me down the street if he is not wearing a training collar. He also knows what the training collar is, and that he cannot drag me down the street when he is wearing one.

We were in the parking lot of the gas station, and he jumped up into the front seat and stuck his entire rostral half out the window in order to sniff the ass of the woman getting something out of the car next to mine.

I think I broke myself from sitting down working on comps for too long. Now whenever I sit down, my hip hurts until I get up, at which point it makes a loud clicking sound :(

Time to go to the doctor...

Comps meeting went really well. No red ink, no smashed windows, no tears and recriminations. Not even any recriminations, to be honest.

Now I have a buttload of work to do. See y'all in like six weeks.

I am in Oglebay, West Virginia. This is precisely as strange a place as the name would lead one to believe.

I got bored with nineteenfishes, so now I'm pontiuspilates.

Lil' Sharkey, however, remains the mascot of this journal.

1) Running a PubMed search for "dead mice" yields 5401 papers.
2) Running a PubMed search for "scrambled brains" yields 224 papers.
3) Not really funny to those afflicted by it, but... A mutation to a sodium channel occasionally causes a heritable condition known as "paroxysmal extreme pain disorder," aka "familial rectal pain syndrome." This is, quite literally, a massive pain in the ass.

So I live on the other side of town from the university. This is partially because rent is approximately one-third what I would pay in any reasonably liveable neighborhood close to campus, and partially because I prefer to live in a completely separate space from where my work is, so that I don't end up staying at work 14 hours a day and so that it is difficult for people to get me to come back to work at night. (I am a wily person.)

This means that, instead of a simple one-bus commute to campus, I have to change buses Downtown if I want to use public transit. This takes roughly 45 minutes, and the neighborhood bus only runs about once an hour, during fairly circumscribed hours, since the last round of bus service cuts. I find it much simpler to drive to school now, and I found a fairly cheap parking space to lease. Everything was great during the summer.

But now school has started, and with it a new menace. I'm not talking about the school buses, although they are also a menace. I am talking about CROSSING GUARDS. These evil minions did not exist when I was growing up. In my part of the country, a small child's walk to school is considered an evolutionary hurdle that must be survived in order for a child to even merit reaching adulthood. Shit, my neighborhood didn't even have SIDEWALKS until 1999. Anyway, I'm not so much upset that crossing guards exist to help small children and little old ladies cross the street - after all, Pittsburgh is a city, unlike where I grew up. I'm upset at the manner in which they do it.

During my drive to campus, I pass through two or three separate school zones. Each one has a fanatical crossing guard. The crossing guards are almost uniformly large and bulky females, like stereotypical high school volleyball coaches. Whenever anyone approaches their crosswalk, the crossing guard zooms into action, running out into the middle of the street and ushering person across the street, even if the person didn't even want to cross the street in the first place. The crossing guard will then stand there blocking all the cars until the light turns yellow, at which point cars are finally allowed to turn left, and backed-up traffic runs the red light until the crossing guard starts to yell and shake her fist of fury. I understand that little kids and feeble geriatrics need to cross the four-lane street without becoming roadkill, but surely there must be a way to accomodate this without leaving four or five cars stuck in the intersection, unable to turn, during morning rush hour? Why not alter the light cycle when school is in session, so that all the cars get a red light and pedestrians can cross in all directions?

Furthermore, does the crossing guard really need to spring into action to help able-bodied men and women cross the street? I have been yelled at by crossing guards for having the temerity to cross the one street I need to cross, rather than crossing the street in order to cross AT THEIR CROSSWALK and then crossing back to go where I need to go! I actually find it rather embarrassing when a matronly uniformed officer forces all the traffic on a street to a halt, just so that I can cross it. I'm 24 years old. I have been crossing streets by myself, without the benefit of the crossing guard, since I was FIVE. Furthermore, I survived in the absence of the crossing guard for the entire summer and was not run over ONCE.

Why don't they put the crossing guards at actually dangerous intersections, like Bayard and Dithridge? That intersection receives a LOT of pedestrian traffic, and has neither a crosswalk nor a stoplight. Bayard doesn't even have a stop sign (though Dithridge does). Every time I go across that street, I have to step into half the street and block traffic with my body until I can get across the rest of the street. Sometimes the cars don't stop when I do this, and I end up standing on the center line of the (narrow) road with 30-40mph traffic whizzing past me in both directions. Including police cars and school buses. And this is in close proximity to the School for Blind Children. I wouldn't mind a crossing guard there, but the crossing guards at Federal and North, or Middle and North, or Liberty and Pearl, are just superfluous - there's already stoplights and crosswalks at ALL those intersections. I can't believe the city wastes so much money posting asshole crossing guards there and then doesn't put any crossing guards where people are actually in imminent danger of being run over by cars.

( I have too much zucchini. )

It came out super-dense and moist, like a spice cake full of cranberries and walnuts.

In other news, things are going well. My advisor's husband (aka my other advisor) celebrated his 50th birthday this weekend, so there was a huge and ritzy party with delicious food and even better wine (hey advisors - if you're reading this, I really like it when you have parties!)

We are making preparations to disappear into the wilderness for a week. I had no idea that simply getting ready to go camping for a week could be transformed into this massive thing like ( preparing for an expedition to the Antarctic. )

Also I have been running like 10 miles a week, almost every week, since I got Bucky Dog. Previously I had been running an average of 0 miles a week, possibly even negative miles a week. I have suddenly noticed that I am in much better shape than I was in May. Unfortunately, this means that the amazing dress I bought earlier this summer (and only had a chance to wear twice, since it came too late for the Thumper-Windphone nuptials) is already starting to be too big for me. Speaking of badthumper: If you are reading this, I am trying to locate your red palm oil, especially since I put your check in the bank so that I could ship it to you and I don't want to run off with your $40 in a choadly fashion. I didn't see it in your ex-room, but I DID see a battleaxe and what appears to be a pike. I am holding onto them for you, as I don't think I can ship medieval weaponry through the mail. If mounted invaders besiege our home, rest assured that I am now equipped to prevail against them (that pike looks pretty sharp, too).

1) Bucky Dog is adjusting well to our crazy house. In the beginning, he tore up the molding next to the door every time we went out of the house without him for more than five seconds. He settled down pretty well when I bought a thing that releases dog oxytocin or something into the air, though. He has a remarkable facility for pointing at, and flushing out, various kinds of wild game. While he likes birds the most, rabbits and deer come in close behind. He doesn't mind squirrels, either.

2) I went to the vet with the dog because his foot was cut. He hates the vet tech there, but I like her - she has a tattoo of a rose on her arm, and talks in baby talk to the dog. She tried to give him a cookie, and he clamped his mouth shut and SHOOK HIS HEAD in refusal. (He later took the exact same cookie from me and devoured it.)

3) My little brother gave my mother a pit bull/cattle dog mutt for Mother's Day. This ended about as poorly as anyone who knows either of them can imagine. All the cats survived, though.

So apparently, Jerry Falwell died today.

Initially, I must admit, I was a bit pleased to see that the old douchebag had finally kicked the bucket. I went around my lab humming "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead," as a matter of fact. (Ask Brian's tech. He'll tell you.)

But after the initial warm glow of satisfaction subsided, I started to reminisce about the times we shared, me and the Reverend. I realized that he was, in fact, one of the foremost political humorists and satirists of our age, even if the humor was completely unintentional from his end. Remember when Tinky Winky the Teletubby was gay because he was purple and carried a purse? Or when feminists, liberals, and homosexuals were responsible for 9/11? Good times. Or even back in the day, when he was calling Desmond Tutu a phony, and accusing President Clinton of smuggling cocaine (perhaps Clinton was concealing it in the nostrils of future-President Bush?)

Apparently, despite his apocalyptic fantasies, Rev. Falwell did not fall victim to Rapture (although Rupture is a distinct possibility). Nor did he succumb to the AIDS virus, that plague sent down by the good Lord to punish godless heathens and ho-mo-sexuals. I wonder how he is attempting to explain himself up (or down) there, right at this moment.

Loan company says that the registrar has told them I graduated. Registrar won't tell them that I haven't graduated because I am signed up for 3 credits (the department maximum) in the summer and haven't registered for fall yet (because I don't have the paperwork or list of classes, and I don't even think my reg. window for fall opens for another month). I lost my temper and berated the registrar and the loan company. We'll see what happens.

In other news:

1) We have a dog that doesn't want to kill the cats. His name is Bucky. He is half Black Lab and half Irish Setter (he's a great big fat black dog, basically). He was previously owned by a lady who died and (morbid story alert!) nobody noticed for like four days and all the animals were left alone in the house with her corpse. I don't think that they ate either the body or each other, but I was too polite to ask. I think the dog has mostly recovered from this trauma, though. He went to the vet yesterday and got a clean bill of health providing heartworm tests come back negative, and excepting the fact that he needs to lose like 30 pounds. Currently he weighs 110, so it's good that he's a docile animal. I wish the cats were more docile though. Whitman isn't sure about the dog, but I think he'll come around. However, Iggy Fat Cat wants to kill the dog, but has settled for hissing a lot and maiming Jonathon instead.

2) It isn't fun to put liquid stitches on your fiance at 6:30 AM.

3) Goddamn cat!

4) badthumper is apparently moving in next weekend. It will be nice to have a temporary housemate, I think.

5) We had burglars again like a month ago. They didn't take anything, but they left the front door open (scared when the alarm went off). I got really over-excited in a bad way by this event, went running down the hill to alert our neighbor, tripped over my own two dumb feet, and sprained my foot. But it's mostly better now.

I made some new icons. It isn't that I don't love Lil' Sharkey, it's that I am bored.

In other news:
- house is steadily progressing towards me living in it

- DONE WITH PAIN CLASS!

- my turn to do Work In Progress seminar on Friday. This is harder than you would think, considering that all my Work is not really In Progress as much as I'd like, and some of it has not even really Started.

- I was set upon by a woman with makeup and eerily plasticized hair, brandishing a microphone in my face and asking me questions about what I thought the psychological effects would be on the survivors of the shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday. Her accomplice had a large camera with a blinking light. I have been conditioned (by delivering talks and seminars) to professionally, intelligently, and interestedly answer any question asked to me by random people that I'm standing in front of, so I just stood there and talked at her until she walked away. Then I realized that it was actually an interview for the TV news, and that I really don't wish to ever be ON the TV news. Oops. Hopefully the footage will be completely unusable.

- Doctor's appointment today! Maybe now I can find out why my elbow and wrist constantly ache, and why I have a nagging area of discomfort on the bottom of my food. I fear, respectively, carpal tunnel syndrome and plantar fasciitis.

I now have the Alanis Morrisette april fool's day cover of "My Humps" stuck in my head. I blame Al Gore, as he was the inventor of teh internets.

Iggy has finally lost enough weight so that he can groom his own asshole. I don't know if I'm more pleased at the fact that it's getting groomed by someone who isn't me, or more disgusted at the slurping, munching noise emanating from the corner.

So we did Stuff today. Stuff included painting the bedroom of the new place (it's about 2/3 of the way done; I should be able to finish it sometime this week), chipping damaged paint and plastering over the dents in the wall of the office, and BUYING A REFRIGERATOR!

I am very excited about the fridge. I have never bought a new appliance before. I'm also pretty excited about the painting, because the room already looks so much nicer even though it's only semi-painted. We are painting it this really deep red color on bottom, with the pink version of the same hue on top, and a really dark burgundy color for the trim. It sounds vile, I know, but it looks pretty good in the room.

We also found a very tasty Chinese place by accident, after accidentally buying the fridge (we went to K-Mart to shop for patio furniture. We left without furniture but with a major appliance; apparently, K-Mart sells all the Sears clearance appliances, and we got a very good price on that fridge, especially since the sales guy just sort of randomly gave us his employee discount; he was a very pleasant man to deal with). Both the K-Mart and the Chinese place are in the West View Shopping Center, if any of you ever find yourself in West View. (Basically, the Chinese food is at the very end of the 500 bus route). We had potstickers, wonton soup, egg rolls, and General Tso's, and all of them were exceptionally delicious. The General Tso's in particular was really pleasant - sort of sweet with a hint of spiciness and a lot of garlic. Also they actually used good-quality breast meat, instead of scary little grey lumps of indeterminate origin.

Other discoveries: a headless bird stuck in one of the attic windows (no way in hell am i touching that fucked-up nastiness), a crapload of echevaria growing out in the backyard, and the fact that the Bayer sign next to the Duquesne incline functions as a clock for our back porch.

After this weekend, going back to the lab on Monday morning is going to seem downright relaxing...

( errands of terror )

( furniture and booze! )

( people who shouldn't have pets )

( buying shit )

So yeah... Lessons from this weekend:
1) Barleywine is, in fact, more like wine than beer in its potency.
2) Puppies are cute.
3) PUPPIES ARE SO FUCKING CUTE AND I WANT ONE.

So, following the Christmas Break-In of 2006, our stupid fishfaced landlady chose to not replace the door that had actually been broken into, feeling that it was "very secure," because she put some slide bolts across it to augment the 2x4. I didn't really agree with this assessment, but figured that I wasn't going to argue because she had, after all, sprung for a security system. However, she decided that the FRONT door needed to be replaced. So, for the past few months, we have had this new front door.

The front door tries to evict me on a regular basis. See, it has a deadbolt lock and a doorknob lock, but when the doorknob is locked, you can still turn the knob from the inside. This means that, if you are an absentminded smoker like me and mrfishes, you end up locking yourself out on the porch with alarming regularity. In the past, we have been fortunate: either we have had our keys with us, one of us has been inside to let the other one back in, or we have managed to find an unlocked window and break in through that. But not today. Today I went out for a cigarette with mrfishes, and shut the door behind me. Not only did that lock us both out, but my cigarettes, keys, and phone were all still in the house! To add to the general hilarity, Jonathon was wearing a bathrobe, pajama pants, coat, and slippers, whereas I was wearing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT A BATHROBE. (I sleep naked, and I was too lazy to put on shoes because it was like 40 degrees out and I didn't feel it was necessary to be shod for the 7 minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette.)

So then we made the funnily-dressed, bedheaded trek around the block to find a neighbor who was home. Luckily, the large Asian family two houses over had several members who were at home. (Tangentially, I love that family. They are hilarious. There are, among diverse other characters, a kid with a bright yellow tricked out Mitsubishi, a girl who dresses in nothing but extremely brightly-colored preppy-looking clothes, an old lady who only speaks Vietnamese or whatever southeast Asian language they all speak, an ancient man who I periodically see lugging strange things into the house like crates of cinder blocks or five water cooler jugs, and a middle-aged man who always wears an engineer's cap and who, yesterday, was beating a statue of the Virgin Mary with a pair of pliers to cleanse it of discolorations.) The girl who wants to model for Hollister let us use the phone, while emphatically stating that it could not be used to make long-distance calls (WTF?! Why would we call California for a locksmith?), and we finally managed to find a locksmith who wasn't already busy attending to some other poor schmuck's shenanigans. Half an hour and $100 later, we were back inside our cozy domicile.