Interview

3 Carnations sent me interview questions to answer. If you'd like me to interview you, e-mail me (alliesanswers at gmail dot com) and I'll send you some questions. And, if anyone has any more questions for me, leave them in comments. I'm open book.

Well, I'm a partially open - you can read most of the pages, but the binding hasn't been cracked - book.

1. Were you always so "green"? Was there a turning point in your life that made you become so eco-friendly?

I grew up recycling and composting, so that seems like the norm to me, not the exception. I've always been concerned about the environment, but the research I do for AlliesAnswers.com has opened my eyes to so much, and has really enforced my green habits and helped me take things to the next level. The past few years have been an interesting journey in that respect.

2. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

I am an enormous Darwin fan. I saw a documentary about the Galapagos Islands on The Discovery Channel when I was in college in the mid-90's. I remember my adviser asking me if I'd seen anything good lately in one of our meetings. I was a theatre major, and I'm sure he was asking if I'd seen any good plays, or in the very least an interesting Great Performances on PBS or something. Instead I went on for about twenty minutes about the swimming lizards and the seals and the turtles. After that, I bought this little pocket book of Darwin's writings on the Galapagos and I used to carry it around with me and read it whenever I was waiting for an appointment or an audition. I must have read it 15-20 times. I'm dying to go to the Galapagos, and if I could live there and be some kind of conservation specialist, I'd be in heaven. Although, I don't think the dogs would be allowed, and my educational background isn't suited for a conservation job, so I'm sure it's not possible. But if anything were possible, I think that's where I'd go.

3. If you had to eat the same food for breakfast everyday, what would it be?

Homemade gluten-free pizza. I don't think I'd ever get tired of it.

4. What is your greatest pet peeve?

People being unkind, and/or thinking they are better than someone else. I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately, and I love the theme of ordinary people being important - that a person going about his/her life the best they can, honestly and earnestly is what it's all about. Hate, prejudice, imposing religion or "morals" on another person's inalienable rights - those are things I can't stomach or understand. 9 times out of 10, it is easier to be kind and understanding. And, it's a much more satisfying way to live life.

5. If someone at your work sneezes, do you say bless you? (odd question, admittedly, but I've noticed no one but me really does that at my work)

I say bless you to sneezing strangers at the grocery store while I'm out running errands. It's a knee jerk reaction. Someone sneezes, you say bless you! I've actually tried to stop doing it, because I get funny looks. Sometimes the sneezer seems either annoyed or amused. But it's lonely to sneeze when no one says bless you, isn't it?

I AM THE PACK LEADER!

This morning, I walked 158 (Stella is 10lbs lighter than we thought she was) pounds of dog. By myself.

How, you may ask, can 140 pounds of me, walk 158 pounds of them, especially when dogs are twice as strong per pound?

Answer:


I. AM. THE. PACK. LEADER.

That is all.

Mannequin, McCarthy, Cusack, et al

I'm addicted to the Watch Instantly feature on Netflix.com. It's the only way I can bribe myself into doing dishes, folding laundry, making dinner, etc. I also have a burning love of 80's movies. So, when I found out that I could watch Mannequin on my computer while making dinner on Saturday, I was in heaven. But, after I started watching it, I was horribly disturbed.

As a kid, I was in love with Andrew McCarthy. Mannequin, Class, Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire - I watched them all over and over and over again. Andrew McCarthy was almost as good as John Cusack (but who will ever be as good as Lloyd Dobler, you know?). I even remember an awkward interlude on an episode of Muppet Babies where Baby Piggy professed her love for Mr. McCarthy, so I knew I was in good company (and you now know about the odd, Rain Man way my brain absorbs and stores anything in television form). But when I watched Mannequin this time, I was not swooning over Andrew. I kind of wanted to bake him cookies and ask him if he was remembering to eat his veggies. In other words, he looked like an infant.

When the hell did that happen? I know in reality Andrew McCarthy isn't an infant. In fact, at 46, he's a totally age appropriate older man who could sweep me off my feet crush. But I have no interest in watching him in Lipstick Jungle (I think it's canceled now anyway), because it's not a crappy 80's movie (which is, after all, my favorite movie genre).

I want my McCarthy fix to come complete with music by Starship, shoulder pads, power suits, and the light-hearted buffoonery of Meshack Taylor. But I want to swoon instead of having maternal thoughts about him. While I was watching, I couldn't stop thinking that he can't be getting enough sleep staying up all night cavorting around the department store with Kim Cattrall. Being sleep deprived is a surefire way to get sick, you know.

I think someone should go in and digitally enhance all Brat Pack movies to make the male actors look older so us thirty-somethings can walk down memory lane without feeling weird about it. I don't think I'll ever be able to watch Say Anything again. I'm too afraid I'll have the burning desire to spit in a Kleenex and wipe Lloyd Dobler's cheeks.

It's like you're always stuck in second gear. . .

I woke up this morning with the absolute worst cramps (sorry if this is TMI). It was so bad that J had to take Stella for her walk because I could only manage to put on my jacket before lying down on Argo's dog bed in the fetal position.

When J came back, we sat at the kitchen table with our coffee. J was reading feeds on his computer.

"I want a new uterus," I told him. "You should order me one."

"Okay," he said, and typed uterus into the Amazon search bar.

"Just books," he said when the results came up. "And there's a CD, Uterus & Human. Crap." He looked at me. "This is really going to frack with my Amazon recommendations. " He looked back down. "Yeah, see? Already. Friends, Season 4."

Jump to the Jam, Boogie Woogie Jam Slam

In other words, funky, funky, which best describes the mood I was in for the past couple of weeks. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you may be too young to read my blog, and you should probably watch this).

God, I miss the 90's sometimes - that little teeny tiny moment in time when it was cool to be an Xer. Because honestly, sometimes, I feel like we're just gasping for air, smooshed between the Boomers and the Y's. But that's probably another rant for another day.

Anyway, I was stuck in a really big funk and that's why I wasn't blogging. Noelle wrote about having a new year breakdown and crying about everything crappy that happened in 2008, and I had one of my own. While I was sobbing uncontrollably (in the backyard), I was actually thinking, this happened to Noelle too, maybe it's just a 2009 rite of passage or something.

What spurred it? Well, of course it was dog related.

Since Thanksgiving, I have worked my ass off with Stella. She wouldn't pee while she was on her leash, so we had to let her off leash in the backyard to go, so she wouldn't end up exploding, or peeing on our rug (which happened 3 times). But we don't have a fenced in yard, so getting her to come back in was a challenge. Add to that her inexplicable fear of doorways, and you have a big problem.

After working with her to the point where I was beginning to feel like my only purpose in life was to be a dog babysitter, I finally got her to come inside easily when I called her. But then, last weekend, when it was all of 10 degrees out, Stella ran off after some birds and discovered that Mrs. Gnome leaves chunks of meat in her backyard.

Yes. Chunks of meat.

I spent an hour (in my slippers) running around trying to get the dog to 1. drop the meat, and 2. go back in the motherflipping house. When the snow pulled my slipper off mid-run, and I ended up barefoot in snow up to my shin, the stream of profanity that left my mouth would have made George Carlin proud. J came out to help me, and we got Stella back in the house. One problem. She still hadn't peed.

I found Argo's super long training leash and used that to bring Stella out in the yard again, hoping that the 20 or so feet of personal space she could get on that leash would be enough to get her to go, but it still took a good 30 minutes before she peed. And somewhere in those last 30 minutes in the back yard, I lost it. I started openly weeping and whimpering things like "Why can't you pee like a normal dog?" and "Who puts meat in the their back yard?" But it wasn't all about my urinarily handicapped dog and the freaking meat chunks. I cried because my goal in life is not to be a dog babysitter. I cried because I hate our house and our neighborhood and our not-so-delightfully wacky neighbors. I cried because I miss my best friend, and I was tired and it was cold and I hadn't seen sun for days, and I didn't accomplished everything I set out to in 2008. I cried because no matter how much I accomplish, what I don't accomplish always seems to matter more.

But, let's get back to the important part of this story. Who the frack puts meat out in their back yard? At first, I thought maybe Mrs. Gnome was trying to poison Stella, because Stella may or may not have peed in The Crap Garden (ha! That's funny) earlier in the week. When I finally got Stella to drop the meat, I ran into the house and dropped the meat in a plastic bag to store in the freezer, ranting to J that if Stella got sick, I was going to tell the authorities it was a homicide attempt and they could test the meat and Mrs. Gnome would totally do hard time in a bad place with other dog killers. After running around for an hour in slippers in 10 degree weather, I'd given up on being rational. Also, in my near hypothermic-rage, I may or may not have threatened to urinate in the gnome's garden. I am thankful that my husband realizes I am all bark and no bite.

Later, I remembered Mrs. Gnome telling me that she feeds the fox that lives behind our houses to encourage him to stick around and eat the bunnies that eat her garden.


Um. . . wait a minute. Bunnies don't hibernate. I see 2 or 3 of them a day. Our yard is littered with bunny tracks and little brown marbles, and I would like to go so far as to propose that we have so many bunnies in our yard, because Mr. Fox has an endless supply of meat waiting for him in The Crap Garden. I mean, if I were a fox and I had the choice between running around in the snow after bunnies and chowing down on meat that's already cut up in neat little cubes waiting for me under the bird feeders, I know what I'd choose. I spent an hour running around in the snow after Stella, and, it wasn't fun. Although, admittedly, I had no desire to eat her once I caught her, so perhaps the chase was missing some essential element.

So now, despite my two months of work with Stella to get her to come when she's called, I am forced to take her out on her long leash and wait and wait and wait for her to pee (last night, when it was 2 degrees, it was especially fun), because Mrs. Gnome hasn't seen enough episodes of nature to know that a fox with a belly full of meat probably isn't going to chase a rabbit.

But I did get a good long cry out of the deal, and that, like a fever breaking, was the beginning of the end of the funk.

We really need to move. Also, if we ever do, I am going to have "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" tattooed on the back of my hand before we start househunting, because I believe no truer words were ever spoken.

A hair follicle trauma or an insect bite

Argo does not have cancer. The bump was benign and the biopsy report stated that it was a hair follicle trauma or an insect bite.

How they aren't able to tell the difference between the two, but still know that it was one or the other and not one of the gazillion other things that could result in a fairly large, tumor-y looking bump is beyond me, but I am not going to waste time splitting hairs over that. It's not cancer, and I am so freaking relieved.

It was around this time last year that Argo did have cancer, and we made several trips to the amazing veterinary school/hospital two hours away for diagnosis/surgery/follow-up. I just kept thinking, here we go again, worrying that since the bump was at his side, there wouldn't be enough spare tissue to remove to get wide margins around the tumor this time, so the next step would be radiation, but radiation is way more expensive than we could afford (but how do you put a price tag on your dog's life?) and even if we could afford it, the tissue gets so weak from the treatment that it's important to keep it from trauma and the little dog likes to jump on Argo all the time and how would we stop that and would we have to give up the little dog and oh my god my brain can go a mile a minute when I let it.

I'd like to thank the jerkwad at the microchip company for feeding my overactive brain by telling me last year that my dog would probably get cancer and die young because he was just destined to and the microchip had nothing to do with the cancer even though the chip was at the base of the tumor and the oncology specialists couldn't figure why a dog Argo's age would get that kind of tumor in that location until they found the microchip. Because, for the past two weeks, I have heard his smug voice in my head saying, "I told you so," every time I checked Argo's stitches.

Well, Mr. Microchip Man, I TOLD YOU SO. I am not a scientist, or an oncologist, or a doctor, but people who were told me the chip/tumor connection seemed highly suspicious, and while I will continue to have odd bumps biopsied, I also will continue to believe that my dog's microchip caused his cancer, and it does not mean that my dog is destined to die young. It means that the soulless butt-wipes at the microchip company play on your heartstrings and fears about losing your pet so they can sell you a product that may actually be the cause of your pet loss.

Of course, this is all my opinion, because causation in cancer cases is very very hard to prove. That's my disclaimer so the microchip company doesn't get on my case about it.

My other disclaimer is that I honestly believe that if your dog is over 40 lbs and has enough fur so he doesn't get cold in the winter, there is no reason or excuse for dressing him. But given the choice between

1. Putting him in a cone collar that will allow him to knock everything off of every surface in our house, terrorize the cat and the little dog, and cut up the backs of our legs when he runs into them
   
2. Watching him every single second until the stitches come out, including taking him with me to the bathroom
3. Allowing him to remove his own stitches and running to the vet ER to deal with the resulting infection
4. Putting a t-shirt on him so he can't get to his incision

I will chose the t-shirt. And I will take pictures of it, because it's pretty damn funny.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take care of all the things I ignored for the past two weeks while I waited for the results. After, of course, I play bad music at deafening decibels and jump around the room with my dogs for a few minutes.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Thursday.

I have to say that I'm glad today is the end of the holiday season. And while I enjoyed certain perks during our wonderfully low key holiday break, I can still honestly say that I just don't like the holiday season and I would prefer that it didn't exist.

I like every day life. I really do. I like the ins and outs of normal existance. I'm fine with stepping out of that for trips to places I want to go, or things I particularly want to do, but just because it's December and everyone else is doing it isn't a good enough reason for me. I think maybe I prefer to keep things on an even keel instead of having big highs and lows. That's probably disfunctional, but it's the truth.

I'm happiest when I'm writing and can devote my stray thoughts to the project I'm working on. When I'm bogged down with thoughts of gift lists and holiday cards and ornaments and festive meals, and people we were supposed to call but didn't, and do we have everything we could possibly need before the grocery store that is our life's blood closes down for the day, my stray thoughts are spoken for. And when I'm not spending my days in the writing trenches, I start the cycle of beating up on myself about being too far away from my writing. I start up with all the fears about whether my writing accomplishments up until this point have just been a major fluke. I can look at the facts and talk myself down, but it's still this nagging feeling of ick that follows me around until I can sit down, pound out some pages and say, "Phew, I can still write." It's one of the ways I get on my own nerves, but, hey, if I weren't so neurotic, I probably wouldn't be a writer. I'm learning to accept it as par for the course, and I'm working at making adjustments to accomodate my neroses instead of swimming upstream all the time.

This year, we managed the holidays well by not doing a whole lot of anything (although, I'd still be happy doing even less next year). I think I might even be willing to admit that I actually enjoyed the holidays, I just hated the stress that leads up to the holidays, but we did try hard to keep it minimal. We didn't get a tree. We kept things simple with gifts. I really did intend to get holiday cards out, but I only sent out about 10 and then got caught up with other things. This is the first time since I was 20 that I haven't sent out cards to my whole list. I think, instead, I may just make an effort to write an actual letter to a person from my list every month this year. That's more meaningful than writing "Wishing you all the best for the holidays and in the New Year," and scribbling my name and J's over and over again anyway.

The low key thing really paid off. I was able to dive back into my folk singer project, come up with a lot of new ideas for my character, and pound out a good chunk of pages. My productivity kept the nagging feeling of ick to a minimum.

There were more good things that happened over holiday time (some even because of holiday time). Here are a few:

• J had a relaxed work schedule and I got to be around him lots and lots. I know it's probably a little sickening, but I just like occupying the same space as J. We coexist so well together, and even when we're focusing on different things, I'm just happier knowing he's around.
• We ate good food.
  
• I got to meet NPW and Kir while they were in town for holiday festivities. You should totally be jealous of this, because they both completely and totally rock.
• I got to have a crazy long lunch with my friend K, since she's in town on break from grad school. She is one of my favorite favorite people.
• I had an awesome, highly philosophical exchange with Neil via e-mail that put some things in perspective for me.
• I got to have a good long Christmas Eve chat with Lady.
  
• J & I had a great time ringing in the new year with one of my writer-friends and his family.
  
• We spent tons and tons of time with the dogs.
  
• We watched a ridiculous number of Doctor Who episodes, although a few perk points get subtracted because the tenth Doctor is not as amazing as the ninth Doctor (but really, could anyone be as amazing as the ninth?). If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you really need to watch Doctor Who (the new series, I haven't seen the old one). The production quality sucks, but the story lines are great and the characters are endearing. And, I think I learned something about putting a character in hot water. Those writers take the art of cliffhangers to a new level.
  
• I discovered MI-5 (or Spooks if you're in the UK), thanks to a Netflix recommendation. The main character looks John Cusack and has a lovely British accent. The show is great too, but really, after the first point in its favor, does it even need to be? It's my new favorite thing to watch while I'm doing housework (Is Netflix Instant Queue not the best thing ever?)
  
• 2008 went away (2008 was a rough one, wasn't it?)
  
• I've made it through 9 days of the 10-14 day wait on Argo's biopsy results without pulling out all of my hair, (although, I'm hoping the holidays didn't slow everything down, because waiting more than 4-5 more days will probably result in baldness). Here's hoping the growth was benign and we can package up 2008 as the horrible year of dog cancer, put it in a box and shove it back on a shelf in the basement to forget about it.
  
• Stella got a bath (and boy did she need it).
• I had eggnog in my coffee every morning.
  

But, in 2009, I'd prefer to do my celebrating on my own terms, thank you very much. At the very least, I'd like to avoid the late October through December "oh, crap, the holidays are fast approaching, where does the time go?" thing next year.