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We often speak for the dogs, who seem to have similar mock voices. Walt likes to be right with you and often climbs into David's lap, even in an office chair. He says, "I'm comin' up!" Note the squeaky ball on the desk. Walt brought it over to play but Casper, aka The Fun Police, growls and barks when he squeaks it, so we have to put toys out of reach as they arrive. She says, "There will be no fun around here! I'm going to attack you for having that ball even though I don't want it!" He never stops grinning (we call that look Cartoon Dog) even when she gives him the snarliest looks. The ball is not particularly out of reach if you consider that when we are out of the room, Walt gets up on counters to grab what seems interesting and then chews up the items on the bed or under the dining room table. Last week he even took a souvenir magnet I got in Rome off the fridge and ate that. While we were out of town this weekend, he apparently got a new package of Patagonia socks off my tall dresser, tore a hole in the bag, and somehow got one of the socks to Casper who ate it and has been pooping it out for three days.

David called on his way to a client's house. "Well, I finally did something I always thought I'd screw up. Every time I think, Hey, don't forget to do this stupid thing you're going to forget to do. How many garbage disposals have I installed? About {large number which shall remain undisclosed}? Yeah, that's right, about the same number of women I've slept with." This is how I found out the Previous Number of Partners. We haven't really been interested in discussing the numbers in the last four-plus years. It was actually pretty funny, since he just kept going about how he apparently forgot to remove an inlet plug and the client called to say the recently-installed disposal wasn't working, and of course I was at work at the time, which prompted all the guys in our trailer to start discussing this way of relating previous partners to appliance installations, does he give discounts, etc. Meanwhile I was listening to our CEO's voicemail about quarterly earnings, which I had to replay since all this discussion kept interrupting. When I told Nicole later, she admitted she had only installed one garbage disposal and forgot to remove the inlet plug too. I thought this was a sweet euphemistic commitment to her husband, to which she replied, Oh puke.

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Update on the Six Pound Challenge: It's still six to go but in a lot less than six weeks since I regained a couple pounds! Oops.

While deleting old email, I found this article, Caring For Your Introvert. What a great piece! Most people in my life are not overbearing and respect my need for personal time (or maybe I just hang out with busy people so it all works out). And I've gotten better at dealing with the general public since I do so many volunteer shifts. But this is great:

Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts.

Hey Matt! Check this out. I still know all the words... I remember traveling to a school in Columbus to stay overnight for the yearly convention of the Little Hoosiers. Mrs. Chambers was our sponsor, and she was in her 40s and had braces. We made Indiana-shaped cookies at some club meetings and went to Feast of the Hunter's Moon (would you believe I bought a rabbit pelt?) and Council Oak and Pierre Navarre Days. I was the secretary at least one year. I wasn't popular enough to be President. We had a Sergeant-at-Arms too, but it's not like elementary kids were that rowdy in the 80s. However, this is a mimeographed paper, and the room where they made the mimeos was also where they paddled the bad kids. Good old Nuner school. I believe I still have my blue History Is Fun shirt from the club. I'll have to find that. Also in old-school coolness: Found my old sticker collection! It includes Garbage Pail Kids and a Michael Jackson sticker that came from a gumball machine. Pizza Tyme sponsored my dad's slow pitch softball team. We'd head down to the city parks to watch his games (or rather play in the park with the other players' kids) and then go to Pizza Tyme afterward and say "Put it on my dad's tab" to get all the Mountain Dew and pizza we wanted. We played Gorgon pinball, and on the jukebox was Eye of the Tiger, Beat It, Thriller, I Just Called To Say I Love You, and Elvira. I miss Pizza Tyme. It was on the Memorial Day parade route, too, which we went to every year. One time I got sand in my eye at the playground and had to go to the hospital to get it out. And I remember driving to a game in the new Green Bomber, a crummy old green Buick my dad bought from the neighbor's son that had to be hit in just the right spot to get out the passenger door. I thought it had a "new car smell" because it was new to me!

It's a buyer's market, folks, but I'm a seller so I'm screwed, and you want this house. Check it out here, where you can get dizzy spinning in the yard panoramic video view. I spent a lot of time and a fair amount of money getting it ready, so let's have a party before it gets dirty again! All furniture is also for sale if you so desire, though I believe the couches are spoken for. Note: push mowing in 90°F weather is not fun. I did wait until 8 p.m. so I'd kill less ozone (plus it was a little cooler). Attack offf the Killer ToMAYtoessss: Our tomatoes are taller than we are! This is at a different house, but if you buy the first one, you can have all the tomatoes too.

Here's a petition you'll actually want to sign! The Obamas plan to get a dog after the election. The AKC is promoting a purebred dog, showing pictures of the breeds they recommend, as well as pictures of the breeds McCain has--but NOT of a mutt, which he also has! Poor Coco. Good old Best Friends has a petition to encourage the Obamas to adopt their next dog, not buy it. It's a quick, easy, electronic signature! Come on Obama family, adopt your dog! I know many of you are doggie lovers and rescue supporters. I'm signature 33,747...

Proof! Week zero: Week one: Note my Teva-farmer-tanned feet and my pink capri jammies with turtles. That's our very unfinished basement bathroom. Of course tonight David discovered I have cellulite when I sit a certain way. I can't believe this is its first appearance in the last four years. Ah well. This man is in denial about his baldness: Walt snoozes on my pillow on the couch. He's not supposed to be up there. I took the dogs out on the front porch last week. They really enjoyed watching the world go by. Now you can see why we need to paint the porch--we are not responsible for (nor can we remove) that seafoam green. Sorry for the dim lighting... Harry the big bun met the pups a few days ago. He jumped away when Walt licked his nose.

This is Henry, up for adoption with a regional collie rescue. I like to imagine this is what Casper looked like when she was a puppy.

I had dinner with Nicole's family last night (she made great veggie burgers from scratch, including the bulgur I bought at the cult), and we took a walk with little Ainsley after we ate. Nicole announced that she and Oz are having a six-pounds-in-six-weeks weight loss challenge for bragging rights and stamina at GenCon, and since it's always helpful to have a kick in the pants, I decided to join the challenge. I've never worried about my weight, but in the last year I learned it no longer maintains itself--some evil post-30 metabolism drop. I have to watch what I eat to some degree, and go out and get sweaty more often than I really want to, and fortunately that's been enough. Usually. Sometimes I have to get really serious about it, so I'd better do it now before I have to buy new pants. I've been back on fitday.com, a very useful site for tracking what you eat and how you exercise, and I finished the last piece of cheesecake before my weigh-in, so here we go! So, folks, anyone want to join us? I can even give you guest posting access if you'd like to write your own entries about it. :) You do not have to reveal your weight! BTW, exciting dental update: Had a cleaning yesterday and I'm grinding my new teeth! I have to wear the guard or I'm going to crack $30k of work.

I have been involved in "discussions" (once the name-calling comes in, are they arguments?) in a local message forum for IndyGasPrices.com, where I am generally the lone liberal and suffer for it. I have to work hard at being nice and also at not responding to everything, because it gets old and I have better things to do, and I just don't need to stress about these people's ideas. But seriously, the place is an echo chamber of ridiculous statements on poverty, homelessness, the environment, global warming, and of course the solutions to high gas prices (I'll save you the trouble: it's all the Democrats' and environmentalists' faults, and poor people are lazy leeches on society). I know they feel the same disgust at what I say, but it makes me sad that there are so many cranky, uncaring, thoughtless Hoosiers. It's just the loudest ones that make it seem that everyone is like that, but that's one of the reasons I try to maintain a presence: so everyone else doesn't think ALL Hoosiers have those opinions. At least all the discussions have prompted me to do some more reading (and I'm sure my sources are too liberally biased to be worthwhile, if you ask them), including my library checkout of The Working Poor, a rather long Wikipedia article on Hugo Chavez, and today I was trying to find information on why apparently 80% of leased oil exploration areas don't actually get explored (i.e., why do we need more drilling areas opened anyway?). I found this article from January on an Alaskan area threatened by a proposed oil and gas field, focusing on polar bear habitat and generally being way too liberal for the folks I mentioned previously. But the article ends with

"We can live without petroleum, but we cannot live without the whale," said George Edwardson, Inupiaq subsistence hunter.

That profoundly captures exactly how I feel. Of course that subsistence hunter can't live without the whale and can totally avoid oil, but I'd say our planet and its population have the same basic needs. We've built this petroleum energy economy that threatens our very existence by shortages, political wars, unsustainable practices, and terrorism, and yet we blindly push for moremoremore of the addiction, never considering conservation or alternative energy seriously until, oops, I can't afford to fill my SUV. It's someone's fault! Get me my American-guaranteed cheap gas! Those third world people are using too much oil! (The U.S. still consumes a QUARTER of the world's energy but has 5% of the world's population.) If we'd just get back to the basics, where we respect nature instead of pillage it, where we help the hungry instead of fertilizing and factory farming our way into Western obesity and soil depletion and water contamination, and where we stop thinking the planet is ours to trash, maybe we'd actually get somewhere.

I swear that is the song my neighbors (not the super nice ones to the west who I think left me perennials on my front porch this morning) are currently karaoke-singing in their backyard! They did apologize to me over the mic as I was getting in and out of the shed to do yardwork; they swore they'd be better singers when they were drunker. David thinks they bought their daughter the new red Mustang. She doesn't seem old enough to drive. They're nice enough and we swap who cuts the side yard between us, so I'm not too worried. Their charcoal grill smells good. I feel like I am cutting down the backyard, and every pile of brush I create unearths old dog poo piles. The dogs are thrilled that their favorite areas will now be accessible again. I suppose that's better than Casper pooping on the walk like she did this morning.

As seen in Carmel, IN

I have been reading more lately, but my interests in the past few years have been on topics of social justice and animal welfare, not the "classics" so much nor any bestselling novels. On the occasion that I do read fiction, I generally pick something minority-written and often along social justice lines. Must Be Motherhood (who posted the below meme recently and is apparently on blog vacation now) sent me Three Cups of Tea this week, and now that I've finished The Working Poor (hooray for the library) as of last night, I can move on to the next book. But I also have PQ's Half of Me on the shelf, as well as Dominion and The Omnivore's Dilemma, both of which I've been working on for awhile. So far this year I finished The China Study and Nickel and Dimed, and I keep up with one food magazine. Some months I don't read much of anything in book form at all. (And yes, I'm too lazy to underline titles and give you links to them at Amazon.) I read a TON of email and of course I'm usually home late every night, never finding time to sit with a book. I look forward to the times I can do nothing but read, but sometimes I have to carve that time by neglecting something else (replying to email, making phone calls, bonding bunnies, sleeping). Is it a hallmark of American culture to be swamped with stuff to do all the time? It's not like I watch more than about two hours of TV a week, and that's while eating dinner. On to the meme, something from the National Endowment for the Arts, which approximates that most American adults have only read six out of the 100 titles on this list. Looks like I hit 21 of these. That number is pitiful in many ways, but there are so many other things to read. I thought almost all of the books were school assignments, but after reconsidering the list, I think a third of them were just books I chose to read. I don't even remember many of them too well. Some of my favorite classes (note I was a chemistry major and didn't have to take any lit) were elective literature courses, Russian lit, Gothic lit, and two semesters of African American lit. Here’s what you do: 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Underline the books you LOVE. 4) Reprint this list on your own blog. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible (parts, of course) 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Several plays, of course 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy several of his short stories, though 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 52 Dune - Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath after I found out she went to and then taught at my alma mater 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession - A. S. Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker my favorite book 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom oh come on 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery one of my favorite quotes: You are responsible forever for that which you have tamed 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare but I saw the play when I visited Stratford-on-Avon! 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo if David sings this one more time... let's put it this way: He named a foster rabbit Eponine