(:::Pauses to consider Blanche at Woodstock:::  )

(Ha ha ha).

Anyway, I took the day off of work. I spent the morning at the Nissan dealership (oil change! filter change! something or other cleaning! $200 and change! Whee!) and of course at Dr. P’s office (see separate ranting post). (Except I left out the part where my appointment was for 10:45 and I didn’t even get out of the Waiting Room of Doom until 11:30).

And then Gene and I went shooting. He’s a membership of a local wildlife association (don’t worry, we didn’t shoot anything but targets, and believe me, the targets got the worst of it). I shot big guns and I did pretty well. I don’t like guns, but I do think that when I have shot them it gives me a respect for what they can do. And I know one thing: I do not want to get shot. Holy cow that must hurt. It’s hard enough pulling the friggin’ trigger.

And, I made a birthday cake for Gene that we started eating on Saturday. It was this cake and it was delightful. I made it from scratch. Yes, really. The recipe calls for cake flour, but I couldn’t find any. I should probably have looked longer, but the cake was still good. (Oh, and while I was baking the cake, Gene bought me a bouquet of flowers. Yay!)

In better news, the Great Black and Brown Hunter (a/k/a Betty) killed a rabbit today. And left it behind my chair. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Fortunately, Gene handled disposal. Eek.

And in TRULY better news: Gene got a phone call yesterday from a lady reporting that she had our dogs – black and brown dogs – and that one of them was badly injured. The dogs had tags from the suburb’s police department. They had the same personalized collars (with names and phone #s) that Betty & Scooby have. (That is, the collars had OUR phone #s on them, just different dog names).

“M’am,” Gene says, “I can see my dogs right here.”
How did these impostor dogs get collars with our phone # on them? Weird! I hope the injured dog is safe, but I am enough of an asshole to admit that I am glad the dogs were not ours. When I got home (the lady called 3 minutes before I leave work), Gene was lying in the dog bed, holding both dogs like his life depended on it. (Awwwwwwwww).

(And how was YOUR weekend?)

Anyway. So, we dropped the dogs off and headed out of town to go to a chili cookoff in a small town a few counties away. After awhile on the highway, we decide to take country roads to our destination. After awhile on the country roads, we decide that since we are headed that direction anyway, we should stop off and say hello to Blanche.

Except, remember the last time we tried this and got so lost we ended up in a neighboring state? Yeah. Thanks to Hertz NeverLost, we had good directions to the funeral home but we couldn’t remember the name of the church she’s buried in (so sue me – it was something or other Baptist church and you can’t throw a beanbag without hitting a half dozen Baptist churches down here).

Eventually, we find it. We check out her gravestone, leave some flowers, and proceed to take off, possibly to try and find Gene’s late father’s burial site (which we knew was in a VA cemetery about 20 minutes away, although we would have been lost once we got there!). Oh, and by this time it is 11:30 or so and I haven’t eaten a thing all day. I am famished. And thirsty.

So, we start to drive down this little two lane road (is it a two lane road when there is one lane for each direction?) and I look over and see…uhoh. A stray dog. Remember Awesome-O? Awesome-O II? Awesome-O III? Well, we had us (hee) another Awesome-O. She was friendly. She had a decrepit collar on but no tags. She came right up to us and was IN the car about 20 seconds later. 

So, the city we’re in? Is one of the 10 poorest in the entire United States (CNN tells me so). There are no rescue groups and the one and only vet’s office that was open scanned the dog and said she wasn’t chipped so they couldn’t try and find her owners. “But hey, you may have found yourself a new dog!”

(Umm, NO).

So eventually we get the city cops involved…who call the county sherriff’s office involved (because the dog was found outside city limits, it’s a county issue)…who finally get animal control to show up. And that lady put that cute little dog in the back of her truck (the kind with crates, like you see on Animal Cops) and thanked us and drove off. And I’m pretty sure that Awesome-O IV went to live on a farm for the rest of her days. 

(It’s 3 PM by this point)

We wandered through the chili cookoff area, which had devolved into a few carts selling drinks, candy apples, etc but the chili was gone On the bright side, we got to the hotel (which is why we could not have kept A-IV), got the grime off of us, relaxed, watched a little TV, went to a really good dinner and then watched a little more TV.

And now we’re home and back to regular life. So regular, in fact, that I am going to go fold laundry. The joy of grownup life.

PS: I am including this under the “Sweet Things My Husband Has Done” tag because, even though he’s beating himself up for wasting the early afternoon trying to get a dog (who we may or may not have accidentally stolen, per the cops) someplace safe, it was still done with a good heart. If it had been Betty or Scooby, they would have been lucky to find a stranger like him.

1) He cleaned the guest bathroom! (Since we let the cleaning lady go, the guest bathroom is categorized as His Problem. Perhaps you think that the rest of the house being Largely My Problem makes it out of balance, but I think that this means there is one less toilet to clean and I am FINE with that).

2) He cleaned up the kitchen after last night’s very complicated dinner (I mean, a pasta pot AND a skillet? I know that *I* wouldn’t have wanted to clean all that – really).

3) He took a cabinet door off its hinges so we could go order a replacement from Lowes Home Improvement and then! He actually went to Lowes to order it. (Seriously – if it had been a Me Problem, the door would have stayed propped on the stairs for months). And! When it comes in he’s going to install it! With his bare hands! Color me impressed, especially if one of those bare hands is holding a screwdriver.

4) And then! We went to Chik-Fil-A for milkshakes. And he paid. Yea! (That may sound stupid, but we are budgeted only so much fun money a month, and I’d spent a bit of mine buying him milkshakes so this evens us out).

5) And this week! He is going out of town Wednesday night (big concert in Washington DC) so you know what that means! Taco Bell! Yeehaw. (Or maybe frozen food, but let’s assume Taco Bell).

So now I’m stuck in PA and I haven’t even begun my exciting day of flight yet. I knew something was weird when I didn’t have to wait to get through security. (Amazing).

Here’s how my weekend was otherwise: Gene picked me up about 11-ish Friday night. It was SO NICE to see him!!! It totally felt like the old days when we were dating and I’d fly into Cheesecake City or wherever to spend a weekend with him. Saturday, we wandered around and had breakfast at a coffee shop and then drove around the Princeton campus. I thought about buying a Princeton alumnae shirt but decided against it as it would devalue the shirt’s worth if they let a Ball State grad like ME wear it. (It would also devalue the shirt because I just tried to spell the word “shurt”).

Gene showed me the office park where he works. It’s one of those fancy “campus” settings with a day care and a cafeteria. The amount of land was huge and as we drove around the city he kept saying “And here’s another building where I had to go for a meeting” or, my favorite, “and here’s the building for the big wigs with the helopad”.

Some of my coworkers joked with me that I’d get here and Gene would surprise me by making me go look for houses for sale because he’s been relocated. Fortunately, NO. And I say fortunately because it turns out I wasn’t too thrilled with NJ. Gene’s been here off and on for the last few month and he keeps complaining because there are no restaurants that serve anything other than A) pizza/Italian or B) wings. HE’S RIGHT! Eeesh. I was reminded again that I don’t like old cities. Just don’t. Cheesecake City, being part of the New South, is not an old city. I hear that Los Angeles is the same way, but luckily Cheesecake isn’t that far gone YET. I know there are good parts of NJ and good parts of Philly but I also know that I didn’t see any of it this weekend.

(Hell yeah I’m a princess. What of it?)

Is that the manifestation of “love means wanting to make your partner happy” or is it just the manifestation of “money fixes everything”? It is probably the latter, and we have racked up a huuuuge Visa bill from our party-hearty lifestyle so I guess I should refrain from making a $500 purchase (yeah, the system is a mere $250 but when you add in all the extra thingies and then buy games for the thing, $500 is probably a lowball estimate).

Plus, the reason Gene wants the Wii is to set it up upstairs to use Wii Fit and we can’t just buy a Wii and Wii Fit, we also have to buy a TV, mount it to the wall and buy enough mats to plastic carpet the entire upstairs. (“The upstairs” = The Boy’s room and also where I have stashed adorable items of tiny clothing and the MBUS.) And yes I know that we could just buy the Wii and the game and call it a day, but we really can’t. Neither of us like to do stuff half way.

The problem is this: Gene is really, REAAAALLY generous to me on my birthdays. For example, when I turned 30 (shhh, don’t tell!), I got flowers, an Edible Arrangement, dinner out, an iPod shuffle, a gift card to a salon and other assorted smaller items. How can I just turn up on August 17 with only… nothing? (Well, not literally nothing, but there are SOME things I do not discuss on the blog, tyvm).

Unless I want to move to New Jersey. Umm, NO. (Between the crime, the housing prices and the New Jersey-ness of it all, what’s not to hate?)

I am pretty excited because his new client is way more international (ie, has offices in countries that aren’t considered Third World). I am totally angling for a trip to go “visit the London office.”

Anyway, to celebrate Gene being home, we went and had a romantic evening down in Cheesecake City. Discretion forbids me from saying more.

(Oh, WTF. Thursday was day 5 of round 3 of Clomid).

Our mini break was fabulous and we both needed it badly. He’s been out of town 4.5 out of the last 6 weeks and will have been gone 6 out of the last 8 weeks before it’s all over. (If my math is correct anyway). He mentioned earlier today taking a job where he’d travel most of the time. At this point in our lives, I’m cool with that. I have made it clear that I am happy to relocate as required as well. With Gene’s employer, it used to be that to get anywhere in the company you have to “do time” in a certain Texas shithole but anymore we’d be just as likely to “do time” in Dubai, Auburn Hills or Nowheresville India (quite literally BFE).

He went to Gymboree.

Yes, really. Everything was 30% off before noon and I had an additional 20% off my entire order coupon (plus now we have Gymbucks because Gymbo knows all about getting you on the comeback). I gave him the coupon and his orders were “gender neutral and don’t forget the matching hats!”

And when he retrieved me from the doctor’s office, he told me that he could never go there again because he would go broke. Hee hee! (“Especially if we had a little girl” which is EVEN funnier).

Seriously, he did a fabulous job. The reason we were shopping Gymbo was we needed a nice present for Gene’s best friend and his wife. Their first is due in early January (I think – we aren’t close so I don’t know exactly) and they either aren’t finding out the gender or aren’t telling the gender (meanies!) so, beige and yellow it is.