BFF Bandit

When I was in law school, I used to take my then-puppy Mia everywhere. We used to study together at dog-friendly coffee shops. Well, I studied; she usually snacked. I walked her to campus whenever I had errands to run. She'd sit patiently outside while I ran into the library to drop off a book or make a quick copy. I remember once, though, that she happened to sneak in when some one opened the door and found me in the computer lab. She had friends all over campus -- the registrar's office, professors, random students that would be all crowded around her whenever I left her somewhere for a minute. Anyway, my point is that its easy and fun to take one dog with you everywhere. But now, with Gregg's two dogs in the picture also, its much easier to just leave them all at home. One is cute; 3 is a circus.

But this last weekend, G went camping with his brother and took Mia and Tucker with him. So I got to hang out with just Bandit. And I have to say, the one dog thing is just as much fun now. I didn't do that much this weekend, but it was nice having her with me everywhere. We went to Santana Row and met up with Yi-ling and Charles for lunch. I think just about every shop we went into allowed dogs. Some had treats for her. It was funny to watch her on the escalator at Borders. She'd never been on one before, so she freaked. Couldn't figure out how to get off and on. And it was funny watching her around other people. Unlike the other two, she's pretty rude when it comes to people. Not unfriendly, just won't really give you the time of day. People would coo over her and try to pet her; she'd walk right past them, totally oblivious. She hung out in the car with treats while I was at TJs, and then wandered around with me at Home Depot. Yesterday, I tried this yoga video and she came up next to me and did a few stretches of her own. Until she got bored and started bringing her ball over for me to throw. Apparently dogs don't find the downward dog all that entertaining.

For a dog that normally just sits around and sleeps all day, I think she had quite the exciting weekend.

Please VOTE!!

EVERYONE seems to have an opinion about Sarah Palin. Honestly, I feel like I barely noticed when Obama picked his VP candidate. But then along comes Palin and she's got even Pink running "terrified." Crazy conservatives (and I mean CRAZY) like Dr. Laura seem to have a problem with the choice, too -- taking us back to the 20s, she asks why McCain couldn't have chosen a female candidate with grown children. Because we all know what's gonna happen now -- Palin's gonna be all torn between her kids' runny noses and nuclear arms deals with Russia, and we're can't trust her to prioritize appropriately. On a lighter note, Slate.com asked their readers to send in any Sarah Palin dreams they might be having. And you'd be amazed to read just how many dream worlds Palin's been visiting lately. . . . come on, really? This is what people dream about? http://www.slate.com/id/2200015/

Personally, I like knowing that the only thing standing between me and the vice presidency is American citizenship, a couple of years on my local city council, and a Miss Alaska title. I take comfort knowing that when my kids go to the school, they'll have choices. They don't have to buy into the whole evolution myth if they don't want to.

Man, who knew I'd be agreeing with Pink?

Are you going to eat that cookie?

Since I started my diet last week, I'm pretty much either always starving or gorging myself while feeling guilty. I've never been a huge dieter, but especially with the wedding coming up, it seemed like a good time to practice healthy living. I know I don't have the will power to really cut any of the good stuff, but I figure if I can cut my portions and exercise more, I'll be well on my way to being acceptable in my wedding pictures. But damn, that's easier said than done.

Seriously, suddenly all I do is think about food. Yesterday, in a fit of masochism, I started perusing my favorite recipe site just so I could drool at the pictures. (Well, I needed healthy dinner ideas, what else was I supposed to do?) To manage my portions, I've started keeping track of all my calories at this great website - www.fitday.com. Sometimes, when I'm really hungry, I'll get on there and start entering in foods that I want to eat, so that I can see what I might be able to get away with. The website lets you track activities/calories burned also, so I play that game too -- see if I can't balance that extra portion of lunch with an extra 10 minutes of walking. Its become something of an obsession.

What's sad is that its only been a couple of weeks and there have already been days when I've gone way beyond my allotted calorie intake. NO, no - actually what's even sadder is when I realize how much of a piggy I was before all this started. Case in point, this morning I happened to notice the number of calories in a package of Ramen (all right, I admit it -- my love for Ramen is a freak of nature that somehow survived the college years). Anyway, there are 190 calories per serving of Ramen. But get this - there are 2 servings per package! AND whenever I ate Ramen, I almost always ate 2 packages. So can you imagine what my total daily intake might have been like if I was wasting almost 800 calories on this crap?!?

the next level

I've been wondering who else to tell about my engagement. You know how it is. First, I was calling all my close friends and telling them about it. Then, a few weeks later, I changed my relationship status on Facebook. Which, by the way, did wonders for my usually neglected wall -- thanks everyone! So the rush of congratulations from that was pretty nice.

But now what? How else can I advertise my engagement and who else can I really get to care? Well, today, I found a new outlet. Looking for photographers for the wedding, I had a thought. Back in Jan. they did an article on CASA when I was working there. And the photographer that took my pictures mentioned doing wedding photography on the side. I thought I'd check her out but didn't have any contact information. So I sent an email to this other girl I know at the paper to get the scoop. Turns out, though, that she doesn't work there anymore -- actually, neither she nor the photographer do, but that's beside the point. Anyway, within minutes, I got an email from her replacement. Soon after that, I got an email from the EDITOR congratulating me on my engagement. Any minute now, I expect the photographer herself to get wind of the whole thing and contact me with her prices. :)

So judging from how quickly word spread, I think its clearly time for me to start hitting all the papers.

garden madness

So Gregg has a couple of long stretches in his yard that aren't covered in grass, so for the last couple of years, we've been planting vegetables along the side of his yard. Last year, we started too late and never quite got the hang of watering regularly. This year, we planted so early that on some nights, he had to go out and cover everything to protect them from frost. And he got all into setting up a drip system all around the yard so that everything in his yard is watered automatically now. We even got excited and built another planter so that we could buy more plants. Well, G built it but I provided some moral support along the way. :) We ended up with zucchinni, tomatoes (3 types), eggplant, bell peppers (2-3 types), corn, basil (2 types), cilantro, mint, japanese cucumbers, chili peppers (a million different varieties, it seems). I don't know if we just got a little too excited or what, but we've been swimming in vegetables now for a couple of months. These pics are about a month old, so a lot of our plants are even bushier and bigger now. Except for the corn which seems be done now for the season and has been slowly wilting away.

Gregg does most of the tending - the weeding, fertilizing, spraying, that kind of stuff. And I've been trying to actually use everything. I like veggies, but its been hard keeping up. So if anyone has any good recipes out there that involve A LOT of vegetables, please pass them along. The winner so far was a night about a week or so ago when I made veggie paella (with just about very veggie we have) and gazpacho (which uses a lot of both tomatoes and cukes!). A couple of zucchini casseroles, a corn chowder, pickled cucumbers, lots of pasta primavera -- Its been fun trying out new recipes, but enough already. Especially if your recipe is easy and doesn't involve a ton of chopping, I'm be so ready to hear it!

And if you want any chili peppers, please come and take them. This is definitely a case where we went a little overboard. They sell a lot of peppers as six packs at the beginning of the season. And that's actually a lot of peppers, seeing as how one plant is more than enough to feed a family of 4 for the whole summer but we didn't know that. We started off with six packs of serranos and jalapenos. Happened to run into some Thai Chillis, Anaheims, then some Cayenne. We searched all over for Jabaneros and then even found these super hot Carribbeean peppers. Needless to say, our taste buds have been slowly withering away. Lately now we've taken to sauteeing a bunch of peppers in some oil, then blending it all up into a pure chili hot sauce that we've been throwing on everything. Fortunately for us, they seem to be staggered, the serranos will probably die off here in a bit just as the super hot ones like the Carribbean and Jabaneros are starting to ripen. But still, we have more heat than we can handle, so any help would be appreciated.

Belated kayak update

About a week after our trip, we re-inflated our kayak in the garage to see if there was a leak. This time, instead of using our "short cut" car pump, we used the foot pump provided with the kayak. What do you know -- the kayak actually inflates to about twice the size of what we had pumped it to for our trip! AND there's a gauge that tells you when you're at full size. Turns out we weren't even close to full size when we went to Elkhorn. Guess that's what instructions are for. :)

"Maybe you're not as retarded as I made you out to be"

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a kayak and it finally arrived last week. Gregg and I have been itching to take it out for a spin, so Sat we went to Elkhorn Slough near Moss Landing for a trial run. Its a two-person inflatable kayak, so took us a little bit to get it all pumped up and ready to go. There were a few different parts - the kayak itself, the seats that were separately inflatable and inserted into the kayak, and of course the paddles. Now, I should preface this whole story by saying that neither of us are really avid kayakers (Gregg had never gone before Sat, and I can count the number of times on one hand). Also, neither of us are particularly active in general anymore so we probably have no business engaging in strenuous exercise to begin with.

But anyway, we inflated the kayak in the parking lot and set off.

The first problem we encountered almost immediately was that we couldn't get the kayak to face forward. I was sitting in the back so was technically steering, I suppose, but no matter what we do, we ended up doing little donuts and facing backwards. And also, Gregg's seat deflated almost instantly and kept sliding down, so that it felt like he was doing crunches whenever he paddled. So we decided that maybe we should try switching places and looked around for some place to pull over. Of course, there wasn't any, so decided to just switch on the go by turning around and moving our seats over. So basically, G would take the middle seat out, move it towards his end and turn around so that we were facing different directions and he was in the back. Not sure if that makes any sense, but basically, we had switched it up so the back of the kayak was in the opposite side, he was steering and I was in front. The plan had diaster written all over it, but actually turned out ok.

There was a HUGE difference almost immediately. I don't know how long I had to put up G making fun of my steering abilities. It had to have been at least 10 minutes before he felt underneath the kayak and realized on his side, there were these little fins that were supposed to be in the back of the kayak and guide the steering. So really we had just set the seats up wrong in the beginning and that's why we were doing donuts up the slough. So you'd think that at this point, I'd get a little apology for all the ribbing. All I got was, "Hmm, maybe you're not as retarded as I made you out to be." See what I have to put up with?!?

Anyway, the trip was much better after that for a while. We were going in the direction of the wind and current, so we basically just coasted. Definitely our kind of exercise! But then we stopped for lunch at the end of the Slough near some railroad tracks and that's when we realized how deflated our kayak was! It looked seriously sad. Some guy actually pulled over on the road on the other side of the slough while we were eating and asked if we were ok.

We hadn't even thought to bring the pump with us either! But we figured it'd be ok, we'd just get a little wet. Famous last thoughts, I guess, because we couldn't have been paddling long on the way back before we realized that we so were not ok. First of all, the wind was blowing against us now, so it wasn't as easy. And then, the kayak was pretty deflated, so we didn't have much to work with. Basically we kept paddling and paddling but not making any progress. So we didn't know what to do. At some point, we gave up and thought we'd just paddle over to one side and see if we couldn't leave the kayak somewhere, walk back, and then come back and get it with our car. Seemed like an all right plan, except that it took forever to get over to the side with it being all marshy and thick with weeds. And then once we got there, we realized we weren't anywhere close to the road! So then we were stuck walking along the railroad tracks with the kayak!

We tried it for a while and then just decided that paddling was probably the lesser of two evils and got back to that. Made it back eventually. Actually I think we'd made more progress than we realized too because even by the time we jumped back in, we could see the parking lot in the distance. So I guess we had that going for us. When we finally made it back, we were deflating the kayak to head home (although at that point, it was pretty much all the way deflated anyway) we noticed a big vent that we had left completley open the whole time. Doh!