It’s the “Saints Come Marching” ring again. From a different customer. It’s contagious. Ugh.
Archive for November, 2006
Here are some photos from the last couple of weeks:
(It’s so, so hard to stay awake when you’re dressed like a bear…)
(In the last few days, Thomas has figured out how to really get the jumperoo going. He has also figured out how to make this face, which is very very cute.)
(Otto knows that this blanket is Thomas’ blanket, and that, as with Thomas’ toys, he shouldn’t stake a claim to it. But he so so wants to be in on the action that he can’t help but sit just on the edge…)
Check out this video of a deer who wandered into a Target in West Des Moines, IA.
I doubt that the inventors of Automatic CAUTION Doors considered their product’s potential for unleashing bambi on unsuspecting shoppers. (Or, alternatively, the potential for unleashing slippery floors and terrifying shoppers on unsuspecting deer.)
To the lady at the coffeeshop whose cell phone ringtone is an incredibly obnoxious rendition of “When the Saints Come Marching In”:
Turn your ringer down. It is annoying. It sounds like something that was created on a 1980s Casio Keyboard with the express purpose of irritating anyone who hears it. And it is far too loud. If EVERYONE in the entire coffeeshop stops what they’re doing to turn and look at you when your phone rings, IT IS TOO LOUD. And it rings far too often. I have heard it three times just this week.
Have you heard of the “vibrate” setting?
Mr Thomas has become mobile (slightly). He has been able to roll from front to back for a while now, mostly because he doesn’t particularly like to be on his tummy and when put in that position he squirms until he throws himself over. But in the last few days, he has begun rolling from back to front.
It’s his new favorite thing. He must must must do it anytime he is placed on his back. Most of the time he rolls over and rolls right back, which allows him to scoot around and keep his eyes on the dog (in whom he is very interested). But sometimes he gets stuck, and seems to have forgotten that he learned the front-to-back roll long ago. He starts grunting and grumping, complaining and complaining and trying to roll back over, but can’t figure it out, and we finally step in.
This is still all very cute, really, except for when it’s bedtime. Last night after I put him to sleep, I seriously had to go back into his room five or six times to flip him over. And there’s no use ignoring him and hoping he’ll just flip back and fall asleep, because the longer he’s stuck on his tummy, the madder and more awake he gets. So there’s basically nothing to do but go in, flip him over, and hope that at some point he’ll stop thrashing around and actually go to sleep.
Then there were the two other times last night when he ended up tummified and pissed off–at 2:00 and 5:45. Poor guy (and poor mommy, since daddy somehow manages to sleep through all of this). I hope this phase ends soon. We’re making him practice the tummy-to-back maneuver in hopes that he’ll put two and two together sometime soon…
We have these neighbors across the street. They’re okay, but kind of weird. They’re probably in their mid-fifties, and they are the neighbors who think they own the neighborhood and are always telling people how they’re breaking meaningless, unenforced laws. The wife at least pretends to be nice most of the time (though we have some pretty good stories about how she actually isn’t), but the husband never smiles or even returns a wave.
So anyway, the husband just came out of his house and put a full-sized tripod on his lawn next to the street. Then he went back into the house and came back out with a video camera. After attaching the camera to the tripod, he ran up to his garage. (I emphasize ran because I have never actually seen this guy run. He’s usually moving pretty slowly. But he seems to be moving with purpose today.)
At this point, I thought maybe he was trying to catch our delinquent neighbor (you know, the one I wrote about last summer) doing something illegal on tape, because like I said, he’s the kind of person who would try to do that. But I was wrong. It’s way weirder than that.
He came out of the garage with his bike, and he was wearing a skin-colored bike helmet with some sort of black fur or hair attached to it as if it were a mo-hawk or a spartan helmet.
Then he started riding around on his bike in an oval, in front of the house next to his. He seriously rode around eighteen to twenty times, and a few of those times he gave the camera a thumbs-up as he went by. Then he got off the bike, looked at what he had filmed, and then ran back to his bike, rode around several times in a smaller circle, then stopped again, looked at the camera, got back on the bike, etc.
By the way, in addition to the spartan/mo-hawk thing, he is wearing a bright yellow t-shirt, black shorts, black socks, and black high-topped tennis shoes. And he’s riding a hybrid bike, complete with dorktacular saddle-bag-type panniers.
Oh, now he’s taken of the helmet and he appears to be packing up the camera equipment. Don’t you just wish sometimes you knew why people were doing things?
Yesterday, we returned from Thomas’ doctor’s appointment (he’s progressing just perfectly) to find halloween candy wrappers scattered across the livingroom floor and Otto sleeping peacefully on the couch.
I know, I know, it was stupid of me to leave the bowl of candy we had offered to trick-or-treaters the night before sitting on the sofa table. I had meant to move it before we left. But I forgot.
I so wish I had taken a picture of the aftermath of Otto’s Victorious Battle with the Tightly-Packaged Candy, but I was too shocked and just rushed to clean it up and (more importantly) to determine how much chocolate he ingested.
As it turns out, he only ate 11 or 12 pieces of candy. Nestles Crunch appear to be his favorite (he ate about 6 of them), followed by Reeses Peanut Butter Cups (3) Kit Kats (1 — there were several unopened Kit Kats scattered in the debris, which suggests that these are the hardest for Schnauzers to open) and Tootsie Pops (1).
We called the vet, and they told us that to be in serious trouble, he would have needed to ingest one ounce of chocolate for every pound of his body weight, which we think would probably have been about three times what he actually got. Phew.
Most interestingly, the bowl that originally held the candy was not tipped over or disturbed in any way, despite the fact that the carnage seems to have centered around a blanket on the floor a good 6 feet away from it. And the couch stands between the bowl and the blanket.
Oh, how I wish I knew exactly how the whole thing transpired. Did he take out each piece of candy, carry it to the blanket, eat it, and return for another? Or did he stand on the sofa table, pick up each piece of candy, toss it to the floor with a quick flick of the neck, and then descend for a single orgy of candy-consumption? How exactly did he get the wrappers open? How long did all of this take? How is it that he has shown absolutely no signs of illness despite the fact that he consumed a non-trivial amount of a toxic substance? If it weren’t for the little bits of candy stuck to his beard, we could plausibly suspect that some other dog had invaded the house, eaten the candy, and then escaped.
But here is my most burning question: how did Otto manage to eat an entire Tootsie Pop while leaving the wrapper and stick in perfect condition? I really wish I could have witnessed that one.
