The fattest squirrel in the world

Here's a squirrel we met last month in the Common. Squirrels there are very, um, friendly, and this one must be particularly forward, as evidenced by its gut. Note that you can barely see its little feet. Note also that it is eating. We gave it that nut. We're enablers.

I wonder if this squirrel is even able to haul itself up trees, or if it has become a ground squirrel due to its heft.

Maybe we should have fed it a rice cake instead.

The perils of being hardcore

Last month, I decided that I had made the transition from mediumcore to Hard. Core. It happened one day when I was running. It had been snowing all week and the sidewalks were icy and slushy and generally a mess. But I just couldn't run on the treadmill one more time without losing my mind, so I strapped some traction on my feet and hit the streets.

There I was, running down Mass. Ave. and Aretha Franklin's Respect came on my iPod. As this happened, a woman drove by and gave me a thumbs up with an amazed look on her face, like "You go girl!" And while I was waiting for a stoplight to change, some guy told me how incredible he thought it was that I was out running. The weather sucked, but I felt like a rock star. Take that, New England winter! California Girl is in the hizzouse!

So yesterday, I thought it would be fine to go for a 10 to 11 mile run in the snow. I woke up in the morning to find that a light coating had fallen over night. The forecast called for "snow showers," which to me means light, pretty, intermittent snow. Snow was falling gently as I left the house and I figured that it would probably stop soon.

When I got outside, I realized that things weren't as pretty as they had looked from my window. The wind was blowing the snow into my eyes and that nice light layer of snow made the ruts in the sidewalk hard to see, so I kept falling all over myself. And the snow that was supposed to stop just got heavier. So there I was, trudging along, half-blind, when a dumbass driver zoomed by and splashed me with muddy water. I won't write what I said as the car obliviously drove away, but it wasn't very polite.

Around mile 5, I decided to call it quits and go home. Unfortunately, I was still about a mile and a half from my house, but I figured I could stick it out. As I turned and headed in the general direction of defeat, I realized that the snow had changed yet again and was like tiny ice-pellets of death being shot directly into my eyes by the increasing wind. My eyes were burning and I was running (shuffling, really) down the street with one eye closed and the other only partly open. As my eyes watered profusely, I wondered if they could actually freeze shut. I must have looked like I was having a stroke or something. Good thing I didn't see any young children because I'm sure I would have scared them.

The good news is that I finally made it home, though I was cranky, wet and the top of my head was encased in ice. The bad news is that when I went to take a scaldingly hot shower, there was only lukewarm water. Evidently, everyone in the building had already taken a shower in boiling water and was doing their laundry at exactly that moment. Bollocks!

After my third-world shower, I looked out the window again and saw that the snow had stopped and a happy-looking group of runners was going by. They are really lucky that I didn't throw any snowballs at them.

After all this, I'm not so sure I'm hardcore anymore. Or that I necessarily want to be. It's a lot of work and it messes up my hair. Maybe I should be in the hizzouse by just staying indoors.

I'm ready for spring now.

Pajamas and the end of an era

Beginning in college, I became something of a pajama connoisseur. I think this was because I needed to have something presentable in which to lounge about the dorm. (Funny how I defined "presentable" back then.) So I happily collected many a novelty pajama pant over the years. That's right, just the pants -- for me, PJs are generally flannel pants paired with a t-shirt and a sweatshirt if needed.

During the course of approximately the last 10 years, I've collected flannel pants with the following patterns: plaid (at least 2 different kinds), cows, clouds, penguins and leaves. In addition, I have owned several PJ sets, which I would wear when I had the urge to match. One of the sets was "silky" (polyester) and gold and had a cheetah-print trim. Kjerste also owned this same set of PJs (we shop at the same stores, namely, Target) and we would wear them at the same time while we drank cheap alcohol together. Which is often what we would do: While the other college girls might have been out at a party, we were always more the "let's put on the PJs and have a drink" types. The cheetah-print ones just happened to be our "dressy" pajamas.

At one point in college, I may have actually owned all these different pajama options at the same time. Which is good, because I would wear them all sorts of places nobody should really be wearing pajamas, such as the grocery store, the dining hall, and class. But given that I was a college student at Santa Cruz, one of the most casual places on earth, I suppose it didn't really matter what I was wearing as long as I was clothed. At least, this is what I told myself.

After several moves, however, my pajama collection dwindled by necessity. Who wants to haul around 20 pairs of flannel pants? And I haven't bought any additional pants since shortly after college -- I clearly have not needed them. After the move from California, the only flannel pants I had left were the ones with the leaves, the cows, and the penguins, which died last year due to a large hole.

Yesterday, something very, very bad happened. I went to put on my leaf pants and the 7-year- old drawstring broke. And there is no way to fix it. I tried. I even was wondering if there might be a way to substitute a shoe lace, but there wasn't. I'm also not sure if the desire to try to hold up my pants with a shoe lace was industrious or just sad. In spite of my incredible loss, I remained hopeful that my cow pants, which looked comfortingly at me from my drawer, might save the day. But when I went to put them on, the 10-year-old elastic in the waistband let out a great snap and gave way. The final moo.

Well, not entirely, as it turns out. You see, I have no other pajama pants to wear. So the cows are currently being held up by an enormous pleat I created in the front with a large safety pin. Please do not call the fashion police. I know that this is only a temporary resuscitation and not an episode of Project Runway. I will need to find my way to a store and buy some decent night wear.

This is all very sad. After all, I have a history of growing attached to textiles. As a child, I had a "favorite blankie" that I chewed on. The only way my mom could wean my off of it was by clipping it into smaller and smaller bits. This was made easier by the fact that I was chewing holes through it.

This truly is the end of a pajama-wearing era. In honor of this, I encourage all my reader(s) to wear their pajamas while having a drink. Do it for the cows.

"I'll keep your resume on file."

What job-seeker hasn't heard that one before? It's like someone telling you that they hope you can "still be friends" after a breakup. You know what it means. It's a lie that's supposed to soften a rejection and it doesn't. You know what? I'm not friends with any of my ex-boyfriends. In the event of a break up, I wanted to kick their asses, not go out for coffee and a chat. And the resume file? That would be a recycling bin. (And hopefully not a garbage can. At least reject me in an environmentally sensitive way.)

I have heard the "we'll keep your resume on file" bit a handful of times over the last several months as I have been looking (and looking, and looking) for a job. I heard it last summer from somebody who I happened to have a phone conversation with last week about some other issue. She wondered why my name was familiar and I told her that she knows me because she's an idiot and rejected me. Well, not really. I said something that sounded very professional and imminently employable. Then I heard her shuffle some papers and behold! She read me a line from my resume.

She had apparently actually kept it on file.

Now I find myself wondering just what her resume file looks like. When I was in high school and would encounter the "resume on file" bit in my attempts at low-paying jobs, I at first naively thought that people kept file folders with resumes that they paged through occasionally. Can't you see it? A manager of a video store sips coffee on her break and needs something to read. So she goes to the resume file. And of course, she sees mine and wonders why she didn't hire me.

I got over that fantasy quickly. Especially when I realized that the manager of a video store may not be the type to spontaneously read pages that are not mostly pictures. Ooh, I'm such a snob! But it's okay. When they handed me my graduate school diploma, it also came with a Certificate of Entitlement to Snobbery in a lovely pleather case.

But back to the woman who actually has a resume file. Clearly, I will have to get hired by her so I can sneak into her office and try to find the file. Perhaps I should ingratiate myself to her by sending her a gift of some manila folders imprinted with a picture of me. I won't just be in the file. I'll be the file.

In other news: This is my 100th post. It seems significant. Just thought I'd mention it in case you want to send gifts. Don't worry: Registry information will be forthcoming.

Housekeeping

Yeah, I know that I just said that I don't make New Year's Resolutions. But I do like to start the new year with a clean house and a clear head (to the extent possible, at least). To that end, I have reorganized the links over there to the left. At last, I have alphabetized them. Please try to contain your excitement. I've also removed from my blogroll any blogs that seem to have died (like those with no new posts for a year). Hopefully, nobody is offended by this. To offset this loss, I've added a couple of new ones. So have a read and enjoy. I know I will.

Bad Blogger

It seems that I've been a neglectful blogger of late. I'm not really sure how almost a month has passed since my last post. I haven't been insanely busy or anything. I guess I just haven't been living a very blog-worthy life of late.

It seems particularly sad that it's 2 weeks into the new year and I haven't blogged. Perhaps this is because I find New Year's to be a somewhat depressing holiday. All it does for me is mark the end of the holiday season and the beginning of a month that has very little going for it. Oh boy! Nothing to look forward to! All January is to me is an endless slog of more winter. At least with February, March is coming next, which means you can delude yourself about spring being just around the corner. In January, there is no delusion. Also, as has been the case for Kjerste, many of my New Year's Eves of yore have not been very inspiring. Furthermore, I refuse to make resolutions because I am convinced that they are only setups for disappointment. And I do hate to be disappointed, especially by myself. Maybe this is all really just a roundabout way of saying that I'm kind of cranky.

The high point of January so far has been our trip last week to San Francisco. Todd had to go for business (or "bidness" -- whichever you prefer) so I tagged along and got to see some friends, enjoy a wide expanse of non-icy sidewalks and relish not having to work very hard to find vegetarian food. Unfortunately for us, our flight there was first canceled and then delayed (due to mechanical problems and weather, respectively). And then on the way back, we sat on the runway for an hour while they fixed a problem with the landing gear. Which I'm glad they did, by the way. I just wished the mechanics had figured out that there was a problem before everyone got on the plane.

Frankly, I think having all of these "mechanical problems" seems a bit far-fetched. You know what I really think was going on? I think there were snakes on the plane and they just didn't want to tell us. I've never seen that movie, but I've decided that "snakes on a plane" is a good metaphor for all manner of air travel problems. I can see the conversations now:

"How was your flight?"

"Oh, you know. We got in late. Snakes on the plane."

Or:

"What is taking the flight attendants so long to bring out drinks?"

"There are probably snakes on the plane."

I think this metaphor works particularly well since half the time you don't really know what's going on with your flight anyway. So it might as well be snakes. At the very least, snakes would be more interesting than problems with a sensor on the landing gear.

And in the interest of adding to my litany of complaints, I'd also like to say that I got a cold immediately upon returning to Boston. Clearly, some of the snakes on the plane were germy little buggers.

Apparently, it's going to be a very good year.