Blue Eyes.

I recently fostered a rescue dog that was...um...unique. He was mostly or all blue Australian cattledog, with blue eyes. This gave him a permanent case of crazy eyes.

Fortunately he was also a wonderfully well-behaved dog, to the point of being boring sometimes. We got tons of applications for him and he went to his new home within a couple of weeks. This freed me from my obligation to provide the rescue with "better" pictures of him...

Favoratism.

I noticed recently that I like my niece a whole more than I like my nephew. This makes me a terrible person.

It's not his fault, it's just that he has a long was to go before he is nearly as cool as his sister. She was pretty interesting when she was learning how to walk and talk and stuff, but she's way more exciting now that she has ideas and questions and plays pretend. Meanwhile, her brother just turned two, and the walking and talking stuff seems pretty boring by comparison.

It doesn't help that my niece was speech-delayed and then caught up very suddenly, leading me to believe that language acquisition was a fairly expedient process. I totally thought that kids started talking and then used that as their primary form of communication.

Actually, it turns out that language acquisition is a very slow process that begins with the kid pointing at things and making sounds. According to people with kids, this counts as "talking". My nephew has been "talking" for a year now and I still hear nothing but gibberish. The adults he has lived with (my sister, her husband, and my parents up until a year ago) all know what those sounds mean, and can't understand why I don't respond when he babbles a string of syllables at me.

I assume he will eventually start speaking intelligible words like a normal person, but for now our linguistic divide makes it difficult for us to relate. I am perpetually finding things to bring my niece, usually stuff I was going to get rid of and realized she would enjoy. This means I almost always come bearing treasures for her, usually with nothing for my nephew. I imagine at some point I will start finding things for him too, probably when he gets more interesting and less equally amused by binoculars and paper towel rolls. Otherwise I have no idea how I'm going to handle my desire to bring bags of wonderful things just for niece.

Dog Ownership

I can't ever remember not wanting a dog. My entire childhood was spent reading about dogs, looking at pictures of dogs, pretending to train my stuffed dogs, and chasing down passers-by begging to pet their dogs.

I walked all the dogs in my neighborhood. I attempted to catch every loose dog I saw. I desperately wanted a dog of my own, and I was always hoping that maybe wouldn't be able to find the owners and I would get to keep one of those strays, just like in my dog books. Of course, we always managed to find their owners, and my parents really didn't want to deal with a dog so they always had an excuse why I couldn't have one. Our yard wasn't secure enough, dogs were too expensive. They said wouldn't want to feed it or walk it or clean up its poop. Every breed was either too big, too small and yappy, too noisy, or potentially aggressive.

I don't think they ever understood how much it hurt for me to not have a dog. Real, actual pain. It was a constant, aching void. Nearly every day I would find a place and time to quietly cry that I didn't have a dog. I had an imaginary dog that followed me everywhere, something I could pretend was taking up that empty spot behind me where my dog should be. I could never make anyone understand how utterly incomplete I felt, without something that I had never had.

Dogs have been following human beings around for 30,000 years, that's longer than we've had agriculture or permanent settlements. It's longer than we've had writing, and almost as long as we've had language. Maybe it's long enough for people to have evolved adaptations around dogs. Maybe dogs became ubiquitous in human culture because some of us actually need dogs. I really don't have any evidence to back up this vague idea, it's also distinctly possible that I have some sort of mental disease involving dogs. At any rate, when I was 12 one of the dogs I walked regularly was offered to me because her family was moving, and my parents finally, finally let me have a dog.

It has been nearly two decades now, and the novelty still hasn't worn off. It might have actually gotten stronger. I am heavily involved in dog rescue, have competed in dog sports, and advocate for animal welfare and humane legislation. Training my dogs is one of my primary hobbies. I currently work at a dog daycare, and started a dog blog about Awesomedog, Tinydog, and my various foster dogs. Having dogs has been every bit as awesome as I always imagined, if not better.

Babies.

Whenever I make eye contact with a baby without its keeper watching, I stare at it to see if I can make it cry.

Suspense is like Anaphylaxis

I've been helping a friend edit her novel, every few weeks she gives me a new chapter. I read it and then return it covered in scribbles about grammar, possible continuity errors, awkward phrasing, word choice, phrasing I love, questions, and predictions. It's a great story, and getting the chapters so far apart means I'm pretty much perpetally dying to find out what happens next.

Early in the story, one character tells the protagonist that she definitely cannot ever be seen by another character. Halfway through the book, the protagonist arranges for the two to meet. I read this chapter right after getting my allergy shots. An important thing to know about allergy shots is that they have a slight possibility of causing a systemic reaction that makes you puff up and die. Allergists make you wait for 30 minutes after your shots because if you are going to puff up and die, it's probably going to be in that period. This systemic reaction is called anaphylaxis, and can progress to anaphylactic shock, where your airway swells up until you can't breathe. The cure for this is a shot of epinephrine and cup of weapons-grade Benadryl.

I read feverishly through confrontation scene, barely breathing through the suspense. I finished the chapter, and somehow still felt...suspenseful.

Apparently anaphylaxis feels a lot like suspense.

My Buddy.

I recently watched the Chucky movies, and was uncomfortably reminded of the My Buddy dolls of my childhood.

 I never had one, or wanted one, and neither did my siblings or any of my friends. I occasionally came across one when visiting other people's houses, and they were always sort of tossed away in a corner and forgotten. The owner of said doll was usually vaguely embarrassed about it.

I always found them strangely unappealing, as if they were somehow deliberately designed to not evoke feelings of affection in children. The Kid Sister version of the doll was just downright puzzling to my child self. Every girl I knew had piles of dolls already, why would we need a vaguely unsettling and definitely unappealing one to lug around? I'm sure my uneasiness about the My Buddy dolls predates the Chucky movies, so I can't even use that as a convenient excuse.

Adult me would totally love a Good Guy doll, though.

The Tractor Ride

On a recent trip to Disneyland, Z and I decided to try all the rides in the new Cars-themed part of California Adventures. This is where I found the most entertaining ride in the entire park: Mater's Junkyard Jamboree. This might be my new favorite.

The basic concept is that the tractos pull little trailers with room for a couple of people. They move on interlocking circular tracks, describing something like a figure eight. Disneyland describes the ride like this: "Board a trailer pulled by an adorable little tractor and swing in time to lively music." Sounds pretty tame, right? What they fail to warn you is that the trailers swing with quite a lot of force, and the seat is a simple bench and lap bar, so there is absolutely nothing to stop the occupant from sliding across and whacking into the far side with each turn.

Now consider that the majority of the people on this ride are adults riding with small children. "Swinging in time to lively music" immediately becomes "Desperately trying not to squash your progeny."

The fact that I find this hilariously entertaining to watch probably means that I am a terrible person.