the power of suggestion strikes again...

so today . . .  i cannot blog.

i cannot blog today, but not for the usual reasons.  usually when i say i cannot blog, it is because i am too tired, or nothing blog-worthy happened, or my brain has left the building.  but none of those reasons are the reason i cannot blog today... (well, except that really nothing blog-worthy happened, but i could probably come up with something if i gave it some thought.)  the problem today is that i need to do report cards and homework letters for school tomorrow, and it is already almost 10:00!

why, you may ask, didn't i get started earlier?  well, i have my reasons!

first of all, i didn't sleep very well last night.  and it is all my doctor's fault! 

i had to go to the doctor yesterday for a follow up visit to my "annual procedure."  she is not happy with the mediocre results we are getting with my current medications, so she wants to make some changes in a few weeks.  in order to make the best decision, she started asking me some questions about how my current medications are affecting me.  "are you irritable?" she asked.  "i don't think so," i replied.  "i mean, my husband hasn't looked at me like i was a crazy person and asked what the heck was wrong with me!  so no, i don't think i am irritable."  "ok," she said, "what about sleeping?  are you sleeping ok?"  "yes," i said, "i sleep really good!  sometimes i wake up in the night, but i usually go right back to sleep.  but sometimes i go to bed really late." (i didn't tell her it was because i blog!) "so maybe i don't get enough sleep, but not because i CAN'T sleep."  "ok," she said, "i'm asking because one of your medications tends to ramp most people up."

what?!?!  one of my medications tends to ramp most people up?  where is my ramping up???  this is a side effect i could use!  it seems like i am always tired (probably because i hardly have any iron in my blood, but that is another story...) i think that if i have to take this medication, it is only fair that i get the good side effects...

now i am irritable.

but my doctor said adequate sleep is important to managing my medical issues.  so last night i went to bed early.  before 9:00!   and laid there, not sleeping.  i didn't get to sleep until after 11:00, and then i woke up every couple of hours!  all. night. long.  this has never happened to me before.  i am usually a good sleeper.  i stay up until i am tired, and then i fall asleep quickly and am dead to the world until i start smacking the snooze button on my alarm at 7:00 in the morning.

in fact once, our security system went off in the middle of the night.  rollie immediately leaped out of bed, grabbed a weapon and went to investigate.  diandra jumped out of bed and peeked out into the hall to see what was happening.  the dogs barked, and mia jumped off the bed and on the bed and off the bed and on the bed.  i was aware that the alarm had gone off, but i just rolled over and continued to sleep.  i only know what happened, because rollie told me the next morning... along with little comments like, "if i wasn't home, and that was a real burglar breaking in to the house, you would be dead!  you have to pay attention to the alarm!"  i sort of think that if i was alone and a real burglar was breaking into the house, my best defense would be to stay asleep and hope he would just take the valuables and run...

but i digress.

my point is that i slept perfectly fine until my doctor put the notion in my head that maybe i shouldn't be sleeping perfectly fine.  and so last night i didn't sleep perfectly fine, which meant that i was tired today.  so when i came home from school, i took a little nap... just to get me through the evening.  because it is thursday, and rollie teaches a class on thursdays, and usually we go out to eat before his class. and i had some errands to run after that, so i didn't get home until almost 8:00. and then it was time to farm with my dad on facebook.  and then, milo started bugging me to hold him...

which would have been fine if he would have let me hold him.  but he didn't want to lay in my lap, he wanted me to hold him in my arms.  but he kept shifting around.  he just couldn't get comfortable.  he will lay in rollie's lap and let rollie hold him for hours, but when i hold him, he wants to actually be held.  in my arms.  and he is a bit chubby, so my arms get tired pretty quickly.  

finally rollie came home from his class.  "oh good!  you are home!!"  i exclaimed.  "why?  what's the matter?" he asked.  "milo is demanding to be held, and i have stuff to do!  maybe he doesn't feel good..."  "he is probably just ready to go to bed.  usually we are in bed by now, and he seems to know when it is time."

ah yes... milo doesn't have any trouble sleeping at all!  of course, maybe that is because he lays his chubby little body on the most comfortable spot on the bed... my pillow!  

for some reason he has recently decided that he has every bit as much right to lay his little furry head (or whole body,) on my pillow as i have.  and usually he gets away with it.  because usually i am asleep!  of course, if last night is any indication, that may soon all change...

and so, here i am at 10:45, "not blogging" because it is late, and i have school work to do.  i don't think i am going to be asleep by 11:00 tonight either...  and getting all the school work done before morning is starting to look less and less likely to happen...

... unless, of course, some "ramping up" starts to occur...

dog walkers

so today . . . we walked the dogs. and i cooked. i'm pretty sure they are passing out coats and mittens in hell...

things have kind of gotten out of control around here. (is gotten even a word? i mean, i know i don't use capital letters when i blog. and i've totally butchered all the grammatical rules of sentence structure and paragraph formation. by choice. for effect. but i think i draw the line at using words like 'wanna' and 'gonna.' i'm just not sure if gotten fits into that category...) we have been busy. we have no consistency or predictability to our schedules. when we come home from work, there is always something that needs to be done. and on those rare times when nothing is demanding our immediate attention, we sort of just want to sit. we don't want to go change into our sneakers and walk the dogs. or cook. i know these are two separate issues, but for some strange reason, in my mind they are connected...

i know we need to walk the dogs--mia needs to expend some of her excess energy, which she usually reserves so that she can bark at whatever happens to walk past our house, and milo... well, milo is chubby. exceptionally chubby. i worry about milo's weight. and mine, just a little bit, because i have noticed that i can no longer eat a dozen chocolate chip cookies from del taco all by myself in one day and still comfortably get into my jeans. and i'm not buying bigger jeans! at least, not yet...

i've been planning to walk the dogs for quite some time now. in fact, it has been one of my new year's resolutions for the past few years. but since i keep making the same resolution over and over and over again, you can probably figure out that my follow through is not all that good. i've read that to be consistent with exercise, you need to "buddy up" with someone. of course the logical someone for me to buddy up with is rollie. i've brought it up a few times, but he always scoffs and sneers and looks at me like, "what?!? do i LOOK like a little old lady?? walking isn't REAL exercise. REAL exercise requires a ball and rules and a referee. besides, you would never be able to keep up with me. i would have to walk so slowly to stay with you, that it wouldn't do any good at all."

(i feel i should just point out here that rollie never actually said any of those words. that is just the conversation that happened in my head when i said, "maybe you should walk with me," and he looked at me with an expression of confusion and disbelief. i don't recall he ever actually said any words. but i could read it all in his face...)

and truthfully, i didn't really push it. because if he walked with me then i couldn't listen to my ipod--i would be forced to have a conversation. not that i don't like to talk to my husband, it's just that i never get to listen to my ipod, and walking is the perfect opportunity. plus, if rollie decided he wanted to walk with me, then i couldn't wimp out. i would have to go. every day. and while one part of my brain really wants that, another part just wants to watch tv and drink soda pop. and so, it has been several months since i walked the dogs...

and then, a couple of weeks ago, rollie came home from a meeting and said, "i think we should start walking the dogs together."

whaaaat?!?!?! seriously?!?!??!? because as i said, every time i brought it up, his expression pretty much said, "walking is sissy exercise!" but instead of reminding him of that, i just said, "thank you Jesus!" and listened to his plan. he had apparently heard a speaker talk about stress and health and how walking was probably the best daily exercise to do--it can be done anywhere, any time, it doesn't require any special equipment or a gym membership, and half an hour a day is adequate. rollie, of course, thought we should walk an hour. because, you know, if half an hour is adequate, then an hour would be better! so last monday, we walked the dogs...

the first obstacle was getting them leashed up. they are used to wearing collars, but when we walk them, they need harnesses. because mia thinks she is a contender for the kentucky derby, and milo thinks he is a big dog, capable of taking down any cat or rotweiller we happen to encounter. yes, they can be a little hard to control... rollie, bless his little pink heart, was going to walk mia. he thought she should sit and stay while he put her harness on, and then walk calmly beside him. silly boy! clearly he has never walked mia. she gets so excited to go for a walk that she can't stop wiggling and jumping around. and the more he said, "mia! sit!" the more excited she got! and then, there's milo. he is perpetual motion. and trying to get his harness snapped around his chubby little body is always a challenge. but we finally managed to get the harnesses on and the leashes clipped and headed out the door into our new neighborhood. with our dogs. for the first time. together...

since our dogs are different sizes--as are rollie and i--finding a pace we can all live with isn't that easy. we all start out really fast, but milo fades first. when milo fades, we all slow down. the first day we walked, he didn't even make it half way around the block. and when i say he didn't make it, what i mean is he just stopped walking. he stopped. he wouldn't budge. he plopped his 18 pound body down and refused to move. he was done. so, i picked him up and carried him the rest of the way. mia was glad to pull rollie along, and since we had only been walking for about five minutes, i just kept going... carrying our 18 pound chihuahua.

that was day one. on day two, milo made it quite a bit further. on day three, he did pretty good again, but still needed to be carried about half of the way home. rollie had seen me carry milo the previous two days, me with my scrawny little arms, and so he thought he would be nice and give me a break. he took milo in his arms and gave me mia's leash. we hadn't gone far when he said, "this dog is heavy! i don't know how you carried him so long!!" i know he was thinking, "i don't know how you carried him so long with those scrawny little arms," but he didn't say it. he didn't say it, because my scrawny little arms had carried that fat, little dog longer than his big muscular arms had. "it's the mom in me," i said. "moms have to be able to carry at least 20 pounds around. think about how much toddlers weigh!" i don't really mind carrying milo while we finish walking. i've seen people walk with hand held weights for increased exercise benefits--my extra 20 pounds is just furry and cute! but we do get some funny looks...

our neighborhood is pretty quiet. it is a walled community. walled, not gated. which means that anyone can get in, but why would they? there is no place to go! the only traffic at 5:00 at night are people coming home from work who live here. this is great for us, because we have to walk our unruly pets in the street...

we have to walk our unruly pets in the street for a couple of reasons. first of all, the sidewalk isn't wide enough for all four of us, which makes talking impossible. and secondly, milo feels the need to mark every vertical surface he passes. and some horizontal ones too! if we walk on the sidewalk, it takes us FOREVER to get around the block. so we walk in the street, which doesn't completely deter milo from marking the whole neighborhood as his territory--he just looks for car tires, garbage cans, the occasional random pine cone, the CURB... milo doesn't so much walk for the exercise as he walks for the opportunity to do his business someplace other than his own yard.

the first day we walked, i forgot to take a plastic bag in case he pooped. i say 'in case,' but it is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. milo always poops when we walk. always. but since it has been a while since we walked, i forgot to take a bag. and sure enough, halfway around the block, he stopped. i knew what was about to happen. he was going to make a doggie bomb right there in front of God and everybody... including the two neighbors that just happened to be in their front yards. and i didn't have a bag! this was not good, not good at all. i tried to keep him moving. i thought if i could just keep him walking, maybe he could wait...

he couldn't.

and there is was. right in the middle of the street in front of the entrance to our neighborhood. and we had no bag. we were in deep and serious you know what... we couldn't just walk on like nothing had happened! people had seen us!! and there was physical evidence! so rollie and i had this loud conversation about how, oh no, we had forgotten to bring a bag but it was ok, we would just go home and get one and walk around the block again and pick up milo's little gift the next time we came by...

i'm pretty sure those neighbors went into their houses and watched for us to return. they probably had their phones in hand, ready to dial the city poop police if we didn't come back and clean up after our pup. which, of course, we did. talking loudly again, just so that everyone within earshot would know that we are NOT the kind of people who walk our dogs and let them poop wherever they want to and then just walk off and leave it! no sir! we are the kind of people who will go out of our way to make sure our streets are safe for people to walk on after dark without fear of, well, you know...

it's stressful being the new kids on the block...

technical difficulties=a short blog

so today > > > milo has sabotaged my computer>

i was sitting here minding my own business<> milo jumped up onto the couch next to me and flopped his cute little head onto my computer keyboard> he does this often enough that i have taken photos of it> i probably should have made him move, but instead i said to diandra< "look at milo! isn't he cute?"

and he was. and then, a mysterious message popped up on my computer screen. a message that i didn't really understand. so i clicked "ok" and continued eating my chicken nuggets... because, you know, just because i didn't know what it meant doesn't mean it wasn't ok. my computer wouldn't prompt me to click on something bad, would it?

well, maybe not bad exactly. but certainly quirky. because suddenly my computer was doing all sorts of goofy things. every time i went to another page on the internet, it opened a new window. you would not believe how many windows i had open at one time before i figured it out! and whenever i hit a non-letter key, it would type the shift character (which is why there are all those arrows at the beginning of the blog--those are supposed to be periods and commas.) and then suddenly it stopped doing that!

i am very confused and very frustrated. i've tried everything i know to fix this problem, but there is a strange icon at the bottom of my screen that says "filter keys" which i am sure is the key to my problem, but i don't know how to turn it off! and so i am probably going to have to have help. fortunately i am meeting with my computer wizard james tomorrow night. he will be able to help me.

and i can't wait to see his face when i tell him, "my dog did it..."