biscuit vs. the vacuum cleaner
daisy went to the vet today to be fixed, but biscuit didn't really know she had left. he's been looking for her in the house. well, as soon as he caught a glimpse of his evil nemisis The Vacuum Cleaner, he knew what had happened. The vacuum had eaten daisy. now he's clawing and scraping at the linoleum floor in front of the closet where the vacuum is. my dad even showed him the vacuum and demonstrated that it was harmless, but he still wouldn't let up. he whines and screams and barks, trying to talk to daisy, i suppose. when my dad changed the overdue bag was probably the most traumatic. he pulled a daisy-sized bag out of the belly of the vacuum. now he's lying prone on the floor, staring at the closet. maybe a little snip-snip will take care of his neurosis.

new yorkie
in case you didn't know, pit bulls are going to be renamed "new yorkies." the man initiating this believes that new yorkers and pit bulls both are misunderstood. yeah, they're generous people and loving, sociable dogs. of course, they're temperamental and unpredictable, too. j/k. i've never actually met a person from new york city, i don't think. and i'm sure everyone reading this (is anyone reading this?) is thinking me a closed-minded bigot, but hey, they make fun of us, too. it all balances out. i'm sure a lot of the mauling and killing done by pit bulls is caused by the way the owners raise them. i don't know about those new yorkers though... :c)

obsolete? kiss my toner
the edict was issued: anything we print out for the yearbook has to be lasar, not inkjet. well, i didn't want to go to hell, because that's certainly where i'd go if i used inkjet, so my mom and i pulled out the old $1500 b&w lasar printer that hadn't been used in muchos a?os. The sticker on the back was dated "May 1990." a month older than my sister and just as annoying. we had a devil of a time getting it to work, but we did. then when we went back to actually print what i needed, we found ourselves back at square one. we tweaked every setting you can imagine, and nothing worked. so we gave up. this afternoon, i knew i had to get it working because my page was due very soon. i plugged the printer in, and it worked perfectly. only out of certain applications, and only with unrendered text, but it worked! twenty sheets of paper and 600 dpi later, i got it to print images. my mom said it was only a 300 dpi printer, but it took 600 to get rid of the alias edges. and if i was really a perfectionist, i would crank it up to 900. hmmm...

all a flaky biscuit needs is a dollop of daisy
we have a puppy named daisy. she has a brother. we seriously thought about getting him and her, but we decided one dog was enough. well, my dad got to see the brother every day as he delivered his route. her brother was kept outside and teathered to a tree. now he's in our house because his mom had already had another litter of puppies and the guy was read to give him away. so we took him so he would have a home until the family that was meant to be his owners came along. we bathed him and shaved him, and the vet gave him his shots and cleaned out his ears. he's a big, chunky puppy, but he's laid back and really like a stuffed animal. with drool. daisy has been more of an agitator than he has been, but when he has enough and starts playing/gnawing on the side of her head, he's a little too rough. he's sweet, though. daisy and he slept on my bed last night, which was his first night in a house. he woke me up by smacking his lips one time, one of the few times i actually slept. luckily, none of them farted, which would have been especially dangerous because i was trapped underneath them and couldn't run away.

do not eat
this christmas, i've been marveling over the various methods of packaging, realizing that the whole objective of packaging is to keep one from getting whatever is inside. it's sadistic, but true. but eveyone's seen those little quanta of tiny pellets that come in your shoes and your pill bottles. "silica gel, do not eat," it says. i always figured it was poisonous or harmful. i remember at school one day i found a packet in my coat and opened it up. andrew ate two pellets, and jarrod ate one because it tasted nasty i guess. and our science teacher said they would pop in water, so we tried it. it wasn't very impressive. well, my dog ate a small package of them last night, so i searched the web to see if they were poisonous. turns out they're harmless, although some animals have had vomiting and lack of appetite. but daisy's fine. i did, however find an interesting blog discussion about the mysterious pellets. turns out some people eat them as nutritional suppliments. but the little packets can absorb bad things, so stick to cheeze-its for afternoon snacks.

homing pigeon...no.
i don't like roads. especially the ones that go in both directions. if you turn the wrong way on that road, then you're going the totally opposite way that you really want to go. and it's bad for me, in that i'm not good at finding my way around places unless i go that way often. if i get really confused, i have trouble telling right from left. so, my mom makes maps for me. maybe it's the confusing lines of the fancy maps, or maybe it's the fragrant sharpie smell of my mom's maps, but i prefer her maps to the maps with all the tiny streets. and my friends make fun of my maps. road trip plans are swiftly squelched by my custom made maps. but i never get lost with my maps. and i use them to fill in the missing pieces of my mental map, which is getting pretty large now. maybe, when i'm 25, i won't need my mom's maps anymore.

morons say the darnedest things
sadam was offered some water during an interrogation, and he declined, saying:
"if i drink water, i will have to use the bathroom. how can i use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?"

well, that answers the question of "how can i get kidney stones and a bladder infection while my people are in bondage?"

a real quote from Dick Gephardt:
"everything you care about is vanishing. our good jobs are vanishing, our civil rights are vanishing, our clean air and clean water are vanishing. osama bin laden has vanished. sadam hussein has vanished. george bush needs to vanish."

we care about bin laden? we care about sadam? but he's not vanished anymore, though. i think "dip" gephardt needs to vanish. and they make fun of george bush for saying stupid things.

a holiday moment
i experienced a holiday moment today. it was 6th period. mrs. g had just opened a cutesy little christmas card someone had emailed her. from the speakers came the music of "silent night." i looked out the open portable door and saw the snow falling. and i saw an indian (from india) in a hawaiian shirt licking a light pole.

oh shut up!
i swear, i'm probably going to go deaf. but i'm not sure that's a bad thing. i put on headphones to drown out all the other sounds around me. but it's not working. my sister sings. loud. and totally interrupts my solitude with her warbling. arrrg! and when i tell her to sing quietly or go somewhere else, she sings louder because she lives to be annoying. so i turn up my music until i can't hear her. but i still can hear her. like the tell-tale heart, i can still hear her. so i turn up the volume more. and more. and the angrier i get, the louder the music gets. i can almost hear the cilia in my ear bending and snapping, like my last nerve. maybe i need some of those noise-canceling ear-buds.

the scarlet mustang
i have a certain space i park in at school. it doesn't have me name on it, but it might as well, because that's where i've always parked. well, this lady, a preschool aide, decides she wants to park her red mustang in the space beside me. i was perfectly fine with that. until she crossed the line. the literal line. first her tires, and i would compensate, giving her plenty of room. and i was ok with that. slowly, she began to encroach more and more upon my space. then, one day, i arrived at school, and there was the scarlet mustang, parked diagonally across two spaces, including mine. i held my irritation in check, assuming she was just trying to be cute. but everyday, there she would be, blatantly disregarding any seniority i held over that spot. and i began to become irritated. and so did the the rest of my class, probably because when the senior girls tried to park like that, we were specifically told, "only one space per student." so one day, after a week or two of the crazy parking, i arrived at school and saw jana and karen attempting to block her in, (suggested by a sub that heard our travails). jana parked on one side, and karen on the other, while karen's mom and erin watched approvingly. karen backed up a little so i could park, and we had made our point. it didn't take long for people to notice. the parents who had to wait at the most 45 seconds to get into the parking lot (in order to get in line and wait some more) complained about the students "practicing parallel parking." we weren't practicing. we were teaching a lesson! well, word got to the owner of the mustang, and she was furious. she said we had blocked her in, but we didn't. she could get out just fine and did before 1st period was over. she said she was going to talk to us, even though she didn't know who the cars belonged to exactly. but she never did come talk to us, probably because she knew we would ask her why she was parking like that, and "because i'm too lazy to back in the right way" wasn't a good enough answer. anyway, today she wasn't there, and i had my spot back. she never did talk to us, and the office didn't really care if we were "parallel parking" because they didn't say anything. so i don't forsee anymore problems from that controversial corner in the future.