Hump Day Randomness....

Here's a fun fact for the day: I've never seen Cooper lick his wiener. Not that I'm the type of weirdo who hangs around keeping track of that sort of thing, but Simon and I were talking with friends recently and they commented about how their dog licks his wiener at the most inopportune times. Which is usually the case with dogs, and cats too, I suppose. They behave normally until you sit down to watch TV or you have guests over, then decide that right then and there is the perfect time to give a good washing to their genitals. In front of everyone. No shame. So that got me thinking...Cooper never does that. Isn't that weird? Shouldn't he? I can't decide if he neglects wiener washings simply because he doesn't care, or if it's a matter of him not having the flexibility to reach. I certainly don't want to take up the torch of cleaning his wiener for him, especially since it's been 11 years and all has been well in that department thus far. It's just kind of a funny thing to think about. Animals are weird. They cause us people to be weird, too.

Moving on with more stories about Cooper...seriously, I could probably fill an entire blog up with stories about him...he's such an odd little bugger. Simon and I went to Phoenix in late December to have a sort of couple's getaway. It was a nice reprieve from all our responsibilities, and while there was a cold snap going through and it wasn't the nice, warm, balmy weather we expecting, it was nice to just get away from work, laundry, doing the dishes, cooking, bills, and all those other things that get in the way of us just focusing on each other and having fun. So we lined up our wonderful pet sitter, Bryn, to watch Cooper for us, as usual. Well...all was not as usual when Bryn messaged me to tell me that Cooper had peed all over our bed after we left. Like, on the pillows. Granted, Simon and I have needed new pillows for a while, but I hadn't counted on the dog making that final decision for us. I was completely flabbergasted by it. It's a phenomenon known as the "angry pee," and it's really not all that uncommon of a thing. It's their way of punishing us for leaving them behind or putting them in situations that they're not happy about. My first dog, Lady, was notorious for the angry pee. If that little dog felt slighted in the least, you could bet there would be a puddle on the floor to show for it. And what do you do then? Punish her? And risk yet another angry pee? I usually did punish her, but I felt bad about it because I knew that she was frustrated or afraid and couldn't think of a better way to show it. The alternative to angry peeing probably would have been to destroy something of mine or Simon's...most likely mine, since she adored Simon. So back to Cooper...at 11 years old, he has never, ever angry peed. And the reason I know that it was an angry pee and not just a straight up accident is because it was on our bed. He's had the occasional accident over the years, but never on the bed...this time, it was personal. I felt bad for Bryn, having to deal with that, but luckily we have lots of spare bedding at the ready, so at least she didn't have to deal too much with it. What a little turd.

So now that it's wintertime, I can air my grievances about my disdain for the smell of cold people. I know, it's such a weird thing to notice, but I don't like the way people smell when they come inside from the cold. I can't even describe what it smells like, just that I find it overwhelmingly unpleasant. I have a hypersensitive sense of smell, and while good things smell really really good, that also means that bad things smell really really bad. Downright terrible, in fact...frequently nauseating. People ask me how I've been able to be a nurse for this long with a strong sense of smell. Simple...I hold my breath. All the time. Sometimes to the point that I feel as though I'm putting myself at risk for passing out. I haven't passed out yet, but there have been some close calls of me running out of the door of the patient room for a brief second just to take a breath of some fresher air (because, let's be serious, you don't have to be a hypersensitive smeller to realize that there's no such thing as fresh air in a hospital). I couldn't eat Indian food for the longest time, not just because it looks like vomit, but because the smell of the spices upon entering the restaurant made me want to hurl. The first time I went to an Indian restaurant I physically almost turned around and walked right back out. Had my friends not been behind me, I probably would have. Even after all these years of really enjoying Indian food, I still hold my breath when I enter an Indian restaurant. I physically gag almost every time I pick up Cooper's poop. You'd think after all this time I'd have the breath holding down to a science when it comes to picking up dog poop, but no, sometimes I just forget and inhale at the wrong time, or sometimes I do get the breath holding just right, but the smell still lingers after I've determined that it might be safe to breathe. Simon used to make fun of me every time I'd pick up the poop, because I would always say, "that poop stinks!" Well, yeah...because it's poop...poop always stinks. But...I think it stinks worse to me. When we first started dating and I would comment on how good something smelled, Simon used to think that having a hypersensitive sense of smell was a blessing in disguise...after having to deal with me and my nose for 8+ years, he's come to believe that it's actually quite the curse, having determined that there are far more bad smelling things in this world than good smelling. Life is hard, eh?

In my previous blog, I had eluded to the idea of some changes that I'm going to make in the coming year. One of those changes might be the acquisition of a Jeep Wrangler. Don't get me wrong, I like both of our current carss, but I don't particularly enjoy them. Ever since my Jeep Liberty, which I had for 8 wonderful years, I just haven't enjoyed our cars all that much. The Grand Cherokee is huge, and while it's got about all the bells and whistles a person could want, it's not all that fun to tear around in. Truth be told, I shouldn't be tearing around in it at all, as it's rather top heavy and feels like it's going to roll over if I take a corner too fast. But I do love those heated seats...oh yes, I don't think I'll ever own another car without heated seats (peter heaters, as we've come to call them). Outside of the lack of tearing around ability, the Grand Cherokee is a really good vehicle...it pulls our trailer like a champ. Even when we had two kayaks up top and a giant 6x12 trailer loaded to the gills on our move out here to Flagstaff, that thing never stuttered for a second. It's got a great engine, it can get through dang near any sort of terrain, and it has that fabulous Jeep turning radius. What more could a person want? Well...I want to start Jeeping...which means I want to start driving down dirt roads and taking off-road trails that are designed specifically for off-road vehicles. I know that the Grand Cherokee has a Trail Rated badge on it, which means that per factory specifications, it's equipped to go off-road, but it's big and sometimes unwieldy, and honestly, despite the wonderful Jeep turning radius, getting that thing turned around in a tight spot might very well have me careening off a cliff. But we're not ready to get rid of the Cherokee yet, mostly because it's the only vehicle we have that can pull our trailer, and better yet, it's paid off. So...the Juke might be the one to get the axe, should I decide to go through with getting the Wrangler. There used to be a time in my life when trading in my old car for a new car would have me in tears. As if the old car and I had bonded on an emotional level and that I was abandoning it to the unknown. That's probably why I've sold most of my old cars to my parents...so I could still drive them once in a while and feel that I left the car in good hands. Silly, I know. But I've kind of gotten over that. I like the Juke, but I don't love the Juke. I've never really gotten used to the turbo-charged engine, mostly because of the turbo-lag, which I knew nothing about prior to owning a car with a turbo. It's kind of like the car is under powered when you first push on the accelerator, which is actually quite frightening when you're trying to pull out in traffic, and then all the sudden that turbo kicks in and you're thrown back in the seat whilst roasting the tires...let me tell you, there's nothing sexier than a little front-wheel drive hatchback roasting the tires at an intersection...hahaha! Not that I'm looking for sexy, I'm just looking for something more enjoyable and fun. I've wanted a Wrangler for a long time, and now that I'm in a position to do so, and I'm trying to focus on activities and such that make me the happiest, I think I'd really enjoy a vehicle that I can do more with. So I'm thinking about it. In obtaining as much happiness as possible, I'm remaining mindful of the fact that flipping cars all the time isn't exactly financially smart, and given that one of our bigger changes in the next year or so will require a fair amount of money, maybe an additional expense simply for fun isn't the smartest idea. So we'll see.

More dog stuff, and this is just plain weird. So when I had Brie, my other little pug (rest her stinky little soul), one of her favorite things was to chew up my underpants. Sometimes she'd outright destroy them, other times she'd simply gnaw on them for a while and leave little damage to speak of, outside of maybe a small hole or two. Well, being the cheapy that I am, I'd survey the wreckage and determine if the underpants were salvageable or not. More often than not, they were, and those underpants would then be downgraded to the "work underpants" drawer. I have no idea how this whole idea of work underpants came about. I think because my job had the high probability of being disgusting a fair amount of the time, I found it somewhat frivolous to waste my good underpants on a night spent cleaning up blood and body fluids. Not that it even matters...they're just underpants for crying out loud, and it's not like I'm continually getting splashed by other people's excrement, but for some reason I feel that being at work requires underpants that are on the B-squad. Being a nurse, the last things I care about in underpants while on the job are panty lines or lace trim...what I really care about are underpants that aren't going to ride up my butt when I'm chasing a naked patient down the hallway. So the underpants that Brie liked the best soon became work underpants. The other day, a pair of Brie/work underpants reached the level of holiness that destined them for the trash can. I had a moment of sadness as I remembered what delight she got out of ripping apart my grundies...as if throwing them away was like throwing away a physical memory of her. Silly, I know, but I loved that little dog and I still miss her so much, and any little bit of her that I can hold on to, I do. Like I said...dogs are weird...so are their people.

Well, now that we're all weirded out by my personal habits and my bizarre attachment issues to chewed up underpants (would it be less weird if it was Simon who had been chewing on them? Wait...don't answer that...), let's move on. I have a weird annoyance associated with the addition of skin color choices for the emojis on my iphone. Why be annoyed by something so trivial? I have no idea. It's just one of those things. Prior to the skin color choices, pretty much everything that represented a human being was yellow. Bright yellow. Like no person outside of someone dying of liver failure is actually that shade of yellow. So, in representing no one, the yellow emojis represented everyone. Were people really complaining or offended by a lack of a brown, or a tan, or a white person emoji?  There's a middle finger emoji now (complete with skin color choices); are people offended by that too? Simon said that maybe a white person or a black person might not feel like they're being accurately represented by the yellow emoji. Does the color of the emoji better get your point across? I mean, if you're getting an emoji from me and I chose to use a black person rather than a white person, does that change the meaning of the emoji itself? As a white person, is it appropriate for me to even use the black person emoji? It's like 2mm tall for pete's sake...half the time I can barely tell what the emoji is doing, let alone what its skin color happens to be. It's not like the emoji represents a significant portion of my expression, and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about them or using them...I think I'm more annoyed by that extra step I have to take in picking the skin color of my emoji that bothers me. So now I avoid the people emojis...problem solved. Of all the things to spend time thinking about in the world...

During the holiday season, there was a lot of discussion about when holiday pay started at work, and when it ended. I still don't know, but there was holiday pay on my paycheck so I figured that was good enough. But...I should probably know, so that if there were errors in the doling out of holiday pay, I could catch it and make it right. All that aside, a few coworkers and I got on the subject of holiday pay hours from jobs that we'd had previously. One of the guys in telemetry used to work for one of the local grocery store chains, and he said that during the application and interview process, management made a big deal about how the employees would receive holiday pay for Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. What the management didn't tell the employees until later was that the store closed at 3pm on Thanksgiving, and that it wasn't open at all on Christmas. So...really, they only got holiday pay for half of a day, one day a year. Not gonna lie, that seems a little dishonest, and why bother bringing it up at all? Honestly, most people would probably be more excited that they didn't have to work at all on Christmas than they would be about having to work and getting holiday pay. It just seemed like such an odd "benefit" to mention during the interview process, and I doubt most people base whether or not they take a job on the 2 days out of the year that holiday pay is offered. I just think it's funny the way management will sometimes manipulate a situation to make it seem better than it actually is, even if that situation is so trivial that it actually seems like more work to manipulate it in the first place. 

So there's that. I don't know if you've noticed (most likely not unless you work in the print industry), but I've been trying really hard to stop double-spacing after a period when I type. I was taught all those years ago that you had to double-space after a period to further denote the end of a sentence...apparently this stems from back in the day when people were using typewriters and all letters took up the same amount of space...meaning, a lowercase i took up the same space as a capital B. So it made sense back then to double-space at the end of a sentence so a person knew when one sentence ended and the other began. I'd have to think that the period would make that clear, but I wasn't using typewriters so I don't honestly know. Now that typefaces have changed to allow each letter to have its own individual space, there isn't a need to have so much extra space between sentences. A friend of mine who works in journalism has posted several grievances on Facebook about people who type letters to the editor and double-space after a period. Apparently it causes issues with the page layout and whatnot, meaning the editors have to go through and remove spaces one-by-one after every single sentence. So I've been making an effort to stop double-spacing (fun fact: Facebook automatically removes the double space behind a sentence and replaces it with a single space when you post something...so even when I double space on Facebook, it looks like I'm single-spacing). It's been really difficult to break my double-spacing habit. Partly because there is a certain satisfaction that comes with double spacing after a period...like "Whoo hoo! That sentence is DONE!" There's also that muscle memory associated with double-spacing...that's the hardest part. I'll be going along single-spacing, then all the sudden I have a full paragraph of double-spacing. Then I go back and take them out...quite the process. Good thing I don't have to do that for a living...sorry Adam, I am trying to be better! It still seems like a trivial thing to me, but now that it has my attention, I think about it...and I have to say, it looks weird to me, but I'll get over that with time. I'm sure there are simple oddities with my job too that would seem trivial to people outside the profession.

Simon and I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the second time last night, and I have to say, I like it even more. I had read a few articles online about how some people were disappointed with some of the plot holes, some of the characters' behaviors, and some of the actors who ended up playing those characters. After seeing it a second time, I've come to the conclusion that those people need to find something else to do with their time. First of all, Star Wars isn't real...let's just throw that out there for all the people who seemed personally offended by the movie. I thought that this newest episode actually felt more like the first three (and by first three, I mean Episodes 4-6). It was light-hearted when it could be, but serious when it needed to be. I also liked that it had a lot of throwbacks to the some of the sayings and situations in Episodes 4-6, which a lot of fans seemed to appreciate (some thought it was a lack of imagination and that the writers were just recycling old material...I disagree). While I don't count myself amongst the many who thought episodes 1-3 were the worst movies ever made, I think Episode 7 was just as good as Episodes 4-6. And as for the plot holes...it was the first of 3 movies...they've got two more movies to clear up some of the things that left us guessing and scratching our heads...we have to trust in the writers and not get so worked up about it. Just relax and enjoy it for what it is...a fun action movie with recognizable characters. I will say, and this is a bit of a spoiler, I thought the whole scenario behind Poe's apparent rescue from Jakku after the TIE Fighter crash (and Finn being left behind) to his nonchalant appearance later on in the movie was rather weird. Who rescued him? Why did they leave Finn behind? How did the rescuers even know where Poe was? How did the rescuers get to Jakku before the First Order? And how did they get off Jakku without the First Order taking them out? That was my only beef with the movie...there was just a lack of details and some timeline issues surrounding the perceived death but actual rescue of an important character in the movie. But again, overall, a very good flick, and I'm looking forward to the next one. Is it 2017 yet??

And that's all she wrote! And by she, I mean me. Have a great Hump Day!