The Cat's Nuts

Once again, life has come in the way of my proper blogging schedule. That, and a new puppy, and getting settled in the new house AND starting to travel. Damn it’s been busy. Last weekend Melissa and I finally finished our furniture shopping. We rounded out the endeavor with a fabulous Bassett bedroom set which we lovingly refinished this past weekend…well, painted it anyway. Hopefully it’ll all look simply wonderful when it’s in place, but I didn’t get to see it in its full glory as I had to fly out on Tuesday morning.

The puppy, Dagny, has been wonderful. She’s a sweetheart and doesn’t have many of the bad puppy traits that I can’t stand. In the three weeks that we’ve had her, she has only wet in the house 3 times and twice were in the same day (on Melissa’s watch ;) ). It’ll be really exciting to watch her grow up into a good dog that we know she’s going to be….damn I sound like a proud parent.

This weekend, my parents have finally decided to make the trip down to the wonderful South. They are driving down the two cats to come and live with me again, so that’s pretty exciting. They cats have been living up at my parents house for the past year and a half, so to finally have them back will be nice. Hopefully Seven will stop his random pissing habit that he’s developed since he moved to my parents house, but we’ll have to wait and see. Worst case scenario, I’ll just have to limit him to the laundry room. In preparation for the cats, this past weekend Melissa and I got two bird feeders and hung those in the yard. We also did a bunch of yard work to spruce it up a bit, got out-door patio furniture and cleaned up the yard. The front lawn needs a good mowing, but hell, there’s only so much time in the weekend. That’s definitely one of the draw backs about traveling on the weekends.

My parents should arrive tonight around 10:00, and tomorrow morning we’re going to drive out to 6 Flags for a work function that I have to attend. Tickets were free, so it’ll be a good time I’m sure. If nothing else, it’s something to do for the day to get us outside. Don’t really have many other plans other than showing my parents around the city. I’m sure that I can find some things around the house where my father can provide some input, but my guess is that there is going to be a lot of wine and beer drinking, lots of dog talk/play and probably more good food than we should eat, all of which I am looking forward to.

Work has been going well. I’ve been working on a Hyperion project, flying out half way across the country ever week, which, as you can imagine, isn’t the greatest thing. Granted, I am able to save some money, but that’s not really any consolation when I have a puppy and a girlfriend at home that are both needing my attention. We’ll see how long this travel thing lasts. I figure that in a few weeks, I’ll talk to my boss in Atlanta about finding an Atlanta based project. On the slightly brighter side, at least I’ll be able to build up some hotel and flight miles.

I still have my car. Had a little fender bender with it, which wasn’t my fault, so I’ve gotta get it repaired which is a pain in the butt. Insurance paid me $1200 to get it repaired, and I have a feeling that the body shop that I bring it to will come to a higher number, so I’ve gotta go and get that taken care of, but I don’t think it’ll happen this weekend. Perhaps next weekend I can bring it up to Marietta, where I found a garage, and have an estimate done.

Posted by Michael at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the realization that I am going to be traveling, and the fact that Melissa would be home at the house, alone, we decided that it would be the "ideal" time to get a dog. While there isn't really an "ideal" time, now seemed like it was the best that we were going to find, so off we went. We've been scouring petfinder.org for the past few months, looking at all the cute little puppies and generally there were lots of ooooos and ahhhs, but nothing that really struck us to the core. Then we found her.

Her name was "Athena", and she had the most soulful eyes. She's really really beautiful. Last weekend, Melissa and I drove out to Athens and visited with her foster mother outside of a pet store. She was romping around with her other litter mates, all playing in the pen outside the store. When we scooped her up and tested her temperament, she passed with flying colors, letting out no whelps, not biting and not trying to get away like a crazy pup. It was perfect.

So that day we brought her home with us, converted the dining room into a make shift dog area and thus it has been for the past week.

I am happy to report that she has only messed in the house on two occassions, both of which were minor wet spots, both on hard surfaces, so that's been amazing. Much better than I could have hoped for. She's getting much better about sleeping through the night, but we do have to bring her out at least once in the middle of the night, so that's rather irritating, but that'll stop once she gets a little older. Right now we have her crate in the bedroom, so she can see if we're awake and that's usually when she starts to whine. The first night we had her, she went out to the bathroom around 4-5 times. THAT was miserable, but like I said, it's getting much better. She's very much a morning dog, so around 7:30am she decides that it's time to get up. I'm just happy that we have a back yard where she can go and play and we don't have to pay much attention to her during those early morning hours.

The house is coming along nicely. We just got a dishwasher installed, as the original one that came with the house wasn't working worth a damn, so it's nice to have a working dishwasher. We're working on putting together a picture wall of friends and family, so that's going well too, just taking some time. We need to sift through some photos and figure out what we're going to blow up to put in some of the frames.

This week I am again flying out of town for work, and frankly, I'm not really looking forward to it. I need to get into an exercise routine again like I did when I was traveling down to Atlanta, so that's the one bright spot. Speaking of which, I gotta get going and get a haircut because I'm looking like a shaggy dog.

Posted by Michael at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Freaking dumb people.

Posted by Michael at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think that the only explination that I have for my recent run of bad luck is that I've done something that really pissed off the karma gods. That's really the only way to explain it.

Yesterday, Melissa and I went out to get some breakfast and then picked up some bedrails. On the way home from the thrift store where we made these purchases, I had an "incident". It was a 4 lane road, two lanes on either side and I was in a 5th lane, which was a right hand turn only. I was slowing down as the turn was only 50 yards or so away and I had bed rails in my Bimmer. Well, what I didn't see was a young black girl in a Buick Park Avenue crossing 4 of the 5 lanes of traffic. She continued into my lane, without even so much as looking to see if anyone was coming, as she really couldn't see anyway. I ended up slamming my brakes in order to avoid hitting the Buick that was now completely blocking my lane. My car skidded and I rammed the side of her car at around 3-4mph, crumpling in her door, but not doing much else.

Now, I've been joking about getting into a car accident as my efforts to sell my car have been less than stellar and it turns out I'll be losing a good bit of money if I do go and sell my car. Well, this accident, because of the severity of it, isn't going to total my car...not even close. So I get to go through the hassel of having her insurance company try to pay for it and getting all that done with. As if that weren't enough, she was on the phone with a lawyer while at the accident scene, so I wouldn't be shocked if she tried to sue me for something stupid. She argued with the cop and told him that I was speeding, that's why I couldn't stop, and she was politely informed that it didn't matter if I was doing 90, she wasn't supposed to cross into my lane. She didn't care and sped off, so now I get to wait until the police report comes out so that I can file a claim against her insurance company. Pain in the butt really, but what else are you going to do? Hopefully the accident will allow me to get my electrical system issues under control, as now my car alarm goes off when no one is around and for apparently no reason....worse than before.

On top of all this lovely stuff, the house is taking forever to get put together. Mostly because Melissa and I don't have enough furniture to really stock the house, but more for the fact that we're still painting stuff, and that's takeing a bunch of time. I can't wait for the house to finally be done so that my weekends aren't spent doing this stuff.

This coming week...hell...tomorrow, I am going to be in Duluth on a project which is billable, so that's awesome, and after that I'm going to be flying out west for the next 9 weeks. Melissa isn't all that pleased about it, but it should afford me the ability to have her come out and visit and take some trips to places that I normally wouldn't splurge to go to. Speaking of which, I should probably start to book my flights for that sort of stuff.

In a few minutes, Melissa and I are going out to go and buy a lawnmower and get a desk for her. It'll be nice to get out of the house for a little bit. I think that I should go and shower as I smell like a three day old dead monkey in a bag.

Posted by Michael at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)