I had a bad day at work yesterday, a day in which I sat in my cubicle under a dark storm cloud and made no forward progress on any project at all. After eight hours stewing in hate I drove home in bad traffic and went to bed, completely exhausted.

I dreamed I was at work, and it was a really bad day, but an entirely different bad day from the one I had already actually had. In my dream I went out to have a nice long run, which usually helps to cheer me up. And in my dream the run just utterly sucked because I was still so angry from having such a bad day at work. I woke up completely exhausted.

So I got up and had breakfast and went into town for a real run. When I got there I discovered that I had brought two left running shoes. I went running in my street shoes instead, which felt kind of like running on rocks with my hamstrings tightened up to 11. I lasted a little over three miles before the sparks of pain in my hips forced me to stop, and some kind of bug stung me on the neck. I walked back to the gym in a dark storm cloud and drove home again.

Now I’m here working at home and I’m having a really bad day, making no forward progress on any project at all. I feel completely exhausted.

I would take a nap but I’m afraid I would dream about writing a blog post about having a bad day and then dream about having a bad day and going for a run and then dream about going for a run and writing about it.

What day is it anyway?

(warning, long)

The war has gone on for so long that we almost cannot remember a time in which we were at peace. We start awake at night at the slightest noise, ready to charge outside shouting with guns drawn, only to find we are hurling our fury at shadows, and there is nothing there. Sometimes we awaken in the morning to find they have silently raided us in the night and left nothing but rubble and torn ground in their wake.

We have greater resources, but they have more numbers, and they are relentless. They have worn us down over the years, our rampaging enemy with the floppy ears and the big, round, soft eyes.

* * *

At first I thought the mule deer in the yard were harmless, charming, even. For the first winter after we moved in I watched them from the window as they grazed, pastorally, at the edge of the lawn. With big eyes and ears and huge soft black noses they looked adorable, and when startled they leaped gracefully away into the brush, tails raised in the air like flags. I had a Disney cartoon running 24 hours a day in my backyard, and I couldn’t be happier.

One of the group of deer that lingered around the house was smaller than the others, probably a fawn from that year, and I named him Edward. Edward was frequently in a group with a larger doe, and she became Eleanor. In truth, since it was winter, none of the deer had antlers so I couldn’t tell whether Eleanor was Edward or vice versa, and since all deer look essentially alike eventually all big deer became Eleanor and all small deer became Edward. Eric thought this was very funny. “Look!” he’d say, calling me over to laugh at me. “There’s another Edward on the lawn!”

Eric didn’t think much of my ungulate fan club. He had studied wildlife biology in college, and had been a hunter for a few years before becoming a vegetarian. Deer, he explained to me, were stupider than dirt, and they were completely infested with fleas and ticks. The ticks carry lyme disease, and the fleas carry plague. Deer are prone to “mad deer disease.” (“You’re making that up,” I said. “I AM NOT,” he insisted. “Google it.” I did, and he’s right. Deer get a wasting disease caused by the same sort of prions that cause Mad Cow.) Even having the deer in the yard probably meant that we were all going to die a horrible death of some kind of painful hemorrhagic fever. On the other hand, Eric admitted, if all of modern civilization were to collapse in the Y2K armageddon and zombie masses roamed the earth, we would be OK at least for a little while because we could shoot and eat the deer.

Eric’s cheery optimism did not change my mind; I still thought the deer were awesome. All that first winter I watched them stroll pastorally through the yard. And then that spring I planted some roses in the garden beds next to the house and Edward or Eleanor strolled pastorally up to the house and ate them. Gobbled them right down to the hard bare branches. And suddenly I wasn’t quite so in love with the deer.

For years when I lived in apartments I had been cutting out pictures from magazines of sprawling cottage gardens, of big lush messy beds of old-fashioned flowers in white and pink and lavender and blue. Cottage gardens reminded me of my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, of lazy summer afternoons, of watching honeybees wander lazily over the flowers, of brushing sand off of my feet after a day on the beach. I had been daydreaming of a cottage garden for years, and now that I had my big country house I wanted my garden. I wanted roses and lilacs and lavender; I wanted bees and hummingbirds and summer. But Edward and Eleanor were thwarting all my plans. It seemed like no matter what I planted Edward and Eleanor swept in, usually at night, and ate the new plants right down to the ground. If they didn’t eat the whole plant they just nibbled it really well to make sure it wasn’t good to eat, or they pulled it up and left it to die on the dirt. If I wanted my cottage garden, I needed solutions, and I needed them fast.

* * *

“I have deer eating my garden,” I said to the thin, bespectacled man with the ponytail who worked at the garden center. He reached out and touched my arm. “I’m so sorry,” he said, as if I had just told him I had cervical cancer. He led me to the section of the store labelled “Pests.” They did not sell pests in Pests. Along the wall were stacked an enormously impressive variety of commercial deer repellants with descriptive and similar names (“Deer-Out,” “Deer-Go,” “Deer-X,” “Deer-Rid,” “Deer-Be-Gone,”). My garden guy, however, suggested a small bottle of coyote pee, which cost $15. “Works like a charm,” he said.

“How do they get the coyote to pee in the bottle?” I asked.

My garden guy gave me a tired look. “Everyone makes that joke,” he said.

I applied the coyote pee as directed, and I could hear Edward and Eleanor laughing at me, just before they ate my plants. Coyotes, on the other hand, started coming by and wondering what the hell was going on. Was there a party, and they hadn’t been invited?

I went back to the garden center and asked for something stronger. My garden guy offered me a $25 deer repellant that was absolutely a sure thing. “Works like a charm,” my garden guy said. “Make sure you dilute it.” Confident, I mixed up the brown smelly goo per the instructions and sprayed an entire garden bed with it. Every leaf on every plant in the bed shrivelled up and died within two days. I suppose killing all the plants could be considered a form of deer repellant, but that wasn’t precisely the result I was looking for.

It took some time for my beds to recover from that experience, but after the garden and the deer came back this time I decided to resort to less commercial and less expensive solutions. A Google search for “deer repellant” gave me a variety of things to try to keep the deer away from my plants, many of them disgusting, but none of them cost me more than a buck or two (pun not intended). I tried Irish Spring soap, human hair, garlic, mustard, lemons, blood meal, dried milk, and hot pepper. I put dishes of used kitty litter all over the garden. I had Eric pee on my plants (“What? You want me to do what?”). Nothing. I considered growing rocks in the garden instead of plants.

And then I discovered rotten eggs. Based on an suggestion in an internet forum I put two eggs in a blender with a little dish soap and some water, filled up a spray bottle and left it out in the sun for a few days. This was a terrifically effective repellant, not just for deer, but also for everything else. I made the mistake of spraying it on the garden on a windy day, and Eric made me sleep on the couch for two days until the smell wore off. But it worked. It absolutely worked. With rotten egg all over the plants the deer left them alone. For almost a whole season the garden was perfect.

Rotten eggs are a perfect solution for overcoming deer hunger and curiosity, but they suffer from one major flaw: they do not cure laziness in the gardener. The egg repellant would work for a week or so, and then the effect would wear off, randomly. After a few days I couldn’t tell whether it was still working — I couldn’t smell it, even though the deer still could. It would also wash off if there was the slightest bit of rain or fog, and once it was gone, the marauding deer would take all my plants again. To keep the repellant effect going I had to mix up a new batch and have it ready to go every week.

I would like to claim that my gardening habits allow for that kind of strict attention to detail, but they don’t. As much as I like having a garden, and as much as I like puttering around in the garden, there are whole weeks where I forget that plants need things like water. A deer solution that requires constant maintenance is too complicated for me.

* * *

The most obvious solution to the deer problem was to shoot the deer. But despite the damage they were doing to my flowers I still did actually like the deer. I liked having the deer around, and I liked watching them graze in groups at the edges of the yard. I didn’t want the deer to die, or even to suffer serious injury. I just wanted to keep them out of the garden.

Our neighbor Roberta next door told us that she kept the deer out of her fruit trees by paying her son to shoot rocks at them with a slingshot. This mostly taught the deer to be afraid of her son, which only worked when he was actually around, and became entirely ineffective when her son went away to college. But the slingshot gave Eric the idea to buy a paintball gun. Paintballs, the theory went, wouldn’t hurt the deer like a real gun or even an air rifle would, but they would sting a lot. And we could shoot the deer from a far enough distance away that they might not associate the sting with us.

Paintball guns, it turns out, are really expensive, if you care about things like accuracy, firing speed and muzzle velocity. The best paintball guns operate with C02 cartridges, can shoot a paint ball at 200 miles per hour and are fully automatic — pull the trigger and get a continuous stream of paintpball pellets, as many as 60 balls a second. Since we were not interested in re-enacting Saving Private Ryan in the backyard with deer and paint, we aimed for something that was simpler and cheaper. One simple gun that would fire one simple paintball.

“Let’s get this one,” Eric said, showing me his computer. On the screen was an online store selling the SplatMatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun. I was momentarily speechless.

“Is that real?” I asked. “Is it really called that?”

The SplatMatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun was a simple spring-loaded paint ball gun. You cocked it like a pump action shotgun, and it fired one paintball at a time. It was just what we wanted. We ordered one and a big jar of multicolored paintballs.

When Eric got the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun he went out on the porch to try it out. I went out to watch. There were no deer in sight. Boof, he shot a paintball at a tree, which sailed at very slow speed some feet off to the right of the tree. “Hmmm,” said Eric.

It took some practice to get the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun to shoot where it was aimed. The paintballs had a habit of wandering off slowly in all directions, anywhere except where they had actually been aimed. After a few more experiments shooting at trees Eric got good enough to where the margin of error was only a few feet to either side. “Well, maybe I can hit a deer if they’re the size of a barn,” he commented, grumbling.

A few days later we had opportunity to try. “There’s a deer on the lawn,” I announced one weekend afternoon, and Eric leapt up from the couch and grabbed the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun from its spot behind the kitchen table. I watched from the window as he carefully crept outside onto the porch, crouched down on his haunches, and cocked the gun. Boof, a blue paintball sailed out from the shotgun, arced slowly through the air, and fell in the grass about two feet short of the deer. The deer watched it coming, looked curiously at the spot where it had landed, and then moved over and sniffed it.

Eric moved over a bit, cocked the gun again, and aimed more carefully. Boof, the paintball smacked the deer right on the butt, and bounced off into the grass right near the previous paintball. The deer twitched one ear and looked mildly startled. Perhaps it was coming down with mad deer disease.

Eric stood up and brandished the shotgun and stuck his arms in the air with a yell that sounded like “BLEAAGH!” That worked — the deer turned and darted off down the hill. Eric came back inside. “Maybe we should get a slingshot,” I said. “Maybe,” Eric replied.

* * *

The second most obvious solution to the deer in the garden problem is to put up a fence. Fence out the deer, and the problem immediately goes away. And, in fact, this is the solution I used for my vegetable garden, which is enclosed in a high fence at one side of the yard. Deer have never touched that garden. But the big yard around the house with my flowers in it is open to the lawn and to the woods and to the fields.

Fencing the entire yard and the flower garden would require not only a lot of fence, but it would also block out all the rest of the wildlife I liked to watch from the kitchen windows. Part of living in the mountains was letting the mountains in. I liked having the deer around; I just didn’t want them in the garden beds. A big fence was out.

I did try putting lightweight netting over the entire garden bed, which is a fine solution if you want your garden to look like it is into light bondage. The netting made the garden difficult to work in, but it did keep Edward and Eleanor out, at least until they figured out that they could grab the netting in their teeth and drag it right off the plants, leaving a vomit-like pile of black shaggy plastic on the lawn, tangled up with twigs and leaves and bits of plant. “I thought you said deer were stupid.” I asked Eric. “Maybe our deer went to college,” Eric replied.

* * *

Utimately, I resorted to the solution of “deer-proof gardening.” Rather than stubbornly planting all the beautiful old fashioned cottage garden plants from my books and articles, plants which the deer all seemed to love to eat, I would plant things the deer didn’t want to eat at all. Poisonous plants, stinky plants, hairy plants, and plants that simply didn’t taste good. I felt some despair at this solution because it meant having to give in to the deer, to admit that I couldn’t grow exactly what I wanted to grow in my own garden. It felt like admitting defeat. But if I couldn’t have my cottage garden, at least I could have some garden, and that was better than no garden at all.

I found a list of “deer-resistant plants” on the internet and worked from that. Gone were the roses and hollyhocks, hostas, tulips and daylilies. In were lavender, iris, lots of sages, foxglove, herbs of all kinds. Sometimes plants on the list didn’t work at all. I planted a penstemon on the list and the deer ate it the first night. “Maybe the deer didn’t read the list,” Eric said. I planted shasta diasies — my neighbor Roberta had a whole bed of them in her front yard — and the deer ate them. I planted a hydrangea which grew for four years and gave me glorious huge blue puffy flowers every year. And then in the fifth year the deer ate it right down to the ground. (I reconsidered my “no shooting” rule after that incident.)

But slowly, over time, and with experimentation, my garden started to become bigger and less appealing to the deer. Slowly, over time, I learned the plants the deer would and would not eat. Slowly, over time, I built a garden that wasn’t a cottage garden, not like the ones I had always dreamed of, but it was my garden, and it worked with my house and my yard and my schedule and my wildlife.

* * *

Even after I figured out deer-proof gardening, and we had convinced the deer that the paintball gun was at least a marginal threat, the deer still came around, as if to taunt us. One summer they took to sleeping under the porch. In the front yard, due to a quirk of landscaping, we have a small bridge that extends from the porch onto a hill with trees on it. Under the bridge it is dark and cool and on hot afternoons especially the deer took to creeping underneath it and going to sleep. Having deer nesting under the house was a continual surprise to everyone involved. We would unsuspectingly open the front door and step onto the bridge and suddenly with a huge banging and clattering deer would shoot out in all directions. Go outside, and have an instant heart attack, each and every time.

Eric was especially affronted by the deer sleeping under the porch. “Deer are WILD ANIMALS,” he said. “They are not supposed to be this tame.” For him, the deer sleeping under the porch not only represented the utter failure of the paintballs in frightening the deer away from the house, but also an escalation in the war. Now the deer were not only hanging out nearby. Now they were setting up camp. It was like fighting an infestation of very large adorable cockroaches. If we didn’t put a stop to it right away, soon we might be finding deer under the couch or peering back at us from inside the refrigerator. We would turn on the lights in the middle of the night and surprise huge herds of deer, which would scurry away and hide under the bed. Something had to be done.

One day we came home from town and Eric suddenly stopped midway up the road, short of the house, and got out of the truck. “What?” I asked.

“There’s a deer sleeping under the bridge,” he said. “I’m going to teach it a lesson so it doesn’t come back.”

I watched from inside the truck as Eric crept up the driveway, crouched down so the deer wouldn’t see him. He slunk as quietly as he could around the rock wall at the side of the hill, over to within yards of the bridge, and then jumped up, stuck his arms in the air with a yell that sounded like “BLEAAGH!” There was a BANG as the deer came to its feet and knocked up against the low ceiling, and then squirted out from under the bridge and took off up the hill toward the garage. Eric leapt up onto the wall to chase after it, and then stopped. Then he walked up through the trees in the direction the deer had run. Then he stopped walking and put his hands over his mouth.

Something bad had just happened. I turned off the truck, pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out and ran up the driveway toward Eric. He put out his arm to keep me away. “What?” I asked. “What happened?”

“I think I killed it,” he said. “It ran up the bank and fell back down again. I think it broke its neck.”

I walked further up to where I could see the deer, lying there in the road just short of the steep bank next to the garage. It was still twitching a little, its eyes rolled up, its neck twisted. I got kind of a sick feeling. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were just supposed to scare the deer away, not kill it.

If we were better country people we would have taken this as a blessing: free food, dropped right into our lap, and we didn’t even have to waste any ammunition to get it. We would have hung up the deer and skinned it and cleaned it and popped it into the freezer and eaten well for months. But Eric is a vegetarian and I wouldn’t know how to clean a deer if it had instructions painted on it (“cut at dotted lines”). As angry as I was about my hydrangeas, and as much as Eric had joked about his Y2K food source, this wasn’t supposed to be a war with actual casualties.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Eric.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll call fish and game and try to explain to them that I scared a deer to death.”

But then the deer on the ground beside us thrashed, once, and its whole body shuddered. Alive! It’s alive! I thought. The deer untwisted itself, raised its head and looked around. Eric and I backed away to give it space, and as we watched from some distance the deer eventually got up, looked around for a while, and then trotted off into the woods. Other than a slightly unsteady list, it seemed to be just fine. After some conferring we decided that after falling on the bank it must have just been stunned. We didn’t kill it after all. We just harassed it badly.

That particular deer never darkened the space under the bridge again, and he apparently told all his friends, because no other deer ever showed up under the porch, either. All the deer kept their distance from the house and from the porch for at least a week, before returning to the usual habit of grazing through the yard and nibbling on all my plants that were not hairy, stinky, or poisonous. Eric reloaded his paintball gun, and the war resumed as usual.

In recent years, however, we have found a new weapon in our war against the deer, although it would be more accurate to say that the weapon has found us. Our new weapon is a newly resident mountain lion. We haven’t seen the mountain lion, but we’ve see paw prints on the driveway, six inches wide. Since the mountain lion moseyed into town there are many fewer Edwards and Eleanors in the yard, and those that remain are much more skittish. There are no deer sleeping under the porch. There are no deer nibbling on my garden. The paintball gun is gathering dust. The weapon is so effective that recently I’ve even been considering planting roses again. I’ve been thinking that maybe I can have my cottage garden after all. The tide of the war has been turned. Now we have to cross our fingers and hope that the cure isn’t worse than the disease, and that we don’t come out of the house some day to find a mountain lion under the porch waiting for us.

Sometime in the last couple weeks when I wasn’t paying attention Elsa moved into the #1 cat spot on Google Image Search.

Its too bad she’s not, you know, alive, or I would give her a nice big can of tuna for being such a famous kitty.

I was in focus mode most of this month launching my first big project at the new job. Now a few weeks later with some quiet time to clean out my mailbox and my task list and a bunch of days off to spend time with family and listen to xmas music and eat and eat and eat and eat, I’m starting to feel like a lazy do-nothing slacker again (ahhhhh). I have the rest of the year off and I should feel just about perfect right in time to go back to work and start the next big project.

Today, once again, is the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. At this time of the year it seems like there’s no sunlight at all. Get up in the dark, go to work in the dark, sit in a small cubicle under flourescent light, go home in the dark. Maybe there’s ten or so minutes of sunlight walking across the quad from one’s building to the cafeteria. Ten minutes, if you walk slow and don’t take the shortcut along the lawn. But mostly dark. Dark dark dark dark dark. Dark.

It only gets better from here.

Eric: Are those orange fruits on the counter going bad?
Laura: No. They are bletting.

Fourteen years ago, give or take, I got my motorcycle license. I owned a whole lot of bikes, and rode a lot, and worked on bikes, and wrote about bikes, and quite a bunch of my life revolved around motorcycles for a long time.

And then slowly, over time, I stopped riding.

Eric still rides and we still have a lot of motorcycling friends. And so quite often we would get together in big motorcycling groups and someone would ask me the question: so why did you stop riding?

And I had a bunch of half-assed answers about how I had fallen over too many times, I had a bike that was too big for me, we had moved to a house with a complicated driveway, I live near a dangerous road, etc, etc, etc. A bunch of dumb answers I stated emphatically, with conviction. My friends nodded as if they understood.

If you had really held me down and demanded an actual honest, truthful reason for why I gave up riding I suppose I would have had to say that I was scared. I never rode enough to be comfortable on a bike. It was never all that much fun for me. I had a lot of trouble with the basics, with slow-speed maneuvering. I had a terrible sense of balance. I fell over a lot. I felt like an idiot. I lived in constant fear of u-turns, of parking lots, of gas stations. Riding at night was out of the question. Riding in traffic was terrifying. It wasn’t that I was frightened of getting injured or getting run over or crashing at speed; I had training. I knew how to avoid accidents. Mostly I was just afraid of the bike.

But its hard to say that to friends who are into bikes. Its hard to say that you’re just plain bad at the skills that are completely second nature to them. Its hard to just admit you were scared.

Over the years I sold all my motorcycles: the blue RZ350 that I adored but that was too tall and I kept falling over on; the red Honda Hawk that a good friend had sold me just before he lost his battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma; the gutless Honda dirtbike that was so hard to kickstart when I fell over on it. The only bike I had left was a 1960’s Honda 305 Superhawk, the bike I had always considered the most beautiful classic bike ever, a bike with terrible handling, terrible suspension and terrible brakes. It was my only remaining bike and I could not bear to sell it, not only because it was my most beautiful bike but also because if I sold that bike then I would have no bikes left. If I sold that bike I would no longer be a motorcyclist — even if I hadn’t actually ridden in years. Even if I didn’t really want to ride anymore.

But then, recently, something changed. Part of it was because of bicycling. I started cycling a few years ago when my hips and feet went all bad from running. And thanks to bicycling my balance got enormously better. My road skills on the bike have improved immensely over the last few years. A motorcycle is of course different from a bicycle in terms of weight and balance…but a lot of the skills do transfer. I feel different. I feel better.

And then I realized that I actually wanted to ride again. I missed it. In amongst all the memories of being incompetent on a bike I also had terrific memories of long rides in the hills and perfect corners and that incredible feeling when you twist the throttle and the bike pulls under you, pulls away and you have to go go faster faster, holding tight and leaving everything behind.

I missed it.

And then a few months ago a co-worker noted that my IM login was motorcycle related and asked me about it. “I don’t ride anymore,” I explained. “Why not?” he asked. The dreaded question.

And this time my honest, truthful answer was: I don’t know. I really don’t know.

It was soon after that I started shopping for a new bike.

It took a long time; I decided to buy a bike at the same time that gas prices hit an all-time high and everyone in the world decided motorcycles were a good idea. I found a bike and then it took time to get the paperwork sorted out. That was OK because it gave me some time to re-take my training, the same beginning motorcycle class I took fourteen years ago and at that time did only OK in. This time I passed it with flying colors, and I felt so confident. I felt so much better. This time I wasn’t scared at all.

And this weekend I brought home the new bike: a 2004 Kawasaki Ninja 250, a little blue sport bike. Its a cool little bike, small enough to me to relearn how to ride but still cool enough that I’m not embarrassed to be seen on it.

The bike sat with the previous owner and it needs a little tuneup work before I can ride it. But it won’t be long before I’m out riding again.

I can’t wait.

I have, actually, been writing a bunch of stuff.

But none of it is fit for posting. Its all long and rambly and boring and the kind of daily blather no one wants to read (“today I raked the lawn.”) Worst of all, it is unfunny.

I’ve just been really tired lately, especially in the evenings when I have actual time for blogging. Evenings seem to be the time I sit around and catch up on brainless TV watching. Weekends are for catching up on the stuff I didn’t do around the house when I was watching brainless TV instead. In between chores and TV I write some, but then I go back the next day and read what I’ve written and have the “this really sucks” moment. I’ve been having a lot of those lately.

Is the new job sapping all my energy? Is it the time change? Am I not taking my vitamins? Am I eating too many carbs? Do I need more coffee? Do I need less coffee? I’m not altogether sure.

I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, this guy’s kind of funny.

One of the unfortunate side effects of joining a new company is being exposed to new diseases for which one has no immunity whatsoever. One would think that since the valley is a small place and we all know each other that any flus, colds, bacterial infections, hantavirus, toxoplasmosis, etc, etc, would pass rapidly through the entire population and we would all reach some eventual pathogen equilibrium. But no.

I’ve found that companies are pretty much germ pool islands. Once a particular disease hits a company, of course, that company is doomed thanks to the modern miracle of recirculating air and that fact that none of us ever go outside. But diseases tend to stay mostly localized within a company, minus the few cross-company disease vectors involving dual-income couples or preschool children.

Unfortunately for those of us that move around a lot between companies that means near-constant exposure to new diseases. Which brings me to my point: I’ve been sick all damn week. Normally I’m pretty good at fighting off this stuff; I’m healthy, I eat my vegetables, I take my vitamins. But I’ve been lazy as heck over the last few months, eating bad food and not going to the gym and here’s the result. Sick all damn week.

I’m in the tail end of it now, which explains how I have the energy to be so annoyed. It’s just a cold. Its not even a really really bad kind of cold where I can just take a shot or two of Hateful Nyqil and just sleep through the whole thing. Its just enough of a cold to make me miserable, to keep me home from work for a few days and bore me out of my mind. Hate. Colds. Bah.

The worst part of this cold was a weird inner ear thing that messed up my balance. As long as I stayed horizontal I was fine. If I sat up or tried to think very hard things got woozy around the edges. If I stood up things got VERY woozy, I fell over, and threw up. So I stayed on the couch and remained brainless. I watched everything on the TiVo. I watched my NetFlix DVDs. I watched four consecutive episodes of “101 Best Celebrity Oops Moments” on E! (I am so ashamed). I provided a warm nesting spot for two extremely happy cats.

Bored senseless and able to sit up long enough to drive, I went back to work yesterday and spent the day staring blearily at the computer trying not to throw up. But I figure its my responsibility to go contribute my germs to the pool.

Besides, everyone else in my group already had the darn cold.

• If there is going to be an event at work where there might be co-workers there who might take your picture and put it up on flickr, consider wearing eye makeup.
• At least attempt to feign interest in one’s boss’s conversation.

(posted by jchaddickerson) (thanks!)

A few weeks back I surmised that George is a dog, based on his talent for fetching.

We have a new theory. George is a raccoon. He’s decided that his feather toy, the same one that he fetches, usually in the middle of the night, is much more fun to play with once it has been dunked repeatedly into his water dish.

Quiet on the blog again, and you’re thinking, hey Laura, did you go and do something stupid like get a JOB again?

Uh. Yeah.

I even did something extra stupid. I got a real job, an honest-to-god, wage-slave, boss-having, 401K earning job. A job job. I am an actual employee.

Have you passed out from shock yet? Well hang on, there’s more. Its at Yahoo.

I’ll wait for you all to recover from that.

For those of you tuning in late and wondering what the heck this is all about, I quit my job some eleven years ago to write books. When the books thing turned bad I went back to work doing contract tech writing. In this way I could maintain my slacker dilettante lone-wolf lifestyle, doing good work for cool companies (and sometimes stupid ones), and then most importantly getting the hell out before it turned weird and political. Work some, take some time off. Repeat. Good deal. Point being: I have not had a real job since 1994.

But this job is different, or so I have perhaps been deluded into believing. This job involves lots of cool stuff in web services for the brand new Yahoo! Developer Network. Web 2.0 stuff. Mashups. AJAX. RSS. You know, all that stuff the kids are all excited about these days. I’m the lead goombah writer, in a new group, and I get to learn all kinds of new things. I really, really like learning new things. So what the hell. Sign me up.

And besides, they have free espresso at Yahoo. I am doomed. So doomed.

This last week has been busy with settling into the new job, getting entirely lost on campus (what IS it with tech companies that they have to make every building and every floor look EXACTLY the same?), getting all the IT crap settled and trying to figure out the optimal commute times (as always, my commute SUCKS). Things should be less busy soon and I can post more.

For future reference, however, I’m not planning on doing a lot of Yahoo blogging here. For one thing, I signed this big scary form that says I can’t do that. For another, I’d much rather write about squid sex.

For friday cat blogging I have stories.

Fierce Cat has a new trick. She has figured out that we won’t let her bring live mice in the house. So she hides them. In her mouth. She tucks them up somewhere and then stands by the door like she wants to be let in. Then once she gets in she gives them to George. I think she thinks George needs to be taught how to hunt, or maybe he’s not being fed well enough or something. George is insanely grateful (he agrees with the not being fed well enough assessment) and incredibly disappointed when we retrieve the mouse from the corner and scold the heck out of Fierce Cat.

But we’ve begun to get smart about Fierce Cat’s ploy because she can’t hide the whole mouse in her mouth. If you’re paying attention you can usually spot tiny mousie feet or a tail sticking out the sides. And the innocent look gives it away every time.

In the meantime we have discovered that George is actually a dog. He fetches. Repeatedly, and eagerly, and will not stop. He has one particular toy, a bunch of green feathers bound together at the end, that he particularly likes to fetch. The feather toy must be put in a secure location at the end of the day or he will demand it be thrown for fetching at 3AM. Note: closed drawers are not a secure location.

If we are both in the room he will kindly alternate bringing the toy to Eric and to me. And if you don’t feel like playing fetch he will repeatedly tuck it behind you on the couch and then pull it out again to get your attention. Meanwhile, Fierce Cat looks on disgustedly and thinks “Have some dignity, you tool.”

Perhaps she is feeding him mice to try to explain to him his rightful position as Cat.

I’m sorry. I do not have plans to see either Serenity nor Mirrormask this weekend. My deep abiding hatred for people in crowds just way outweighs my need to be geeky.

I am officially on vacation next week but could not get organized enough to actually go anywhere, so perhaps I will take in matinee.

I was in South Park on monday (the neighborhood in SF, not the cartoon), on my way to my hairdresser’s. And a nice young well dressed couple were walking along the sidewalk toward me. Her: pale, blonde, impeccably dressed, really nice shoes. Him: black, stunningly handsome. Young urban lawyers or marketing or bizdev, moving up in the world. As they passed, I overheard her state emphatically:

“No, no, its not true, I get laid there all the time.”

Did I turn around and follow them to find out what that conversation was all about? No I did not. Its been bugging me ever since. All the time? *all* the time? Where is this? What’s not true? Arrrgghhh!

Dammit, it really is true that marketing is just one big drunken sex party and only the beautiful people are invited, isn’t it.