RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Last week my sister and her family went down to Florida, so Steve and I got to keep their dog for them!  Beau Thomas is an 8 month old Red Heeler dog that Logan, one of my nephews, got just around last Christmas.  He's adorable, but he's a hand full.  Red Heelers are (I think) a breed of Australian cattle herding dogs and they have a LOT of energy.  He's much smaller than either Butler or Bear, which meant he could get into a lot of places that they couldn't.  He has a nubby little tail, giant ears and very expressive eyes, which meant he could pretty much do anything he wanted and I couldn't get mad at him. He also has a vertical jump of about 4 feet, so he had to be watched closely to make sure he didn't get on top of things.  I wasn't expecting the amount of energy that dog had.  By the time Butler and Bear had gone to live on a farm, they were both old and slow, but Beau acted like he'd just eaten gunpowder and someone was trying to light his tail!  He was after me all the time to play. If I didn't sit down in the floor and volunteer to throw a ball or play tug, he'd bring the toys to me while I was sitting in my chair and put them in my lap. I likened the whole situation to finding some parents who have raised their kids and sent them off to college, only to have someone hand them a hyper 4 year old and tell them "Good Luck" as they run out the door!  It was fun, though.  We basically had a 7 day long game of fetch.

He was very hard on the toys, though.  I swear, he destroyed everything he played with.   When they brought him to our house, they brought two toys, a rope toy and a thick rubber ball with a smaller ball trapped in side it. He'd mangled the rope before the first day was out.  Then he found the basket of dog toys that had belonged to Bear (Yes, we still have them. Shut up.) and he pulled them all apart. We didn't mind that, but it was hard to keep up with which toy he was playing with because he was determined to eat the squeaker out of something, but with 10 disemboweled toys in the floor, you never knew which one he was rooting around in.  He managed to also eat his rubber ball and part of a Beanie Baby.  In fact, for most of the time he was here, I was constantly having to yell "OMG, what did you just eat? Did you just eat something? Spit it out! SPIT IT OUT!" I fished more stuff out of that dog than I want to talk about.  I even had to go buy more toys so that he wouldn't get bored and start eating the furniture.  He destroyed two of the three things I bought for him within a couple of hours.  He is a very sweet dog, though. I'm glad we got to have him for a week!

I've decided that if we ever get another dog, it'll have to be a big, slow one. I don't know if I could handle a hyper dog all the time.


2) I have been waking up around 2:00 am, on and off, for a while now. No matter when I go to sleep, I'll just pop awake for no reason.  I hate it.  Most of the time it's only slightly annoying since I keep my iPad nearby, and I'll just pick it up and read until I get sleepy again.  However, there are times when it gets downright awful because of what I've come to think of as "Night Brain."  Night Brain hates me. 

I know I'm not the only one this happens to, because I've talked to other people who have the same issue.  If you're unfamiliar with it, basically what happens is that I wake up in the middle of the night and because of whatever is going on in my head, every bad thought that could possibly intrude on me comes rushing in.  It's relentless.  I can only assume that a well rested brain is a much more rational brain, and/or there is some kind of buffer that your brain usually enables as you wake up that keeps things in perspective. Night Brain, however, is mean.  For instance:

NB: Hey!  You're up!  Now we can talk!  Oh, remember that thing that happened a few weeks ago? You know, that thing you swore you'd do again the first chance you got?
ME: Yes!
NB: Well, actually, that was a terrible thing to do and here are all the reasons why it will not only ruin your life, but the lives of countless others!
ME: Wait, what? It wasn't that big of a de...
NB: It actually was, and you are awful and now you'll die alone and unloved.
MS: But...
NB: Well, let me rephrase, it was a big deal to you, but everyone else is laughing at you. They think you're a sad, silly person.
ME: That doesn't even make sense!
NB: Of course it does!  You'd know that too if you were smart.  Oh, and that friend you like so much? Yeah, they are bored of you, leave them alone.
ME: No they aren't!
NB: Yes, they are! When they get messages from you, they roll their eyes and ignore them, and they only respond after a while because they don't want to be rude. They make jokes about you to their other friends.
ME: Really? Well, I guess you could be right, but...
NB: By the way, it's been a while since you thought about your dogs that died! How about that? Or, hey, do you remember when your dad died? That sucked, didn't it?  Plus, you got fired and will probably never work in your field again! Oh, and you're fat!
ME: Hey, not cool!
NB: No, forget all that! I've got something even better!  Let's relive 2008!

So, yeah, I hate that.  It's worse when I start believing it, but at 2:00 in the morning, with no chance to protect myself from those thoughts, it's hard to be rational.  I'm just glad it doesn't happen every night.

3) I finally got my hair cut again!  I didn't want to do it, but I'd accidentally run my hand through my hair while I was holding an open pair of scissors, which snagged one side of my hair, so I had to do it.  I went back to the mall, because I never learn, and fortunately/unfortunately the place I usually go was completely full of people. I'd forgotten it was the week before school started, so everyone was getting their hair did.  I actually had to bounce between two different salons before I could find someone with a bit of time to cut my hair.  The girl who cut it was very nice and talkative, and she cut my hair just like I asked her to!  Nice!  Of course, then she styled it and I looked a little like Flo from the Progressive Insurance commercials, but it was OK since I was going home.  After several days of trying to figure out how to fix my new haircut, I decided that maybe she didn't cut it exactly like I asked.  I have a cross between The Rachael and a mullet. That sounds kind of dire, but it doesn't look terrible.  Now it just sticks out in weird ways if I'm not careful, and when I wake up in the morning, I look like the Bride of Frankenstein a bit. Eh, it'll do.  I've come to terms that I'll never have a good haircut. 

4) I had to have another CAT scan for my lungs, but the doctor didn't find anything new!  Yay!  He said I still have the nodules in my lungs, but they haven't changed.  I wonder why they aren't going away?  Well, he wasn't worried, so neither am I.  I do have to have another CAT scan in three months, so hopefully they will have shrunk down a little by then!

5) We almost have the church's media computer back online!  We weren't able to use the piece of hardware we had before, but Steve dug around and found a different kind of equipment that would do the same thing.  There are a few bugs that have to be worked out, but mainly it's just stuff that we have to learn about the new thing. (That sounds very technical, no?)  It's really supposed to be used for gaming, so I hope that it'll still work well enough for what we are using it for!

I'm so glad we are getting it fixed!  I did do something fairly rude, though.  I had an open ticket with tech support from the company that made the old piece of equipment, and I told them that we had to trash their hardware and go with a different brand!  I could have been nicer, but I think that by the third email with them I should have gotten further than "Is your cable working?"  Cable working, my ass.