Bright Eyed and Bushy Tailed…

“Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man wealthy but socially dead.”
- Animaniacs

Yes, but… (via)

I scribble this to you, kittens, bleary and cranky from my desk at work.  I’ve been here since 6:30am.

After months of applications, a few interviews, unreturned phone calls, and more applications, J. and I figured that there was no work to be had for him around here – not too shocking a revelation, but still pretty unwelcome.  We’d decided to head out to the East Coast to spend some quality time with my family, who we don’t get to see often enough, and do whatever odd work we could find out there.  Last week we started making concrete plans.

Which is, of course, when J. got a last minute interview and a job offer.

I could just pout.  Not because I’m not thrilled and grateful he found summer work, I am!  But because this has more or less been the pattern of our lives for the past year – we make a plan, it’s a good plan, we start working towards that plan, and fwoop!  The rug is tugged out from underneath us.  We’re pros at righting ourselves when our balance is tampered with, but still.  I’ll be spending some time out there by myself, and we’ll spend a couple of weeks there together on our way to London, but I was really looking forward to my summer in the woods.  Ah well, I’ve already started coming up with some schemes to make up for it.

The only bad part about this job of his is that it starts at 7am, which means I must be deposited at my office with enough time for J. to get to work.  He gets the car because his shift ends in the early afternoon and I’ll still have hours of work left.  My last month at the PD will have some long hours (and we all know that a morning person, I am not!).  On the other hand, I now have another previously untapped hour in which to work on projects.  That’s pretty great, to be honest.

It’s just already been a long day, and my trainee is struggling.  But it’s Monday so I feel both she and I are entitled.

Bad. Romance.

“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.” 
– Lao Tzu

Historical accuracy is the way to my heart.

I’ve never been big on Valentine’s day, some of it is a bit over processed for me (although the history I can clearly get behind) and a lot is just a bit too cheesy.  When J. and I were dating and we both knew we were moving towards getting married, I actually threatened him with rejection if he proposed to me on V Day – to which he burst out laughing and declared, “Understood.”  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the love but the pink and red of it all just strike me as a little bit too much.

Longwinded way of saying if you came here looking for hearts and sparkles, kittens, trot off elsewhere.  It’s just isn’t our style.

I spent the first half of the day at the office finishing up some pretty somber assignments for a couple of really sad cases (the kind that are hard to work on) and half battling a sort of pre-cold that refuses to either go away or develop into the full blown thing.  I threw in the towel at lunchtime, got home, worked frantically on the MP for a couple hours, trie to get some sort of rest in because we have a newborn in the flat below us and a baby being sleep trained in the one above which means haven’t had a full night of sleep in weeks (subtext: I am never having children!), only to be thwarted in the rest attempt by…the screaming infants.

I actually forgot it was Valentine’s Day until I lurched through the door and J. (working at home in his basketball shorts and an old t-shirt) reminded me from the couch.
“Good,” muttered I.  “By the way, our tax return came through, let’s pay off the credit card.”
We didn’t do presents and the only way we are celebrating is by going out to a nice dinner in a restaurant we’ve both wanted to go to for a while.  We’ll dress up a bit, him in the suit he likes best, me in my favorite little black dress and we’ll enjoy ourselves.  But the truth is, we’ll probably go to the gym first.

Here’s the thing about stylized romance that I find so annoying – I think it’s often used to sell a bad product.  No amount of roses or over the top dates turns The Bachelor into a show about love.  Oceans of wine and acres of flowers don’t make a steady relationship.  Making out in the rain is cold, wet, and uncomfortable and only to be attempted when making a perfume add under the watchful eye of trained couturiers.  Romance is not (in my opinion) dying for love, or sonnets, or grand gestures – those are surprisingly easy, even the first one if half the poets are to be believed.  Sometimes it’s about not buying flowers so that money can go to our upcoming move to London – where we both want to go and have been working towards for years.  Together.

*Oh fine, minions here are some valentines for you:

These are for the history nerds (and I’ve decided when in London I am going to seek this woman out because anyone with that level of love for the Plantagenet dynasty is someone I was clearly destined to be friends with).

And these are for the Lizzie Bennett Diaries/Jane Austen fans out there.  Let’s not dissemble, we’re all friends here. 

Saturday Quotables

“Oh thank goodness…tomorrow’s Sunday, not Monday!”
“You forgot what day it is?”
“We’re lying about in pajamas watching PBS, it’s a totally plausible mistake.”
- C. and J.

Entertainment During Saturday Chores

“You need to see this puppy rescue video.”
“No way, those make me cry.  Besides, I’m watching a murder mystery, those are much less upsetting.”
– J. and C.

Friday Links LII

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” 
~ Andrew Wyeth

So, a couple days ago I was begging benign forces to just let me make it to April, which seemed like an awfully long way off, and bam!  Suddenly I looked up and it’s February already.  Either my prayers were answered or I have a very slippery grip on the reality of space/time interactions.  Probably the latter.

Anyway, I like February.  It’s a quirky little month that likes to throw people off with how short it is – clearly, we’ve got something in common.  It’s also the month of Chip and Dip For Three Meals Sunday (the Superbowl), the excuse to have a really fancy dinner (Valentine’s Day), and the Small Dog Annual Couture Smackdown (the Oscars).  Delightful things to look forward to, yes minions?  Here are your links:

Girls and their cooties ruin all the boys’ fun.

Very cute short film nominated for an Oscar.  (This one is still my favorite romantic short ever.)

So, most of our friends long ago left our university town for bigger things which should mean we’re not doing anything for the Superbowl, right?  Wrong, minions!  Honestly, don’t you know us at all?  We’re throwing a two person party complete with pizza and homemade dips and salsa.  Anyone left in the area is welcome to just show up, throw yourself on the sofas, and indulge.  J. is also hilariously excited about this relatively new tradition.  Which doesn’t help our puppy lust.

For a variety of reasons, personal and political, I want about fifty copies of this.  I want to paper whole walls with it!

Another useful thing to hang on a wall, since I can never remember the exchanges.

One of the strangest things to watch is how a word or idea with a certain definition takes on a new meaning within a group.  I have personal fascination with the word “modesty” when used by various religious groups – it’s anthropologically engrossing and personally discomforting to see how a word originally describing a behavior or mindset has come to refer to how long hems or sleeves are, almost solely for women.

I want this gorgeous candle in several equally gorgeous scents.

Let’s talk sparkles!

This article comes recommended by Peregrine, and is doubly hilarious to me because recently I was channel surfing to find something to watch while I folded laundry and flicked through a station where one of Suze Orman’s programs was playing.  I only got a sentence fragment: “I realized that all the financial advice I’ve given is wrong -”  And yet, somehow, people are still paying her to give it.

Caitlin Kelly, friend and favorite of the blog, shared this on Facebook and I giggled mightily at it.

My father hiked the the Grand Teton (edited: corrected by Dad)  when I was young and we were living in Germany.  Apparently somewhere along the way, a marmot chewed through his knapsack and ate his trail mix.  In commemoration, he bought me a plush toy marmot that I’m pretty sure is still tucked away safely somewhere.  Where my father failed to bond with the beasts, this boy did not!

The weekly sheep.

Annnnnd Scene!

J: “You have to wrap my presents!’
C: “We don’t even have a tree to put them under.”
J: “We have an [exercise] bike.  I’ve draped it with jackets, it looks like snow.”
C: “It’s not the same thing!”

The Christmas spirit is clearly kicking at Chez Small Dog.  All are welcome at the festivities, which include napping.

Who’s In Charge Here?

“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”
- C.S. Lewis

J. and I both had, “Oh dear, we’re grown up…” moments last night.

J.’s experience was in a grocery store where he heard two girls talking about graduating, and they looked so young! “There are full grown adults,” he said, with some resignation in his voice, “who are younger than us.”

This is a pretty surprising thing, to be honest.  Working at a university, living in a university town, it gets a bit easy to smugly lump the majority of the residence together as “those helpless little darlings,” that you tend to see the most of – freshmen and sophmores who generally haven’t a clue.  But we’ve lived here long enough post my graduation that entire class of students has cycled through their four year degrees and scampered off to greater things.  To many of them, we are their Five Year Plan personified – there’s horror for you.

My clash with age was at my zumba class where for fun the instructor taught us the routine to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which I thought was great fun for the upcoming holiday spirit.  Walking out of the gym, I overheard two girls talking to one another.
“I liked it except for that weird monster dance we did.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t even a good song.”
Cue C. clutching herself in horror.

The decade I was born in is now something to be trotted out in fashion or for parties, usually “ironically.”  I lived before the internet – something we’re only a couple of freshman classes away from being ancient history.  I lived during the bleeding Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a country, Europe was split down the middle, and communism was still a threat, instead of a largely pejorative term to be hurled at anyone who disagrees with you socially.   And these people have no idea who Michael Jackson was except for the last few, collapsing years of his life!  What gives!

J.’s less than a month away from 27, which somehow seems unnervingly closer to 30 than 26 for some reason, and he’s only seven months older than me.  We’re the grown ups.

Dear heavens…

Emmy Night At the Small Dogs’

“Just so you know, Benedict Cumberbatch is my get out of marriage free card.”
“Wha…oh.  Ok.  Fair enough.”
-C. and J.

Yep.  That’s about it.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

“There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”
~Alexis de Tocqueville

You know, sometimes I take a lot of things about J. for granted (he’s a really impressive specimen), but now and then his stellar points are highlighted.  A friend recently took me aside to ask if J. and I are politically in sync, because she suspected we weren’t and wondered how we dealt with it.  Election season has come to her house and she and her husband are not exactly aligned.  I was torn between thinking, “Oh, look, we are the very model of a modern [major] marriage,” and, “Ha!  Fooled another one!”  But on reflection, I was reminded again just how much I appreciate J. for the fact that he profoundly respects my right to disagree.

Working at a police department gives me ample evidence that not all marriages are like this.  Our congregation, nice as it can be, often provides examples that not all marriages are like this.  Even among some friends I’ve seen relationships made of people who do not respect the right to have differing opinions.  And this has always bothered me because it seems like such a basic human thing – if I demand the right to think and believe what I will, without reference to any other person, surely that means I have an obligation to render than same right to others.  My marriage is like that, all my close friendships are like that, but is it a commonality or a rare thing?

It is shocking to me how many people in marriages, partnerships, and friendships do not give one another the right to disagree.  How do you get through the day, much less an election season!  Every opinion is a potential battle, every thought a potentially traitorous action – it must be exhausting.  I know it is, I’ve seen so many people exhausted by it.

J. and I are not politically aligned (he’s center, I’m left of center), we’re not identical religiously, and widely divided on sports – but it doesn’t matter.  Our ethics line up, the values we look for in others we find in one another, we are a team.  When we disagree, we assume that the other person has come to their opinion through thought, personal experience, and logic, and we do not call one another idiots, bombard one another with new clippings (of varying degrees of authenticity), or rail against the other.  We do not make it a project to overhaul one another consciences.

I used to think this sort of relationship was normal.  I’m starting to wonder if I’m lucky.

Sound off, ducklings, I know many of you have wonderful friendships and relationships unaffected by dogmas of any kind.  Have you ever been in a situation where dogma made a work relationship, friendship, or family situation uncomfortable (goodness knows I have!), and how did you make it work?  Restore my faith in people during political open season!

Reason #498 Why I Love My Marriage

“I have witnessed and enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.”
- Mark Twain

PBS (my Great American Love) is in the middle of doing Wagner’s entire Ring Cycle on it’s Great Performances at the Met program, starting with an introductory program on the staging of Robert Lepage’s fantastical set for the Met’s production.  We’re loving it and staying up way too late to enjoy it.  And we would feel bad about listening to Wagner late at night except that our neighbors have been treating us to a  rather tone deaf rendition of Les Miserables for the better part of the week.   We’ll see your French suffering and raise you the fall of the German/Icelandic gods.

Of course, tonight is Die Walkure, so we had to prepare properly.  Naturally by watching this.

The Small Dog editorial team: mature, educated, cultured.