I was over at my parent’s house last night. This is quickly becoming a Monday ritual. Brian plays video games with Curtis on Mondays and I head over to my parents house for wine, dinner, doggie and chats with mom and dad too if he’s feeling up to it. I love spending time with my folks. One of the reasons I moved back to Oregon was to be closer to my family but, it’s really easy to just get into the grind and not see them for weeks. I’m trying to not let that happen.
First up on last night’s agenda, Mom’s computer. So mom got a new computer a few months ago and of course the damn thing is running Vista. What a pile of crap. Ok, to be honest it’s really not that bad but they’ve put everything in an ever so slightly different place which makes it a pain in the ass to find anything in a hurry. To top it off mom, while not computer illiterate, has very little patience for technology that isn’t running as fast as she’d like.
This computer combined with my mother is a bit of a nightmare. I’m constantly trying to fix it or help her with some crazy Photoshop project she’s gotten herself suckered into. She really doesn’t do too bad on her own most of the time, so long as everything is working. It’s when she encounters a hurdle and starts messing with things that it all goes downhill. Last night we spent a good hour making flyers for the republican women’s group. The problem was the lady that made them last year had saved her flyer as a PDF and we were having a bitch of a time trying to edit or recreate it. In the end I think it came out alright.
We decided to get a Papa Murphy’s take n bake pizza for dinner. I hadn’t had one of those in ages as Brian is not a big fan of the place. I think maybe they had too many of them growing up. It was yummy but a little soggy so we had to toss it back in the over for a bit. It went great with my wine. One thing I love about my parents is the always have at least 4 different wines to choose from. Yum, yum!
We played with Bond a bunch as well. He’s my parents little Boston/Pug mix they got a few weeks ago. He’s so damn cute and, my goodness what a ham. Everywhere we go people have to pet him, ask about him, even if they don’t make it obvious you can see them checking him out. I mean he’s a neat looking dog. Oh and he just loves to be in your lap, well really his favorite thing is to lean back against your stomach, and have you wrap your arms around him, like you might hold a young child, and he’ll look backwards at you and make little grunty, piggy noises. I just want to squeeze him till he pops. Unfortunately for me I’m allergic to dogs so when I leave my parent house I have hives on my face anywhere I let the dog touch me. It’s hard to avoid when he loves to snuggle up under your chin. It really doesn’t bother me all that much. I just try and remember not to touch my eyes and the hives go away in about 20 minutes or so.
While snuggling with Bond on my parents couch we were watching animal planet which I’m generally not allowed to watch at night during the week. The reason for this is a little show called animal cops. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it but it’s about the most depressing thing ever. It’s not unlike the show cops but instead of laughing at a bunch of idiot criminals and what have you, your horrified over and over again as they go into homes to rescue abused animals, often in truly horrific condition.
Last night they rescued these two horses. They were both in pretty bad shape but one of them, my god. He looked like a skeleton. It was amazing that it was even still alive. They spent the whole show trying to nurse it back to health but in the end they had to put him down. It was awful. On the upside, the other horse that was rescued pulled through and was adopted by a good family and of course they show you the whole six months later video with him happily prancing through a field. Amazingly, I managed not to cry. However the next show I was not so lucky. It wasn’t even a sad show. It was just a silly dog show that highlight’s 2 or three different breeds of dogs each episode and talks about their pros and cons and whether or not they’d make a good pet for you.
This week’s episode, first up, German Shepherds. Well, of course we just lost our German Shepherd, Wickette a few weeks ago so we were already sad just looking at shepherds but what really twisted the knife was that they highlighted a black German shepherd that look almost just like her accept for his brown front paws. And then they went on to tell a story about how the owner of the dog had lost his last shepherd dog in what sounded to be the exact way we lost wickette. Needless to say, mom and I were in tears. I managed to pull myself together but as soon as I got in the car to drive home it I felt a wave of sadness just wash over me. I cried for the next 10 miles.
