In Which MoM Arrives

Mother of Mossy, a.k.a. MoM, arrived for the holidays Tuesday night. The Amtrak train was--are you sitting, Gentle Reader?--early. Early!  Not on time, which it has never been the 22 years I've lived here, but early, forty minutes early, in fact. I'm still gobsmacked over the whole early thing, three days later. It's a good thing I'm sitting.

The Hotel across the street from the train depot has a hip and trendy club in it, and the swinging twenty-somethings were all playing some kind of trivia game with a real emcee from the club. Mr. Big and I (Mr. Big always comes to the train station with me; he likes an outing) stood on the sidewalk opposite, playing along in my little head. I guess it's not fair for an over-educated, middle-aged woman who likes to read to play these kinds of games, even in her mind, against a patio of somewhat tipsy college students because there was only one possible outcome: there was only one question I didn't know. There were lots of long, silent gaps as the emcee waited for someone to answer the trivia question, and I'd be silently saying the answer over and over, hoping someone would pull that answer out of the ether, and then he'd finally move on. Not that my fellow citizens are dumb, mind you, but 10 o'clock on a Tuesday evening may not bring out the smart drinkers and clubbers, especially when many college papers are due this week before the Thanksgiving break. (I hope that sentence magically and psychically flits it way across cyberspace into the heads of my A 4XX students--disguised to protect the innocent--, whose paper is due next week, the night before Thanksgiving. Harsh, you say? Oh, but Gentle Reader, I cancelled class that night so no one has to hang around for an evening class the night before Thanksgiving. I'm not a completely heartless professor. Only partially heartless.)

After spending weeks last year telling me that the Honda Element was ugly, MoM told me how wonderful it was halfway through the ten minute ride to my home. Shades of her first Georgie impression, also at long distance and also without actually having seen him, who she thought was the ugliest cat and "why would I adopt him, he's ugly." Until he spent 3 months with her cat, Bo, while I was out of the country and he and Bo had a grand old time chasing each other around her house, hiding behind furniture and then jumping out to pounce on each other, followed by Georgie snuggling into her lap for a nap, and then her tune changed to  "You know, George and Bo get along so well, you should just leave him here when you go back to graduate school. He's so handsome and sweet and loving." Like MoM, I appear to be always right, so I'm not sure why she doesn't believe me in the first place when I tell her something. (insert cheesy snarky wink here, Reader)  Really, world, I would be a kind and benevolent despot who was always right. Just give in.

Ugly, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

In Which We Celebrate a Birthday

Mr. Knightley turned 1 today. Yes, I am one of those overly sentimental people who name their cars. Here he is in all his splendor. Ain't he handsome?

And RIP, Percy (Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel).

In Which The Pups Go on an Excursion

Today was our local Animal Fair, an event that was started about 8 years. Both of my dogs usually enjoy going to this event. It's olfactory overload, what with the food vendors and dog product vendors and animal adoption groups and rally and flyball and K-9 demonstration teams, and thousands of people over the course of the day, but even more thousands of dogs. And as there were often 2 or 3 dogs per person, there were more dogs than people there. They were expecting 7,000 people, so I assume that translates into 10,000 dogs.

I wasn't going to take them this year as Mr. Big's leg is not healed, but we had gone for a ride, and were passing the park twenty minutes before the event was scheduled to start, and there was still lots of parking. I decided we needed to practice my using the ramp while holding onto both of them. Easy. The process went very smoothly, and they are getting used to using a ramp to enter and exit the car. Mr. Big doesn't seem to be suffering tonight from too much stress on his gimpy leg. I can tell you, though, it was great for his brain and his disposition. Other than the vet and the very short walks of last week down the street, he hasn't been anywhere in 3 months, and he was so excited to be out and about. And don't they look comfortable in the back of the E? I just wish there was a way to have the seats down and a blanket to protect the upholstery and still use their seatbelt harnesses.

And then it got very cold and the wind started to gust, and after 15 minutes of just walking about, we left. No sooner had we arrived home, then it started to rain. And it's rained off and on all day; a fairly cool rain, too. Great for the wildflowers next month. Not so great for the weeds, which are a visible green carpet 1 mm tall across that part of my front yard not xeriscaped. Yes, another year when I forgot to spray pre-emergent. Yes, another year when I will be battling weeds.

In Which I Admit My Car Is Smarter Than Me

I had to buy a new car in October, and chose my dream car, a Honda Element. I love it. I feel a little disloyal to my old car, but it was killed; I had no choice but to replace it. I still feel guilty.

I had to figure out how the windshield wipers worked last week, because that rain was the first we'd had since I bought the car (welcome to living in the desert). And I've discovered that the E system is backwards from the wipers on my little Civic. Last Friday, I went out to dinner with my friends Kerry and John, who were down from the SuperMegalopolis for work meetings for her and university stuff for him. It was pouring when I left the restaurant (El Charro, muy delicioso! I had the pollo con mole enchiladas, ummm!), so I smugly flicked on those wipers. Then I got to a red light. The wipers stopped. Hmm, thought I, I must have accidentally hit the mechanism, so I turned them back on, higher, and they flipped merrily away until we got to the next light, when they stopped. The light bulb finally went on. The wipers stop when the car is stopped! Maybe you, Gentle Reader, have known about this for a long time, but my beloved little Civic (may Percy rest in peace) was born in 1991, so the computerized car is a whole new animal to me.

It's raining again today, and not only am I enjoying the rain immensely and looking for a big puddle to jump in, I giggled the whole way to work every time I had to stop the car. I am easily amused.

In honor of a rainy winter day: comfort food for lunch--tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich on my homemade bread, and spaghetti squash for dinner. Soup and sauce are very comforting and cosy, and we have to enjoy these pale imitations of a winter day when they happen, as they are so rare nowadays.