Alright, I am slowly catching up. Go to my Flickr account to see the (annotated) highlights of my trip to Brooklyn last weekend (Sept. 4-7).

I went to Brooklyn last weekend, and shot this video of my cutie-patootie niece, who is four and two-thirds years old.



I don't know how YouTube's compression system manages to make everything I upload look so incredibly terrible.

I haven't posted all week because my right arm is in burny pain pretty much all of the time -- from my neck to my fingers. RSI, probably, but who really knows? I am 99% sure my doctor will tell me to take ibuprofen and take it easy, and I'm already doing that, so I've been avoiding wasting my time and money. I've been trying to use my arm as little as possible, so no more typing for me at the moment.

Today the whole family (six adults, two young children) decided "what better day than Black Friday to go shopping?" And so we went to Babies R' Us, where the most recent parents in the group eventually (after much deliberation) purchased a car seat and a case of baby food. I took T to ride the coin-op Sesame-Street-character-themed firetruck in the entrance foyer, and after waiting for someone to enter the store so the door would be activated, the rest of the family joined us there. Which meant we were trapped. Instead of waiting for someone to show up and enter the store so we could escape the airlock-like foyer, CJ walked back into the store and out the actual exit so he could activate the door, freeing us. And T has been calling him "hero" ever since. As in, "Hero! Pick me up!" etc. It kind of hurts, the cuteness of everyone.

I also volunteered to take one for the team by taking T to the bathroom at a restaurant today. While she was pooping (let me tell you non-parents out there, holding a small person on a too-big toilet while they shit is AWESOME*), she said something like, "You know what's bad? When someone is peeing or pooping, and another person comes and pees and poops through that other person peeing and pooping." I'm not sure if she's just stating that she's anti-scat, or if it had to do with the fact that it was a multi-stall restroom and some strange woman had just entered the neighboring stall.

*That was sarcasm. I didn't really need to say it was sarcasm, did I? I just wanted to be sure I was not misunderstood.**

** Also, having to wipe the dirty bum of a small uncooperative person is AWESOME.*

[Um, it's still Saturday on the west coast.] I've had a very lazy day because of my being under the weather. One significant thing did happen, though: The cats finally discovered the footed wooden bucket-like thing that I bought specifically as a cat bed about a year and a half ago. They have been curled up together in it all day. I could not be prouder.
I also went to Snow Farm for their seconds/samples sale, where I bought nothing, and the Williamsburg general store, where I also bought nothing. CJ cooked me a chicken and heated up some tasty butternut squash soup and a loaf of bread and made a salad. It was very tasty, even though I feel kinda gross at all times due to the cold.
New to this cold: As an experiment, I am going to see if NOT cutting out dairy makes any difference at all. So far it hasn't. I was taught that drinking milk during a cold made you more mucousy, but a few people in the past couple of years have told me that that's bullshit. Please share your thoughts on the matter in the comments below.

Oh SHIT, it's NaBloPoMo. And my blog-slacker sister
is doing it, so I really have no excuse. I just reread some old blog posts from 2003, looking for the 7th-grade diary entries I transcribed (they're in February, if you're interested) and man, I used to blog all the time, plus I was so much funnier and more energetic. What the hell happened? It's kind of depressing.
I have lots of things I could talk about, but a lot of it is personal. And I'm the only one of my friends who lays themselves bare on a blog, so I think part of my problem is Fear of People Not Liking Me. This is an ongoing crisis (see: the previous 5 years of this blog) and one I need to work on. But, like most difficult things I "need to work on," there's always tomorrow to start actually working, if you know what I mean.
Anyway. I'll blog every day for this month, even though I took the weekend off. Here, I'll tell you about my weekend in animals:
I met a very pretty, gray, short-haired dog on the street Friday night, before the Sitting Next To Brian CD release show. The show was fantastic, by the way. We were drifting off to sleep by the end of their set (not the band's fault) so we missed Space Captain.
The next night, CJ and I saw The Darjeerling Limited, which was great, though felt similar to The Life Aquatic. A snake has a cameo role.
Yesterday, after a baby shower at Chandler's Tavern, I drove up to Lenox, where CJ and I went for a short walk at the Audubon place. We turned a corner of a path and saw a beaver slip into a tiny pond. We froze, and the beaver slowly swam in a circle and came back to where it had been before, about ten feet away from us. It lumbered up onto a fallen log and started nibbling on dead leaves. Beavers are very noisy chewers, and when they're standing half-submerged in a pool of still water, the vibrations cause tiny ripples to radiate out from their bodies. It stayed there for a while, then took a small branch in its mouth and swam a few feet away to continue chewing, as if to give us the full Beaver Viewing Experience of swimming, eating, and grasping things with hand-like claws.
This morning on my drive home on the Pike, I saw a couple of guys in orange safety vests standing by the jersey barrier in the middle. As soon as I whizzed past, they dragged a deer carcass across the roadway to the shoulder, each of them holding a rear leg, going as quickly as they could. The deer wasn't mangled at all, it was just dead. I spent the next ten minutes daydreaming about calling the local hunting store to find out if I could pay someone to clean and dress a doe I'd hit with my car (if I ever do, god forbid), or would that be a problem, since I didn't have a deer-hunting license?
And now I'm home, and need to do some interview prep work. Which is difficult, and which is why I haven't started (see what I did there? With the tag-back?). The interview is only rhetorical at this point; I expect it'll be scheduled soon. I hope.

Oh, I forgot a follow-up to the five superballs I mentioned. I gave one to the cats as a toy -- they loved it; they picked it up and carried it around like dogs, just to drop it and whack it away to skitter across the open floor. I left the other four in a shallow bowl on my dining table. The next day I noticed there were only three in the bowl, but thought I might have lost one myself somehow... Except the day after that, all of the balls were gone. My cats had discovered the superball nest and had routed them out! I was only able to find three (under the fridge and the stove... not easy); the other two seem to have gone back to their home planet. I have one in a cat-proof area and I'm letting them do whatever they'd like to the remaining two. (Whatever they like = losing them underneath something immobile.)