pets

as my time at elena's is slowly coming to a close, i realized i never introduced you all to the puppies. Oliver is the golden lab in the front. they are both eating whatever they can find on the deck. edible or not. there is a pecan tree in the back, so they spend the late summer chewing on those.

say hello to nala, quite possibly the needy-est dog to ever walk the plant earth. her desire for human contact is insatiable. she's playing it cool for the cameras, i think. she usually gives me the most piteous and pathetic look i have ever seen in my life, if my hand is not on her head.

oliver is a bit more laid back. likes his own space mostly. but he loves licking flesh. post-soccer sweaty legs are his all time favorite. its pretty gross.

they are awesome dogs though. fairly well behaved, though not always. and if you learn how to properly keep a kitchen, no food ever disappears into the great unknown of nala's stomach either.

on the other pet front, it seems that one of the cats (my vote goes to masha) has consumed (or played with until dead and left in difficult to find place that will begin reeking very soon) one of Tejas' fish. We're still not sure how this happened. all we know is that the fish disappeared. and that's the best guess we could come up with. i guess maybe it jumped out of the tank for some reason (they don't even notice the fish in the tank, so i don't think they went fishing themselves) and the rest is history. very sad. it was pretty fish. also, boo has lost a TON of weight. he actually has a waist now. he still has the flabby skin belly, but the fat is no more. he still probably weighs 15-16 lbs. but now he's a lean, mean, grass eating (and subsequently throwing up) machine. sadly, this has not cleared up his leaky bum syndrome.

allergies and jobs

masha's breakout was (thankfully) very small and did not spread this time around. on the other hand, oliver has some allergies (to the season and to fleas apparently) and has been scratching up a storm lately as well as rubbing his snout and gums on the carpet (which just sounds really painful to me). ugh.
anyway, i did not get the NIST fellowship or the teaching job, and i no longer think thats such a bad thing.

so i don't have any pictures from graduation since no one has given me any (my hood was blue), but i do have this one!

i'm pretty sure that NIST is NEVER going to let me know anything. did i mention that Courtney found out 3 WEEKS ago that she didn't get an offer? that means that they have known for 3 WEEKS who they are and are not making offers to. so what's the freakin hold up people?!? damn government agencies and their beaurocracy.

also, oxford college can kiss my fanny. the guy gave me NO information about ANYTHING during my interview. and i emailed him the following monday to thank him for inviting me out and liking the faculty, etc, crap, etc. no, "thanks but no thanks", no, "we can let you know by x", just "thanks for coming, can you find your car?" very helpful. really.

i'm offically off the pay roll at Tech next wed. i still have two papers to write for andrew though.

also, masha is showing signs of her head breaking out again (when did this happen last time? could it be a seasonal thing?) and booboo has been hairballing up large chunks if grass since we've been letting him outside recently. yum. and i forgot to feed the dogs last night, and i feel really bad about it. the problem is that they always act food crazy, so there was no obvious sign. :( poor guys.

its one of those days

you know how sometimes you want to magically reinvent yourself, somewhere far away where no one knows you and you are pretty much invisible? i'm having one of those days.

the fact that i have pretty much no control over anything major in my life right now AND no information about anything either is really messing with my head.

rather anti-climactic i would have to say

so it is obviously past march 20, or D-day, as it certainly felt like, and that means i've finished my defense (thankfully finished positively). therefore, I am apparently now a PhD. it certainly doesn't feel like it. on the other hand it DOES feel freaking awesome to be done with it! (granted, i still have a bunch of crap i have to change in the text before submitting it to the university next week, but whatever). In celebration, I have set up the office at Elena's (where i previously worked on my thesis) as a sewing room, and I finally got the chance to use the wonderful yarn swift that my dad and tejas made for me over thanksgiving. (it basically holds yarn hanks and rotates slowly as you pull to make the yarn into a ball, instead of having to wrap the hank around your knees and inevitably end up with a big knotted mess). I may have jumped the gun a little with the room conversion, as i still have to do the thesis revisions and write another paper or two in the next month and a half, but i don't care. I plan to do a crap load of sewing in the next month and half as well.

why am i doing this again?

i'm finding it incredibly difficult to give a crap about my upcoming defense on thursday. i've only (half-heartedly) worked on my presentation once this past week, and i'm supposed to be going over it with andrew tomorrow morning. and i'm still not really interested in doing anything to it. why? why don't i care? am i really in the right career if i can't summon up a little bit of enthusiasm over the culmination of the degree i've busted my ass and wasted my life over for the last 5 yrs? i'm beginning to wonder. granted, i have my fair share of non-trivial distractions, like my dad's in the hospital again (they are going to take out his gall bladder on monday, and that will hopefully fix the problem), tejas' dad is here this weekend, and a few other life altering decisions are up in the air as well. but still. this needs to be taking precedent, and i just don't seem to give a damn. bah.

finished (sort of)

so i had high hopes of being able to do absolutely nothing tomorrow. i wasn't even sure i wanted to get out of bed all day. sadly, i still need to write a future works chapter and my acknowledgements :( but i guess the worst is over. now i can start bathing again. and changing my clothes every day. and doing laundry. woohoo. oh, and i really need to start going to the gym again. but tonight there will be lots of glorious sleep. sleep that doesn't come along with dreams of writing or data analysis or any of that crap. but hopefully there will be some food and a beer first.