Saturday, July 19, 2008

 

Dear God...it's me...

Please say a prayer for my aunt (my mom's brother's wife). Her nephew died this past week, and one of her brothers died tonight, in an unrelated incident. What an awful time.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

 

Yesssssssss!!!

So I've been feeling DCsick lately, and AirTran having a sale was enough to motivate me to investigate the best weekends for visiting. Unfortunately, my friends have the schedules of social butterflies, and the best weekends for visiting were...this weekend and sometime in late August.

Well, late August is way too far away (and who knows how long I'll be underemployed? *knock on wood*) so I checked out this weekend. The flights = prohibitively expensive. So, Amtrak it was. Until...one of my friends mentioned taking the bus. I investigated Greyhound, and it equaled 15 hours of misery and 150 bucks down the train. It was a better investment to spend $250 on Amtrak, I thought. But then, I thought about Chinatown. And the Bolt Bus. And the lightbulb clicked. I checked the schedules, and if I left Boston at 7:30 a.m., had a 1.5 hour layover in NYC, and got a connecting bus trip down to D.C., I'd have a 10-hour trip for the grand sum of $35, or, for roundtrip, $70. Right now, when my copious amounts of time are worth less than my savings, that's the sort of trip I'm willing to take.

That convinced me. Thus begins the great Bolt Bus experience on July 10!

Saturday, July 05, 2008

 

happy fourth!

I know I'm addicted to Carolyn Hax to the point where it's probably really old for all of my friends, but I was just reading an archived column and she had said something really insightful:

Mature people distinguish between the things they can and can't change, and adapt their own behavior accordingly. Immature people expect everyone else to adapt to their own expectations.

It's so true. One of the more freeing things I've learned how to do (okay, still learning how to do it, to be precise) is just that. You can't change others, but you can change your reaction to them. This is pretty much the basic foundation that Hax builds everything upon, I think...that you can't change others, but you can change YOU. If you're not happy about your life, do everything in your power to make yourself happy. Don't wait for others to fix it for you, or to "fix" their behaviors so that they match your ideal (because they won't!).

At any rate. I'm pretty sure I've said that all before, and recently, but whatever. Today was the fourth...it was a bit not-how-I-planned. I got up around 10 a.m., heard some nice country music on the radio, rolled out of my bed...and my dad called up the stairs to let me know that he was taking Seamus (our dog) to the E.R. I threw on some clothes and went with him. Seamus is usually so freaking obnoxious, jumping around, bouncing up and down, biting me in the stringy back of the leg where my calves and thighs meet. But he was just lying in the crate, not moving, and he was crying when we moved him. He had morphed into a 99-year-old dog suffering from arthritis overnight, apparently.

So, at the E.R. they admit him right away (what service!) and it wasn't looking too crowded—we were set up for a nice short visit. But then a boxer came in with an allergic reaction, and he was having trouble breathing without grunting like a potbellied pig. Seamus dropped down the totem pole then, I think. Then some woman brought in a wild bunny that had been mauled by some critter and needed to be sent to the hereafter STAT. THEN some woman brought in her dachshund. It was having puppies, and one puppy was stuck (yeah. stuck!). And then the pizza man delivered six pizzas to the secret doctor area, which I'm sure set us back a few minutes.

Since poor little Seamus wasn't an extreme foot-sticking-out-of-ass case, we ended being the first ones in the waiting room at 10:30 and the last ones out at 1:55 p.m. They're not quite sure what's going on — he either has a mild case of lyme disease or he has massive neurological issues. Obviously we're hoping that it's lyme disease, but we'll find out when he either recovers in the next 48 hours or takes a tragic turn for the worse. Poor little puppy. :-( He's like my freaking sunshine right now; I hope he'll be okay.



On a more positive note, I had a great time at the family party that we hit up after the Doggy E.R. I ate LOTS of good food, drank copious amounts of beer, played baggo, and hung out with my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Also, it was announced that one of my cousins just got engaged! Which is really exciting...I love a wedding, and this is going to be a great one.

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