Erm, I guess you can see I wasn’t all that crazy about nablopomo.
More tomorrow. Busy snuggling nano.
Archives for the month of: November, 2007
Jen, I’m looking at you.
What sort of vegetables does one dip into a cheese fondue?
One of my favorite things about having nano in our life (other than, say, his rollicking adorability) is the whole dog/park-socializing thing. Who knew so many people in my neighborhood were friendly? I didn’t, not until I started dragging a ten-pound ball of cute around on a red leash.
We’ve met an elderly chihuahua dame with speckled fur like a palomino; she wears pearls around her neck and nano is be-smitten with her. We’ve met a big old boxer/pit mix named Maddie who’s gentle as a lamb with nano. We’ve met two labs named Marlowe and Beckham and their athletic owners, one of whom is in law school. We’ve met Kenzie, an extremely adorable Shepherd/collie puppy with enormous paws that spent quality time on nano’s head.
Of all nano’s shynesses, and they are legion, other dogs are not amongst them. He spent most of Thanksgiving weekend politely keeping a three-foot berth from my incredibly patient family, all of whom are good with dogs. He’s put up heroic resistance to most of our house guests and everyone on the street who literally cannot help crouch down and coo at his extreme cuteness. I explained to a friend that I suspect to nano, we are all like the Empire State Building, and when we crouch down and think we’re making ourselves less intimidating, what we’re actually doing is mimicking a controlled demolition of the Empire State Building.
But nano is good with other dogs. And I am good with other humans. So when we meet fellow park-goers, there’s this wonderful little repartee where I socialize with the human and nano exchanges butt-sniffing protocols with the dogs.
I’m grateful for that. Not the butt-sniffing per se, but feeling like I’m part of my neighborhood, thanks to the little ball of cute on the end of the red leash.
Here it is again, another evening winding inexorably until midnight, and me whining that I have nothing to blo for napomo. Today I worked for over ten hours! Today projects bested me and deadlines fuddled me! Today, Stuart had the day off and updated me throughout the day on nano, and the cute things he did.
Today I ate little reese’s peanut butter cups to stay sane while I shuffled and re-shuffled the week’s priorities to make room for bigger, loomier projects. While I sat there I thought about the turkey, and my family, and the crunchy yellow leaves in the park.
There isn’t a moral here. Shoo! Sometimes a crappy day is just a crappy day, not a box of chocolates. However, I will award special points to 9pm onwards, where Stuart made sure there was dinner (reheated Brazilian from mom, thanks mom!) and a glass of wine and magazines and an adorable dog waiting for me, and then we watched a scary Doctor Who episode and then I curled up with some long-overdue Grey’s Anatomy. Oh, Shonda Rhimes! But also, oh, Stuart! You are both awesome.
(Stuart is awesomer, obvs.)
drinks and dinner, late.
nano, he has to pee, bad.
responsibility!
For Thanksgiving weekend when no one is reading blogs anyway, a rare meme! Mayumi, god love you, this is the only one I’m doing! But I’m doing it. And I’m not tagging anyone. Kids! Getoffamylawn etc.
So! The Seven Things You Didn’t Know But Probably Did Because I’ve Probably Resorted to This Cheap Blogging Trick Before Meme:
1. My heart catches every time I change lanes, no matter how many times I’ve checked the blind spot.
2. I eat nutella with the tiniest coffee spoon I can find. If none is available, I actually eat it with the handle of a spoon so I can take tiny, tiny amounts at a time. This never actually stops me from snarfing a third of the jar in one sitting.
3. Quiet people make me exceedingly nervous. They are surely judging me!
4. I bite my fingers. No, not my nail. The cuticle and surrounding area to the nail. It’s disgusting! Let’s never talk about it again.
5. I sleep like a chalk-outlined dead body. Stuart would like me to point out that I also pivot in place by launching my body into the air and turning. With a pillow between my knees. This makes him insane.
6. I laugh really hard when I fall down and get really quiet when I’m angry and rail against stupid grammar mistakes while using LOLcatspeak and, well, and other contradictory things as well. I also enjoy being a hypocrite, like mocking a trend until I decide I like it or making fun of something and then coveting it ravenously (hello, iPhone). Somehow, all these things bother other people more than they bother me since I see no reason to be consistent about the small stuff. Please! I’m already consistent on a macro level.
7. I thought Larry King’s name was Larry King Live until I was about 10 years old. I never realized polar bears were so named because they are found at the pole or that Slytherin is also, like, slithering. I like to think that my brain is too busy with serious issues to figure these things out. Other people disagree.
Bonus Thing! Apparently, re-reading the last two, 8. I disagree with other people a lot.
Nano would like to put a bid in for the pack to move to Providence, immediately, so that he can spend all his available time in this park. Which, you know, is right across the street. Need he say more?
No, he thinks not.
Today I am grateful:
For a family full of immigrants around the table, enjoying the all-American splendor.
For words from far-flung friends.
For crisp sunny walks with my pack.
For nano and his ever-widening circle of confidence.
For my mother and father and brother and all the ways they made me, and continue to inform me.
For quality sappy television on this most awesome of holidays.
For sharing Stuart’s sense of humor so acutely. Junk mail pinatas! The Britney/Barcardi Float! Spinging!
(For Stuart, obvs.)
For turkey and stuffing and different potatoes and two kinds of dessert and the tryptophantasticness of it all.
For missing the dog show every year because of cooking, and for knowing it will be on the next day.
For a holiday without too much fanfare and just enough food and family to go around.
For you! and YOU! And heck, even you.
Coming to Rhode Island is always a peculiar brand of wonderful. I love my parents’ home with the sort of delight that only comes after your family has lived in dozens of homes for the past few decades and you know the true meaning of settling down.
It’s also – did you know this? – beautiful here. The crispness of the clean air, the wide boulevards, the riotous fall colors, the sweet wooden houses. Providence’s East Side fulfills every single inch of my rigid aesthetic boundaries. It is very simply beautiful without making any challenging demands, like New York does. New York asks you to love it in spite of the grime and the grit and the damage. My parents’ neighborhood embraces you with pastel wood patios and original details and ginko biloba trees.
My parents’ house is all familiar furniture, airy doorways, bright glass windows. Everything is a memento, everything smells fresh and clean and in its right place. There are tiny bite marks on the coffee table – I put them there when I was a toddler. There is a painting I made, hanging in my father’s study, of a palomino horse with no dimensionality. I remember the smell of the book from which I copied the horse. In my ten-year-old mind, I named her Isabella. I was sort of obsessed with horses.
I love New York. But when we come to Rhode Island, I can see some watercolor-dripped future where we live in a tiny vibrant city in an old, wide-streeted neighborhood with wooden houses and ginko biloba trees and a PT Cruiser.
I’m not sure if I’ve made my peace with the conflicts between loving the city and relishing this easier, prettier and slower life. Maybe one day, I will. But I guess it’s Thanksgiving and we spent all day cooking in the kitchen and introducing our dog to a new place and it’s been such a good day, so I’ll just be thankful for both worlds.
