I think I shall go shoe shopping today. I love overwhelming futility of looking for attractive shoes in my size, and the crushing insecurity you get from clerks escorting you from the aisles of shoes intended for contortionists/teenagers.
“Another one wandered off from the ‘sensible’ aisle, Tyffany.”
We got my dog about 9 years ago. He is a wonderful dog, and the whole experience of getting him was excellent. I found a breeder of mixed breed dogs, because I have allergies and couldn’t risk getting a shelter pup of questionable lineage. Her dogs were actually cross-breeds, so both parents were purebred. I spoke several times on the phone with the breeder about our needs, the kind of dog that would fit in best with my family. She had several litters of mixed breed pups brewing, and most types were only available 2 or 3 times a year at most. It was a small, family-run breeding business and the puppies spent a lot of time with her family, making them well-socialized.
I sent photos of Phantom to her and a few became part of the website. I would peek back on periodically, and a few years ago noticed she had a LOT more puppies available, in a LOT of new mixes. Like, a LOT. This bothered me, as I knew when we got my dog the litters were housed in an area attached to her home where she also did grooming. I should have given it more thought than I did, but I didn’t.
Yesterday I tried to pull up the site to look for a photo of a specific mix, and the site was unavailable. This morning I did some digging. There were complaints that she was running a puppy mill, dating back to 2011 or so. The large numbers of available puppies apparently were a concern. There wasn’t any record of an “aha!” Investigation into her business, it appears people where making claims and asking her to provide photos of the building where the puppies were housed, and a claim that the family no longer lived on the property.
There were no new mentions of her, the website, her business or anthing after 2012. It appears she sold the whole thing to someone who went out of business last year. It probably didn’t help that even if the new owner was on the up and up, the old domain was listed on the web as a puppy mill.
I feel things went off the rails when they started to make money, and just kept adding more and more dogs, built a separate building for them, etc. I’m not convinced they run it like one of those horrid mills with wire cages, etc., (because nothing I’ve read says that was the case) but the only photos I ever saw were the old days. When the dogs were happy and playing with the family. I hope.
Yesterday, the world lost an amazing person. My ex-colleague, Kip Martin, died of complications from liver disease.
Kip may have been the funniest person I’ve ever met. Well, funny because he had the same sense of humor as me, which is priceless in a friend. We shared a love of old tv sitcoms; his favorites were the world of Paul Henning’s design, especially Green Acres. We were the only two people on the planet who saw the brilliance of Tom Arnold’s Jackie Thomas Show. He understood the perfection of the book of Leonard Nemoy love poems that became shared property of the group of tech writers to which we belonged. Some of his legacy lives on at this website. We had a conversation about That Girl, and how it would suck to be “Mr. Marie.” That started a list of other people with first names for last names. The paper hung outside my cubicle and we all contributed. The List of Famous People With a First Name for a Last Name has been on this site for 18 years now. Two other lists, Famous Bobs (anyone named Robert was included, see “Bob Louis Stevenson”) and Famous Dicks were also created.
Kip and I lost touch but reconnected via Facebook a few years ago, where I learned of his liver problems, and how it kept him from working, which kept him from being able to afford health insurance. If he could get the liver covered, given it was a pre-existing condition. He needed a transplant, and couldn’t afford to get one. I screen captured part of a post of his from 2011, which I’ve included below.
I want you to read what he wrote closely. This man knew that to survive he needed a transplant, and he needed insurance that covered pre-existing conditions to get it. He was waiting for ACA to be available – he assumed in 2013. By the time the political bullshit got worked out and Universal Healthcare FINALLY kicked in on Jan 1, 2014, his liver (and now his kidneys) were failing. He was hospitalized but it was really too late to do anything. He died less than a month after the thing he hoped would keep him alive was finally available.
The only death panels in this story are the politicians would fought to keep the people who need it most from getting insurance necessary to stay alive. As far as I’m concerned, politics killed my friend. Do not DARE try to tell me how bad the ACA is, when a lack of it hastened this man’s death. Just do not.
My son starred as Billy Flynn in Chicago over the weekend. I took video of his three big numbers.
(Quality: taken with my iPhone from the back half of the theater, surprisingly not horrible, but not flawless.)
We Both Reached For The Gun (live, this number brought the house down)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykkipCi-47E
Razzle Dazzle (This one is stuck in my head) http://youtu.be/J3heVAVjyuo
All I Care About Is Love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ROEuy2WHU
Yesterday the people in my work group were invited to participate in an ugly Christmas sweater contest with a group sitting in our section of the building. Normally we have very little to do with these people, which is what happens in company with 40,000 employees. But clearly we have been identified as movers and shakers and people who enjoy embarrassing ourselves, so they reached out.
There’s a dress code policy in the office and one of the rewards we are given as a motivator is the ability to wear jeans on certain days. (I’d like to point out that while we are allowed to wear jeans, at no point are we ever allowed to wear sneakers. Some of us have worked around that ruled by finding brands of sneakers that don’t look like sneakers. I have become a person who went from wearing sneakers to work every day to not even wearing sneakers on weekends. Maybe that’s a sign of maturity. Maybe it’s a sign of laziness, because most of my shoes don’t require me to tie them.)
So when I heard that anyone participating in the ugly sweater contest would be allowed to wear jeans, I immediately started looking online for ugly Christmas sweaters. With only two weeks until Christmas, most of the “good” styles are sold out, or have had prices jacked up. Unfortunately given the time of year and the desperation someone like me feels, anything still available is priced at $40 or higher. I just can’t spend $40 on an ugly Christmas sweater. The prize would have to be cash of that amount or higher. I don’t think there’s a prize at all, just questionable bragging rights. You can get the following for sixty five dollars.
There are some fantastic ugly Christmas sweaters out there. There are also a lot of ugly Christmas sweaters that feature reindeer having sex. I didn’t know that this was a thing, but apparently it is. Three reindeer having sex, two reindeer having sex. I don’t know if any of the sweaters with a single reindeer having sex, I wasn’t looking that closely.
I decided spending $40 on an ugly Christmas sweater just so I could wear jeans on Tuesday is probably not a good use of my hard-earned cash. Last night I was going through my closet I found a sweater that some might consider a little ugly. The design on the sweater is very busy, and looks something like black and white snowflakes. I realized with horror that I could wear this sweater for ugly sweater day, and most people would agree that it was ugly.
Thus my existential sweater crisis. If I wear the sweater for Ugly Sweater Day, I can no longer wear that sweater for Not Ugly Sweater Day. On the other hand, if it fits in so nicely for ugly sweater day, it’s probably an ugly sweater. If I wear it a month from now, will people think, “wow that’s an ugly sweater.” More importantly, have I doomed it by even considering it for Tuesday?
I think the answer is clear. I need to wire that puppy up with blinking lights and appliqué snowmen and OWN Ugly Sweater Day. I’m going to do it for the children.
