February 2008

Sg and I had our first conversation last weekend. She learned the sign for milk, but she thinks it means “give me what I want”. Which I guess it does, so long as she wants milk.

Anyway, we had fun with that during breakfast, when what she wanted was milk. So at lunch, when she made the sign, I hurried off to get a glass of milk. When I came back and offered her the straw, she frowned at me and shook her head “no”. Then she pointed at her cereal box on the table and made the milk sign.

I figured I’d offer her milk whenever she made the sign and eventually she’d figure it out. So throughout lunch, she would say “milk”, and then I would say “would you like some milk?” She: “No - I don’t want that; I want cereal.” Me: “Oh, ok, here’s a few cheerios.” That’s a conversation, right?

It was at first, anyway. By the end of the meal the whole thing had become a ritualized little game, and even her “no - I don’t want that” frown was playful.

Somehow mixing Madonna with the Sex Pistols only brings her up to their level. This song is too long, though, so I usually only listen to the first half.

Prologue: at the end of a week that felt unusually long (for reasons that are sort of hazy to me), and at the end of a Friday that felt particularly gruesome (same as ante), Cathy sent me a picture of a rat terrier puppy, all curled up on a pillow and looking a lot like baby Daisy. “Is this a dog that’s up for adoption?” Yep. The dog’s name was Olive, and she was featured on this page. I filled out an application to adopt.

Today: My dad and I spent the morning setting up his new laptop, and then AT, sg, Daisy and I drove over to Atlanta Pet Rescue and got in line for an interview. Daisy was exceedingly well-behaved. You probably already know that, while Daisy is very sweet and eager to please, she is also fairly tightly wound, and on many days being trapped on a leash in a room full of dogs would be enough stimulation to put her over the top. Again: good girl, but prone to fits of, um, enthusiasm.

(“AAAAH! AAAH! OMY GOD! WHY ARE WE SHOUTING!?”)

Anyway, she was very good.

The interview was in a little chain-link partition with a door so everyone could be off their leashes. I think that Daisy gets that Olive is a puppy, because she let Olive get away with a few things that might normally have caused some tension. Like, for example, when I was sitting on the floor and Olive crawled up into my lap. Daisy stared and seemed slightly anxious, but didn’t rush in to squeeze in closer to me (as she has always sought to squeeze in between me and the cats). So it went well, except: there was another family there to interview about Olive.

!

We waited while this other couple played with our puppy, but it turns out that there was no reason to worry, as they weren’t married, just living together, both work full time, don’t plan to crate train, and the guy has had two other rat terriers that he had to get rid of. Contrast that with our life, which is, like, Martha Stewart, possessed by the spirit of Betty Crocker, being married to a Jason Seaver/Ward Cleaver hybrid with a baby made of gold that meditates and hovers a full foot off the ground while she does it. So ha, we win.

Olive and Daisy played together in the backyard for a while, which generally went pretty well. Back inside, there were a few tense moments while Daisy laid down some ground rules, but Olive seemed to get it, and as I write this they’re curled up on the bed together.

So here’s Olive (and then I’ll describe the car wreck):

So then AT and I are in the living room with the dogs and there’s this extended wail of skidding tires out on DeKalb, and it goes on long enough, and doesn’t seem to be easing up, and you just know it will be punctuated by the *WHUNK* of two cars trying to occupy the same space. And it was. The time that we’ve been in Atlanta is the only time in my life that the number of car crashes I hear in real life is greater than the number of car crashes I hear on TV and in movies. It’s been a surprise to find that they sound less like the apocalypse and more like a rubbermaid container full of poorly-packed silverware being dropped a few feet to the floor, only louder.

Anyway, some guy in a pickup was going to fast (he must have been — he was skidding for a good two seconds before smacking the car in front of him, but the damage was pretty extensive) and not paying attention and hit some guy in a Ford Escape. I happened to have a phone in my hand, so I called 911, and I told them that I didn’t think anyone was hurt — the guy in the pickup was already out of his car and walking around, and the Escape just didn’t seem to be as badly damaged as the pickup. But the guy in the Escape, the rear-endee, ended up sitting in his car for about half an hour and eventually being put into an ambulance on a stretcher and wearing a neck brace.

Here’s why I’m telling this story: the guy who was just driving around in his mini-SUV (hey, I drive around in a mini-SUV!) had his three or four year old daughter in a car-seat in the back. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that she’s fine — she’s in a five-point restraint harness, her head is lighter, she’s probably more flexible than her dad, etc. But now dad’s immobilized and, eventually, on a stretcher. What kind of decisions does he make? Hopefully he was able to call someone to come be with his daughter while he was getting x-rayed and cat-scanned, but jeez. I mean, he’s sitting around with a spinal cord injury at exactly the time when he’d probably most like to be in control for his kid. That sucks.

Final note: the guy in the pickup was out of the pickup when I walked up to where they’d pulled aside and in a big hurry to explain himself. To me! “I didn’t see it, just heard it”, I said. He’s got some faded hipster t-shirt on, a suit coat, blue jeans and sneakers, and long greasy hair that he keeps running his fingers through like a sixth-grade girl (you know, fingers move from temple to behind the ear, with a little jerk of the head at the end that’s an unconscious and muted, but unmistakable, parody of “salon fresh” hair care product commercials). He has an iPhone. “I already called 911”, I said. I did not add “…so you can put away your fashion phone” or cough a fake cough that sounded like the word “douchebag”.

I was looking around on the web for something I could use as a visual indicator of the ratings that restaurants will get via Operation Munch Eagle, and I didn’t find much. I ended up making some buttons, and I figured I’d put them out there in case anyone else is ever searching for something similar.

• Download the .png files.
  5 Point Rating Google Maps Icons by Lance McCord are licensed
  under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License .
• Download the Photoshop file (so’s you can make your own, or scale these down to a more resonable size).
  5 Point Rating Google Maps Icons Photoshop File by Lance McCord is
  licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License .

Here’s what they look like:

This is for one star, where one star is bad, because nothing says “just don’t” like a big fat black diagonal slash.

Two stars - it kind of looks like two poo-sticks raced across this button; at least they’re trying.

Three stars - swooosh! Things are looking up!

Four stars - this looks like some kind of space-general’s button; must be very important.

Five stars - I was running out of ideas.