plunderpuss

When I'm crapping myself in a nursing home, this is one of the things I will remember.

…So before it slips too far behind, I’d like to photographically chronicle a recent hike I took. We went on Excelsior Pass. I gotta tell ya, that hike is a pain in the ass. I had to crabstep sideways during long stretches because it was uncomfortable to take a forward step when it meant my foot was going to be at a 45 degree angle to my shin.

You can see, though, that it was worth it. Not just to lay in a waterfall, with hot sun on my belly and face and cool mountain water soaking the sweat out of my t-shirt. There were lots of tiny details to enjoy.

They must be poisonous, or there'd be more than one bite taken out. hehehe

One of those photos you take because you know it'll make a good LOLcat some day...

Favorite photo I took on that hike.

We didn’t make it up to the top because of time and heart attack constraints, but we’ll go back again some time. I know this because we need to dangle a camera down The Hole.  Neither WTA.org nor Google can tell me what this mystery hole is for or how it came to be.

John threw a rock and it made noise for a long, long time.

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

He eats everything he can fit in his mouth, plays in mud, and LOVEd these little guys. I think he's a pigbull.

Hanzo saw the piglets from about twenty feet away and perked up, wagging his tail, just like he does for other dogs. We took him up to the fence and he touched their noses with his, then licked their faces like he does with people. He was pretty happy to just sniff and lick, but the piglets of course have a different agenda. They’re only curious until they find out whether there is food involved; Hanzo didn’t feed them, so they became disinterested and wandered away. Hanzo uttered a heartbreaking whine, just the way he does when there’s a dog he likes behind a fence he can’t play with, or a child in a stroller he can’t lick.

It was one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

I need somewhere to sleep the nights of June 25 and June 26. My original plans fell through.*

I don’t have a car, and I strongly prefer not to be late/miss part of the (expensive!) writing workshop because I screw up the bus schedule. So I need a place on Capital Hill–then I can walk there! If you live on Cap Hill, or if you’re staying in a hotel for the Locus Awards, please consider having me.

Reasons you should offer to house me for two nights:

1. I won’t get cooties on you or your stuff. I will bring my own bedding, and I definitely want the floor. (It’s possible I would even prefer your porch/balcony.)

2. You won’t have to see me, speak with me, or acknowledge me unnecessarily. I’ll either be at the workshop, or doing homework from the workshop for the entire weekend. (If you like, I’m sure we can arrange to have dinner and hang out a bit… after all, I don’t make a lot of social trips outside Bellingham, and whoever you are, I probably like you! I just mean you won’t be obligated to entertain me.)

3. I’m perfectly capable of wearing a pair of headphones as I sleep (or all the time) to tune out whatever it is you’re doing with that jackhammer and those aardvarks.

4. I don’t expect charity. I don’t have much $$$ left after the workshop tuition, but I can pony up about $30 a night. Or we can trade slave labor! I can brush your teeth for you or something.

5. Being in my near vicinity is scientifically proven to give you super powers. And not shitty Aquaman powers, either, but like, laser eyes.

6. You can gawk at my gorgeous new hairstyle/color(s). No, I’m not showing you a photo. That takes away incentive!

* A few people have already offered to house me, but I’m hesitant for various reasons–they live too far away, they already have company, etc. So I probably won’t have to sleep in an alley, but my options at the moment, in spite of the fantastic spirit in which they were offered, are less than optimal.

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

Hanzo has a condition called “luxating patella,” or “kneecap fell out of place and is floating around like a kid with an illicit hall pass.”

(Dark as the inside of my dog's leg...)

Usually, this happens to small breeds like Yorkshire terriers or pomeranians, in which case it’s congenital. Sometimes, it happens to larger dogs, especially active jumpy ones like our spazzy little pitbull. We don’t know how it occurred. It could have been trauma that we didn’t witness (or that we underestimated the impact of), or it could have been uneven development in his hind legs that stretched out the ligament. Apparently sometimes dogs with muscular legs get a slightly bowed bone as they develop, and that creates sideways pressure on the patella.

He’s going in for surgery tomorrow morning. If I understand correctly, the vet is going to deepen the groove in the femur (top white blob) where that little bean-shaped thing (patella) is supposed to go, then stuff it back in, and attach the loose ligament to a pin in the tibial ridge (poky bit on the right of the bottom white blob)  so it doesn’t come loose again. Captain Jumpytron will have to remain quiet and mostly still for six weeks.

Because if he doesn’t, he’ll have to have surgery again, and then be still for twelve weeks. (As you can see below, that is going to be impossible without a boatload of tranquilizers.)

Poor Hanzo.

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

My dog has an ugly nudibranch for a mouth.

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

Photo by John Poor

I didn’t look much like Lady Gaga, but it was close enough for most drunk people to figure out who I was, and then holler encouraging nonsense at me from blocks away. They were only excited because they didn’t see this photo:

(You don't want to know. But you can probably guess.)

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At the beginning of the evening, I looked like this:

Click the jump to see the rest of the step-by-step process!

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Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

At about 9:30 p.m. my boss calls to let us know that there’s been a string of robberies in the past few days. The perpetrator was a Caucasian male in black clothes who told the clerks he had a bomb hidden under his clothes; alternately, he would show them a butcher knife.

Good plan.

Now, I don’t actually tell my co-worker about this, because I don’t want to worry her, and what are the chances this goon is going to pick our store? Right? We’re as prepared as we always are. We have a selection of panic buttons, two phones, state-of-the-art security cameras, and we’re double-staffed.

Half of an hour later, this clown shuffles in wearing an outfit his big brother must not have wanted and insists he has a bomb hidden…somewhere. He flails around on an explosive Easter egg hunt inside his own pants, and while to us this just looks like public masturbation, he clearly thinks this indicates he has a Looney Tunes-sized case of TNT in his jockstrap.

The way he walks and talks sounds like he really hopes he’s the bad guy in a low-budget blaxploitation flick. If you’re going to use the M.F. word as punctuation, and you want me to be threatened by it, you better sound like you mean it at least as much as Samuel L. Jackson does. Especially when you have sweaty withdrawal skin, googly Cookie Monster eyes, and you’re hiding half of your face like an Old West bandit.

I think the poor robber was just trying to hide his messed up meth teeth.

Him: “I have a bomb! Give me all the money!”

Me: “No. You don’t. We already got a call about you.”

(This is the point where I suddenly realize my coworker ‘Tasha actually thinks there might be a bomb strapped to this nervous wreck’s genitals. Oops. Prooobably should have told her.)

He isn’t stunned for long, but his next brilliant move is to pull out his butcher knife… Which is still in the sheath, with two snaps holding it there. If I was the kind of idiot who refuses to give money to an armed robber (I’m only the kind of idiot who tells them they’re a liar), I could have made it to Miami and been sitting in a wicker chair sipping a freaking maitai by the time his shaky hands got that thing loose, and even if he tried to chase me,  he would have tripped over his floppy pants and stabbed himself in his penis. (I don’t know how his junk managed to get out of our store in one piece.)

Also good plan.

Me, as I reach toward the button that opens the register: “Okay, I’ll give it to you. But the police are already on their way here. We hit the buttons.”

Him: “You’re [Redacted]suckers. [Redacted] this!”

He throws a plastic bag on the counter and storms out just as awkwardly as you’d expect from someone who is trying to walk inside of a camping tent. He was a two-second wait from getting several hundred dollars. And he left.

Robber: 0. Me and 'Tasha: Plastic bag.

In conclusion,

1. My retired police officer father is going to kill me when he finds out I sassed a robber after the stories he’s told me and

2. This guy is just lucky he didn’t spill anything on ‘Tasha:

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

On Saturday, I went on a hike with Hanzo and my friends Elizabeth and Studphish (don’t ask, it’s a long story). We were looking for this little-known trail with lots of big sandbars sticking out into the Skagit River, but instead we found ourselves at a derelict concrete factory by an abandoned limestone quarry.

IT. WAS. SO. COOL.

It's a fixer-upper.

Stud was the first to venture inside:

(sing with me) Fat man in a little hole! Fat man in a little hole!

The inside smelled of pee and wet stone, exactly like a real goblin lair! We set about looking for goblins, but mostly we found dangerous holes and graffiti that could have used some copy-editing.

This building was built by the Swiss. Or maybe by Frank Lloyd Wr--Okay, I won't. I won't. Just put down the hammer.

He doesn't see the resemblance.

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Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

I'm thoughtful. And CLASSY.

All joking cat sex aside, my mother is amazing. She’s good at anything she tries to do. She can craft, garden, cook, sew, sculpt, collage, paint, fix up old antiques to look less crappy than they really are, and she is an unending fount of intuitive patience for those she loves (and even those she doesn’t). There’s more, but I don’t want to make you feel bad about yourself compared to how great my mom is.

Here, let me show you a photo!

You can see where I learned my classiness.

All right, all right. Maybe this is a good time to show you this photo. You can see by the way she’s looking at me that she’s used to me posting those other things, and yet she still loves me. Best mother ever!

Classy women like this can easily pretend I'm not their least favorite child.

(BTW I took that photo of those cats last year and I’ve been waiting for a chance to use it. And no, they’re not my cats, who are spayed and neutered because I am responsible like my Mom taught me to be.)

Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.

This is just a fracion of my colossal pigsty.

Okay, all finished? Here are the answers:

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Originally published at Calamity Cove. You can comment here or there.