Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

...and I covet this new shoe from J.Crew:



And that's all I have to say for myself today. Thanks for playing.

D's summertime activities have produced more entertaining fare than my own. To wit:


Space Roke from Derek Jenkins on Vimeo.

In the year 2070, Colonel Blaze Blasterson crash landed on a strange planet. He's been stuck in that fiery wasteland for years, his only company a monkey named Reginald and a beat-up old karaoke machine. Slowly but surely, trudging across the desolate landscape in search of food and water, during their heartfelt duets under the stars, he and Corporal Reginald fell deeply in love. That all ended two years ago when Reginald was swallowed whole by a Flaming Blort. Left with nobody else to duet with, Blaze sings alone and dreams of his lost love. He's the loneliest man in the galaxy. Instead of being one of two "Islands in the Stream," he's found himself deserted.

In space, no one can hear you sing.

(This is what happened after we watched Robinson Crusoe on Mars a couple weeks ago.)

Yesterday I purchased a bra that came with extra parts and instructions.

I assure you that I am not amply endowed enough to warrant such extravagance—but when Victoria's Secret is having a sale, what's a girl to do?

In other news, I am exhausted. I'm teaching two full summer session courses. I'm sitting on, what, six? different thesis committees for students who must defend before August. I'm raising a puppy who is hitting puberty and consequently becoming insane. D has given her three baths in the last five days because she will not stop rolling in her own shit every time she goes outside. (Fortunately for your heroine, Miss Daisy is now too large for me to control in the bathtub, so bathing her is D's job.) I'm working on three—wait, four—different writing projects, all of which I'd hoped to have out by summer's end. I'm waiting to hear back from a journal on whether they want to publish something I sent them. I'm worried they don't. I'm planning a wedding. We discovered two days ago that we'd planned our Fayetteville reception for the same weekend as the home game against Ole Miss, which means that there is literally not a single hotel room available in all of northwest Arkansas. We're rescheduling the reception.

In the midst of all of this, I treated myself to a lip gloss and overdrew my checking account and got charged, like, a billion dollar penalty fee. Now I'm just avoiding the bank.

I'm sure there's a LOLcat out there that is perfectly appropriate to my current mood, but I'm too tired to find it.

more cat

Your result for The Commonly Confused Words Test ...
English Genius

You scored 100% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 100% Expert!
You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!

Take the quiz yourself

If I'd scored less, I obviously wouldn't have bothered to post this meme.

Having slept poorly (which is to say, not at all) the previous two nights, last night I slept soundly and dreamt of being reunited with my puppy, only to wake at 8:52am to the horrible realization that my first class was starting at 9:10.

I was in the classroom at exactly 9:10, with lipgloss on.

I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed of myself.

Things that are wrong right now:

1. D and Daisy Mae are out of town for a few days and I am going through puppy withdrawal.

2. It is six am and I am awake.

3. One of the reasons I am awake is because I cut my finger on broken glass last night and it hurt so much I couldn't sleep, which is a lot, because, as you may recall, I'm the girl who slept quite soundly two nights in a row before discovering she had a broken wrist.

4. Back in my one-time hometown, Bon Jovi are playing a free concert in Central Park and I can't go, not that I would, but if I still lived in New York at least I could.

A review I wrote for The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation has just gone up on their website. To be honest, it is not very interesting, and the book was not very good, but it's there and you can look at it if you're looking to kill another few minutes staring at your computer. Go here, click on "Essay-Reviews," and then on "Imagining the Female Nation."

As my closest friends know, and as NKB can confirm following her recent Arkansan adventure, I have a severe addiction to bath and body product, and minty ones in particular. I recently stocked up on old favorites and made some new discoveries, so I thought I'd share.

Minty bath products are fantastic year-round. In the summer they cool you off; in the winter, they relieve the perennial head-cold. I also swear by an extended minty shower as hangover treatment. I particularly recommend the following:

Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Liquid Soap: This classic Dr. B's is a staple of my shower stock. We always have a bottle in there. D won't wash with anything else since I introduced him to it. Dr. B's is great for travel, too, because you can use it as a shampoo, hand wash laundry detergent, and surface cleaner as well. I will add that some people find Dr. B's Peppermint a little intense for more intimate personal cleansing, so unless you're up for some kinky clean, proceed with caution.

Stress Relief Sugar Scrub in Tranquil Mint: part of Bath & Body Works' aromatherapy line, this scrub is possibly the best thing B&B Works has ever done. The essential oils base is deeply minty and leaves you feeling tingly and fresh. I also like the Body Wash and Lotion in this scent, which is refreshing without being medicinal.

C. O. Bigelow Mentha Hair Mint-Infused Invigorating Shampoo and Conditioner: C. O. Bigelow's classic apothecary in New York's West Village is one of my favorite hometown indulgences, and I was delighted when B&B Works started carrying their signature line in their stores. Minty shampoo is a necessary everyday luxury.

Aveda Rosemary Mint Shampoo and Conditioner: my staple hair care products before Bigelow joined the minty hair industry. These products smell so delicious you will want to eat them. I do not recommend that, but they are fantastic for hair washing.

I'll just let this one speak for itself, friends.

Portable Karaoke Machine for Singing on the Fly

TOKYO (Reuters) - Love to sing? A Japanese toy maker will soon sell a portable, personal karaoke machine so you can belt out your favorite tunes anywhere, and without having to wait for the microphone.

The "Hi-kara" karaoke machine, by Takara Tomy, is a 7-cm (nearly 3-inch) cube which weighs less than a pound and works like a real machine.

Once the singer selects a song, which can be downloaded off the Internet or from special music cartridges, the lyrics come up on a 2.4-inch display. The machine also has headphones and speakers attached.

"Hi-kara" will go on sale in October for about $100, with song cartridges costing about $40 each.

Shigekazu Mihashi, marketing director at Takara Tomy, told Reuters the machine was aimed at youngsters who could not go into karaoke booths or parlors, which often serve alcohol.

According to Japanese law, youngsters under 16 must leave karaoke parlors by 6 p.m. while those aged under 18 can stay only until 11 p.m.

"Girls who are middle-school age and under can't go to karaoke parlors by themselves even if they wanted to sing, but now they can try it at home with this new karaoke machine," Mihashi said.

Japan is the birthplace of the first karaoke machine and the word is derived from the Japanese for "empty orchestra." Karaoke singing is popular all over the world, and especially in Asia where many families own personal karaoke machines and "KTV" lounges abound.

Is there anything the Japanese haven't thought of?

Last night I dreamt I had written a paper on the objectification of race in family heirlooms and when it was finished I hoped it would land me a job at my alma mater and Bruce Robbins, a friend of my one-time dissertation director, kindly offered to read it for me because he's on the faculty there and when he gave it back he'd written on the back of the first page, "I can't find an argument here because you have no THOUGHT TREE! How can you know what you CAN'T-HAVE? How do you choose a beer in the bar??? You can't have it all at once!" and even though he'd put smiley faces all over to let me know he was nice and said I should send it along to Columbia when it was completed I cried big frustrated tears because my dissertation director had always tried to teach me how to use "thought trees" but I just didn't get it and also Bruce Robbins gave me a B+ and there was some other guy I didn't think was very smart and I saw he had an A-

I also dreamt that one of my graduate students caught on to my sinister plan never to actually read and return any of their written work and my only hope was that none of the other students would believe him because he had a reputation for being kind of a dweeb

Astute reader (and karaoke superstar) SHock recently sent me this follow-up to my last Weird Japanese News alert. Yahoo! News reports that a Japanese patient's "tumor" turned out to be a 25-year-old towel:

TOKYO (AFP) - Doctors who carried out surgery on a Japanese man to remove a "tumour" had good news and bad news for him. He did not have cancer -- but the "growth" that had been causing him pain was in fact a 25-year-old surgical towel.

The patient had been carrying the cloth since 1983, when surgeons at the Asahi General Hospital in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo left it in him after an operation to treat an ulcer, a spokesman for the hospital said.

The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain.

When examinations found what was believed to be an eight-centimetre (3.2-inch) tumour, he underwent the operation to remove it. It was only then that surgeons realised it was a towel.

"The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour," the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.

Asahi hospital officials visited the man and apologised, he said.

The former patient has no plans to sue the hospital, which is in talks with him over compensation or other measures, the official said.

Japanese media reports said the man, who was not identified, still had his spleen removed.

The part I don't get is "still had his spleen removed." Like, for the hell of it?

According to the NYTimes, Jim Davis is a fan of Garfield Minus Garfield:

Jim Davis, the cartoonist who created “Garfield,” calls himself an occasional reader of the site, which he calls “fascinating.” He says he is flattered rather than peeved by the imitation.

“Some of them really work, and some of them work better,” Mr. Davis said in a telephone interview.

...

“I think it’s the body of work that makes me laugh — the more you read of these strips, the funnier it gets,” Mr. Davis said. As for Garfield himself, “this makes a compelling argument that maybe he doesn’t need to be there. Less is more.”

As I've said before, Garfield Minus Garfield is one of the most brilliant things I've come across recently. I read it every day.

In other news, Wired informs us that YouveBeenLeftBehind.com, a website that allows you to send email to your unsaved friends after the Rapture to let them know that they are going to hell and you are not, is For Reals. From YouveBeenLeftBehind.com:

We all have family and friends who have failed to receive the Good News of the Gospel. The unsaved will be "left behind" on earth to go through the "tribulation period" after the "Rapture". You remember how, for a short time, after (9/11/01) people were open to spiritual things and answers. (We are still singing "God Bless America" at baseballs' seventh inning stretch.) Imagine how taken back they will be by the millions of missing Christians and devastation at the rapture. They will know it was true and that they have blown it.

It goes on to say that emails sent from the site are intended to court those left behind during their "small window" of opportunity to join the saved. It seems to this reader, however, that the best use of this service is merely to mock non-believers with an "I told you so," as if enduring the apocalypse and facing eternal damnation were not devastating enough for them. At least that's what I'd use it for ... which is probably why I'll be left behind in the first place.

And yes, I do get ALL of my information from The Morning News.

Spotty posting lately because this is how I feel:



...except less adorable.

"Boneless Thursday" is a really bad promotion for Hooters.

Someone should inform our local franchise.

This is a very weird story out of Tokyo.

A homeless woman has been arrested after living undetected for almost a year in a tiny cupboard in a man's house in Japan.

...

Horikawa told police that she had nowhere to live and had first taken up residence in the cupboard, in a room that the man rarely used, about one year previously when the owner of the house had gone out and not locked the door.

Police believe she may have moved between different addresses in the neighbourhood during her stowaway year.

The woman did not apparently steal any money or other items from the house, but did make use of the shower and toilet.

The police described Horikawa as looking neat and clean. She was charged with trespassing.

Locally, my lady NKB-VP-LTL is in town for the weekend and last night we almost killed ourselves with fun. We've spent the day convalescing on the couch. The cycle shall continue through Monday.

Remember in "I'm the One that I Want" when Margaret Cho says, "I save my mother's messages because my mother's messages are worth saving"? Well, I post my baby sister's emails for much the same reason.

Latest missive from Baby Sister, sent to all members of immediate family:

Dear Family,

I am concerned about 2 things:

1. I know more about what is going on in my sister's dog's life than
her own, because she does not get in touch with me but does update her
dog's blog regularly

2. I now know from the dog's blog that one of my parents is sending
mail (pretending to be the cat) to the dog

If all of you have so much time on your hands you should come visit me
in london.

(K is completely excluded from all ridicule as she not only came
to visit me in london but also calls and emails me more regularly than
anyone else)

Love,
E

A list of Things I've Said This Week That I Probably Never Would Have Said Ever If I Hadn't Gotten A Puppy:

1. "'Cat food' means 'food for cats.' Are you a cat?"

2. "What part of 'I'm on the toilet' do you not understand?"

3. "That better not be poop in your mouth."

4. "That is poop in your mouth, isn't it?"

5. "Why don't you go chew on a duck or something?"

6. "Please get your nose out of kitty's butt while she's eating."

7. "Are you really that attached to my fiance's underpants?"


And now, a shorter list of Things I've Said To Puppy Today That It's Possible I've Said Before, Not To Puppy:

1. "Give me back my panties, NOW."

2. "Just because you're cute doesn't mean you get to come in bed."

3. "You are such a dog."

Sims On Stage Karaoke is about to change my life, and probably not for the better.

Lady Z: I have the new Death Cab for Cutie...

D: Great. Are you driving your own car?

Lady Z: ...and Okkerville River...

D: So it's just all emo, all the time today, huh?

Lady Z: ...ooh! And the new Frightened Rabbit.

D: Awesome. How about Sad Kitten? Despondent Moppet?

Lady Z: Never mind.

Despite the fact that several of his freelance employers are behind in paying him, so that we are lately eking out a living by not spending superfluous cash or, more frequently, feeling guilty when we do, D's quiet infiltration of mainstream culture continues apace. See this piece in the Arkansas Times, which tracks the buzz on his article in last summer's Oxford American on singer Teddy Grace: it received a shout-out from Ben Greenman at the New Yorker website, and may be the source and inspiration of a track on Elvis Costello's new album.

Also, tomorrow we hit the road so D can interview Judge Reinhold at the Little Rock Film Festival. I sense that an episode of Lady Z Gets Drunk with Judge Reinhold and Asks Him Too Many Questions About Fast Times at Ridgemont High is likely, if not inevitable.

It will make excellent material for my future testimonials on "D: The E! True Hollywood Story."

What else? The other night we went to see "Iron Man," and I agree with everything bcjennyo said. It was way fun, everything that "Transformers" should have been and was not. Much of that had to do with the presence of one Mr. Robert Downey, Jr. He is at the top of my list of Celebrities I Am Allowed to Go Home With If Ever Given the Opportunity. (Incidentally, I believe the existence of such lists is entirely necessary to a healthy long-term relationship. Some time ago, however, I heard from a friend who experienced a crisis of sorts when the opportunity to go home with a member of her list actually materialized, and she wasn't sure if the list—or, more precisely, its permissions—were "real" or not. I suggest ironing out such details preemptively with one's partner.) The ONLY thing that might have made the movie better is if it had been the movie D and I fantasized about on our way to the movie theater, in which Robert Downey, Jr. actually plays himself hitting rock-bottom in the Hollywood spiral of leisurely self-destruction, checks himself into rehab, and there, fashions himself a flying robot suit and emerges a shiny superhero.

What else? Our house is infested with tiny ants. It is extremely annoying. They are also in my car.

What else? Pretty much all puppy, all the time. See dog blog for further accounts of cuteness and destruction. Life with puppy, today, means waking up at noon on the couch with a wet, snorfling nose in my face—not knowing how long I've been lying here or whether I managed in my early morning somnambulism to feed her, but certain that the moment I sit up I will find evidence of Bad Behavior.

What else? My office iMac completely self-destructed last week, and, armed with only my new MacBook, a firewire cable, and my Googling skills, I managed to diagnose the problem (a "kernel panic" of sorts) and, after three days of strife, to fix it (by doing some fancy footwork with the system folder). It seems my years of procrastinating on Macs have turned me into a semicompetent computer technician. Does that count as a marketable skill?

Overheard from downstairs as I dressed upstairs:

"No! No! No, puppy, that's my shoe. I need to wear that to walk around in. Do you understand that? No, you don't, because you're a fucking dog."

On the last PopCast before Lady Z's summer hiatus: Chicks on Speed don't play guitars, Camera Obscura are ready to be heartbroken, and Patti Page wonders about that doggie in the window. Then Lady Z makes like The Breeders and gets Fortunately Gone until the fall semester.

Download The Pop Tart 4/30/08

Ginger Spice retires from music to focus on authoring children's books featuring character named after ME.

And that's really all I have to say about that.

Linda Scott tells every little star, Daniel Rossen covers Jo Jo, and Jens Lekman sings a farewell song to Rocky Dennis. Tous les garcons et les filles agree: listen to this week's show!

Download THE POP TART 4/16/08

My phone rang "Baby Got Back" in the middle of my morning lecture on Oscar Wilde.

I am so ready for summer break.

Last night I finally watched Juno. Since the moment I saw the trailer for this movie way back when, I knew I was going to like it, so it hasn't seemed very necessary to actually watch it. But I'm glad that I did, and I'll tell you why—in case you, too, have just heard too much about it and can't muster the enthusiasm to rent it.

This movie is a neat little fable about maturity. It's quirky and delightful, yes, but its real strength (as many others have mentioned) is the respect with which it treats its main female characters. Not just Juno, the pregnant teenager at its center, but also her stepmother (played by the always fantastic Allison Janney) and the prospective adoptive mother (played by Jennifer Garner, in one of the film's two truly great performances, but more about that anon). Both of these older women are initially mocked to a certain extent—Janney spends her evenings cutting out magazine pictures of weimaraners when, as Juno points out, "you don't even have a dog!" and Garner's straightlaced thirtysomething keeps an immaculate yuppie subdivision mansion, consigning her husband's guitars and music collections to the basement—but ultimately those characteristics that make them seem absurd Juno's (and our) eyes are precisely the characteristics that make them strong women in their own contexts. Janney meets Juno's scorn at her weimaraner habit by pointing out that the reason she doesn't have an actual dog is because that is a sacrifice she has made to be a parent. And Garner's perfectly cringe-worthy speech when we first meet her about how she was just "born to be a mommy" turns out to be a declaration of her ability to be the movie's hero. Janney's character is never anything less than Juno's "real mom" despite her explicit status as stepparent, and the movie's intelligent refusal to make the authenticity of constructed family bonds an issue quietly underpins the adoption narrative—we never doubt that adoptive parents could be a baby's "real family."

Ultimately, Juno is less about the trials of a sixteen-year-old girl than it is about the morality of knowing how to act your age. Maturity is not a state of being one reaches by jumping through certain hoops, here; instead, it is a state of grace achieved by fulfilling your present stage of life in the most responsible fashion, whether that means not getting a dog, adopting a child, or knowing that you are (in Juno's words) "ill-equipped" as a high-school girl to be a parent. I think this movie is in many ways aimed directly at viewers like me: women inclined to identify with Juno's style, her taste in music and her way of talking, but who are actually closer in age to Garner's earnest, maternal yuppie. We are grown women who still make mix tapes that sound exactly like the movie's soundtrack (seriously, I have actually made mixes that are, I think, EXACTLY the movie's soundtrack) and want desperately not to come off as Garner does in her first scenes—crisp, joyless, unembarrassed by her predilection for the Pottery Barn aesthetic and the joys of motherhood. But we are also the kind of women who are likely, as we reach thirty, to find ourselves married (as Garner's character is) to former boyfriends who have refused to give up their half-assed and increasingly sad rockstar ambitions (I am not speaking personally, here, by the way), and who are exactly at the point at which it's time to put away the crappy hamburger phone and start thinking about what it takes to be a grown-up—to keep a home, hold down a job, maintain a family. At one point, Garner's husband (played perfectly by Jason Bateman) and Juno share a laugh over Garner's nagging that Bateman doesn't "contribute"—but what we come to see is that while "contributing" to a household might not (perhaps shouldn't) make sense to a teenage girl, it sure as hell should to a married 34-year-old man on the verge of adopting a baby.

I really thought Garner was a knockout in this movie. I tend to like her anyway (I will admit that I LOVE 13 Going on 30, another movie made for me and my ilk, and, now that I write it down, an interesting counterpoint to Juno as a film about women whose identities fluctuate between thirteen and thirty years old) but I was really surprised by how well her character resisted the potential satire aimed at her, without having to reveal inner depths that are initially unapparent. She is always exactly what she says in her first interview with Juno and Juno's father; we just come to respect what that is as the film progresses.

The other great performance is the always pitch-perfect Michael Cera, who plays the unlikely father of Juno's fetus. He is exactly the kind of kid that some of us (now I am kind of speaking personally) remember, with a bit of shame, taking for granted in high school—the quiet, not-so-cool, desperately loyal boy whose perpetual crush bolstered our own adolescent self-confidence. Again, the movie beautifully fails to mock the pathos of such a character, instead revealing it to be yet another unlikely form of maturity that deserves Juno's, and our, respect. In the one scene in which Cera's character is pushed to stick up for himself against Juno's thoughtlessness, the lines he delivers are so true, and delivered with such reluctance (you'll know what I'm talking about when you see him swallow his "la la la") that I got a lump in my throat—a lump, it turns out, that arises in Juno's throat at the same time, and explodes into frustrated tears a little while later when she is alone in her Previa. This scene reminded me powerfully of one of the classic moments of teenage-girl-called-out-and-instilled-with-sense-of-shame-necessary-to-her-maturation: the scene from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (which, yes, I happen to be teaching today) in which Henry Tilney calls out Catherine Morland for harboring disrespectful thoughts, jarring her into a moment of teary self-consciousness that teaches her the difference between being a feisty, self-absorbed girl (fine up till now) and being a smart, respectful young woman capable of mature love and relationships.

I have now squandered the morning I'd slotted for class preparation to singing Juno's praises, so you should similarly drop something important and take an hour and a half to watch the movie.

In another breakthrough on the procrastination front, some absolute genius named Neil Hennessey has devised a Jabberwoky Engine. It works thus:

JABBER produces nonsense words that sound like English words, in the way that the portmanteau words from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky sound like English words.

When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator.

JABBER realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.

My initial output:

aveadiac
astrealla
psam
arsidell
indainic
beraptic
bery
chen
gric
endesers
quordrin
draitumpt
ersister
erishomme
enus
ores
kopestin
ionse
essi
tusigie
fing
holo
ruiste

The "astrealla quordrin" sounds like a nice place to go, "indainic" and "draitumpt" sound like moods I've been in, and "fing" is obviously the future profanity derived from our ephemistic "eff-ing." I shall start propagating it.

And now, my code-literate friends, who wants to figure out a Jabberwoky Engine screensaver for me?

Apparently, how annoying Daisy Mae can be is directly proportional to how tired I feel when I start the day with her. This morning she started whining around 5:30 am, which is simply too early by any standard of sanity, so I let her out and then put both of us back to bed. By 6:30 I couldn't sleep anymore, so I got her up and fed her and took her out for a walk while she was still sleepier than I was. And she's been a total angel all day—which is, admittedly, only a few hours old as of this note. But, seriously, it is amazing what an extra hour of sleep and a caaaaaaaaalm morning can do for a girl.

Maybe she knew I was talkin' smack on the internets.

P.S. Thanks to florafloraflora for the advice in the BC forum—I think part of today's success was certainly my being rested enough not to get into shouting matches with puppy.

Today, I actually thought to myself, "You know, you could just step on her. She's just a puppy." Daisy Mae is growing exponentially, and she's much healthier than when we found her at the shelter, and, consequently, a raging spitfire of puppy energy anytime she is not eating or sleeping. At her hyper peaks, she nips to get attention and thinks "NO" is part of a delightful game. We've tried every recommended technique we've found for teaching a pup not to bite—holding her lower jaw, stimulating her gag reflex, coating ourselves in bitter concoctions, shaking a can of pennies. The can of pennies is the only thing that seemed to get her attention, by which I mean she stopped going for my hands and feet long enough to try to bite the can of pennies. I'm sure she's just getting used to the new surges of energy coursing through her, and trying out her new strength, but Jesus Christ.

Of course, I did take advantage of a drowsy moment today to roll her over and sing a song called, "I've Got Your Arms, Your Widdle Puppy Arms," so, you know, we're all insane and torturing each other in creative ways.

Give D a Flip, a MacBook, and a puppy, and voila! an auteur is born.


Also available on i am daisy mae.

This week on THE POP TART: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs get the Diplo treatment, Sergio Mendes meets some Black Eyed Peas, Weezer channel Buddy Holly, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans revive a (racist?) Disney classic, and Usher sings in the rain!

Download THE POP TART 4/9/08

Me: I can't believe I'm teaching Sade. It's like 600 pages of sodomy and incest.

D: Awesome. Sounds like the Bible.

Last night D says, "We're going to have to not become insufferable puppy parents."

Apparently I was not listening because today I did this.

And I will keep doing it.

As if things weren't exciting enough around here these days, D and I have gone and got ourselves a puppy. We found Daisy Mae (rap name: Day-Z) at the Rogers Animal Shelter on Wednesday, brought her home on Thursday ... and, 24 hours later, she's already a movie star: