Dear Dogs,

I know that having your male human gone is upsetting you terribly and that no amount of walks and bellyrubs can make it all better. However, please realize that I am not going to abandon you and leave you to starve. Even if I'm in an accident, my first thought upon consciousness will be of you and your needs. So, from now on, could you please stop the madness that ensues when I get home? To watch you three, you'd think Michael Vick had been standing outside the window taunting you all day.

Sincerely,
Your mama

The Husband Has Landed

For those following such things, Kevin made it to Vienna with no problems, other than the fact that JFK sucks, particularly when you have an 8-hour layover. His hotel is cheap student fare, but it's in a beautiful area. He's done some walking around already, had some good eats, sat in a cafe drinking coffee and reading, and attended his first day of classes. His course for the first 2 weeks is comparative international law, and it's a 3-hour course stuffed into 2 weeks. He is in lectures from 8 am until 2 pm, with a lunch break. Many evenings the program has special events planned, like walking tours, a visit to a wine festival, and special museum visits. On the weekends, he'll be going to Prague, Salzburg, and Venice. Being an old fart and the only person who speaks German, he hasn't really bonded much with the other students, although the coordinator for the program has chatted with him quite a bit and took him to dinner, in part because he isn't the usual law student (she hates lawyers).

As for us on the homefront, we're doing fine. The dogs miss Kevin terribly, as evidenced [grrr, I hate nouns that have become verbs] by their general naughtiness and the fact that every time they hear a noise, they think he's come home. I miss him too, however we are using video chat to talk just about every day, though, so we're getting about the same level of communication as we do during the 3 weeks before finals. I am enjoying being able to sleep in the middle of the bed. But we can't wait to have him home, and I am so looking forward to touring bits of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with my husband. This is our first long vacation since our wedding/honeymoon trip.

Kevin is on Facebook and has been posting photos, so if you're there and his friend, check them out.

Summer Reading Program Book #5

Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce

The subtitle provides a succinct synopsis of this treatise of American anti-intellectualism in its present state and how it has impacted not just this country, but the entire planet: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. I found that this made a terrific follow-up to Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason. While Jacoby's language is erudite and intellectual, Pierce cuts through the bullshit and tells it like it is. His humor helps keep the horror of the insanity of his topic at bay.

But why listen to me? I found the following text, in a section about how the Bush administration managed to lie through its teeth to the American people about the threat posed by Iraq with little uproar by the majority of the populace (there was some resistance: a few hundred thousand of us marched the street of D.C. on a freezing today to demonstrate that we knew it was all bunk), to illustrate exactly what he means by "Idiot America":

The successful sale of the Iraq war was a pure product of Idiot America. But Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the results of millions of decisions made and not made, to reduce everything to salesmanship. Debate becomes corrupted argument, in which every point of view is just another product, no better or worse than all the others, and informed citizenship is abandoned to the marketplace. Idiot America is the develtopment of the collective Gut at the expense of the collective mind. It's what results when we abandon our duty to treat the ridiculous with ridicule. It's what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and we not only surrender our right to punish them at the polls but also become too timit to pinish their ideas with daily scorn--because the polls say those ideas are popular, and therefore they must hold some sort of truth, which we should respect.

Stuff

On my mind this evening:

• We hit the triple digits today, temperature wise. Believe it or not, these are records for the New Orleans area. A number of streets (including the interstate east of us) have buckled from the heat.
• On top of this, we haven't gotten rain in about a month. Our garden is just about dead, and the farmer's market is full of signs that the booth occupant has no produce due to the drought.
  
• I'm simultaneously sad and gleeful. Kevin leaves next Friday for a month in Vienna for a study abroad program. I don't want to be without him for that long, particularly since I pretty much lose him once school starts. However, I will be joining him after he finishes for a week driving around southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I will probably blog our trip, assuming he lets me use his laptop.
  
• Our tentative plan involves me picking up a rental car in Frankfurt and driving to Munich to meet up with Kevin. This is the scariest part of the trip to me, even though the Germans drive on the same side of the road as the U.S.
• Went to WV for a 3-day weekend. Discovered that my own brother is one of those idiots who texts while he drives. I'm glad I went, because it seemed to mean a lot to my grandmother that I made it to her little family cookout, especially since my uncle didn't show after telling her he would.
  
• Seriously sprained my pinky toe falling down the back steps. Haven't been to the gym since, so I've backslidden in my work on the Couch to 5K.
• Signed up for a German class via LSU's Independent and Distance Learning program. May also meet with a tutor to work on my skills prior to going to Germany.
  
• In a moment of insanity, I also joined an adult kickball league. I figured it's socialization, it's exercise, and it's outdoors, but I'm really scared to death. I am so not the athletic type, and I still have nightmares about middle school gym class.
• Animals all good, except when they're not. Tristan may be seeing a vet specializing in aggression issues, Mischa is having eye surgery this week, and Cali is far too thin for my tastes.
  

Gute nacht. Ich muss schlafen.

Summer Reading Program Book #4

Such a Pretty Fat, by Jen Lancaster

OK, this one had me from the first two pages. It is simply not in my nature to turn away from an author who is owned by a pit bull named Maisy the Love Monster. Subtitled "One Narcissist's Quest To Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, Or Why Pie is Not The Answer," this book is a hilarious look through the joys of weight loss, which for the author ended up in a deeper reassessment of the way she conducted her life. Cool stuff.

As a teaser, here's a promo clip Lancaster did for BookTV:

Big Bad Baby Blanket, Green Edition

At long last, I finished the baby blanket I was doing in Knit Picks's Shine Worsted, in Mallard. It turned out beautifully, although I need to get a better handle on joining yarn at the ends, particularly when there isn't an inside and outside to the piece. The yarn was soft to work with, will be washable (a priority when its intended user is a creature without control of its innards), and didn't fuzz up much. And I loved the color so much (I feel sorry for babies stuck with pastels) that I used the remainder to knit a second baby blanket for a different procreator in my life.

Summer Reading Program Book #3

The God Virus, by Darrel W. Ray

Written by an educational psychologist, The God Virus uses the virus metaphor to great effect in describing how religions reproduce themselves, impact their "hosts," and affects the world around them. Treating religion as an organic entity provides a fresh perspective in demonstrating the psychology behind how and why religions propogate. Without the vitriol that many other authors have sent toward the religious, Ray addresses a variety of topics I've not seen addressed before, such as having a conversation with the "infected" that kindly focuses on the person and not the religion. At just over 200 pages and with fairly clear language, the book is a quick read. I found myself turning the pages, wanting to see where he was going to go next with it. Based on some of the end chapters, I'd like to see the author use his expertise to address the issue of recovery from the virus.

Being honest with myself

Despite all of the guilt I have about not living near my family, reading the local newspaper makes me glad I left.

Summer Reading Program Book #2

The Dogs of Riga, by Henning Mankell

The second in Mankell's Kurt Wallander series (recently made even more popular by a BBC/PBS production starring Kenneth Branaugh) begins with two dead bodies in a life raft and ends with a surprise reveal. Most of the book takes place away from Wallander's native Sweden in the (for him) wholly unfamiliar backdrop of Riga, Latvia. At the time of the story, Latvia is still under the control of the Soviet Union but is pushing for independence, which adds to the "normal" levels of paranoia and justified fear in a country where eyes and ears are everywhere. The plot moves along slowly, in and out of the fog, as Wallander thinks he gets close to a murderer but then realizes he's in a blind alley. I like this very flawed detective, who causes as much trouble for himself (falling in love with a recent widow?) as the criminals do.