Sunday is the Krewe of Mutts, which regular readers will recognize as the Mardi Gras parade in Baton Rouge for dogs. This year’s theme is “The Good, the Bad, and the Furry.”
My best costume idea is to dress the dogs like WW2 American soldiers. Then, I’ll have Vanya dressed as a Nazi, pulling the wagon with Kolya in there, wearing a gray suit and a Hitler mustache.
At the risk of jinxing it, we’ve had nothing but lovely weather this month. A little rain, but nothing like usual in the winter, and the usual post-rain cold weather has so far failed to materialize. We’ve had some cool mornings, but in truth, it’s been warm enough for shorts every day.
It was a great win for the inaugural Louisiana Marathon, which managed to parlay the weather with a long holiday weekend in January to come up with a destination event for runners. On Saturday, there was a 10K, followed by a 1.2-mile kids run. I had taken Vanya for a couple of practice runs, and he was set to have a good go of it. On our last practice, he ran a mile in 13 minutes, despite skipping for the first quarter mile and tripping, skidding along the road, and stopping to cry for a few minutes. I really expected to run it in 10 or 11 minutes, which would be about as fast as I’m capable of pacing him.
Of late, I’ve been crippled with fear of posting to my blog. The topic that came right to mind was the outrageously good football season that we were having, but when it comes to football fandom, I hold superstitions, and that ridiculous part of my brain doesn’t allow me to deviate from whatever routine I was able to establish when the wins were coming.
So I watched every game without a stitch of underwear on. I went all season without washing my hat. (Note to self: don’t buy any more white hats.) And I didn’t praise our team in writing.
Of course, what was to be the best season in my lifetime, possibly the best season in school history disappeared.
I’ve got a story from our travels in Russia that I think more properly belongs here in my (poor, neglected) blog than it does over in the adoption journal going on in the family-oriented section of my website.
We spent yesterday walking around Yaroslavl, and we found a crowded open-air market. Lots of hats, sweaters, stuff like that. It was cold outside, but the market was still crowded with people bundled up and going through the packed little stalls.
One stall had a mannequin, in the female shape, and that mannequin was wearing a sweater. But apparently, the sweater wasn’t enough to keep the mannequin warm, because her swollen breasts were adorned with prominent nipples.
I didn’t take a photo. I would have had to stop and pull my camera out from the inside of my coat, and, well, it would have just been too weird.
Who would make a mannequin with nipples?
Yesterday morning, I was behind a car at a stop light, and there was a little black dog with his head sticking out of the passenger side window. And I shit you not, the dog was wearing goggles. I tried several times to get a cell phone picture, but the dog kept turning away as the picture took, and then Mrs. theskinnyonbenny phoned. I got three shots of the back of the damn dog’s head.
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| I swear that this dog is wearing goggles. |
I’m just a little bit tired of hearing/reading that the SEC is down this year. Don’t we have three teams in the top 10, including two teams that are clearly better than everyone except each other? Isn’t the current national champion trying to hang on to fourth place in their division? Oregon is certainly in the top tier of teams, and they got clobbered by LSU. Alabama handled Penn State with similar ease. Just because Georgia and Florida are down doesn’t mean that the conference is down.
V goes to one of the only schools around that sends Kindergarteners home with homework. One of the things we do each night is to work through sheets of reading words. One night recently, he was sounding out the word “pit.”
“Puh – Ih – Tuh”
Wrong number this morning.
“May I speak to Mary?”
“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.”
“Oh, I’m so terribly sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.” It was 8:00 AM on a weekday.
Perhaps you heard (or maybe you caught it two posts ago) that we were recently in Russia. You can probably guess what we were doing, but unlike 2007, when we did something similar, we’ve been asked not to publicly share stories, details, or pictures.
Still, our friends know what they know, and it would be nice to be able to post some news when there’s news to post. So Ive added some info pages here, but I put them behind a password wall. If you’re a legit friend, let me know that your interested (text, email, whatever), and I’ll be happy to share.
Hopefully, in a few months everything will be done and will have gone smoothly. If that’s the case, I’ll get rid of the password wall.
