I spent the day with the RLA yesterday, and most of it went along these lines: I'd watch him doing something and think, hmmm, that would make a great entry for my blog... if I wanted a divorce.
No, really. I mean, we're walking the dogs in the dead of night, and first one dog pees, then the other dog pees, and then the RLA takes a piss in the trees.

Just marking his territory, he says. But. We live in the suburbs, for chrissakes. With lights and stuff. And people driving by. Granted, not at eleven at night, and we were in a particularly dark part of the street, but just the same, I have to ask you: Does your man piss on trees to mark his territory?

For whatever it's worth, the dogs in the neighborhood seem to respect it, because the really big dogs do not poop on our lawn over by that particular tree, so maybe he has a point. But. It's the twenty-first century. We are (allegedly) civilized people. Pissing in the bushes?

On another note, living with two dogs of such disparate breeds is like having my own private Westminster Show on a daily basis. There is the noble dog Nails, a Jack Russell Terrier, not AKC, but Jack Russell Terrier Club of America registered, which means he's from before the AKC accepted and standardized the breed. He is a dog's dog. He barks at squirrels. He chases things. He is (for a Jack) Very Well Behaved. He goes for a swim in the pool after every walk. (His choice, by the way. He does doggies laps, too. He jumps off the steps and swims in 4-foot circles, then goes back to the steps and sits down, like a little old man at the hotel pool.) He plays with gravity by pushing balls off the couch, or into the pool so he can chase them. He will watch the ball floating in the pool and wait until it gets close to the edge, then paw it in to within mouth distance. You can watch him calculate the time it will take to float to him. If he doesn't like the distance, he will bark at me or the RLA to push the ball closer to him. For a dog, the animal is a genius.

And now we have Miss JoJo. She's a flopsy puppy. She never barks, except when Nails is barking at another dog, and then she'll add her two cents, and stop. Nails will bark until the other dog has passed beyond his sight.

JoJo is a digger. I have gopher holes all over the yard, now. She chews on all the toys that Nails disdained. She loves her Frisbee, where Nails is afraid of them. She digs. All. The. Time. She never makes any noise. If she needs to go out, she pokes me with her nose.

Watching them play together yesterday was a hoot. Nails is clever, stealthy and plots ahead. JoJo is a gonif, and will wait until Nails is distracted, and then steal his toys. Nails, knowing that JoJo doesn't go in the pool, kept dropping his ball in the pool to keep it away from her. Then he'd pull it out, and tease her with it.

There should be a groove in the pool deck by now, from the number of laps they ran around it. Fist JoJo in the lead with Nails' toy, and then Nails playing keep away with her.

This is why I got a puppy. I laughed until my cheeks hurt.

I've been reading the surrogate daughters' blogs. Number One is in her junior year of college, Number Two is in her senior year of high school, Number Three is in high school too, and I've lost track of the year.

Number Three is all about boys and friends and I have to bang my head against a wall when I read it. It's just so jejeune and sophomoric and mostly so badly spelled that it takes all of my loyalty to her mother to read it. Cause, you know... Mom can't read it, and someone has to keep track.

It's Number One who makes my heart hurt so much. I am reminded of the story of Gertrude Stein telling F. Scott Fitzgerald "Oh, we are ALL a lost generation."
My N1SD is wallowing around in those deep and heady days of being away at school, drinking and getting stoned. She thinks that her generation invented ennui and depression and philosophical angst. "Oh," she laments "The world is so lousy, the job market is so lousy, what's the point of it all?"

Imagine, if you will, this being said by a facially-pierced young woman with fuschia streaks in her hair and an English major, whilst posturing with the back of her wrist against her forehead, and you will know why her mother and I want to slap her senseless... except that she's pretty senseless right now anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love this girl. She is smart, and talented, and utterly, utterly lame at this moment in her life. She is cynical and jaded, only without the experience to back it up. She is scornful of her peers, but exhibits the same lax habits and mental shortcuts she disdains.

I love her to death, and I want very much to slap the bullshit out of her. She is, and it pains me to my core to say this, turning into a female, less libidinous version of her wasterel father... a companion of my own salad days, when I was young and green.

Except, stoned as I was, drunk as I was, I maintained my GPA. I graduated cum laude and was in an honors fraternity. I rarely, if ever, skipped class and I never, ever went to class high. I worked enough to pay for my own bad habits, and never had to call my parents for more money. I lived in the dorms, despite that I rather would not have. I ate in the cafeteria, and managed just fine on tuna melts and gallons of coffee.

I was not, nor do I pretend to have been, perfect, or even good, but I was always punctual about turning in work and getting to class, and meeting my deadlines. I learned a lot in school, and being responsible for my own vices was one of the most important lessons. I hope N1SD learns that one thing before she graduates.

I have come to the realization that if I'm not bitching about the idiots I work(ed) with, or the stupidity of mankind in general, or yapping about food, that I have nothing to say on this blog.
Which is absurd, of course. Ask anyone who knows me personally, and they will tell you that I am never, ever at a loss for words. Maybe for true content, but not words.

In any event, I only have three paychecks left before my severence package runs out, which means that I really should be thinking about a new job.

Or a new career. The problem as I see it is this: I have absolutely no desire to go back into the work place. In fact, I can't wait for the RLA to end his winter break and go back to work. The idea of being home alone (well, not counting the four-footed inhabitants of the Briarpatch) is enough to make me swoon.

My studio is calling me. I want to make quilts. A lot of quilts. ALl the fabric I've collected over the years, all the patterns that I've marked in all the books....

Well, now is the time to sew.

And I promise you all, I'll have plenty to say when I start that project. I also have promised myself to completely redesign Girlyshoes... you know, the rest of the stuff that makes up this site.

Gotta go. The gym is also a jealous mistress and it too, is calling me this morning.

I received a call today from one of the guys I used to work with. They couldn't wait to tell me the news. The PR director from hell has resigned to take a new position with AvMed. To which I can only say, pull your money out of AvMed now, before she wreaks havoc on their image.
I hope it was as voluntary a separation as mine was. I'd like to think that someone finally told her that things DO have to be done right, and not just done. That it was about the quality of her work, that it was about her, personally.

I'd like to think that, but I doubt it happened that way. No, it happened like everything else has happened at the hospital: ass backwards and inadverdently.

This woman, this incapable, ignorant bitch managed to ruin lives and destroy institutions that I worked hard to build (the publications office, the web) and now she is simply walking away, with no compunction and utterly no comprehension of the harm she did to the hospital with her incompetence.

Ah, fuck 'em anyway. I have a new puppy, and a new batch of lox brining away in the back of the fridge. On Friday, this miserable year will come to an end, and I can pin my dreams on 2005.

My sistergirlfriendgirl sent me a LoxBoxTM for my birthday. Looks like a plastic shoe box, contains a small slab of granite, an instruction book and a bag of bags. Turns out to be a do-it-yourself kit for making lox.
OK, I'm game. Publix has salmon on sale for 5 bucks a pound, and lox is going for close to twenty. I have Kosher salt, water, pepper and sugar. Pick up fresh dill, and I'm on my way home.

It took all of ten minutes to put the ingredients together, and that included rinsing the salmon.

Two days later, I look in the back of the refrigerator, and damned if the box doesn't contain something that looks like lox, as opposed to raw salmon sitting on a bed of salt and dill.

The RLA and I cautiously sliced up the salmon, and it did indeed look like real lox. A schmear of cream cheese later, and we are eating the best damned lox I've had in years. How about that?

Next time I'll use a little less dill and a hair less salt and try the Julia Child version with a little cognac.

This is so cool, I'm going to have to give them to my cooking friends, and you all know who you are.

The LoxBox can be found here.

Today is the day every Jew feels like a stranger in a strange land. I don't care how assimilated they are, how they call it a Channukah Bush, or they've married outside of the faith, and they are accomodating a spouse. This is not our holiday.
But that's OK, too, you know? When I was growing up in that small South Florida town, my family used to drive around, looking at all the Christmas lights. It was charming. The little Mediteranean Revival cottages, the mid-century not so much modern as ranch-styles were all duded up for a holiday.

There was magic in the way the palm trees glowed. It made it feel like a holiday.

In our store we always decorated for Christmas. It was a Christian town. We were in business. Christmas was big business in a dry goods store. Still is, you might notice. Big business is good for a small mom and pop business. We loved Christmas.

Christmas meant hard work for all of us. Only my Grandmother was exempt during the season. Curling ribbons, straightening stock, wrapping packages, making sales... that was the ladder we grandchildren climbed. On Christmas Eve we closed the store as early as we could gently expell the truly last second shoppers. There was a party for the employees, and the men and women who weren't family might just as well have been. These people had been in the store almost as long as my parents. After the party, the family would head over to my Grandfather's house, just a block away on the St.Lucie River. We'd all drink a toast to Christmas. I'd love to say that we then all went out for Chinese food, but there wasn't much in the way of Chinese food in Stuart, and I don't remember going to Frances Langford's Outrigger.

All my friends thought that I had no Christmas, being Jewish, so I can't count the number of trees I trimmed as a child. My sistergirlfriendgirl's family had wonderful ornements, little hedgehogs from England, based on Beatrix Potter's illustrations. Another friend's family had old glass balls, the ones people kill to collect these days. Sigh. It's never stopped, either, this Christian sympathy as though I've missed out on something.

When I lived in New York, a pair of women friends thought I needed to experience tree buying in the snow. So their present to me was a trip to the tree lot in Greenwich Village, picking their tree, helping to schlep it through the falling and deep snow to their West Village apartment where I would get to decorate the tree with them. It was just as magical a time as they wanted me to have.

Frankly though, I've always been in it for the grub. Lawdy. The grub in a Southern home at Christmas is why God invented ham. Redeye gravy and grits with butter the next day. Homemade biscuits. Butter. Cream gravy. Did I mention the roast ham? Exotic food and I still swoon for a good slice of fried ham with redeye gravy. Haven't had one in years.

I think that I embrace Christmas as the secular holiday my friends all tell me it's become. I celebrate Christmas vicariously through my friends, but I still won't celebrate it in my home. I am a Jew. This is the dividing point between them and us. I respect Christian belief enough to abstain from celebrating Christian holidays. I am grateful when they chose to share one of mine with me, and love to open my Passover seders to my non-Jewish friends.

But make no mistake, I am treating them to my holiday, letting them in on the Jewishness of the night. I am not trying to convert them. I would ask the same of the Christian Right.

I keep reading about Christmas in Bagdad, and around and about Iraq, and how the soldiers are giving out candy canes. I was asked by a business to click on a link to send gifts to the soldiers and children. The soldiers could get books, an amazing array of titles mostly having to do with politics, anti-war politics mostly, and how to get a better job, or prepare yourself for leaving the military. I thought that was a little cold, a little too much propaganda for those guys over there who don't want to be there any more. I opted for a rag doll for an Iraqi child, but at the same time, I felt guilty. As though I were one of the Christians trying to force a religious holiday on someone of another faith. Hey, little Iraqi kid getting a rag doll for a holiday you don't celebrate: I don't celebrate it either. Take the presents and roll with it.

RJ and MJ have an agreement: he celebrates all the Jewish holidays, and she has to celebrate Christmas and St. Patrick's Day with him. I think this is a great deal for RJ and told her so. She gets all her holidays (and trust me when I say that they mostly involve food) and the only two of his he wants to celebrate require giving presents and drinking to excess.