Good suggestion. :)

Gecko mating habits vary greatly. Like most reptiles, the majority of geckos lay eggs. The female gecko lays four or five pairs of eggs between May and August, with two or four weeks between layings. Gecko egg shells tend to be soft at first, but harden quickly...

I (un) Heart Cats

Found out that the cat drank from my cereal bowl (Apple Jacks, in case you're interested).   Which is fine and all, except for I learned this information right after I had finished gulping up the last of the milk from that particular bowl.   So thank you, dear family, for that awesome heads-up.   And thank you, Karfcia, for reminding me why cats are the bane of my existence.

This week was grueling with some good parts and some lousy parts. I should write about it, but I really don't want to.   Maybe my sis will step up and write something worthwhile this weekend (such as more fascinating facts regarding the mating habits of geckos); then I'll officially be off the hook.

Okay, I came on here to actually write a post, but I've already lost steam.  Dang it.  Here, I'm going to insert a cute cartoony image of a cat to make this seem like a real post.

Calm Before the Storm

A couple weeks ago, I reported feeling "remarkably calm." HA! That did NOT last! Starting on Friday, 09/07, I experienced 6 days of emotional hell. I couldn't even tell you WHY. Work was good, home was good...but I was so....blah. Depressed. And not in a "calm" way. It was in a spontaneously-combusting-into-tears kinda way. And then on that following Thursday, I woke up, and I was fine. Which was strange, because physically, I felt like crap. My head was hurting and I felt dizzy. Based on my pathetic physical state, I should have been crabby as hell. But emotionally, I was totally normal again. I could feel the difference only minutes after I had woken up. So....what the heck?

I'm still obsessed with stupid geography stuff. I've noticed much of the obsession is fixated on bodies of water. Did you know that it is impossible to sink in the Dead Sea because of the high salinity? Did you know that in the Black Sea, the lower and upper parts of the water never mix, which causes 90% of the water to be anoxic (unlivable for sea life)? Oh, and there are over 3,000 known species of fish in the Amazon River?

I asked Jeremy for a globe for my birthday.

Speaking of my birthday, I'm getting the new iPhone for my present...yay! I just don't know WHEN. I guess the iPhones are coming out on the 22nd, but when Jer tried to pre-order one for me, they had already sold out. I'm pretty excited though, because my current phone is super glitchy, and the Internet won't even work on it unless I am in my room. 

We had an unpleasant situation with our neighbors. They left a note on my car complaining about our dogs barking too much (but wrote that they had "no issue with the pig"). Jer's response was something along the lines of, "F*** them, they knew we had dogs when they moved in." I was upset though...I felt like a bad neighbor. So we bought a bark collar for Izzy. Initially I was going to buy one for Dusty as well, but the poor dog already lost a leg, and I couldn't handle her losing her bark too. I am amazed at how well the collar works for Izzy. And now that Izzy is barely barking, Dusty is barking less too. Shaddock (my oldest dog) only barks when there is a person or animal nearby, so no way am I putting a bark collar on him. I keep letting Izzy in the house to make sure she is still happy despite the collar, and she seems perfectly okay.

On a side note, this is a Tokay Gecko, and Jeremy has one. 

This gecko got out of it's tank and is running loose in our room. It wakes me up in the middle of the night EVERY NIGHT with a REALLY loud mating call. The mating call sounds like "gekk gekk gekk gekk....POOOO-KAYYYYYYY!" It has been loose for over a week now, and I am feeling a little sleep deprived. I have seen it several times, but it runs off, and it's a MEAN little sucker. Sometimes I wish Jer would just throw a female Tokay in our room and let them hump, so I could get some sleep. But then we would probably end up with a bunch of baby Tokay dinosaurs running amok. 

Tumbleweed Days Parade

Remember last year when I said I was stuck in a time loop?  Probably not.  But I feel like I am.  I keep repeating the same exact events year after year.  Everything around me seems frozen in a perpetual state of unchangingness (spellcheck is having a field-day with that one), except for me.  I get older every year.  So it's a really f'd up time loop.

That being said, today was the Tumbleweed Day's Parade.  It was awesome!  Even though this event is part of my jacked up time loop, I always come out of the parade on a complete high.  This year we had fifty kids marching.  That was huge.  I was told by past Builders Club members that seven years ago, they only had six or so students participating.  So we've basically gone from six to fifty.  I seem to have a knack for convincing students to sacrifice their Saturdays for grueling, unappealing jobs--it's a gift, really.

Here we all are.  I'm the little dot on the right-hand side, half-crouched with the sunglasses and gray hat near the end of the second row.

Oh, Tumbleweed actually has its own zoo now (can you believe that?), so this year's parade featured a live camel, zebra, and boa constrictor too.  Those were fun additions.  

This morning I woke up to the worst alarm ever.  Olive (the chicken) climbed into the backyard with the dogs, and we woke up to her shrieking all over the yard as they basically attempted to run her down and eat her.  This was right before 6 a.m.  Luckily Clint heard all of the commotion and saved the chicken before she was gobbled up, although there is now a barrage of feathers all over the back yard.  He temporarily put the dogs in our room while he was getting Olive back into her fence, and what does Yang do?  He walks straight to my backpack--the one with all of my students' parade permission slips, sign-in sheet, and other field-trip forms--and pees all over it.  Call me crazy, but I think no person should have to deal with two crazy dogs, one pissed-on backpack, and one frantic chicken before the sun rises.  ~Jodi

Boring Day Challenge

I hereby dedicate the following boring day to my esteemed colleague, Mr. Moore.

Two weekends ago I woke up, fully alert.  The clock read 7:28.  I decided there was no way in hell I was getting up at an hour beginning with a '7' on a Saturday, so I fell back asleep.  Sometime later, I woke up again.  It was now 8:42.  I decided there was no way I was waking up at an hour beginning with an '8' on a Saturday, so I fell back asleep.  Sometime later I woke up again.  It was now 9:51.  I trudged out of bed, feeling proud that I managed to get myself up before the hour reached the double-digits. 

A pile of laundry greeted me at the foot of my bed.  I ignored its greeting.

Bleary-eyed from too much sleep, I meandered out to the couch.  I hopped on the internet (because that’s my coffee on a Saturday morning) and hit the “like” button on a few random facebook updates—not because I actually liked them, or even read them for that matter, but because I think it’s important to be supportive of my friends even when I don’t particularly care about their lives (see why people line up for miles to be my friend?).       

After my mad liking-spree, I stared at the clock for a while, wondering if I should wake up my kids who were now sleeping well into the double digits.  I decided to give them another half hour because waking up the kids meant that…well…I’d have kids.  While staring at the clock, I noticed that the minute hand was seven minutes fast.  Then I thought for a second that maybe the minute hand was just fine, and I had actually jumped seven minutes into the future.  If I was in the future, I thought it might be a good idea to gather as much information as possible to take back to my own time.  Unfortunately while I was contemplating what information I should gather, seven minutes passed, and I was back in my own time period again.  Strangely though, the minute hand was still ahead.

Once I finished analyzing the clock, I decided to make French toast and over-medium eggs, because it’s one of the two meals in this world I can cook.  I cracked open the first egg.  It was hard-boiled.  I cracked open a second egg.  It was hard-boiled too.  At this point I thought that maybe I should do the “spinning test” on egg #3 to make sure it wasn’t hard-boiled.  So I did, and it flew right off the counter onto the tile floor.  It was raw.  Well at least the test worked. 

After the dog licked up the egg, I made my over-medium eggs and French toast.  We were out of syrup, so I melted jelly and told the kids (who finally woke up) that it was specialty syrup.  Like the blueberry syrup you get at IHOP, but grape-flavored instead.  They looked skeptical.

I spent the rest of my fascinating morning in my jammies, eyes glazed over, staring at a computer screen and wishing I had a robot that would grade all my papers and make me look ten years younger.  I'm not sure how my robot would make me look younger...let's say it's a robot with a magic wand. 

And that concludes my boring day.

Okay, I realize that this technically was only a boring morning, but seriously, I haven’t experienced an entire boring day since 1996.  So this is about as good as it gets.

Mr. Moore, I better get a cookie for this. 

Blogger and Pre-Teen Issues

Blogger is driving me crazy.  Ever since I changed the URL, nothing on here works.  I tried commenting on Shan's last post, and once again, Blogger won't let me on the comment page (by the way Sho, that part about the patient has me in stitches! Clint says a "true" therapist would have helped him get there faster).  Sometime in the next month or two, Shan and I will be switching to a new webpage.  We already have our new URL picked out; it's just a matter of us getting together and creating our new space.  This time around I want to go through the process with her, so it's actually our blog; not just mine that she's renting a room from.  Unfortunately the new blog will be platformed on Blogger because that's all we know and neither one of us have time to learn a new one, but hopefully starting from scratch will eliminate these current glitches.  I did manage to use Blogger for three years before having any big problems.

I have too much to write about, but I really don't want to write, so I'll sum everything up.  First, I'm overwhelmed with work right now, but that's nothing new.  Second, I've been absolutely addicted to reading lately--more than usual.  I finally broke down and got a Kindle e-Reader, and I adore the thing.  The first book I read from it was Fifty Shades of Grey.  I started the second book--Fifty Shades Darker--but got bored with it, so I switched over to a new book called Divergent by Veronica Roth.  It was a great read, although it got a little heavy and sad toward the end.  I started the next book in the series (Insurgent), and after that I have four or five other books already downloaded, just waiting for me to read.  Third, I'm currently signed up for three 5Ks, one each month for the next three months.  Yeah, I think I might be getting a little carried away.  Fourth, Trin goes to school with me every day now, which is awesome, but she's driving me nuts at home.  She has been this emotional ball of hormones and constantly having these stupid meltdowns.  And since I'm the parent at home dealing with it, I'm the one that gets demonized.  I have ZERO tolerance for all of this girly crap.  Fifth, we decided to go to the L.A. County Fair again for my and Shan's birthday.  It's not until the third weekend of September, but I am already drooling at the prospect of a giant blue cheese burger and fried jalepenos (coincidentally, I've been craving blue cheese dressing too, but have felt no compulsion to stare at muddy rivers or provinces in Canada).

Okay, I'm going to go count to ten backwards because my daughter is making me see red right now.

A Little Off

Jojo, where are you? 

So I've been feeling kind of off lately. Not in a bad way either. My mood feels remarkably calm and stable, regardless of what is going on (and no, I'm not on any psych meds!). Today, I had to pretend I was angry at Jer to get him to help me clean the house. I was badgering him, frowning, and storming off, but it was just an act to get him off his butt (niceness doesn't work with him very well). Damn, I love that husband of mine, but he can be such a slacker. 

Another weird thing: I've been craving bleu cheese dressing BIG TIME (no, I am not pregnant!). I know this is disgusting, but I have been eating it in large quantities directly out of the jar with a spoon. I have also been eating a lot of avocados. WHOLE avocados, by themselves. Bleu cheese and avocados are sorta the staples of my diet right now. 

One more thing: I have recently become addicted to...geographic related themes? Last night, I spent hours trying to memorize all the world seas, and the different provinces in Canada.  On Thursday, when I should have been in bed because I had to wake up early for work the next morning, I was on Google Earth until well after midnight looking at different parts of the world ( I never realized the Mississippi River was so...brown and muddy looking). Earlier this week, I was looking up all the fault lines in the world, and information regarding continental drifts. 

Basically, I don't know what the hell is going on with me!

So yesterday at work, I accidentally walked in on a patient who was jacking off. OOPS. I just quietly left. I told my supervisor, and she told me I deserve hazard pay for that. 

Work is going SO good (when patients aren't vigorously whacking off). In addition to all my normal responsibilities, I have recently taken on two patients for which I am providing longer term individual therapy. My first patient has advanced stage hepatitis C, and needs a new liver (recovered alcoholic). He is an absolute joy to work with, but it is tough too, because he probably doesn't have a lot of time left, and he experiences chronic pain. My second patient is a compulsive hoarder. She experienced sexual trauma as a girl, and she also suffers from chronic depression. I have known both of these patients from groups for about a year now, and I just love them. 

I feel I should offer an update about school, but there isn't much to say. I started the copy and editing process, and uploaded by dissertation to "ProQuest." I found out last week that I have to dish out another $600 to get the copy, editing, and binding complete. Just another way for my school to ream me. I am probably ordering my invitations and cap and gown this weekend, if I can get myself motivated. 

Tomorrow we are going to Knott's Berry Farm for no particular reason. I told Jer a few days ago that I wanted to go, so we're gonna go, and I am totally looking forward to it! 

(Still says "Jodi." What douches).