El Perro Archives
Baseball fan
4:15 pm | 0 | Photo Album | El Perro
Photo taken by Keefe Borden (a.k.a. VE) at last Sunday’s hash. Click to see more of his work.
Shakin’ that stick and drivin’ me crazy
9:53 pm | 3 | Blog | El Perro, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
For those of you who know me and have already heard this rant, yes, I am still seething about this, and no, I will not get over it. For those of you who haven’t, the story that follows is pretty gross, both in terms of bodily functions and general human behavior. There is a picture at the end. Read on if you have the fortitude. (more…)
There were never any good ol’ days
11:27 pm | 2 | Photo Album | El Perro, Listening
Gogol Bordello restored my faith in rock-n-roll last night. Best show of the year, so far, but Dengue Fever is next weekend so we shall see.
Before the show I was walking Gus* as the sun was setting when we crossed paths with a small gray creature moving slowly along the sidewalk. On a couple of evenings Gus and I have come across a huge possum chillaxin’ near the dumpster in the alley across the street. By huge I mean bigger than Gus, who weighs 25 pounds. I think someone feeds it — there is a hole under the fence through which it always scurries and in the mornings I see paper plates with what looks like cat food lovingly placed in the escape path.
But last night the possum we saw was quite small, probably juvenile, and slow to climb the bush where it sought refuge from my canine. Gus was straining at his leash and I was curious to get as close to the joey as possible, but the kiddo remained calm and cool, not quite playing dead but not ignoring us either. I damned myself for not having my camera and briefly considered running inside for it but was afraid the dude would be gone by then. It was cute! I wanted to snuggle it, but the thought of it’s tiny possum paws scratching out my eyeballs made me keep my distance. That and the fact Gus was FREAKING OUT. Anyway, I think it’s pretty cool that I live about one minute from downtown off one of the busiest streets in Houston and I have wildlife literally in my front yard.
Here comes the sad part of the story: this morning as we were walking before work Gus and I came across a stray cat near the same dumpster where we see the big possum. Cat looked dirty and skinny from afar, typical for a stray, but it was lazing in a patch of sunlight and seemed undisturbed until it noticed us and Gus noticed it. Then it raised it’s head and I could see what looked like a long, thick string of either snot or pus hanging from it’s face. One of it’s eyes was swollen closed. And instead of darting away it got up real slow and then I saw that it’s tail was almost nearly hairless and as thin around as my pinkie. It didn’t even have the energy to run away, only to hiss a weak warning at us.
The whole sight was so simultaneously saddening and disgusting that I felt physically ill. I’m am not much of a cat lover, but jeez, even a raging bastard could understand why I had a hard time choking back tears as I walked back to our door. Poor, poor baby. I wonder now if the cat food was actually for the cat, not the fat possum, and if so then someone is severely neglecting that cat, even if it’s just someone who’s feeding a stray.
I couldn’t be party to that neglect, so as soon as I got to work I called the HSPCA. I’m not entirely sure I’ve done my good deed for the day though. If the cat gets rescued and rehabilitated then I’ll think I have, but even if it’s humanely put out of it’s misery I will feel better for having called. Uhg, even the small amount of recollection it takes to type this has my throat tightening and my heart hurting for that poor little baby.
*Speaking of Gus, this month my sweet little clown is turning six years old.
Gipfelschnaps and grass snakes
9:29 pm | 0 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel, El Perro
This is the start of the third fall in a row I have lived in this apartment in Korea. It’s still warm during the days but it’s now cool enough to leave the windows open at night. The past few weeks have been gray and rainy, which gives the air a misty sea-breeze feeling I’ll miss when I move back to Houston. And the smell — the smell that emanates and originates from somewhere in this building, drifting with the breeze outside and through my open window in the evenings now. I have never figured out who it is, but someone in this apartment smokes cigars, and he is heralding the fall for me as he has done the two years previously.
It’s made me a little lovesick, actually, because there’s almost nothing better than Christopher’s winter beard, cold from standing on the roof where he goes to smoke his nightly pipe, and which I bury my face into and absorb the smell. One week down, two weeks to go.
Jirisan was a beautiful as usual and for the second year in a row we had banner weather. Last year I hiked the highest peak, starting at 600 meters and ending at 1900. It took about 9 hours round-trip and, having done it once, I didn’t feel the need to do it again. This year I hiked to a lower peak, Banyabong , about 1700 meters, but starting at 1100 meters. It took right at 5 hours, including a break during which I ate lunch and had my gipfelschnaps, which was actually rum, not schnapps.
Sunday I visited a nearby temple, Hwaomsa. This was by far the largest and most spectacular temple I’ve seen in my time here. It was also one of the most bustling. The complex was made up of several smaller buildings, and inside of each were monks and meditators chanting and banging their hypnotic, regular beat. You could stand in the middle of the grounds and hear several different beats at a time, intersecting and reverberating off the hills that flank the temple. Or you could walk up to each building and listen more closely, the sound of one chant drowning out all the rest. At one point, I approached a small room in the corner of the complex and stood, transfixed for several minutes, while listening to the monk inside chant and beat, chant and beat. I left feeling quite moved.
On our walk through the park this afternoon Gus and I found a tiny, slender snake, the same color of dead grass. Gus snuffled it and scared it into a defensive coil, and it sat there, tiny and pathetic compared to the two of us, and shook its rattle-less tail at us. I managed to drag Gus away and hopefully left the little bugger in peace.
I think Gus was nipped or bitten by it though, because as we walked back to the building he began to sneeze in the way you do when you bonk your nose, and there was drool swinging from his jowls. The snake was so small I assumed it was harmless, and Gus has been acting normal (well, normal for him) since then, although he now has a small red spot on his snout. Boy scout he is not. Silly dog.
Frankentoys
5:05 pm | 1 | Internerd | El Perro
We gave up a long time ago on buying Gus stuffed animal toys with squeakers inside. He eviscerates them at an alarmingly lightening-like speed in order to get at the stuffing, and that gets to be an expensive hobby.
My friend Alice buys already-loved stuffed toys for her chocolate lab by the bagful at the thrift store.
If I didn’t have four hundred other sewing projects awaiting attention, frankentoys might be a good alternative.
Housewife in training
5:13 pm | 4 | Blog | El Perro, Hitched
Last night, in a desperate display of nesting, a frantic attempt to cope with all the stress that is about to descend upon me, what with the planning of a wedding and the packing of every last one of our possessions and the moving to a foreign country and the love of my life leaving for the afore-mentioned foreign country for six whole weeks, I decided I needed to clean the house.
When C came home from work last night I was standing in the downstairs bathroom, wearing an old tank top and a pair of his boxer shorts, yellow rubber gloves on my sponge-wielding hands and my arms elbow deep in the toilet no one but the dog uses. To drink out of, that is. And the wonderful man immediately commented on how hot I looked.
In approximately two months, I will quit my job to become C’s kept woman. He’s going to whisk me away to South Korea, where I’ll surely spend my days being gawked at by locals while I try to memorize the Korean phrase for “Yes I’m blonde and totally Anglo and, like, almost six feet tall AND American, but I’m no sideshow, y’all!”
Since C is getting off on the whole “provider” thing, I feel like it should be my duty to try to act a little more womanly, which means doing things like Taking Care of The Homestead! And Learning How to Cook Dinner! You know, since he’ll be working all day long and I’ll be doing nothing but essentially living off his money.
I’m absolutely positive that in the two years C has owned his house he has not swept the floor, not even once. I have seen him clean the toilet before, but only when he knew we were going to have guests.
And in the two months since he let Gus and me move in, Gus has shed enough dog hair to practically carpet the entire house. The floor didn’t even feel cold anymore, which is pretty gross considering every square inch of flooring in our house is stained concrete. I can’t believe that dog is not bald yet.
When he was still a bachelor, C bought the greatest bachelor gadget ever created, and that gadget is The Roomba. It is an electronic toy! That cleans your house for you! My soon-to-be husband is a total yuppie! Last night we pulled so much hair out of the Roomba that I could have used it to weave a king-size bedspread.
One time early in our relationship, I was at his house one afternoon and he decided he needed to run the Roomba. I’ve never seen a vacuum with so much personality. The two of us sat on the couch for hours watching the little electronic butler clean the living room floor.
The Roomba can’t navigate the stairs, though, and the staircase is Gus’ most favorite place to hang out, because when I am upstairs and C is downstairs he can act like the nosy little dog that he is and keep his buggly eyes on both of us. Up and down, up and down. Maybe Female Human is doing something fascinating upstairs, but wait Male Human is playing his guitar downstairs and I think it might be helpful to him if I go downstairs and press my cold wet nose against his calf while he tries to play the guitar but Female Human is upstairs in the kitchen and I smell food and if I whine just long enough she’ll give me a piece of cheese or a slice of banana and whisper to me “Don’t tell Daddy, okay?”
Last night I swept each of the stairs, one by one, to get all the Gus hair up. Sweeping is one of Gus’ favorite games, one of the very few times when he barks. I guess through his eyes the broom looks like some sort of bristly little animal dancing back and forth, begging to be chased, because the broom puts Gus in attack mode. He’ll hop back and forth, buck like a little bronco, lean down in pouncing position with his stubbed little tail nub in the air and bark bark bark.
When I am finally able to sweep some of the dust and dog hair and dirt into a pile, suddenly Gus changes his plan and decides, Wait! This furry little creature isn’t moving! I can pounce on it with much less effort and energy! And then he proceeds to run right over the neat little pile I’ve made, stirring up all the dust and fuzz and stuff, so I have to resweep that area all over again. So over the dim of the Roomba and the radio and the barking, there is also me yelling in my serious stern exasperated Serious voice, “Gus! NUH UH UH!”
All this sweeping and dusting and Roomba-ing had every single member of our household sneezing last night. Sneezing in the bathroom, sneezing in the dog room, sneezing in the kitchen. And just when I had swept the last pile of dust into a neat stack to be put into the dust pan, that damn little dog had to go and stick his nosy, cold, wet snout right into the pile, sniffing at it frantically to see if it wanted to be chased.
Two stinkers
3:08 pm | Comments Off | Shorts | El Perro, The Man
Do not try to blame your farts on the dog. The dog does not try to blame his farts on you.
A testament to how much my boyfriend truly loves me
3:06 pm | Comments Off | Blog | El Perro, The Man
C has never had a dog before. In my world, that means he never actually had a childhood, but hey, I don’t judge, unless you’re a cat person, and then that makes you a very, very bad person.
So it goes without saying that when my obsessive-compulsive boyfriend allowed not just me to move into his immaculate house (which really resembles a museum dedicated to Polynesian artifacts more than a condo in a major metropolitan city) but also all of my stuff and my attention-hungry Boston terrier, I understood that this was a major step for him.
A few weeks after I first moved in we had a little gathering where I proceeded to accidentally drink too much and fell asleep on the couch, when I should have been doing one of two things: a) paying attention to our guests, or b) paying attention to the dog, who, apparently, desperately need to be walked.
After all of our friends left, C announced that, since I was basically incapacitated, he would walk Gus so I didn’t have to. But the sound of the front door closing obviously triggered some sort of repressed gag reflex in my body, because the minute my two boys walked out of the house, I began puking banana daiquiris.
I somehow managed to make it to the bathroom, but I did not make it to the toilet, if you get my drift, and C returned to find me in a heap on the floor, the remains of the daiquiris in a heap next to me.
In the meantime, Gus, who had been basically ignored for most of the evening, had proceeded to poop on the floor of our computer room.
So C put me in the shower, then spent the rest of his evening cleaning up both puke and poop, neither of which originated in his own body.
That’s right, ladies. He’s a keeper.