I sometimes feel that the peace between us and two of our closest neighbors is a bit strained, dogwise.  There is one dog in each of their households, and the most charitable description I can give either–dog, not neighbor–is “unpleasant.”  The one I like less is an ugly white boxer who, I swear it, gives me rude looks and mutters nasty comments under his breath whenever he sees me.  He’s bad-tempered and aggressive and given to accosting passersby, whether they be children, little old ladies, or unassuming housewives walking their own dogs.  He is, inexplicably, frequently left out in the unfenced yard unattended and unrestrained.  Needless to say, I don’t often walk down that way, even though it is the best way to get to the park next-door without having to walk on or cross a busy-ish street.

Last night Petra and I headed out for a little stroll with Lucy, and I saw no evidence of the boxer when I looked down the street, so I decided to go that way.  When we got a hundred yards or so away from our house, I noticed that the lesser-of-two-evils neighbor dog, a little black-and-white Spitz-type mix, was out in her yard–also unattended and unrestrained, as is often the case.  Her manner of unpleasantness tends more to the side of posturing and is directed only toward other dogs, and she seems otherwise well enough behaved, so I carried on, just keeping an eye on her.

When we came even with her, she started approaching us in that stiff-legged way dominant dogs do.  I admonished her sternly to go home, but she didn’t stop, so I figured it might just be easier to let her and Lucy do a bit of sniffing before we continued on our way.  Lucy, good submissive that she is, kept to that bargain, but after only the most perfunctory of sniffs, the neighbor dog attacked.

I confess, my first impulse was along the lines of “Bitch, bring it.”  Lucy outweighs her by a good thirty pounds at least, and could take her easily, even leashed.  In the interest of good neighbor relations (and of not traumatizing my pre-schooler), however, I pulled Lucy away and brought her to heel.  Alerted by the commotion, the neighbors called out to their own dog (they didn’t bother to come outside and see what was happening, but whatever), and she trotted away, apparently satisfied that her claim on the street was staked.

I’m still a little agitated about the whole affair, but I guess there’s really nothing to do about it other than avoid these two dogs.  We have amiable relationships with the neighbors otherwise, and, in the spirit of full disclosure, I admit that my own dogs can be something of a nuisance now and then.  While they’re not allowed out unrestrained, they have escaped a time or two and run around the neighborhood for a little while before we caught them.  Also, they bark quite a bit (mostly indoors, true, but they are loud).  Still, they’re not aggressive, either one of them, and in my mind that counts for a lot, particularly in a neighborhood like ours, with lots of kids and other dogs.

Summer’s been coming in fits and starts this year, and I’m starting to worry that the whole thing will pass like this, without it feeling like it ever really got off the ground.  It’s been raining, or threatening to, most days, and even when it’s mostly clear out there’s such a breeze and so many mosquitoes that it’s hard to want to stay out for very long.

My mom’s due over in two weeks, and I’m really hoping for some nice days so that we can get a few outings in without having to pack along our umbrellas and rain gear.  To be honest, though, it’s more me than her who’s worried about what the weather will bring, considering that she lives in summer practically year-round.  No matter what kind of summer we end up having, I’m sure it will be a nice break for her from the sweltering, humid Houston heat.

I’ve been woefully remiss where updating Brynja’s webpage is concerned.  I’ve spent a few hours over the past couple of days remedying that, so now you can check out some terribly out-of-date photos–at her age I need skip only a week or two for the pictures not to be current any longer–as well as a couple that were taken as recently as over the weekend.  Enjoy!

February/March 2008
April/May 2008
June 2008

It’s Petra’s name day today, an occasion that would ordinarily call for cupcakes.  I was in no mood for baking, however, so instead we had ice cream with cookie crumbles and caramel sauce.  I don’t think she minded the switcheroo.

Tage has recently discovered the thrill of outdoor urination, which means he’s making frequent trips outside these days (always followed closely by Petra, who never tires of playing admiring audience).

When I was a kid, my grandma drove a 1979 Chevy Nova.  To my six-year-old mind that car was the very definition of luxury — it was a dark metallic green that fairly glistened in bright sunlight, and it had both air conditioning and an 8-track tape player.  On rare occasions, when there were no other passengers older than I, I was allowed to ride in the front seat next to my grandma, and I confess, it was almost too much for me to take in.

One of my very earliest love affairs got its start in that car.  Unlike most young love, this love has gone the distance, lasting me through childhood and adolescence and early adulthood, through flirtations with bubble gum pop and grunge rock and “new country.”  Even after I discovered that which was to be my ultimate love, I retained a deep and abiding tenderness for my first love, a love that had sprung to life, fully formed, from the speakers in my grandma’s dashboard.

Like many of her contemporaries, my grandma liked ’60s and ’70s country gospel and her music collection of course reflected that.  Among the 8-tracks she rotated through in the car was a little something by a group called the Statler Brothers, the four men who became my first love.  Or more correctly, the men whose album, The Best of the Statler Brothers, became my first love, for though each and every word of the eleven songs on that album is imprinted on my soul, I can’t honestly claim to be a Statler Brothers fan, in the larger sense.

But, oh, that album … it’s the only album I can remember listening to on 8-track, on LP, on cassette, and on CD.  I have personally owned two copies on cassette (my brothers, harboring a love similar to mine, appropriated these, though they’ll doubtless deny it) and at least three on CD, the most recent of these purchased on eBay mere days ago.  Since this newest copy arrived at my house yesterday, I’ve listened to it all the way through five or six times, and it’s every bit as good as I remember.  If the reaction of my kids is anything to go by, however, this love of mine may not pass to the next generation.  That’s okay, though  … we’ve had a good run, the Statler Brothers and I.

This meme has been making the rounds today and, not feeling much else in the way of inspiration, I figured I’d throw it up and and call it good.

In 2003, The Big Read (a BBC program) compiled a list of Britain’s 100 favorite books.  The program reckoned that the average adult has read only 6 of the books on this list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

(Having seen the movie does not count, of course!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (the first three or four, anyway)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Marquèz
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel García Marquèz
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So, 27 read.  Not too bad, I suppose.  The titles I italicized are books I currently have in my shelves, but haven’t read.  That’s as good an indication of intent as any, I’d say.

I’ve hardly seen my husband for the past couple of weeks, thanks to Okami, and now I’ve just gotten email notification that we can expect Super Smash Bros. Brawl in our mailbox tomorrow. Barring any more “must-have” releases, I just may be able to steal a few moments of his attention some time around the end of next month.

I am so not ready for her to be this grown-up and beautiful.