my parents' dog Rascal

My parents are going to a wedding in South Carolina this weekend so I'm dog-sitting for them (for a change). I decided to bring Rascal over to our place to hang out for a bit. Emily has taken refuge somewhere and might come out by tomorrow, but Isis is non-plussed about the whole thing. I was worried that Rascal might be anxious about being in a foreign house, but he seems to have adapted well.

Not only is he on our bed with all my clean folded laundry, he brought a rawhide with him. Then again, I chose to get the camera versus fuss at him, so I'm not really enforcing a lot of rules around here.

30 feels pretty good so far

This weekend I drove up to 's house to meet up with my northern friends for some dinner and karaoke. I decided that I have little to no interest in seeing semi-nude men or women in a bar setting as some sort of rite of passage before getting married, but I did want to do a few things that Rich has less than zero interest in so that I could enjoy a bit of a "girls' night out" experience. So we met up with , , Shannon, Liz, and (for dinner at least before he fled the karaoke scene) to have dinner and then headed to a cafe in Annandale where we could reserve a private room to sing to our hearts out. It was a fine evening all around.

While we had the luxury of choosing whatever songs we wanted from the binders, the videos were a little ... odd. They all looked as though they were filmed in the late 80s and in many cases has nothing to do with the plot of the song itself. Some of my favorites were the stop-motion dolls during "Bohemian Rhapsody" and the Spiderman version of "Reunited (and it feels so good)." Even if they were germane to the plot, they were still bizarre, as was evidenced by the midget starring in Garth Brook's "I've Got Friends in Low Places." Click on the thumbnail to see all the photos from our evening.

I was pleased to have so many of my friends in one place at one time. While we couldn't get everyone together because of schedules, having absolutely all of those cool people in one place might have caused some sort of tear in the universe as we fashioned a new city of Coolville with a population of all my kick ass friends. Sacrifices had to be made for everyone's safety.

This morning at Kim's house I had the luxury of taking a few photos of some of the relics from her duffle bag of high school notes. There were so many complicatedly folded letters written with those damned fountain pens that leaked on fucking EVERYTHING but we loved because they were so unique. So in honor of my 30th birthday today, I'm posting some of the embarrassing crap I wrote 15 years ago to my friend who is still my friend today. I could write all about how where I am today is not necessarily exactly where I thought I would be when I was 15, but thankfully, I'm not that exact same person and have learned to fucking relax (most of the time) and not plan my life out for the next 15 years. Perhaps when I turn 45, we can all look back on the pictures from karaoke yesterday and have the same combination of wistfully smiling and cringing at ourselves.

embroidery machine questions

Ok, folks, I need advice. Tell me what kind of embroidery machines you have. What kinds do you covet? Is all the software really as crappy and tedious as I've used in the past? I see folks adding machine embroidery to their clothing and wonder if it really is taking them 45 minutes to an hour for each design or if they have some secret trick.

My embroidery machine is old and I never use it. I only use it for a sewing machine these days and even then I wouldn't mind finding another home for this one and replacing it.

Given their prices, I'm planning for a purchase I convince myself I need and will actually use.