Prepoceros

Ah, sweet humidity. You don’t know how much you miss it until it’s gone, gone, gone, leaving you with nosebleeds, chapped lips, flat hair, and painfully congested sinuses. The last four nights of the trip John and I slept in a room without a humidifier, and my congestion got worse and worse. The very last night I started a pot of water boiling and set it next to the bed, in the hopes that my stuffy head would clear up enough to let me get some sleep.

I saw many women in Colorado with normal-looking hair, and I wish I knew their secret. From the day we arrived, my hair stuck to my head in flat, limp sheets. I could’ve sworn half of it had plum fallen out, it was so thin. I washed it, I really did! But to no avail. The night we got home it plumped back up to its normal thin-side-of-average texture with no effort on my part. TV tries to tell me that humidity is hair’s archnemesis, but mine seems to thrive in it.

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In the Sky Mall catalogue John found an ad for a cabinet that simultaneously displays and winds watches. As we puzzled over how a cabinet could possibly wind any watch you put in it*, we noticed an amusing heading. It should have read “Why you need Watch Winder” above a list of reasons why this remarkable product was worth fifteen hundred dollars, but an overzealous copyeditor tacked on a question mark.

Ever since then we’ve been busting out “Why you need watch winder?” in our best sitcom-Chinese-restaurant-owner voices, and . . . just try it.

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Yesterday Sam and I took advantage of the 78-degree weather by heading to the dog park. The first two parks we drove by had a total of one dog in them, but the third turned up a small pack, so we went in.

At this particular dog park there are separate fenced-off sections for small and large dogs, which I like. Sam loves to lead the big dogs in chases, but they can get a bit rough with him, especially when they outnumber him four or five to one. Little dogs romp around, sniff some butts, jump on each other, and no one gets hurt. Much nicer.

When we got to the park there were four dogs in the little dog park, all small. After five minutes, though, two people came in with three dogs. One was Sam’s size, but the other two were 40-50 pound mixed breeds. Um. There was a sign? A big sign, on the gate you walked through? It said “Small dog park. No dogs over 20 pounds.”

I didn’t say anything, being all non-confrontational and whatnot, but it irked me. Big dogs go in the big dog park, mkay? It’s like fifty feet away. Small dogs are allowed in the big dog park, so they could’ve all gone over there, or they could’ve split up, since there were two people. Their dogs were pretty well-behaved, except that one barked at everyone, but still.

A while later two other people came in with a freaking pit bull mix, and that was it for me. That dog must’ve weighed at least 70 pounds. Also, PIT BULL. So we left. If I wasn’t going to confront the people with the collie, I definitely wasn’t going to start anything with two pit bull owners.

Maybe they completely missed the enormous sign, I don’t know. I just didn’t want to deal with it, and I wanted to get both of us away from the growing (both in number and size) jumble of dogs.

Rules, people! There are rules for a reason, goshdarnit! (I wanted to shake my fist and say.) I’m sure you think *your* pit bull is sweet and harmless, but has it occurred to you that perfect strangers with chihuahuas might not feel that way? Of all the people who appear on the local news after their pit bull tears the face off of some kid, none ever say, “Yup, Rex was a mean son of a bitch. I always knew he’d flip out and maul somebody one day.”

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* Turns out it’s for automatic watches, the kind that wind themselves when your arm moves. If you collect watches, you can’t wear each one every day, so the cabinet moves the stored watches in little circles to keep them wound. Who knew?

Tags: Sam, weather

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:29 am and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.