Odds and Wombats

I don't post enough.  I know this.  Or at least, I think this, quite a lot.  But then I also think: I have staggeringly little to write about.  My on-again, off-again love affair with coffee.  My refusal to get fitted for new contacts, even though the ones I have give me a headache after twenty minutes and cause me to mistake anything seen from my right eye for the Mock Turtle, from Alice In Wonderland.  My 18th passage through The Ionian Mission.  My backyard experiments with humpback whales.  (I'm training them to deliver messages over long distance and then return home without getting lost--or even knowing how to fly).

So instead of trying to cobble together a coherent, journal-style entry, I'll just list some recent happenings in my not-all-that interesting life.

-The NBA Playoffs have made me happy.  I don't generally keep up with sports (for me, all the joy went went away the day that Tris Speaker retired) but somehow, I've gotten sucked in this year.  At first, I was motivated only by my ever-increasing hatred for Kobe (and only slightly behind him, Phil Jackson) but I've since come to enjoy the games for their own sake.  Orlando should take the East and though I hope Denver gets there against them, I don't think they will. Kobe's a tool, but he is pretty damn good at basketball.  Watching sports is also MUCH better with DVR; you can skip free throws, commercials, Craig Sager, and anything else you don't want to watch.  So that's been good.  I really like the Magic too--no huge stars, just a lot of solid unselfish players who shoot 50 3-pointers every night.  Basketball like it was meant to be played!

-Teaching a dog to roll over isn't easy.  At least, not for me.  If you want to teach a dog to do something it can already do--or already does on its own--you just catch it doing that activity, and then reward it.  It's not too hard.  (That's why the Bink is a past master at obeying command to lie down, sleep, or gnaw off all the rubber tips of doorstops through our entire house).  But dogs do NOT like to just roll over naturally (at least ours doesn't.)  Therefore, a lot of my days now consist of me saying "Roll Oooover" nine or ten times in a row while my dog stares happily and blankly past me, listening for cars to go growl at.  It's not all that different from trying to teach the quadratic equation to a bored 17 year old girl--except that the Bink will probably learn to roll over eventually, whereas my last student will NEVER learn the quadratic equation.  And, I sometimes help the Bink by putting my hand on his back and physically rolling him over.  I don't do that with my students.  Any more.

-Barry Bostwick played George Washington in a PBS miniseries many years ago.  I'm reading a bio of the great man (Washington, not Bostwick) and Bostwick--or at least photos of him taken from the TV show--appear on the cover.  He looks a LOT like Rob Lowe.  

The association has probably not helped my opinion of Washington, since I now imagine his presidency as being a lot like the mayorship of Bostwick on the Michael J Fox show from a few years ago.

-We're going to Mexico at the end of June.  No one seems to be in favor of this.  But what are you going to do?  I have to get my fall supply of Gila Monsters somewhere.