austingirl

RIP Bridget. Good girl. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That rug is machine washable. I'll never have another type of rug in a common area while I have dogs and kids. This brand. On a related note, I've found the best plush dog toy for heavy chewers - I know some of y'all also have dogs who destroy any toy within a few minutes.The brand is Fluff & Tuff. They had a booth at the AHS Puppy Bowl in February and we got a stuffed hippo, fully expecting it to get shredded quickly. That thing lasted for months. Subsequent toys haven't lasted that long now that Rocket is huge, but any toy that can make it more than a couple of days is a winner. I tried every "tough" brand I could find and nothing has worked as well as Fluff & Tuff. Everything at Petsmart had the stuffing pulled out within half an hour. In Austin, I buy Fluff & Tuff at Kriser's on Great Hills, but they're also on Amazon. Of these, the best one is the beach ball because it doesn't have any head, tail, or limbs for them to chew off. Second best is the caterpillar.

Sometimes it's hard fitting your 80-lb, 10-month-old puppy body on the couch. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

He graduated during WWII. Insane. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

"Live to 97 and you can do anything." Love it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

He also has the best name ever. I first spoke to Dr. Goodenough back when I did PR for the UT College of Engineering, when he won the Japan Prize. I was tasked with writing a news release about it. I didn't realize that at 97, he is still technically a professor there. With this prize he also becomes the oldest Nobel laureate ever. Link

He's gone full Bond villain. Oh, so THIS is what could make him lose the mandate of heaven? I can't tell which bizarro world I'm living in these days.

This is the fault of the millennials, right? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

...that is completely fucking terrible. Thought it was a joke at first. Looks like whiskey in Gusher form.

The jokes really are just writing themselves at this point.

When all this is behind us, years from now, I'd love to look back and fully investigate the role social media played in this whole thing, especially if tweets end up being evidence. I started my career doing fairly old-school PR, where NOTHING hit the airwaves without being approved by several folks up the totem pole. It's so crazy to me how little people consider the longevity of internet content and how quickly information is disseminated online, especially when you have upwards of thousands of followers. I worked at one of the bigger tech companies in town for a long time and wrote their first set of social media guidelines (which I'm sure have been updated since then) and 99.9% of the shit I see these morons post violates basic, BASIC tenets of social media use when users affiliate themselves with the companies they work for. I first heard of Twitter at SXSW in 2007, when someone described it to me as something you'd use to basically mass-text your friends and arrange spontaneous get-togethers or let people know where you were, using basic location services. I bet that for all their forward-thinking mindsets, the founders of Twitter never predicted the critical role it would take in affecting news dissemination and politics.

I absolutely remember how great it was pre-kids to be able to pick up and do whatever whenever. I never understand people who are all "I can't even remember what life was before them!" I do and it was kickass. Impromptu weekend road trip? Last-minute happy hour with coworkers? Check and check. My oldest was a NICU baby and was so incredibly high-maintenance that I hated maternity leave. All he did was scream and nurse. I was afraid to leave the house with him. I didn't go out to eat for dinner for 6-8 months after he was born because I knew I would pay later if he didn't get to bed by 6:30 pm. I could not WAIT to go back to work. To be perfectly honest, then, in the bowels of motherhood, I wondered what on earth inspired us to try to get pregnant. I had never really been around kids and thought that some latent maternal instinct would kick in. Eventually, after MANY months, it did, but in the darkest days I worried if I'd made a huge mistake. Point is, people can fuck right off with their opinions. If you're cruising along childless and loving life, I'm certainly not going to tell you you need kids to be fulfilled or whatever. I have two kids and I would lie, cheat, steal, and murder for them, no questions asked. They bring untold joy to me and I never regretted the decision to bring children into my life. But I think it's so intelligent to really think about how children can affect your life, and how ok you will be once you realize that parenting consumes all of you, in ways you probably don't understand yet. More than almost anything else, parenting asks everything of you and asks you to just go with it, blindly, believing that it gets easier and one day you can be you again. This was probably the biggest thing for me to get used to. I'm a control freak, and there's nothing like pregnancy and babies to really bring home that there are things you may never be able to affect, no matter what you do. This lesson hit home when I had a miscarriage between my two boys. I couldn't have done anything about it, and yet, 8 years later, every now and then I'll think about that baby and what it could have become, and I think maybe if there's an afterlife I'll get to meet it and see what made it so special that it was called back at 8 weeks gestation. If we have auras, I think mine would be a bit dimmer than it was before then, before that baby left us and before my post-partum depression decided to stick around permanently. For all that, though I wouldn't go back and do it over differently. Because of lessons learned while raising children, I've become a more patient, empathetic person. I'm less uptight than I was, both at home and work, because after you have a baby that screams the first year of its life and after losing the next one, you realize that you can only do so much, and focus on things you may be able to affect instead of things you won't. These are lessons most everyone learns at some point. Sometimes you learn them on the childfree track, and sometimes you learn along with your kids as you raise them. Both ways are great, but both is not for everyone. Godspeed, childfree friends.

Look at those teef! That's gonna be a handful. To say the least.

This guy on Twitter did a whole thread yesterday on the dogs of 9/11. You will feel all the feels.

Yes. I remember reading it then and getting goosebumps. Still does it to me. This is a good article about it, written 10 years later. Read The Great Deluge if you're interested in learning just how fucked up things were. It opens with a discussion of how the animal shelters in NO had a better hurricane preparedness plan than did the local government. But that is a topic for another thread.

Button classic! Rewatching and forgot about this line: "If I wanted to lick a hippie I'd return Joan Baez's calls."

You lucky son of a bitch.

Small chance of rain today, but I'm not holding my breath. There are at least some clouds out. I'll take what I can get.

The 8-month-old puppy is now bigger than Edgar (who is almost 5). These are from February, May, and August. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Gabi is so big!

I've said this before and I'll say it again: the bill always comes due. What worries me more and more is the question of who is going to pay that bill.

Beto is on fire. And I just saw this, which pretty much proves his point from yesterday. Members of the press, what the fuck indeed. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It wins them elections.