Happy Halloween!

I found these great comics at another blog and thought it would be fun to share them with my friends. I hope you all have a good holiday.

We're laying pretty low today. Our party was last weekend so we're just hanging out at home.

This Week Zoomed By

I have been keeping so busy between school and the internship this week, I hardly know how it got to be Friday afternoon.

I worked at my internship on Monday and Thursday. On Wednesday, I spent 5 hours at the law library. Tuesday was my one "goof off" day. I sort of watched Jane Eyre (I mostly listened) on Netflix while I was formatting and getting started on my final project for Legal Research and Writing.

I typed up the contents and the table of authorities and started the rough draft. I'm quite determined to get my final project done by Thanksgiving, then I can enjoy the holidays. I can simply attend classes and take notes, and I'll have all the homework done. At the end of the semester, all I'll have to worry about is two in-class finals, which hopefully won't be too difficult.

Today I had planned to spend several hours at the law library again, but I think the house simply got too messy for me to ignore it. One minute I was packing up my school stuff, and the next I found myself doing dishes and sifting piles. Oh well, it will be nice to have the piles reduced somewhat. Unfortunately, it is still not clean, just a bit less of a disaster.

We've been terribly neglectful of cooking dinners at home lately. With Jeff working full time and me as busy as I am, we've been buying dinners several nights a week. It's quite shocking for us, since we are normally so thrifty about our eating habits. Tonight, however, we'll be cooking Beef Barley Soup. We have two quarts of beef broth and veges we need to use up, so we're going to make this recipe. We made this recipe, sort of, a couple weeks ago and it was quite good. (We rarely follow recipes exactly.) And we'll also have some leftovers for lunches, too.

We really need to get back into the habit of cooking again. Hopefully once I get into coast-mode at school, I'll have the attention span to deal with putting together crock-pot meals in the morning. We do love crock-potting!

On Tuesday, I have an interview arranged for another internship, this one with an intellectual property firm. I hope it goes well. I do sometimes say such stupid things...(for an interview, anyway).

Finally, to follow up with my whining about my current internship, it has gotten better. As of next week, I'm changing my hours and now I'll be working on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The attorney I'm working for will be in at least one of the days. And I'll also get to work on Jeff's and my will and estate docs in a few weeks. I'll get to learn by doing! I've also decided that I'm going to work on getting my notary public commission. I'm not going to pay for a class; they're expensive. Instead, I'm going to do a cheap at-home study course and then go take the test. Unfortunately, the testing, fingerprinting and supplies cost more than $200, but it should help me find a position when I'm done with school.

Giardia

Well, it's official, Shasta has giardia; the vet called this afternoon. When it was first suggested, I didn't even remember what it was, so I had to go look it up at Wikipedia. I was reminded that it's the intestinal parasite that you worry about when you're out hiking or camping; that's why you boil water before you drink it.

So, now Shasta is getting a bit more stepped-up treatment. She is taking two Metronidazole pills, twice a day, and some Panacur powder added to her food once a day. It's easy to give her the pills, just pop them in some canned dog food and she swallows them right down. Getting her to eat the powder is quite another matter... I guess it makes the food smell not good and she is reluctant to eat it. Well, she's not getting anything else until she eats that dish of food.

I'm curious where Shasta got the giardia; we haven't been hiking at anything remotely like a park lately. The person at the pet store who first suggested she had giardia listed the dog park as a likely source. But Shasta has not been to the dog park in weeks; maybe only once since we bought the scooter. Perhaps she caught it from the K9 Casa where we boarded her a couple weeks ago. Wish I knew... I hate to blame the boarding place, but I'm not likely to take her back there if it's going to add over $200 in vet bills (and inconvenience) to the back end of any trip we take. Maybe once we get her over this, we'll have her immunized against giardia. I don't know...I hate to over-medicate my dog child.

Since we had to take her to the vet anyway, we had a heart worm test done and got a prescription for Revolution. We've had quite enough with fleas. We got spoiled in Oregon—it got cold enough the fleas died over the winter. It doesn't seem to get cold enough here in California to adequately wipe them out. So, we give up; flea treatment, here we come.

Preparing for Midterms

Next week is midterms. (Ugg, we're only halfway!) I lost a lot of momentum when the semester got off to such a slow start, so I basically decided to backtrack. This week I started reading the books over, only this time I'm taking notes while I read. I've realized that I retain material better if I write it down. It's not the notes, it is something about the process of making the notes that helps etch it in my memory. Plus, I have the handy notes when I'm done.

I worked two days this week. Yesterday, I worked on a probate file. I didn't get much done, but I spent a lot of time researching how these types of cases work. It sounds like the languishing probate files will be my project for this internship.

Netflix Convert

We debated about subscribing to Netflix for many of the last several years. I always pushed back because I thought we didn't need it and it would be an unnecessary expense. I'm pretty tightwad on the whole, and subscribing to a DVD rental service seemed extravagant. Of course, when we first talked about it (probably in 2004), we had cable. Cable paired with a 2-channel TiVo provided us with a nearly infinite supply of quality programs to watch.

Then once we moved down to California, we didn't even have a TV for the first year. But when my father gave us one, we were able to borrow from a large DVD library he had, so I again successfully argued against Netflix.

Our recent move to Redwood City, and our purchase of a new TV, brought up the question again and I finally relented. Netflix has a free trial and I figured it was worth a try. Well, I'm glad we tried it. Cable, back when we had it in the early 2000s, was typically more than $50/month. (I couldn't even get a quote at the Comcast website without entering personal information I didn't want to enter.) In my experience, they set a low advertised rate, but then they charge you $5 here and $10 there for premium channels—the ones you'd actually want—so you end up spending far more than their advertised rate. The Netflix membership we signed up for is $18.56/month (includes taxes). (We signed up for two disks in transit $13 and the $3 Blue Ray disk upgrade.)

Since one of the activities we enjoy is watching movies, I think the money we are spending on Netflix is well-justified, especially when compared to cable. And with their huge instant download library, there are so many great programs to watch. While we also incurred the additional expense of a Roku Digital Video Player, we could have just hooked up a computer to the TV. We decided the convenience of the player was worth the extra $124 one-time expense.

Of course, we're not watching the latest episode of those hot new TV programs (like Glee and Dollhouse), but we don't care about that. We are more than happy to catch last season's episodes. Now I'm wondering if we'll ever subscribe to cable again...probably not. We've even decided to get rid of our old TiVo because we just don't have need to store it anymore...

Another thrifty benefit of Netflix has been our total lack of desire to buy new DVDs. When we went to Fry's this weekend, we weren't even tempted. We are more than happy to rent programs, or download them, from Netflix. And of the dozens of movies we've watched over the last month, there are only two that we might buy, if we find the right deal. In the old days, we might have bought a dozen movies on a shopping trip and then decide to just keep a few of them to watch again. I shutter to think of how much money we blew on entertainment back in Oregon.

The worst thing about Netflix, in my opinion, is the unlimited nature of the offerings. It's a bit like going to a buffet: you've paid for your dinner and now you're tempted to eat as much as you can, to get your money's worth. There's a lot of good programs to tempt us to use up our discretionary time.

Shasta ♥ Her Scooter

I took this video a couple days ago and wanted to share it. Shasta has gotten used to her scooter now and can barely wait while we hook her in. She is so impatient to get running.

With the rain, she's driving us a bit bonkers today. We're hoping it clears up enough to take her for a run.

Rain!

We woke this morning to a loud crash and splashing water noises and Jeff correctly surmised it was our pop-up in the backyard collapsing under the weight of the rain water accumulated on the roof. We hustled into our clothes and rain jackets and went out and did our best to cram all we could into the garage. I thought it was a little funny; Jeff was not as amused. =)


That gray tarp in the foreground, that's our stained glass. We hope it survives. We had it in the garage over the weekend, but then it got taken out again when my Dad and stepmother came over on Sunday to clean out the back of the garage. Oh well, there's no room for it now since we crammed everything else in. At least it's covered.

I love fall! We get to wear sweaters and drink hot tea and have hot oatmeal in the mornings. Yeah!

Here's a quick video of how hard it's raining outside. If it keeps this up for too many more hours the garage may flood! I wonder how the storage facility next to the Bay is... I guess we're insured so I won't worry about it. =)


Surveying the damage on Wednesday:

We had a couple of cardboard box casualties in the garage due to the poorly sloped floor. Luckily it was just a box of clothing donations (which I've thrown in the wash) and a box of mostly glass jar food storage. We lost a very little bit of food.

I found this garbage can sitting outside the garage and it was nearly full. It didn't look to be in a position to catch any runoff and it was holding just under 7 inches of water! (That includes the rain for all day yesterday plus the rainfall through the night.)

The popup is entirely destroyed and needs to be disassembled and recycled/tossed out. Too bad; what a waste!

The weather forecast called for more rain today; but it's absolutely sunny and gorgeous outside. What a good day to be in California.