Saturday, June 17, 2006

she's the smartest rodent i ever knowed

we keep a ceramic bowl in the bottom level of chi-chi's cage for hay. she pulls all of the hay out and piles it next to the bowl. why? she poops in the bowl.

okay, so she poops in other places, too. that can't really be helped with a chinchilla. but the bulk of her poops are in the ceramic bowl. i guess that's what we get for giving her a potty dish (with carefresh in it) in her play room (our walk-in closet).

she's also the cleanest rodent i've ever known. she always kept things tidy. she'd put things in dishes or inside her house when she wasn't playing with/chewing on them. got a stick to chew on? keep it in a food dish!

what i recently noticed, though, is that she puts out her dirty laundry.

what?

she has one of matt's old get connected shirts (the gray ones that nobody wants) in her cage, on the second level. it's there so she has something soft to rest on. sometimes, she sleeps on it.

she's pretty good about not peeing on it (she pees on soft things... called carefresh). but she kinda failed at that earlier this week. her solution? she dragged the shirt down to the first level (on the carefresh). i put it back on the second level. she dragged it back to the first.

apparently, she doesn't want a peed-on shirt in the non-peeing area.

***

lola, on the other hand, pees in her (dust) bath, and continues bathing. and then smells like chinchilla pee. and that's why lola's not allowed to take baths unsupervised.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

from the mouth of derek...

"bird flu isn't so bad. it's just that, if you get it, and it's lethal, then you die."

i'm still not entirely sure how he decided to say that.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

as an update to a previous post...

perhaps i am not the only one that feels that way about driving our cars.

less than a week after that post, i found a white gti on the beltway (and by "found" i mean "i changed lanes in front of"). cars ended up between us, and by the time i was merging onto 66, i figured he was going elsewhere... but he exited onto the ramp as well. we drove together for a while, inexplicably moving our sunrooves in synch. when he went to exit, i got a wave goodbye.


it gave me the warm fuzzies.

and i still love my car.

yes, i'm blogging on my lunch break...

okay, i know i said i'd scale back on the basketball blogging, but... it's only one post, right?

anyway, so the mavs lost last night (boo), but avery johnson shocked the hell out of me. in a good way. the only reason it didn't go into OT was because d-wade is amazing.

i've always said that i couldn't be a basketball coach because i don't actually know all the nuances of the game (not to mention that i don't know how to run practice at all), but i seem to be overlooking some glaring shortcomings.

with one second left on the clock and the ball advanced to half court, nowitzki was inbounding. what the hell? i thought you'd want the big shooters on the floor for a last-second shot. catch and shoot. why was nowitzski inbounding?!

high alley to the wade-blocked potentially-overtime-forcing oop. while all the other players (for either team) were around the 3-pt line (for the win, i suppose).


there's no way i could have come up with that play. there's no way i would have even thought to come up with anything original in that situation. i figured it was a catch-and-shoot (and have faith in the shooting abilities of your players) situtation. in the face of normality, avery johnson called a high-percentage play.

they didn't award coach of the year to the little man with the funny voice. they awarded coach of the year to a brilliant coach.