She took that in and after a break in the conversation, she asked, “Is Chief’s doctor a person, or a dog?”

GUFFAW.

“He’s a person.”
“Oh. Well I thought he might be a dog.”

“The player can make decisions about time spent in skill development, such as exercise, reading, creativity, and logic, by adding activities to the daily agenda of the sims. Daily needs fulfillment such as hygiene maintenance and eating can also be scheduled. Although sims can autonomously perform these actions, they may not prioritize them effectively. Much like real humans, sims can suffer consequences for neglecting their own needs. For example, sims can die from starvation if they do not eat for prolonged periods of time. Needs govern the overall moods of the sims. If the needs are not fulfilled, the sims can become grumpy and unwilling to obey certain player-directed commands, particularly ones that do not fulfill the depleted needs in question. This system follows the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which physiological needs must be satisfied before other needs can be attended to.”

I first played the game when I was 20 years old. (TEN YEARS AGO. Man. Anyway.) It was a short-lived experiment – I found the whole thing very stressful and not too fun. I mean you had to monitor each sim’s stomach, bladder, sleepiness, fridge… You had to send them to the bathroom, queue the tasks of cooking, taking out the trash, picking up the paper… Empty, full, empty, full. It was all the pesky little details of life that if one consciously thinks of them all at once, someone like myself will avoid getting out of bed in the morning. Not to mention that any time you spent playing the game, you were NOT tending to your actual life, so while your sim might be fed and making it to work on time, that real world studying wasn’t doing itself.

When I pause to consider all the irons we have in the fire right now, life is a sims game. Which is ludicrous, and maybe their point in making the game, so we can experience a god-like control over the orchestration of such mundane tasks. I think of this as similar in enjoyment to when you’re sleeping through your alarm, but you KNOW you’re sleeping, and thus the sleeping is much more enjoyable than if you were sleeping unaware.

So there are my actual organs, mainly the food tube and bladder. And Zoe’s. And Chief’s. When we had cats, there were their stomachs, bladders AND litter box. The trash can. The groceries, and not just the groceries, but specific items: at what level is the orange juice? The eggs? The dog food? There’s no room in the freezer for ice cream (needs emptying!), but the frozen strawberries are getting low (needs filling!). The checking account. The credit card. The bills. The laundry. The mail. The email. The air filter. The water filter. The car’s oil, gas, registration, inspection. Prescriptions. Toilet paper. How long since we cleaned the shower? Washed the sheets? Tossed out the leftovers? Joel’s a skilled programmer, and I’m sure he could make a control center with detailed reports on each of these things, which might be fairly entertaining. They should make a game like that. Oh wait.

By the by, Angry Birds is more my speed. Launching psychotic fowl at structures built and occupied by militant, thieving swine is pure escapism, not to mention subtle strategical, physical and geometrical lessons.

When I’m thinking about any one of these things, I’m fine. I do it, it’s done, and I move on to the next item on the list. In aggregate, my head spins. I’ve learned through intense cognitive/behavioral conditioning NOT to think about much in aggregate unless I’m prepared and calm enough and ready to enjoy thinking about it, like contemplating the expansive macro and micro universes. Might not want to do that when you’re trying to go to sleep. Or next time you’re stuck in traffic, look out into the sea of cars. Each driver has a whole story and life and family, and those people have stories and families and lives, and their officemates and cashiers at the stores they visit ALSO have stories and lives and families, all past and present, and we easily might not have left even Houston yet.

It might sound like I’m crazy. And yes, this sort of thinking can produce anxiety. But like the alarm/sleeping concept, if I’m aware of all the balls in the air, yet that everyone is fed, no one has wet her pants, the pets and plants are alive, I still talk to friends and family some, and – oh yes – school work is getting done, I feel more like I’m in a swim meet and less like dog paddling. Which reminds me… I need to work exercise back into my routine. In my defense, I’ve had full sinuses and empty energy reserves.

*Apparently Peter Lynch has a financial theory by the same name. I mean no encroachment.

After waking to an alarm this morning in an effort to get ourselves up during the AM hours, I was lying in bed nursing Zoe when I heard a dog – Sarge, no question – heaving to vomit.

Perhaps I should back up just a bit. The vomit was no surprise; I had predicted it yesterday. In the early evening we went to Target as a family. On my way out the door, I told Sarge (as I always do, given his history; see example here) not to destroy anything and gave him a well-meaning pat on the head. When we returned under two hours later, we were faced with the remnants of his symphony of destruction. He had emptied and shredded the diaper bag, including some lotion and Orajel (thus, my prediction), and upset the contents of my backpack, TSA-style. Mouthed but not tattered toys and a few barrettes were strewn across the living room. I wished him pain and general discomfort for causing such an inconvenience and for not respecting our property, dramatically vowed to toss him on the highway from a fast-moving car, cleaned up the mess, and went about our evening, relatively happy that this was one of his less devastating tantrums.

Joel is wont to claim Sarge’s superiority as a dog, especially in relation to Chief, so I was certain he wouldn’t mind taking care of the piles of vomit this morning. Bleary-eyed at 10:30AM, he dealt with the worst of it and returned to bed.

Zoe and I shuffled into the bathroom where she tinkled at least two cups into her potty (revealing her dry diaper – after 11 hours in bed!). She then requested a bath. She splashed about while I got ready to meet a friend for lunch. Said friend is passing down several study aids for me, and as a thank-you, I planned to bake him some cookies. When Zoe and I were both dressed and ready, she was playing happily upstairs. Joel and I had talked a few minutes before (though he was still in bed) and I called to him that I was going downstairs to put cookies in the oven; I would be right back. (Let the record show that I thought he was awake at this point. Also noteworthy is that he was awake enough to have gotten a glass of water lodged into his armpit, a glass that he would later spill as he arose, wetting his shirt and the bed.)

In the famous metaphor, at this point the fan has been turned on, and the poo is definitely in the air.

The consternation transcended our separation; I could feel Joel’s dismay before I actually made it up the stairs. I can’t be sure at which exact moment his valve slammed shut, but it was closed well before he was able to speak. He was Rabbit to Zoe as Tigger. In his (unintentionally) best Rabbit’s voice, I heard, “She’s RUINED $3000 worth of equipment!”

If only I had a picture. We weren’t thinking clearly; no one can blame us. Zoe, on top of the desk, an Expo marker in each hand. Streaks and swirls of black and green on her face, her clothes. The desk. The keyboard. The flat-screen monitor. The mouse. The MacBook Pro.

“Stay calm. It’s dry erase. At least it’s not Sharpie.” Outwardly, I project confidence that this can be fixed. Inside, I know that my OCD husband never will be able to use these items, and possibly look at our daughter, the same way again. He would later describe the incident as having “violated his inner sanctum.”

I took Zoe with me downstairs, trying to keep the time in mind and find something that might clean the marker mess without damaging the items.

In the 8-10 minutes we were in the kitchen: Zoe helped herself to some water from the fridge’s dispenser, overflowing her small cup, which is really hardly worth mentioning since this is a multi-occurring event on a daily basis; a small bowl of syrup bounced with a zig-zag trajectory inside the fridge and onto the floor; and Zoe capsized her bowl of Cheerios, milk and blueberries. I was able to prevent her from playing in the sticky mess long enough to corral the dogs into the kitchen to remind myself why I keep them around.

After my lunch I received a text from Joel that he dripped melted chocolate chip onto his freshly cleaned sweater and jeans, and as we know from Chief Wiggum on the Simpsons, “Nothing gets chocolate out.”

Most of the marker has been removed with a combination of Clorox Green Works, Kaboom! and Goof-Off. Joel professes a continuing and undying love for Zoe despite her egregious error, though his valve likely will remain in the undesirable closed state for some time.

The family lives about an hour and a half outside of Houston, in the country, on three acres. One acre of that is fenced in and has a pond for swimming. Three kids are part of the family, two pre-teen girls and a teenage boy, who later slept with the dogs. The mom wanted dogs that would alert them when someone was approaching; Chief and Sarge are protective that way. It was a perfect fit. When I met the lady and her son at a gas station, we transferred all the dogs’ possessions and loaded them into the car. I cried and cried. (I now understand how my family felt after leaving me in the Fatburger parking lot in College Station. The dorm parking lot was swimming with cars and people, so we went a couple of blocks farther to say our goodbyes, and I walked back to my dorm. We laugh about it now, but I think it is one of my Mom’s great regrets.)

Generally I am not a crier. Crying was once my fallback cathartic mechanism for any overwhelming emotion, from joy to pain to sadness. I guess it was the experience of being a military spouse or watching my Granddad’s decline or having cancer or something during that time. Whatever it was, like a thickened scar, I became not only toughened, but insensitive to pain. I have become rather adept at accepting things and moving on. But for the next week, my heart actually ached, and I cried at the thought of them. It was a little bizarre.

As my birthday approached, Joel asked what I wanted. “Chief,” I told him each time, an answer that was met with pity and consternation. (I got an awesome camera instead, which I really appreciate.)

I called and emailed the lady who had taken them, getting updates a few times. The dogs were happy, she reported, and the kids loved them. I missed them, but as long as they were okay, I thought, I could accept that this was a better situation.

Fast forward to Monday. Having fled Hurricane Ike, we were in Garland at the Watts Homestead. I received an email from the dogs’ Garland vet. A lady outside Houston (in Jacinto City) had Chief and Sergeant Pepper; please contact her ASAP.

The dogs had been roaming in their neighborhood for “a couple of days” – the lady said they appeared after the hurricane. Her kids had seen them hiding in a neighbor’s garage and took them some water. She called the number on their tags and gave my name (which still had our San Antonio information on it), and the vet’s office contacted me.

The Jacinto City family already loved the dogs and would keep them, except for having a damaged fence from the storm and no way to get them food. My dear friend Rachel (whose praises I will sing forever and ever) got them supplies, drove to Jacinto City, and rescued them until we would get back to Houston on Tuesday. (The family wants to visit the dogs sometime.)

Now I’ll never know the details of the dogs’ journey. But the facts are that they were a good distance outside Crosby, Texas (the exact location is unknown), a hurricane hit, and “a couple of days” later they showed up, together, collars on, in a neighborhood at least 19 miles away, with kind people who took them in and tracked down their original owners. Joel made this map to illustrate. They were on a direct path to our residence.

So. The dogs are back with us. As much as I want to know more details, I haven’t called the lady who took them, though she and her kids may want to know that they are safe, depending on what happened.

Zoe has been hugging them and sitting on their backs; I think she missed them, too. The plan, and I expect to be held accountable for this, is to walk with them every night. They need it, and I need it, and our family could use the interaction. We could all benefit from a routine, some fresh air, and more exercise. It’s about the spin you put on things. I can say, “Ugh, the dogs should be walked.” Or I can say, “Let’s all get out there and enjoy the evening together.”

I’m learning that the trick to surviving this busy time is not to eliminate everything from my life. Certain things do have to be put on hold, yes. But as my long-time friend Jennifer (new Mom and pediatric resident) wisely told me as I applied to medical school, you really figure out what’s important, make room for that, and let everything else fall away.

We have a family, and it includes dogs. We’ll make it work.

Today we addressed the issue of our “yard” by going to Lowe’s and getting a few bags of cedar mulch, a roll of weed-resistant blanket stuff, and a few bags of pine bark nuggets. Zoe frolicked in the garden center, and by the time we got home she was asleep. The rest of our project only took half of her nap!

A little raking, spreading, layering, and more spreading, and ta-da! It is improved. We’ll probably add some green or a little fountain later if this holds up well.

Pictures of our short work.

Later we explored a nearby park and ventured to the “Super” Wal*Mart. Turns out it wasn’t so super, as the smattering of groceries available was insufficient to complete my shopping. But we had a lovely, rather productive day. Most of the little thises and thats of moving into a new place were tended to by a parade of skilled workers sent by the leasing office, shortening Zoe’s nap a bit, which is why she naps again, which is why I am able to write this post.

The adjustment to Houston is going well, I would say. Clear Channel’s dominion comforts me in new places; all the radio stations are preset. TiVo is nestled into the armoire we gladly inherited from our friends (THANKS!). I like our place. I’m about to start what I’ve been waiting to do my whole life. I think we will be happy here.

The park left a little something to be desired, such that I will not call it “our park,” but for today it was great. Zoe enjoyed swinging, and I always love to watch her play.

While pushing her on the swing, I got a feeling I knew I had felt previously. When and where was it? Slowly it came to me. My first week in College Station. The moistness. The trickling. The oppressiveness.

Back sweat.

Welcome to Houston. Perhaps residency will take us somewhere cooler.

Side note: what to do for the approximately 144 square feet of “yard” we have? Yard – psh! It is woefully inadequate for our purposes as is. It could have potential I guess… We’re trying to make lemonade anyway. Our leanings are toward synthetic grass, but it’s pricey. Any other ideas? It needs to be appropriate for dogs and Zoe and very low maintenance, preferably something that doesn’t track in much mess, given my disdain for mopping. Pebbles? Mulch?

- Healthy appendage. Last night I ran into an open drawer; it hopped off its tracks and crashed into my right great toe. This was the most severe pain I have ever felt. It’s a closed fracture, and I will see a foot specialist soon. My first broken bone! For now I borrowed Ali‘s boot and am clomping everywhere I go.

- Nintendo GameCube. I sold it on eBay.

- Pair of Levi’s. Also sold on eBay.

We’re finding new homes for all kinds of things! I have someone coming tomorrow about a bunch of MCAT prep materials. We’re also looking for homes for a sofa bed, two chairs, a corner desk, a TV cart, and a headboard.

Also, my list tags aren’t working for some reason, so I have to look like I don’t know what I’m doing. >:| And if you read this when it was entitled “One less…” I apologize that you had to see such a glaring grammatical error.

I take full responsibility for how Wanda came into our lives. We took her in with the intention of finding her a home, and my pregnant self just never did.

I do feel a little badly about Sophie – we chose her purposefully. Our situation has changed now, and for the record, she should go to a home without small children.

All of this is to say that I accept the implications that come with rehoming animals – call me irresponsible or heartless or whatever – I’m thinking these things already. What it comes down to is that I’m putting the human members of our family above the cat ones. Also, we can have only two pets in our new residence, and the dogs made the cut.

Anyway, they are both calico, spayed, and very affectionate. They come with all the cat trimmings. Take one or both. Contact me if you or anyone you know might be interested.

I am LOVING the new book club selection, Marley and Me. It has had me snorting, crying, and gasping for breath for the past four nights – I wasn’t sure I was even capable of that kind of laughing anymore. It reminds me how much I miss my dogs, even that terrible Sarge.

In retrospect I have pinpointed that things started to fall apart when I got us dressed for the day. It is usually a mistake to journey beyond the lax borders of comfortable pants. It is downright catastrophic to do so in favor of freshly dried, one-size-too-small jeans. (Jeans that I got, by the way, before my recent extra five pounds and after I determined that I looked homeless in the jeans I was wearing every day.) No amount of wearing around the house will loosen the waist enough to avoid an epic muffin top. As if the aesthetics weren’t awful alone, my scar aches every moment of every day, and anything but fat pants exacerbates it into a raging pain. (I have resolved to get this seen about next week.) After that, I decided that my hair and nails are embarrassing, I don’t want to live with cats, and Zoe became inconsolably and monotonously fussy, alternately clingy and bored.

Thankfully my memory is terrible and I don’t remember the other little things that happened, though I do know that my original post would have been around 4PM if my network hadn’t gone down, taking my (unsaved) post with it. I also wore my homeless jeans to dinner with my Mom, who is very forgiving with my terrible mood. (Thanks, Mom, for dinner and patience with me.) Is it possible that just getting dressed ruined my day?

Dear Jeebus: Zoe, who is supposed to be sleeping, is fussing again. Separation anxiety is a bitch for both of us. And teething is a cruel, cruel joke.

She’s back to sleep. I wish I could help the little monkey. Anyway I suppose the point of all this is that I need to slow my roll – I have a good life. I just need to work on my patience and get more exercise. And if you see me socially, please forgive me if I am wearing something inappropriate in my search for comfort.