the ocean

We are dog people. Growing up, my family always had beagles, all of whom were slightly insane. They tended to be incredibly sweet until food showed up, at which point they would rip your throat out for a shot at a Lean Cuisine. They were also not necessarily the smartest, although they could devise elaborate schemes to trick you into walking away from a hot dog for long enough to disappear it. And Ian and I have continued this trend into adulthood with the incomparable Aubrey, who can pull off a novelty dog t-shirt like nobody's business, but will strictly cut off cuddle time at the ten minutes per night she has allocated to it in her brain. 

So we have been looking to add to our beagle mafia, which has turned out to be harder than one might expect. We had to requalify for our rescue organization, which involved an interview and a home visit. We passed with only minor notes about the relative accessibility of our trash cans (fair), but still kept missing out on adoption candidates because we were unable to drop everything and drive to pick them up in other states on a weekday. So when Dolly showed up on the website, Ian agreed to make a trip to Michigan on a Tuesday afternoon, and I only partially suspect that he was motivated by a hope of passing a Hardee's on the way.

Regardless, our lives have been forever changed. She's adorable and very, very sweet and cuddly. She is also, unfortunately, quite vocal, and the advice to "just ignore it so you don't end up rewarding the behavior" gets pretty hard to follow after a good ten minutes or so of rapid fire barking. Also, the first three nights or so she simply would not sleep. She wanted to roam the house endlessly, no doubt to plan a complex, Oceans-style heist. We then got her to sleep, but only by taking turns sleeping next to her on the floor. (I ended up buying a camping mattress specific to this purpose.) But as of late last week, we are successfully back in the bed! She wakes up and demands breakfast at 6:30 every morning, but it is progress. And really, when you've got a face like hers, you can get by with anything. Just ask early-zeros Mischa Barton.

My show was on Friday night. After months of writing, practicing, and promoting, it was frankly just a relief to get it done. I had become deeply paranoid about getting sick or losing my voice for the one night of the year where I actually really need it. But I made it to the finish line and we even sold out, with a very supportive (and at times oddly interactive) crowd. Here's a sample:

I spent the week traveling for work, and was reminded how kind of awful that is even under the best of circumstances. I started with the first flight out to New York City on Monday morning, as in get up at 3:30 AM and arrive at O'Hare before the Auntie Anne's Pretzels has even opened. I did end up falling asleep over my Stroopwafel, despite my best efforts to work on the trip there. It took me an hour to get from LaGuardia to my office, my hotel was $750 a night, and it was cold and rainy pretty much the entire time I was there. On the plus side, my firm's offices are in Rockefeller Center, which took me back to my days as an unpaid child guide regurgitating facts I'd memorized about art deco at Quincy's architecture museum (RIP). Also, the hotel had some pretty high quality moisturizer on offer, so there's that.

The past three days were then dedicated to Kansas City, where I did in fact eat barbeque. I was there for a work event encouraging the best and brightest young legal minds (not mine, to be clear), which is kind of hard to argue with, although I will admit that I do sometimes find excellence kind of exhausting. I mean, can't we all just sit back and binge old episodes of Castle while housing fun-sized bags of Doritos every now and then? But I kept any such sentiments to myself, even as the Pinor Noir flowed, and mentored as hard as I possibly could. So if these kids don't all end up becoming supreme court justices, that is absolutely not on me.

 In my non-internet life, I occasionally perform. Here's a clip from the show I wrote last April:

Obviously I am the king of all media.