Remember those old Calgon ads for bath products? Well in Mexico it’s not common practice to put in bathtubs. In fact, in this house our bathrooms are small and square so there’s no room at all for a bathtub, we just have a shower in the corner. But I digress. I want to take a bath because I need to de-stress in the worst way. So I wish Calgon could take me away…

I’ve been killing myself for work lately. I’ve worked part of each day every day in the last 2 weeks, so I’m in need of a serious day off. It might happen next Sunday, but that remains to be seen.

I’m close to finishing 2 big web projects. Both projects have been difficult for me. Both have shown me exactly what parts of project management I happen to SUCK at.

One of these projects is for a non-profit in the U.S. I got the contract for it a long time ago. But I didn’t realize how much work it would be to get the client to make decisions. The work hasn’t ended up taking significantly longer than I expected. But the number of meetings and emails and conference calls it’s taken to make all the needed decisions has literally added ONE YEAR to the project. I’m dumbfounded by this.

The client has even had personnel changes since we started working on this project together. And guess what? My new contact person there seems to hate me. She knows nothing of the history of the project, just that it’s behind schedule. So I get the blame, all the blame. Today she destroyed a conference call by interrupting, being condescending (she sounded like a bratty teenager), and finally hanging up on the rest of us.

The project is finally within mere weeks of being done. And now it’s getting derailed by a bad attitude? Grow up already. Let’s just focus on getting this shit done and fucking be nice about it.

My husband is that champion of “fuck it all”. When he heard about her little snit he said “tell her to fuck off.” We are 98% done and he wants me to walk out on the project because someone treated me like shit. He has no tolerance for bullshit, and that’s what I love about him. But I won’t be taking his advice, not this time anyway.

Recently I attended the first ever LatAm Bloggers Blowout. Sadly I was only able to attend the Friday night blowout, I had to miss the subsequent Saturday and Sunday blowouts.

The best part was meeting all those great bloggers. Us bloggers are a bunch of blabbermouth extroverts so there was no shortage good conversation. I wish I’d had more time to get to know everyone, but there’s always next time. Thanks again to Wayne for sacrificing his sanity to organize the event, he did a bang up job.

Attendees of the Blogger Blowout were given blog homework assignments which came from the book “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog” by Margaret Mason.

My assignment:

How did you get those scars? The one on your thumb is from when you were three and you wondered whether scissors could cut skin. The one on your stomach is from your emergency appendectomy. Your boss figured you had to be in the hospital, because it was the only reason you’d ever be late to work without calling.

Your scars indicate what type of life you’ve lived. Whether you’re athletic, fighting for your health, or just occasionally clumsy, let each scar remind you of the story behind it.

My oldest scar is in the middle of one kneecap. The Momsicle tells me that I acquired it by jumping off a chair when I was about 18 months. I don’t remember exactly what she said and I don’t remember the event.

My next oldest scar is on my face, just by my eyebrow. It causes the nearby eyebrow hairs to poke out at weird angles. I was about 6 and I was trying to pull some piece of clothing out of my sister’s hands. I remember it being her clothing, or rather, I remember myself being guilty. She let go of the item and my own momentum sent me headlong into the corner of my bedpost. One inch over and I would have hit my eyeball on that bedpost.

Then I’ve got a scar just to the side of my other eye, it’s very small. This one was from a raging lunatic who had taken an ungodly amount of LSD and was drunk as well (terrible combination that is). He threw me down 3 flights of stairs. Before I passed out I remember hearing his mother yell “Call the cops before he kills her.” It apparently took 6 cops to get him into the patrol car, but I don’t remember that part. I’m lucky to remember anything at all.

I’ve also got a scar on one foot from a drop of hot oil that flew from a pan. That should have taught me not to cook barefoot…but it didn’t.

And my most recent scar is from a glass that one of my kitties broke. I brought the glass upstairs. When it was empty I placed it near the top of the stairs so I would remember to bring it down. Well my Lilah cat went romping and hit it and broke it. Then I walked by, didn’t see it, and got a deep cut in the top of one foot. That cut healed quickly, but left a distinct scar which still hurts.

I’ve got a few more scars from surgeries, but all were laparoscopic, so there’s almost no scarring on the outside. The inside, well, that’s another issue…

In the world of web design the use of frames is generally considered to be a bad thing, a big no-no. For those of you who don’t know what an html frame is it’s basically a way of making separate pages appear on screen as one.

There are many reasons why this is bad which I won’t get into. But basically it’s a rare site that actually needs to be coded with frames and which uses them to the clear benefit of the site’s visitors. And often sites using frames are hard both for users to navigate and for search engines to index. In short, frames suck both for the users and for the site owner.

So imagine my surprise when I visited the famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s web site and found ugly, nasty, not user-friendly and most importantly NOT EVEN NEEDED frames in use (if your browser window is small enough you see scroll bars which indicate where the edges of the frames are).

One of the most intelligent men on earth has a web site with frames, what is the world coming to?

It’s been cold here in Cancun lately. What that means is that there’s been no need for a/c. And I’ve had to put on socks for a few days in a row to keep my feet warm. I normally only have a couple of need-socks days per year here, and they are in January. So this is pretty weird. I’m wearing sweaters at night, after sunset. And we’ve got a blanket on the bed.

On the other hand, we have all the windows in the house open. And I’m still wearing shorts and t-shirts (with socks). So I recognize that cold is a relative term.

When I moved here from Colorado it was July, and I felt like I’d moved into a blast furnace. I got heat stroke often when I first came here, especially when I was dumb enough to go for a run after say 10 am.

Since then I’ve gotten used to the tropical heat. And now I feel cold if the temp drops into the 70s (21°C to 26°C). I can even run outside at noon now without getting heat stroke symptoms.

But when the temp drops, and I’m beginning to suffer from the labor of having to heat my body, I often find myself unconsciously taunting my friends in northern climes. Without realizing I do it I find that I mention how tortuously cold it is to people who are living in Maine or Colorado or Canada or some other cold place. And of course they retort with a universal “shut up, you bitch.” Well, my mother doesn’t call me a bitch, but pretty much everyone else does.

Obviously, they don’t get it. Sun is setting now, time to find a sweater.

I’m giving myself a full 4 minutes to write this blog entry, so as my daughter’s preschool teacher used to say “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit”. [Incidentally, she went to a preschool called Make a Mess and Make Believe, but the kids affectionately called it Make a Mess and Don’t Clean it Up.]

When I was walking Sam today we saw a dalmatian, it was a female. And it was hiding behind a tree as we walked by. She had a collar on. She was terrified of us but curious. She clearly needed someone. She was clearly lost. She had little boobies, which told me that she had been a mom, but is not currently lactating. Poor thing. Terrified. And Sam wanted to play with her, which scared her.

I just wanted to grab her and take her home. Someone misses her. But she’s so skittish that I wonder if her lost owners might have been abusive. But being a beautiful dalmatian she might be easily adoptable. Maybe I should go look for her (without Sam in tow). But then what if we don’t find a home for her? Or worse, what if we fall for her and can’t give her up (like I did with that dratted, lovely, perfect EmmaCat)?

Ok, time is up. More later.

Five things you were doing ten years ago?

• Earning 6 times more per year than I am now
• Driving 2 hours everyday
• Thinking about divorcing my first husband
• Working for an internet startup
• Making a lot of computer art

Five things you were doing one year ago?

• Trying, in vain, to take care of 16 web clients at once
• Not exercising enough
• Risking my neck on the road to the airport everyday
• Volunteering too much
• Enjoying all my cats

Five snacks you enjoy?

• Papas fritas, I’m a potato chip junkie
• Fresh berries, when I can get them
• Grannie Smith apples, but they have to be cold
• Carrot sticks or celery with ranch dressing
• Good dark chocolate from Belgium

Five songs you know all the lyrics to?

• Any song by Pearl Jam
• Bob Dylan Masters of War
• Sublime What I Got
• They Might Be Giants Birdhouse in Your Soul
• Weird Al Yankovic Smells Like Nirvana

Five things you would do if you were very wealthy?

• Set up a foundation to help Mexico’s street animals
• Travel for 3 months a year
• Make large donations to my many favorite causes
• Help my sister with money
• Adopt more animals

Five things you like doing?

• Watching good movies
• Running and dancing
• Sleeping late
• Eating Thai food
• Listening to my daughter talk about anything

Five things you would never do again?

• Hallucinogenic mushrooms
• Have casual sex
• Go to see Aerosmith live in concert
• Jump off a 25 foot cliff into a raging river
• Intentionally try to set off a point-release avalanche

The other day someone I know only slightly saw me holding a book. She called me over.

She said “That book is really great.”

I said “Oh, have you read it?”

She said “No, but I saw in an airport bookstore that they had many copies of it, and it says on it that it’s a National Bestseller. So it must be good.”

I stood and stared at her. All I could think was “Please don’t reproduce.”

My daughter called me yesterday. She was upset. She was standing outside a slaughterhouse in Salida, Colorado, crying.

Her 8th grade class has been studying food production all year. They’ve visited McDonald’s, they’ve been to an organic farm, they’ve studied nutrition, they’ve been to the warehouse of a major U.S. supermarket chain (they even had to sign non-disclosure agreements saying that they wouldn’t reveal the warehouse’s secrets to the competition).

And yesterday, they visited a slaughterhouse. These are 8th graders. My daughter is 13 years old.

I know that there’s no way to prepare someone for witnessing a deliberate death. I’m sure that these kids were too young. But I think anyone is too young. There’s no right age to walk in and watch a cow get shot in the head and then get slit open and have it’s blood splash out all over. And there’s no way to prepare anyone for such a sight.

Several kids passed out. More of them vomited. Some of them made it outside the building before they vomited. The rest vomited onto the blood-covered floor inside the building.

Many of them vowed to become vegetarians from that day onward.

And now all of them know where meat comes from.

At first I was worried for my daughter. Then I realized that her family already “gets” it on the whole animal rights thing. She’s one of the lucky ones, she’s got emotional support for being against the meat industry. But the kids who go home to a beef dinner and unsympathetic parents are the kids who will really suffer.

My next reaction was to question whether the school knew what it was doing bringing the kids to a slaughterhouse. But as I reflect I see that the slaughterhouse is the reality. And all of us who pretend it doesn’t exist, who pretend it doesn’t feed us, well, we are the ones with the problem. The sooner these kids face the hard, shitty realities of life the sooner they will act to fix the things that are so very wrong with this world.

As she was crying into the phone I was searching for something wise and comforting to say. Do you know what comforted her? The only thing I could say that was comforting was to tell her that she had her whole life ahead of her to raise people’s awareness of how important it is to treat animals well. I reminded her that being a vegetarian herself has saved countless lives. And I reminded her that we’ve saved lots of animals from the streets and from unwanted reproduction. The only comfort I could offer her was the truth and right-ness of her own actions.

My daughter will be fine. The cows, however, are not fine. They are dead now.

What a week. I flew back to Cancun on the red eye from Denver, I got into Cancun at 7 am on Monday morning. I hadn’t slept on the plane so I’d been up for over 24 hours when I got home, and that lack of sleep set the tone for the whole week.

My housekeeper was set to come clean the house at 10 am Monday. She hadn’t cleaned in 2 weeks so I wasn’t about to reschedule her. But I did not need an extra person in the house just then, what I needed was a nap.

And I came home to a dying cat. One of my eldest, Ariel, had been deteriorating for several weeks. While I was away husbandito was giving her liquids with an eye dropper, because she wouldn’t eat or drink on her own. His ministrations kept her alive long enough for me to say goodbye to her.

She died Monday night. She was over 17, I’d adopted her, along with her sister Grace (who is still with us), at about age 1½ from the humane society. Ariel spent most of her last months lying on top of the (covered) printer on my desk. She would get needy sometimes and walk back and forth in front of the monitor and meow at me until I scritched her properly. Now when I sit at the computer it’s oddly peaceful and it feels weird to be able to pile junk on the printer and not have it annoy anyone (but me). I miss you Ariel.

In the last few days I’ve had 4 close friends each need some kind of emergency care from a doctor. The worry for each of them, coupled with the passing of my cat, has made things feel heavy. All of them will be ok, not all of them know that yet, but all of them will be ok. But still I worry for each of them.

And if cats dying and friends in crisis and lack of sleep isn’t enough husbandito and I were driving along the other day and saw an iguana try to cross the road in front of an oncoming truck. The poor thing made it safely between the 2 front tires and then freaked out underneath the truck and was crushed by a back tire. It was so sad to witness this abrupt death. And the poor thing had been crossing to get away from some bulldozers that were tearing up the earth and destroying its habitat. Sometimes life is mean.

Last week in Colorado it seemed like life was meant to be enjoyed. But this week in Cancun was not easy to enjoy. Next week will be better though, better for all of us, I can feel it.

The last couple of days in Colorado with my daughter were great. I took her to the new wing of the Denver Art Museum on Saturday. The new wing was designed by Daniel Libeskind and it was a thrill to set foot in this amazing building.

We went first to a temporary Impressionism exhibit in Libeskind’s building. My daughter was raised looking at pictures of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and could identify the work of Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat and Degas when she was 5 years old. So this exhibit was a treat for her.

After that we decided to visit the Contemporary Art galleries, also in the new wing. I felt like a million bucks when I saw how happily my daughter flitted from one piece of art to another. She got up close to each piece to study materials and brush strokes, she talked to me about the meaning and power of each work and sometimes she sat on the floor to look at certain pieces from a different angle. She was so excited about the pieces she was seeing that it just filled me with pride. I’m not always sure I’m a good parent, but when I see her that informed and that excited about art I figure that I must have done something right somewhere along the way.