When I Was Five

Happy Birthday, Oscar!! Our little bud turns five today. To celebrate, he will get a blog post, a bath, and a green pepper. Why this dog loves green peppers, I have no idea, but if I begin slicing one, he cannot think about doing anything else except standing below me and hoping I drop a piece. This will probably turn into a week long celebration, because I can't give him the whole pepper at once.

To celebrate his five years, I give you a montage of my favorite photos of him through the years. Blogger makes it hard to put them in order, so they jump around chronologically. Enjoy!

When we brought him home at 6 weeks (which I now realize is too early), he only weighed 2.5 lbs!

He has since outgrown this crate. Hard to believe!

The whole first day we had him, he looked this sad, and we had to let him cry through the whole night. In the morning when we came out to the kitchen and he saw us, his little tail started wagging.

After his first trip to meet Billy's parent's dog, Casey, he passed out for hours.

He wore this coat my dad got him for Christmas exactly long enough to pose for the photo.

Besides peppers, his second favorite food is peanut butter. Who can blame him?

Here he is next to the pumpkin he tried to eat the entire time I was carving it.

When Chuck is around, Oscar knows where to go to get spoiled.

First Christmas in our new house!

Oscar loves Clarice and Rudolph. When they are out at Christmas time, he runs over and noses them almost every morning when he comes down the stairs.

Here he is helping Brent bottle his home made beer. He was happy to clean up any overflow.

Christmas in Bowie- 2006?

Must have been summer-- he's wearing his Orioles collar.

He loves the snow so much he even tolerated wearing this jacket. It doesn't fit him anymore, but he would stay out in the snow for hours if we let him.

Graduating from obedience training! He had the second fastest time on the obedience course, but the winner had much longer legs.

Eating Ty's food.

His favorite toy! He's had it since he was a baby, and it's the only thing he hasn't destroyed.

For several months, his ears seemed disproportionately large.

Posing by the South River, where his parents got engaged... but before they got engaged.

Relaxing at home. When he does this, we call him the baby spoon.

Again with the beer. He started early.

Oscar lives strong like the rest of the family.

(When I Was Five is apparently about a boy who recalls his favorite things, all of which have changed, except his best friend. Seems appropriate for man's best friend!)

Finding Fish

When it comes up in conversation that Billy and I are Navy Football season ticket holders, it's always the same question: "Why Navy?" There are several answers.

1) It's close to our house and gives us a chance to spend time together. It takes us longer to get out of the parking lot than it does to drive home, and after a long day of tailgating and football, it's nice to get home quickly. I believe this is how it started.

2) The crowd is different. A lot of the people on the parking lot attended the Academy or have children who attend. People are kind and friendly and fun to talk to. When Pop passed away, we had to ask everyone to move their tables and chairs and tents (twice) so we could get off the lot, and instead of being mad, the people said, "Is everything all right?" When I told one man that we had a death in the family, he rushed to help me ask other people to move their things. As we were getting ready to pull out, a friend of his came up to offer me his condolences.

Yesterday, some guy sat directly next to my tent and smoked a cigar. I gave him an icy glare when the smoke blew directly in my face, but he just looked away and kept smoking. And kept spitting on the ground right next to our grill. This was not a Navy fan. This is not how Navy fans behave. Port-a-potties pushed over, leaking blue sludge everywhere? That was at the Maryland game (ask Vickie), not at Navy Marine Corps Stadium.

3) Before every game, the Brigade of Midshipmen march from campus to the stadium and into formation on the field. I know they hate it, but I still love watching it. And while I have extremely mixed feelings about what the military has been used to accomplish in the past, I respect what these kids have chosen to do. I have that respect for the players, as well, who will fulfill their service commitments after graduation and thus cannot go straight into the NFL. Navy Football gives me everything I love about collegiate athletics and leaves out the stuff I hate.

4) Navy football is fun to watch. They are tiny in comparison to the teams they play, so their defense is often outmatched. They get scored on quite a bit, but if a mid comes up with a big tackle, it feels extra exciting. (Who could ever forget this sack?) Their size also makes the triple option offense the most successful, and they run this really well, which means they score a lot, too. The games are never boring and are rarely blowouts, so even if Navy loses, I never feel let down by my fan experience.

5) Navy's football team is really good. Most of the time, we get to see a win (and from only this far off the field). This year, they're 8-3. This includes a 3 point loss to Ohio State, a 3 point loss to Temple, a single bad loss to Pitt, and wins over Notre Dame, Air Force, and Wake Forest. They're guaranteed to win the Commander in Chief's Trophy even if they lose to Army (which they haven't done since 2001), and they're going to their seventh straight bowl game. Their junior quarterback, Ricky Dobbs, has scored 22 touchdowns, and is now only one TD away from tying the single season record for a quarterback. He missed almost two entire games to injury and he still has two more regular season games to play!!

I don't know why even people in our own area don't know much about Navy Football. Why anyone would rather attend a Redskins game, or a Maryland Football game, I have no idea. But if you ever get a chance to attend a game, go! You won't be disappointed. If you find us, the boys might even let you eat one of my Old Bay Hamburgers, which earn rave reviews every time. : )

(Finding Fish is the memoir of Antwone Fisher, which was subsequently made into an equally excellent movie. Fisher, who survived a life in foster care that is almost impossible to imagine, "found" himself after enlisting in the Navy.)

Had a Good Time

Once in a while, I need to remind myself to stop and take. a. deep. breath. Today, I did.

Billy and I woke up early this morning so I could run the Down's Park 5 miler. I thought this could be interesting, considering I have run a total of 5 miles since the Army 10 miler. (I've been going to the gym with Billy instead.) It was below freezing when I woke up. But the run was fantastic. I felt good, I finished well, and the course was beautiful. Most of it took me through trails and trees with changing leaves, but around mid-way, the course ran right along the Chesepeake Bay. And my husband was waiting for me at the finish line. Here's a photo I found online of the sun coming up over the pier, as it was today:

After the run, Danielle picked me up and we drove up to Harrisburg, PA, and met up with Erin, who had driven down from Syracuse. It was the first time we've gotten to see her since her wedding in July. After catching up over Panera, we took a trip through the mall, and made it to the sports bar in time to see NAVY BEAT NOTRE DAME!!

It was great to see the girls. I have missed them. And it was great to see for myself that after an indeterminate first few months, things have fallen into place and Erin is really happy in her new life up in NY.

I also returned to discover that my friend from grad school, Anne-Marie, has started a new blog about life in Baltimore. It guarantees to provide a fresh perspective on the city. (Vickie might be interested to know that her co-contributor is a nurse living and working in the city. Nudge.)

I feel rested. I feel ready to conquer the rest of the semester. I feel lucky to have such a loving husband and great friends, even though we're spread far and wide across the country.

And how about those mids, anyway?!

(Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards is a brilliantly conceived collection of short stories by Robert Olen Butler. He collects vintage postcards, and in this book, he writes stories inspired by the contents of some of his favorite ones.)

The Awakening

My dad says, "Just keep playing." In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago goes out in that boat every day, 84 times in a row, until he catches that fish.

This morning, on my way into work, I had an epiphany. I can use the research I've been doing on Cather for my writing sample and re-direct it slightly to serve as the paper for the seminar I'm taking this semester. This solves the two major problems of my semester; I don't have time to complete all these papers well, and I had no idea what to write my seminar paper about.

This deserves its own blog post. Consider it the digital equivalent of a sigh of relief.

(The Awakening by Kate Chopin is the story of a young mother's realization that she does not have to live the life society has assigned to her. I assure you my own awakening, however, will not conclude with my death.)

The Elements of Style

This has been my expression for the past two and a half days:

I've been thinking about the relationship between Cather's The Professor's House and One of Ours since April. I've been actively researching it since August. The deadline for my PhD application is just over a month away, so I've been writing about it for the past two days and a half days.

In that time, I've put together 9.5 single spaced pages. An entire first draft, minus introduction and conclusion. I still have to figure out how to boil it down to about 8 pages, intro and conclusion completed. But I feel pretty good about it. Most of all, I feel good that these two and a half days are behind me.

I do love to write. Tonight on "Modern Family," one of the themes was finding something that you do the best. This is the thing that I do the best. I hope this paper is good enough to give me the chance to keep doing it.

(The Elements of Style by William Stunk and E.B. White is a must-own for anyone who takes writing seriously.)

Open

Today I decided that my mid-semester slump is supplemented by tennis fan depression. This is the worst time of year to be a tennis fan. No grand slams. Everyone is injured. And Andre Agassi used meth?

Oscar has been taking a break from literary studies. He's currently helping Billy with a paper about the costs of incorporating security into a corporate network versus the costs of recovering from information breach due to a lack of adequate network security. Once Billy finishes this paper, all he will have left to do before his graduate education is complete is take a final exam.

Seeing Oscar at work on his PC reminds me that we have twice as many computers in this house as we have humans. Welcome to the 21st century.

Tonight we are off to our final softball game in what has become a never ending season. We have lost 3 games in a row, so hopefully we can end on a high note. Happy weekend, everybody!

(Open is Andre Agassi's forthcoming autobiography, in which he evidently admits to hating tennis, wearing fake hair, and taking crystal meth. Maybe not what a tennis fan wants to read in the off season, but I probably will anyway.)

Everything That Rises Must Converge

On Monday, I turned in my final "mid-term" paper. It wasn't my best work, but it was the best I could do before that due date. This meant that on Tuesday, I could return more seriously to trying to write the Cather paper that will be used as my PhD writing sample. This paper has been coming together in my head for about 7 months, and now all I have to do is some concluding research before I can sit down to write it. I am ready to be done with it already, but I am excited to see how it will turn out. I have put a lot of thinking into it, and even if it doesn't get me into the PhD program, I will be glad that I spent time trying to produce the best paper I'm capable of writing.

Also on Tuesday, I received a letter from Willa Cather. It wasn't written to me, obviously (it was the Mencken letter I wrote of earlier), but it felt like it might as well have been. She describes what she was trying to do with One of Ours, and this complements the arguments I'm trying to make. There is also an unusual excitement that people like me get from seeing these "authentic," personal thoughts written by novelists we greatly admire. Literary critics will argue back and forth about whether a text has an "aura" or not, but when I sit down with a photo copy of a letter Cather wrote in 1922, or read the notes that Katherine Anne Porter wrote in the books she read for pleasure, it is an exciting feeling. With the Porter books, it almost feels like the notes have been written to me, because some of them were written after she had agreed to donate her books to UMd. Sometimes it feels like she writes things that she was hoping someone who is interested in her MIGHT find somewhere down the road. With Cather, it is quite the opposite, because she was so protective about her personal thoughts. It's exciting to be reading them, but it also feels kind of wrong, because I know she would object to this invasion of her "privacy."

Every time, I find that eventually the different things I'm working on come together. Some of the ideas I've been researching fall away and the ones that are most important rise to the top. I'm really excited about writing this paper, which is helping to get me through the mountains of other work I have piling up as we speak. I took on a lot this semester, and with about 6 weeks left, I'm already ready for it to be over. But Mrs. Murray, my 10th Grade English teacher, once told me that "the only way out is through." I can't remember how this came up, or what book it might have related to, but I've carried it with me. There's no way to get around all this work I have to do-- all I can do is to accomplish, every day, as much as I can. Eventually, I'll be through to the other side.

(Everything that Rises Must Converge is Flannery O'Connor's final short story collection. In the title story, a young man struggles with relating to his mother. The title is also a reference to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and it is furthermore the name of an artistic installation created by Sarah Sze.)