June 2, 2014

Somehow I forgot to mention the dog fight I broke up last night between Tanner and Beau. As always, it was started by Tanner because he is kind of a dick, and then Beau has to fight back. It was fairly short-lived but both of them ended up with some chunks out of them and Tanner was totally covered in blood. I got out there right after it started and grabbed a chair to wedge between them. The back door was open and I almost got Tanner outside but he got around me and the chair and went back at Beau. After that I gave up on the chair and thought about grabbing Tanner's collar when he took a step back from Beau, but then he dove in again, and I was pissed and annoyed, so I grabbed the scruff of his neck and another handful on his back and then dragged and pushed him out of the back door.

I woke up early-ish this morning so I could call about the jury duty thing. I went through the automated thing again to get to an administrator and then found out office hours don't start until nine o'clock. So I waited around for an hour and called back, only to get an answering machine. I left a message and called it good. It has to be more obvious if you're supposed to actually show up at the courthouse. I'm going with that.

I arranged for my grad school interview. It should be in a couple weeks if I don't get called in for jury duty. Or hauled off to jail for not going to jury duty. I've emailed the librarian and a couple teachers at school to see if they had interviews so I can get some insight. The program director said it is about a ninety-minute process, which sounds like a really long interview. I looked potential questions up online and all those examples made it sound similar to a job interview. I need to start reading up on current events in the field, more stuff about the school and their program, and see if I can figure out a more concrete vision of my future and why I want a degree from their university. I have struggled for years now trying to come up with a specific goal for my future and I don't want to not get into grad school because my future outlook isn't clear enough. Needless to say, I'm nervous. I really want to go to grad school, and I feel like my future depends on it, because I'm currently not going anywhere with my two barely over minimum wage jobs.

I started my Snitch cross stitch today. I'm using metallic string, which I think will look cool (hopefully) but it is also a pain in the butt to work with. The ends fray quickly and the metal part bunches a lot and gets stuck when I'm pulling it through. I have ended up wasting more string than I care to. I worked on it for quite awhile off and on but I'm only about a quarter of the way through the outline. My plan is to do the outline and the lines on the main part in a brighter gold color and then fill it all in with a more muted gold color. It is hard to tell just looking at the string but I'm hoping the two different shades of gold don't clash. When I get done with all that I can figure out how I want to do the stitches. I don't know if I'm going to do one big line with wide stitches or a couple smaller ones with narrower stitches. I'm going to have to test it out on a scrap piece of cloth.

I am quickly running out of YouTube videos to watch so I filled in my downtime with Netflix. If I wasn't already a vegetarian, Free Birds would have probably been enough to push me in that direction. I enjoyed the movie, especially the comedic bits. However, it could easily be used as pro-veg propaganda. Something I'm not against. I was a little worried in the beginning when they were showing that all the turkeys were dumb and wanted to go off with the farmer when it was time for a turkey dinner, but then they travel back to the past and we learn that all the turkeys are smart and have no interest in becoming food. I prefer that view of turkeys. I'm not going to go on a rant about killing animals because it is late and I am tired, but I will say I am happy with my decision to not eat animals.

I also watched a brief history of Joan of Arc because I only had a vague idea of her story. The history was shorter than I would have liked but I did get a better sense of who she was. And to be fair, she left home when she was sixteen and then was burned at the stake when she was nineteen, which isn't a lot of time to work with.

After that I watched the real story of Indiana Jones and the real story of James Bond. Apparently Indiana Jones wasn't necessarily based on real people, but George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg were inspired by the films they watched as kids, and those films were based on actual people. I obviously wasn't paying much attention because I can't remember their names but there was one guy who was very academic but also adventurous. He lead an expedition into a desert and ended up discovering the big red rock outcropping and found the first actual proof of dinosaur eggs, along with a bunch of bones, and it is still a popular place to find bones. He was also good with a pistol and afraid of snakes. There was another very academic guy who spent his life looking for the Holy Grail. He was then forced into joining the Nazi's because Hitler's second-in-command was obsessed with the Grail. After a period of time with no Grail, the academic guy was sent to a prison camp as a guard to punish him. It didn't take him very long before he decided to leave the SS. He wrote a letter requesting to leave and it sounded like he was pressured into saving face, not only for himself but also the SS, by committing suicide, which he did.

As for James Bond, the author of the books was heavily involved in the British Intelligence Agency so a lot of the stuff was based on actual things or had its basis in reality. Bond was thought to be a conglomeration of himself and an intelligence agent that was kind of a badass, in real life. A lot of the characters were also based on real-life people, including M who was based on his boss during his time in the intelligence field.

I've been listening to a lot of One Buck Tuner because their sound makes me nostalgic for high school. Tonight I went on a trip down memory lane by listening to Unwritten Law and Sugarcult while I worked on my cross stitch. Still good music.

I'm not sure what's on the agenda tomorrow. More of the same I imagine. Reading, watching stuff, cross stitching. I might leave the house but we'll see. If I'm not working I really only leave the house to spend money, and I like not spending money, so I try to stay home.