Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Weekends, crazy dogs and chips
I know dogs need walks. The Mac walks his dog, Snowy, every single day. I used to walk the NoodleDog every day, twice a day. It’s not that I don’t walk the NoodleDog every day now, it’s just that Rob and I share dog-walking duties. During the weekdays, Rob walks the doggies in the morning before we go to work. Being a girl, I take longer to get ready, and usually, I’m home a lot earlier in the afternoons so I can walk them then.
However, the weekends are just a disaster. We always start out with great intentions. “We’ll walk them just after lunch!”, and then lunch doesn’t happen until 2p, and by then, I’m dying of starvation and am weak, or the weather is shitty (being in Southern Alberta, it’s a 50-50 shot over the wintertime). So the doggies don’t always get good walks on the weekends. This is a BIG MISTAKE.
On Monday, after the weekend, we left the dogs in the house all day. Foolishly, we thought that since the cats would be in there with them, Cooter would have plenty to keep him occupied. We were so wrong. When I got home, he had hauled a bunch of stuff off the coffee table and utterly destroyed it. He had gotten a hold of an instant camera – a little collectible of Rob’s – and that was in a million pieces all over the floor. He had chewed two D-batteries (lucky the little bugger isn’t dead), and annihilated my pilates mat. I immediately told him “BAD CHEWY” and put him outside, and cleaned up the living room a bit. Then, I ventured down the hallway to see what other destruction awaited me. Sure enough, there was evidence that he had taken something into the main bedroom and chewed it up on the bed. Then, I went into the spare room, and again, not only had he chewed stuff in there – an empty pop can – but he had gotten onto the spare bed and had chewed a large hole in a sweater I had knit when I was in high school. It wasn’t really a wearable sweater, but it had sentimental value. Rotten dog!
We noticed throughout the evening that Cooter was unsettled. He was jumpier than usual, more frantic about the cats. He couldn’t sit still, and would not settle down. Poor guy. After Rob played ball with the dogs out back for about 20 minutes, hard, they both came in and crashed, all nice and peaceful. So walking them, exercising them, is KEY!!
I spent part of the evening chatting with The Mac. I have a land-line now, and that means I can dial long distance again without incurring objectionably large phone bills. So I called him up, and he told me about a guy called “The Dog Whisperer”. This guy has a show on the National Geographic channel, and sure enough, he advocates exercise, discipline and affection in the training of dogs. Dogs are complicated little creatures. They come from a wild background and pack life, and if they don’t have a leader, they get all confusled about things like what to chew, where to go, what rules they don’t need to follow… Apparently, the trick is to teach them that you’re their pack leader and that they need to listen to you, follow you and do what you say, basically. Not exactly rocket science, but then again, not as easy as it sounds. When The NoodleDog and I first moved in with Rob, the NoodleDog really, really liked him a lot, but he didn’t always listen to Rob. Rob’s had to push him over and hold him down a few times to establish dominance. Now, of course, the NoodleDog worships Rob and might actually be in love with him – he can’t stand it when Rob leaves the room or goes out of sight, and always wants to be with him. Me? He can take or leave. Traitor! At least I still have the cats, although Rob says he'll steal their affections, too.
But Cooter has pretty much listened to me the whole time. He does pretty much what I tell him, when I tell him, and is generally fairly obedient. He just can’t get over that built-up store of energy he seems to have. He’s of an energetic breed – border collie mixed with regular collie – so he needs something to do with his day. I think he would be a great working dog – he herds the cats, or counts them at least, and loves playing ball. But the exercise thing is of paramount importance in keeping him happy and settled-down.
The following contains Jeepers Creepers and Jeepers Creepers 2 spoilers. Read at your own risk.
Over the weekend, we watched a scary movie, Jeepers Creepers. We had been up late, at a party, and then came home reasonably early, but kept on drinking and watching TV. Rob kindly noted that Jeepers Creepers was on, so we watched it. It was a little scary, and I don’t usually watch scary movies. Basically, these two horrendously dumb kids “get involved” with this Creeper thing. They see it dumping what looks like bodies down a pipe at some abandoned church full of crows. Personally, if that had been me, and if The Mac had been in the car, we would have taken one look at the scenario and gotten the hell out of there. THE HELL! These kids saw the deed, then WENT BACK to the abandoned church and managed to get one of them fallen down the stupid pipe, and, well, the story from that point on just got less and less realistic. They run. The thing chases them. The thing doesn’t get them and they run some more. The thing keeps on chasing them. They get a PHONE CALL from a psychic woman who tells them basically that they’re in deep shit. They run some more. The thing keeps on chasing them and kills some other people while it’s at it. You don’t get the best look in the world at it, though, so your imagination can do some pretty good stuff with that. The back story on the Creeper thing is that every 23 years, for 23 days it gets to “feed”. It selectively kills people that “have something it needs”, like a tongue, eyes, whatever. No one knows where it came from or anything else about it. Anyway, the kids continue to try to get away from it, only they try to hide out in this police station, which effectively traps them enough for the Creeper thing to catch and carry one off. Yeesh. Oh yeah, the Creeper thing is fairly indestructible and supposedly can’t be killed by conventional means. If it was me? Again? And The Mac? We would have burned it. BURNED IT GOOD!!!
It was disturbing, sort of, and I had to put the lights on all throughout the house in order to remain calm. We went to bed right after (smart idea) and just about as soon as I had started to fall asleep, Rob started snoring. Rob snores after he gets to drinking the beer, and sure enough, he’d had enough beer to snore A LOT! I poked him gently and told him to roll over. He did. He kept on snoring. I told him to wake up because he was snoring. He moved around some. I tried to sleep. SNNKKKKRRRRRR-ch-ch-RRRRR. I poked him harder. He snored louder. I talked to him rationally. He kept on snoring. I shoved him around a bit. He kept on snoring. I kicked him with my feet. Nothing worked.
Finally, in frustration and tiredness, I turned the light on to see if that would make a difference, and of course, it did not. I thought if I thrashed around a bit, he’d wake up and move into a less-snory position. He did not. I got up and out of bed and went into the bathroom, turned on the light there, and then into the spare room to turn on the light there, having decided I’d have to sleep in the spare room for the rest of the night. It was late. I was tired. I was a little wary from having watched that stupid movie. The spare room has no little bedside lamp, so I had to go back into our room, turn on the big light (so there wouldn’t be any total darkness anywhere), get my bedside lamp, bring it into the spare room, set it up and then go back into the main bedroom to turn off the big light. Eventually, I got to bed. And Cooter came with me.
At first, I was glad Cooter was with me. I hugged him and told him he was a good dog to keep me company, and keep me safe. He curled up next to me and I closed my tired eyes, trying hard not to think about that stupid Creeper thing from the movie. Stupid Creeper. About five minutes later, just as I was drifting off again, Cooter got up and moved around. I figured he was just settling in for the night, but no, he got up, hopped off the bed and went in search of cats. He apparently found them all, because he came back a couple of minutes later and got back onto the bed with me, and I hugged him and told him “good doggie! Thanks for coming back!”
Yeah, right. Every five or ten minutes, Cooter would get up and go look for the cats. His job became a lot easier as some of them came into the room to settle down on the bed with me from time to time, but still. He kept on getting up to look at them. I think I finally fell asleep for the rest of the night around 4a-ish… and then by around 8a, the animals all needed to be fed and let out to pee. Greaaaat night. Oh, and I didn’t have any nightmares at all, about that stupid Creeper, or that the Mounties were after it, chasing it around in an abandoned industrial complex, or that I was kidnapped by it at all, or that somehow I escaped and was consulting with the Mounties on how to get it because when you want something done right, you call the Mounties… Nope, not at all.
We didn’t learn a thing from that experience, because the next day, we thought it would be a great idea to rent Jeepers Creepers 2. I have to say, though, that the second movie is a lot less scary than the first, although it had a lot more monster effects. The Creeper thing went from an ominous, inexplicable evil thing chasing down the two hapless teenagers to just a stupid freakish monstery guy with the most unbelievable batwings hunting a busload of idiotic kids. The movie started out well, with the Creeper thing hiding in plain sight in a cornfield, disguised to look like a scarecrow. Scarecrows are a bit eerie. It carried off a little kid who was supposed to be “fixing” the scarecrows as the kid’s father and brother tried to run after it (to no avail – it swooped away on those wings). I did like that the father then wanted to hunt the damn thing down and impale it. That was fun. After that, the Creeper disabled a busload of kids, and did away with the adults first. Then, apparently, it figured it could hunt down the kids it wanted at its leisure. It didn’t count on the enraged dad from the first scene, though! Hee! The kids fought amongst themselves as the Creeper thing chipped away at their bus, and then, for some reason, they all scattered. Scattered to the great outdoors! Heh. One of the girls, since the movie needed a psychic angle, started having visions of the first movie’s dead kid and he told her that this Creeper thing was after certain people and they better get their shit together and get outta there. In the deleted scenes, it shows that, in her supposed vision, the Creeper was involved in some sort of ancient battle, so we should have been supposed to surmise it was… old? Got it. The scene might have been helpful if they’d kept it, but then again, maybe not. As well, the movie’s creator did a little commentary in the accompanying documentary about where the thing was from, and he just said it was a messed-up guy who did something to be cursed long, long ago. Huh? Whatever. Eventually, the enraged father, who was all caution-to-the-wind about it, harpooned the creature with a post-holer and a homemade harpoon. He stabbed the living daylights out of it and, just as it was about to regenerate, it “ran out of time” (since it was on the last of its 23 days), and closed up on itself to wait out the next 23 years. The movie ends with the brother showing the “monster”, cleverly nicknamed “Bat out of Hell”, for five bucks to country rubes, and the dad, who is old, watching over it as he sits in his rocking chair, a harpoon aimed at its head, waiting for it to wake up again so he can stab it some more, presumably. Yeah, old guy? You might want to get SOME GASOLINE AND A MATCH for when it wakes back up. Or run it through a wood-chipper, now, before it’s active again. I’m just sayin’. It always bothers me that no one in the movies takes my suggestions seriously. I can’t tell you how many times I yelled at them to “BURN IT!! BURN IT!!”, only no one did. I guess if they did, there wouldn’t be any more sequels. Heh.
Faults from the movie included that it was “springtime” in the first movie (spring break), and in the second movie that was supposed to be set FOUR DAYS after the first one (so, still during the creature’s killing spree time), it was full-on fall and there was corn to be a-harvested. Also, and I can’t emphasize this enough, those wings. So! Unbelivable! Aerodynamically, that thing wouldn’t have gotten two feet off the ground, even if it had jumped, and it certainly wouldn’t have been able to flap its way along to chase a speeding car. And where was the Creeper’s eerie evil turbocharged truck in the second movie? We don’t know. As well, in the second movie, the Creeper thing was creating these artistic throwing stars or something so it could disable vehicles without having to rip their tops off as they sped down the road. Seriously.
Anyway. I guess that’s taken up enough of my time and attention. The Mac and I chatted briefly about movies when we talked. Your enjoyment of movies depends, really, on what you want to get out of them. Entertainment, for me. I don’t want to have these movies change my life or anything, I just want to watch to be entertained. Those Jeepers Creepers things served their purpose. I wasn’t watching them to get anything deep out of them. They’re like potato chips. You don’t eat them for the nutrition.
Get yourselves some chips, everyone!
However, the weekends are just a disaster. We always start out with great intentions. “We’ll walk them just after lunch!”, and then lunch doesn’t happen until 2p, and by then, I’m dying of starvation and am weak, or the weather is shitty (being in Southern Alberta, it’s a 50-50 shot over the wintertime). So the doggies don’t always get good walks on the weekends. This is a BIG MISTAKE.
On Monday, after the weekend, we left the dogs in the house all day. Foolishly, we thought that since the cats would be in there with them, Cooter would have plenty to keep him occupied. We were so wrong. When I got home, he had hauled a bunch of stuff off the coffee table and utterly destroyed it. He had gotten a hold of an instant camera – a little collectible of Rob’s – and that was in a million pieces all over the floor. He had chewed two D-batteries (lucky the little bugger isn’t dead), and annihilated my pilates mat. I immediately told him “BAD CHEWY” and put him outside, and cleaned up the living room a bit. Then, I ventured down the hallway to see what other destruction awaited me. Sure enough, there was evidence that he had taken something into the main bedroom and chewed it up on the bed. Then, I went into the spare room, and again, not only had he chewed stuff in there – an empty pop can – but he had gotten onto the spare bed and had chewed a large hole in a sweater I had knit when I was in high school. It wasn’t really a wearable sweater, but it had sentimental value. Rotten dog!
We noticed throughout the evening that Cooter was unsettled. He was jumpier than usual, more frantic about the cats. He couldn’t sit still, and would not settle down. Poor guy. After Rob played ball with the dogs out back for about 20 minutes, hard, they both came in and crashed, all nice and peaceful. So walking them, exercising them, is KEY!!
I spent part of the evening chatting with The Mac. I have a land-line now, and that means I can dial long distance again without incurring objectionably large phone bills. So I called him up, and he told me about a guy called “The Dog Whisperer”. This guy has a show on the National Geographic channel, and sure enough, he advocates exercise, discipline and affection in the training of dogs. Dogs are complicated little creatures. They come from a wild background and pack life, and if they don’t have a leader, they get all confusled about things like what to chew, where to go, what rules they don’t need to follow… Apparently, the trick is to teach them that you’re their pack leader and that they need to listen to you, follow you and do what you say, basically. Not exactly rocket science, but then again, not as easy as it sounds. When The NoodleDog and I first moved in with Rob, the NoodleDog really, really liked him a lot, but he didn’t always listen to Rob. Rob’s had to push him over and hold him down a few times to establish dominance. Now, of course, the NoodleDog worships Rob and might actually be in love with him – he can’t stand it when Rob leaves the room or goes out of sight, and always wants to be with him. Me? He can take or leave. Traitor! At least I still have the cats, although Rob says he'll steal their affections, too.
But Cooter has pretty much listened to me the whole time. He does pretty much what I tell him, when I tell him, and is generally fairly obedient. He just can’t get over that built-up store of energy he seems to have. He’s of an energetic breed – border collie mixed with regular collie – so he needs something to do with his day. I think he would be a great working dog – he herds the cats, or counts them at least, and loves playing ball. But the exercise thing is of paramount importance in keeping him happy and settled-down.
The following contains Jeepers Creepers and Jeepers Creepers 2 spoilers. Read at your own risk.
Over the weekend, we watched a scary movie, Jeepers Creepers. We had been up late, at a party, and then came home reasonably early, but kept on drinking and watching TV. Rob kindly noted that Jeepers Creepers was on, so we watched it. It was a little scary, and I don’t usually watch scary movies. Basically, these two horrendously dumb kids “get involved” with this Creeper thing. They see it dumping what looks like bodies down a pipe at some abandoned church full of crows. Personally, if that had been me, and if The Mac had been in the car, we would have taken one look at the scenario and gotten the hell out of there. THE HELL! These kids saw the deed, then WENT BACK to the abandoned church and managed to get one of them fallen down the stupid pipe, and, well, the story from that point on just got less and less realistic. They run. The thing chases them. The thing doesn’t get them and they run some more. The thing keeps on chasing them. They get a PHONE CALL from a psychic woman who tells them basically that they’re in deep shit. They run some more. The thing keeps on chasing them and kills some other people while it’s at it. You don’t get the best look in the world at it, though, so your imagination can do some pretty good stuff with that. The back story on the Creeper thing is that every 23 years, for 23 days it gets to “feed”. It selectively kills people that “have something it needs”, like a tongue, eyes, whatever. No one knows where it came from or anything else about it. Anyway, the kids continue to try to get away from it, only they try to hide out in this police station, which effectively traps them enough for the Creeper thing to catch and carry one off. Yeesh. Oh yeah, the Creeper thing is fairly indestructible and supposedly can’t be killed by conventional means. If it was me? Again? And The Mac? We would have burned it. BURNED IT GOOD!!!
It was disturbing, sort of, and I had to put the lights on all throughout the house in order to remain calm. We went to bed right after (smart idea) and just about as soon as I had started to fall asleep, Rob started snoring. Rob snores after he gets to drinking the beer, and sure enough, he’d had enough beer to snore A LOT! I poked him gently and told him to roll over. He did. He kept on snoring. I told him to wake up because he was snoring. He moved around some. I tried to sleep. SNNKKKKRRRRRR-ch-ch-RRRRR. I poked him harder. He snored louder. I talked to him rationally. He kept on snoring. I shoved him around a bit. He kept on snoring. I kicked him with my feet. Nothing worked.
Finally, in frustration and tiredness, I turned the light on to see if that would make a difference, and of course, it did not. I thought if I thrashed around a bit, he’d wake up and move into a less-snory position. He did not. I got up and out of bed and went into the bathroom, turned on the light there, and then into the spare room to turn on the light there, having decided I’d have to sleep in the spare room for the rest of the night. It was late. I was tired. I was a little wary from having watched that stupid movie. The spare room has no little bedside lamp, so I had to go back into our room, turn on the big light (so there wouldn’t be any total darkness anywhere), get my bedside lamp, bring it into the spare room, set it up and then go back into the main bedroom to turn off the big light. Eventually, I got to bed. And Cooter came with me.
At first, I was glad Cooter was with me. I hugged him and told him he was a good dog to keep me company, and keep me safe. He curled up next to me and I closed my tired eyes, trying hard not to think about that stupid Creeper thing from the movie. Stupid Creeper. About five minutes later, just as I was drifting off again, Cooter got up and moved around. I figured he was just settling in for the night, but no, he got up, hopped off the bed and went in search of cats. He apparently found them all, because he came back a couple of minutes later and got back onto the bed with me, and I hugged him and told him “good doggie! Thanks for coming back!”
Yeah, right. Every five or ten minutes, Cooter would get up and go look for the cats. His job became a lot easier as some of them came into the room to settle down on the bed with me from time to time, but still. He kept on getting up to look at them. I think I finally fell asleep for the rest of the night around 4a-ish… and then by around 8a, the animals all needed to be fed and let out to pee. Greaaaat night. Oh, and I didn’t have any nightmares at all, about that stupid Creeper, or that the Mounties were after it, chasing it around in an abandoned industrial complex, or that I was kidnapped by it at all, or that somehow I escaped and was consulting with the Mounties on how to get it because when you want something done right, you call the Mounties… Nope, not at all.
We didn’t learn a thing from that experience, because the next day, we thought it would be a great idea to rent Jeepers Creepers 2. I have to say, though, that the second movie is a lot less scary than the first, although it had a lot more monster effects. The Creeper thing went from an ominous, inexplicable evil thing chasing down the two hapless teenagers to just a stupid freakish monstery guy with the most unbelievable batwings hunting a busload of idiotic kids. The movie started out well, with the Creeper thing hiding in plain sight in a cornfield, disguised to look like a scarecrow. Scarecrows are a bit eerie. It carried off a little kid who was supposed to be “fixing” the scarecrows as the kid’s father and brother tried to run after it (to no avail – it swooped away on those wings). I did like that the father then wanted to hunt the damn thing down and impale it. That was fun. After that, the Creeper disabled a busload of kids, and did away with the adults first. Then, apparently, it figured it could hunt down the kids it wanted at its leisure. It didn’t count on the enraged dad from the first scene, though! Hee! The kids fought amongst themselves as the Creeper thing chipped away at their bus, and then, for some reason, they all scattered. Scattered to the great outdoors! Heh. One of the girls, since the movie needed a psychic angle, started having visions of the first movie’s dead kid and he told her that this Creeper thing was after certain people and they better get their shit together and get outta there. In the deleted scenes, it shows that, in her supposed vision, the Creeper was involved in some sort of ancient battle, so we should have been supposed to surmise it was… old? Got it. The scene might have been helpful if they’d kept it, but then again, maybe not. As well, the movie’s creator did a little commentary in the accompanying documentary about where the thing was from, and he just said it was a messed-up guy who did something to be cursed long, long ago. Huh? Whatever. Eventually, the enraged father, who was all caution-to-the-wind about it, harpooned the creature with a post-holer and a homemade harpoon. He stabbed the living daylights out of it and, just as it was about to regenerate, it “ran out of time” (since it was on the last of its 23 days), and closed up on itself to wait out the next 23 years. The movie ends with the brother showing the “monster”, cleverly nicknamed “Bat out of Hell”, for five bucks to country rubes, and the dad, who is old, watching over it as he sits in his rocking chair, a harpoon aimed at its head, waiting for it to wake up again so he can stab it some more, presumably. Yeah, old guy? You might want to get SOME GASOLINE AND A MATCH for when it wakes back up. Or run it through a wood-chipper, now, before it’s active again. I’m just sayin’. It always bothers me that no one in the movies takes my suggestions seriously. I can’t tell you how many times I yelled at them to “BURN IT!! BURN IT!!”, only no one did. I guess if they did, there wouldn’t be any more sequels. Heh.
Faults from the movie included that it was “springtime” in the first movie (spring break), and in the second movie that was supposed to be set FOUR DAYS after the first one (so, still during the creature’s killing spree time), it was full-on fall and there was corn to be a-harvested. Also, and I can’t emphasize this enough, those wings. So! Unbelivable! Aerodynamically, that thing wouldn’t have gotten two feet off the ground, even if it had jumped, and it certainly wouldn’t have been able to flap its way along to chase a speeding car. And where was the Creeper’s eerie evil turbocharged truck in the second movie? We don’t know. As well, in the second movie, the Creeper thing was creating these artistic throwing stars or something so it could disable vehicles without having to rip their tops off as they sped down the road. Seriously.
Anyway. I guess that’s taken up enough of my time and attention. The Mac and I chatted briefly about movies when we talked. Your enjoyment of movies depends, really, on what you want to get out of them. Entertainment, for me. I don’t want to have these movies change my life or anything, I just want to watch to be entertained. Those Jeepers Creepers things served their purpose. I wasn’t watching them to get anything deep out of them. They’re like potato chips. You don’t eat them for the nutrition.
Get yourselves some chips, everyone!
