Getting ready for a week of tradeshowing in Vegas.  Yeah, this is where the company pays for us to suck up to clients and show them the ropes with our software.  Of course once the day is done we are off to play.  Sounds like we will end up at Nine Fine Irishmen at New York, New York.  Great pub, but I dread getting up the next day to go work.  

In the old days, the company used ot move the show/user conference between cities.  New Orleans, Orlando, back and forth.  Then they got really smart and moved it to Vegas in July.  The first year, the temperatures were 115 degrees in the shade (no kidding).  But of course it was a dry heat..:) Sorry, but anything over 100 is HOT, and I live in Houston where as they say, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity….

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OK, now this is a funny one, but probably very true.  I’ve been nominated for an RFS Blog Award, in the category:

• Blog most likely to benefit from the (small ammount) of traffic from being being nominated

So vote if you are so inclined:

I’ve been a blog slacker for a while now. Work and school were interfering, but i need to get back to it, and catch the bug again. On to the story….

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Spent this past weekend in Austin, TX. My wife and I ended up going because my 83 year old mother-in-law was planning to drive herself from Houston to Austin. In the name of public safety, the wife unit and I offered to drive her. Needless to say, her vision makes driving something like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The primary reason for the trip was a memorial for my sister-in-law’s ex-husband who passed away recently. The get together was a bunch of family, friend’s of his and the family, and a motorcycle club who had nothing to do with the memorial. Oh, and on Saturday there was also a BD party for our great nephew. Nothing like a multi-purpose party to bring people together (the keg and free food didn’t hurt either).

My wife had an interesting time in the car with us. My hearing isn’t so hot and neither is my mother-in-law’s (MIL), so she ends up translating for us back and forth. When she doesn’t, the results are rather entertaining. Once the MIL was saying she was having trouble breathing, I thought I heard her say she was having trouble reading, so I turned on the overhead light in the car. On this trip, the MIL was directing from the backseat (she actually does pretty good as a navigator) when the traffic light ahead started to turn yellow. She thought a car going to turn in front of us and was shouting “No, no, no!”, but I heard “Go, go, go!” and raced through the intersection (no crashes). It was good for a laugh after the fact…

The drive home only had one funny story. Has anyone ever been to Giddings, TX? It’s a quaint little town on Highway 290. It used to be the place where cell phones cut out on the drive to Austin, now it’s a place to get gas or get caught speeding (speed limit drops from 70 to 30 as you go into town). Well, my MIL was swearing there was this place where we could stop for lunch and get gas. All I knew is that it was good last time she was there, and it was on the right (I never was clear if that was going east or west). We kept driving through town and started to get to the end of the town. She swore that the yellowish building on the left was it…..That was a Bucee’s known for gas and other great items that you would normally only find in a Cracker Barrel Restaurant. I assured her we didn’t want to eat the hot dogs that had been cooking for the past 16 weeks because the Pepcid was packed. I took a right at drove up to Subway. After lunch we did go to Bucee’s and got gas for a whopping $2.39/gal (I wish someone could explain why gas is cheaper out in the boonies). Now Bucee’s has all sorts of thing in addition to the standard 7-11 merchandise: apple butter, cinnamon sugar coated almonds, sweet potato butter, and the list goes on….

The rest of the drive home was smooth sailing, no tickets, no slowpokes, no rain, and lots of bugs on the grill. Oh yeah we did crosswords in the car and my wife read me summaries of Newsweek and Harvard Business Review articles. It was a fun weekend….

Tonight is a guest post by the best wife in the world.

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Rosie Rosita Girl, the sweetest seventy pound lap dog in the world, was a rescue from the local doggie concentration camp on Memorial Weekend.  I had lost my other dog to age about a year ago and had been looking for a new puppy but hadn’t had any luck at the local foster pet leagues.  We were scheduled to see “Gladiator” with Russell Crowe – hubba hubba – and my friend, another doggie lover, took me to the local SPCA where we found a girl dog with Rottweiler coloring, the opposite of my other dog, a white male.   The caretaker there said she was the sweetest dog, gentle and caring, jumped up and put her paws on his shoulder and would lay on her back and let other dogs smell her without any problems.  When I went in to see her, she ran over and stuck her head under my arm.  I was whipped.

So I had Rosie, a Rottweiler/Lab mix, for about two years when enters the cutest husband-to-be.  Rosie takes one look and is in love.  I rescued her and she is laying across my lap when he walks in the room.  She sighs (I swear she did!), gets an adoring look on her face, and follows him around the room with her eyes.   When he is leaving to go up to his apartment and I was going up to meet him, he opened the front door, Rosie without even looking back runs out and jumps in the passenger seat of his truck and looks back at me like “kiss, kiss, I’m going with him”.   Of course he was grinning ear to ear, smugly.

Four years later, after a marriage and several discussions of whose dog Rosie really was, she does lay on my head when it thunders and rains at night, we were suckered in to taking on Hank. 

My vet, who has known me through two dogs and two cats, asked if I wanted a puppy. 

Well, what’s the story?  A puppy, maybe 8-12 months old, had been hit on a local road and they were looking for a good Samaritan to sponsor the surgery.  Well, what was wrong with him? Shattered left front leg, broken left hind leg and pelvis.  What would happen if he didn’t get the surgery? Oh, they’d just put him down.  They’d kill him?! They knew they had me then.  Yep, we sponsored the surgery and adopted him, and as you can see, he’s pretty cute. 

My vet said he’s a Water Dog (we live on the coast) but we think he’s part Jack Russell and Brittany Spaniel, and full of piss and vinegar.  No body told him that he has a bum leg, and even though he limps, when he is low running – you know down to the ground focused, intense running like chasing a squirrel – there is no limp, or slowness.  He teleports to high places, like the back of the couch (he’s only about 17 inches tall and 30 pounds) which is about 28 inches tall, wraps his arms around my neck and puts his head on mine. 

Rosie was not at all sure that she needed a companion when we brought him home.  Actually she was pretty sure she didn’t, and made it clear every time she looked at us, with disgust and suffering.  She does get him back; every time he comes in from the outside, either from a walk or the backyard, she puts her whole mouth around him and plants him in the carpet.  Yep, just letting him know she’s the boss, the Alpha dog, and he shouldn’t forget it.  Of course being the street dog he is (was) he jumps up and races around the house barking and jumping up to bite her back in the neck. 

Finally though, at Christmas, they got up on the same couch to sleep and Rosie didn’t give him a problem.  She actually let him up stay up there, comfortably, companionably.  However, as soon as we got home, she was letting him know that she was the boss again, not willing to share space or us.  Sigh, maybe it was just the Christmas spirit.