Good news everyone!

My mom called today with the test results from Julia’s biopsy. It’s benign! They are pre-cancer cells that were detected early. The vet thinks that the aggressive early removal kept anything from developing or spreading so our pup will be ok! Yay!

Here’s our girl, doing what she does best – eating something.

Yay Julia!

The bad news

My mom called middle of last week with some news. She was rubbing our furry baby’s belly and felt a lump. She took her into the vet and long story short, she had surgery Thursday to remove a decent sized tumor. We’re waiting on biopsy results to come in at the end of this week to see what kind of cancer it is and how aggressive it will be.

Poor Julia’s currently got a drainage tube in her chest and is wearing a “cone of silence” to keep her from chewing at her tube and stitches. My poor mom is saddled with the whole experience. Julia’s bleeding some around the tube so she’s wearing an adult diaper. My mom reports that it’s rather funny to see our big dog, in adult diapers, with a cone on her neck, trying to figure out why she won’t fit thru the doggy door.

The good news is that she’s still really frisky, and still eating like the furry little pig that she is so she’s not showing any signs of illness. I think at this point the plan is to just let her go till she starts to show symptoms. We’ll know more at the end of the week.

Here’s our pretty girl the last time I saw her. She’s curled up on MY bed.

Send good wishes to our poor pup!

Catch up

Yikes, I knew it had been awhile since I blogged but I didn’t realize June 1 was my last post. I’ve been a busy girl! Here’s a quick re-cap then.

My birthday was in early June. Husband spoiled me with the fabulous Spamalot/Maker Faire weekend, then a fantastic dinner in downtown San Jose on my birthday.

YUM, yum and more yum. (More photos here.)

Next up was Apple’s WWDC, in which an old college friend was in the area so we headed up to San Francisco to say hi.

We celebrated 7 years of marriage that weekend and actually did something together for it for the first time in several years. We cut out of work early on Friday and drove down to Carmel-by-the-Sea. I’d booked us a hotel for the weekend and we had a nice weekend away.

On Friday night we had dinner with an old friend of mine and his family. On Saturday we went down CA Hwy 1 to Hearst Castle. Hwy 1 is GORGEOUS. It’s also twisty, windy, scary, and made me a little ill. I mean seriously, look at this road:

The trip was totally worth it though. Hearst Castle is AMAZING.

Seriously. (More photos here.) Drove back to Carmel via 101 to save my tummy and had a chillaxing evening. The next day we drove home via the 17 Mile Drive of Pebble Beach in Monterey. Took us quite a while because there are a lot of scenic stops and we enjoyed walking along the beach. Really very lovely.

(More photos here.) And then back to reality and a brutal work week. But I did get a shiny new iPhone 3G S delivered to me Friday so that made the week a-ok! I haven’t played with it much but it’s MUCH faster than my first generation iPhone. And it’s 32GB! Woot!

Right now I’m chilling with the boys for RAMBO FEST. Sly is ranting incoherently so I should pay attention. Later skaters!

In Which I Pretend To Have Acquired A Life

We’ve been busy peoples lately! It’s like we’re getting out and doing stuff that’s not work! Crazy! Quick re-cap….

Thursday night husband and I went to see the band, The Prodigy, up in San Francisco. The show started at 9pm and the band took the stage after 10pm. Which means we got done waaaay past my bedtime. Friday was a bit rough but I toughed it out enough to do happy hour Friday night.

Saturday night we went up to the city and had Chinese food and saw Spamalot, which was hilarious and raunchy. Loved it.

On Sunday we had a killer good brunch at Buck’s and then I waddled off my buttery croissant French Toast off at MakerFaire with a group of friends. MakerFaire is basically a craft show for geeks. There were all kinds of DIY projects like robots

and burrito guns

and lightning machines.

And lightning machines cooking hot dogs, of course.

We had a great time just looking at all the cool stuff on display.

I have a ton more photos up on Flickr if you want to see more.

Sunday night husband surprised me with a date of a quick bite and a movie. Tonight I was take out AGAIN to see Up. And tomorrow night we have secret dinner reservations! What a good boy I married eh?

Rock N Roll Kinda Week

This was a busy week of rocking and rolling here in California. On Monday at noon we learned that we’d scored tickets to the American Idol finale shows in LA, courtesy of my husband’s work. Unfortunately, it was too short notice for me to swing getting off work so my husband went without me. He ended up rolling with some very VIPs and so got all kinds of access to VIP lounges and parties and met the finalists and sat with Paula and yadda yadda yadda.

He came back Thursday at noon and then Friday we had tickets to the NIN|JA show. We dig Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor (the guy who essentially IS Nine Inch Nails) has basically said this might be his last ever tour so we thought we’d kick off our summer concert season with this show. The show opened with Tom Morello’s new band, Street Sweepers Social Club. Then NIN took the stage, followed by Jane’s Addiction. The show was at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, which is an outdoor venue we’d never been to. And we learned that the lawn SUCKS. At other outdoor venues I’ve been to, say, Riverport Amphitheater in St. Louis, you can see the stage from anywhere on the lawn. Not so at the Shoreline. Totally lame. So we had to stand at the very top of the hill to be able to actually see the stage. Luckily Trent got permissions from the venues to allow in SLR camera with big lenses. We got some fun shots of the show.

None of us were terribly familiar with Jane’s Addiction beyond a few songs. Perry Farrell, the lead singer, cracked me up. He talked about turning us into pigs, asked if we believe in wicca, talked about Obama, and generally bounced around in his corset like some kind of rocker version of Puck. Dave Navarro rocked out on guitar. And we froze our butts off. Here’s a shot of Jane’s Addiction in action:

So we had a good week and are looking forward to a restful three day weekend. More photos of Idol swag are here and more concert photos are here.

Hump Day – Influenced by American Idol

Because my husband is awesome, he’s seeing the American Idol finale shows in LA this week. That’s the way he rolls. Confession: before tonight I’d never ever seen an episode of Idol. I heard something interesting about one of the judges this week, though, and that’s going to be the feature song of this hump day blog.

Now I knew that judge Randy was “in the biz” but I thought he was a producer/songwriter type. No no. What I learned is that he was the bassist for JOURNEY. He also played bass guitar on the Divinyls hit “I Touch Myself.” Randy is AWESOME! I had no idea!

So in honor of awesome Idol Randy, here’s a little Journey for your hump day! But not “Open Arms” the track he played on. Because I hate that song.

Bay to Breakers

We got our lazy butts out of bed on Sunday to attend a San Francisco classic – the Bay to Breakers race. Bay to Breakers is a walk/run race that basically starts on on side of San Francisco and ends up on the other side (the bay side to the breakers side, get it?). But what makes it interesting is that people dress up in costumes. Or sometimes wear nothing. And make floats. And drink. Alot. This year I heard that some 65,000 people were registered to run. It was amazing. We’d never been so I got in touch with a friend in the city and made arrangements to hang out. So we ended up breakfast picnicing with many mimosas and donuts in the park facing the famous Painted Ladies. AND I got to play with the doggies! Yay doggies! I snapped a few pictures – no nudity, though honestly, the people you wanted to see nekkid weren’t, but the people who were nekkid hurt your eyes.

More pictures up on Flickr.

By the way

I found these really cool Batman band-aids for my hand. My husband is totally jealous because right now I have an awesome Bat Symbol plastered to my hand.

Update on the dog

I just got a visit from the Animal Control lady. I filled out a written statement to add to the report. She’s going to have to take the dog to quarantine for ten days of observation it sounds like. I just emailed in photos of the damage to my hand and have to do a drive by to get the address. I have a 10 day supply of antibiotics and more soaking of the wound to do. At least life isn’t boring, right?

The One Where I Get Mauled

This afternoon my husband and I decided that we wanted to go for a walk together. We used to do this all the time but haven’t for quite a while, largely due to my ankle injury. So we get all iPodded up and ready to walk. We’re about 3 minutes from home and turn onto a quite residential loop that we walk. As we turn the corner we see at the first house a man, cleaning out his SUV, and his dog, just hanging out with him. I think to myself “I wonder what kind of dog that is?” And as we walk nearer, the dog runs out barking. We both stopped, because generally, there’s just a lot of barking. And then my brain says “what the sweet bunny rabbit? This dog’s not stopping!” And before we realize what’s happening, the dog is on us. I swear I saw it look to my husband and swerve to me. Prolly realized that husband is a MUCH larger, more dangerous target. He thinks it is because of my love of bacon. I put my hands out to keep the dog away and it swings to my right side. And then my brain registers “CRAP! That’s bone in my hand getting crunched! MOThertrUCKEr!” I registered the fact that the homeowner was trying to call in the dog and then I’m squeezing my hand because it’s bleeding.

To illustrate the ferocity of said dog, it more more like this:

or this:

And less like this:

So the nice man took me in to the house where I ran a lot of cold water over my hand. I knew there was a bleeding puncture on the side of my hand, in the curve between my thumb and pointer finger. I didn’t realize I’d scratched up the top of my hand till I flipped it over. Then the nice man got some peroxide, and we started rinsing it with peroxide. After awhile I got the bleeding to ease up and we bandaged it and took off. Husband insisted on my going to a doctor, STAT, to get it looked at.

So… at this point it’s about 1:30 and we roll into my favorite urgent care center. They’re usually pretty quick so I figured no biggie. One tetanus shot, one wound cleaning, and 4 hours later, we left at 5pm. And we hadn’t had any lunch. So we were smelly, tired, hungry, and, you know, MAULED. Tomorrow I start on 10 days of antibiotic treatment.

Here’s what the top of my hand looked like when we got home.

It actually looks cooler now because you can totally see rows of tooth scrapes that swelled up and appeared a few hours later.

The story will prolly have another chapter because the doctor was required to fill out some kind of dog attack form and file it with animal control. I expect I will hear from them, as will the dog’s owners. It was kind of a freak accident, and they seemed genuinely concerned so I’m not looking to start a big legal thing. I did fail to ask if the dog was up to date on its shots though, so that will likely come up in the next day or two. Raibies treatment would really, really, suck. But I don’t feel like that’s really an issue.

It did make for a pretty crappy Saturday. And will make work tough next week. Why couldn’t the dog bite my pinky finger? I don’t need that finger too much. Stupid selfish dog.

Moral of the story? Fresh air and exercise kills. This is why I’m now safely ensconced on the couch with a bag of Lays and watching hockey.