Oh, my stars and garters!

Statistically unlikely

Thursday afternoon I printed out a copy of the dog's dumb DNA report, took a new black Sharpie and scrawled "REALLY?!?" over several recent pictures of the dog, wrote a polite letter asking for either a do-over or my money back, and mailed a fat envelope to the company in Maryland that makes the dog DNA tests.

Just after noon today I got a phone message from someone who works at the company. She is sorry I was disappointed with the test and she will review the results; she just needs to ask me a few things first. I called back a few hours later and left a message for her. I'm hoping she'll call back tomorrow.

E-mail and web forms are useful for lodging complaints, but I suspect it gives you a slight edge in the customer service game if you go full-bore crazy and start printing shit out and affixing stamps to it. We'll see what happens next.

Oh, My Stars and Garters! presents: 2011 fall fashion preview

(I actually have no idea if sweater shawls are in or out. I'm sure they're completely fine! But I do know that they don't look very good on me. A well-constructed rocket belt, on the other hand, will flatter any figure and complement any lifestyle.)

All the ladies say

We are the proud owners of a...

Ok, everybody! I got the results via e-mail today, about a week sooner than I was expecting. They're after the jump. Ready?

Pupdater

Willa the dog is a year old now. She is not a good dog, exactly, but she's an enormously sweet one, a springy, exuberant creature who enters snort-filled, unseemly paroxysms of joy every time she greets a person or another dog.

She does 11 different tricks and responds to our commands probably 80 percent of the time. We can leave her unsupervised for long periods of time, although I still can't entirely trust her. After being allowed on the bed for months without incident, she chewed a big hole in my down comforter last night. God, what a bitch!

But also last night, after many treats and much manipulation, she lay quietly and chewed on her bone while the cat dozed on the other side of the room, something I was starting to think would never happen.

She's still uneven. But she's steadily getting better, and I already think she's fantastic.

All this is to say that Eric and I are completely in love with this goddamn dog. And like people in love, we sometimes do stupid things. In this case, we bought and administered a doggie DNA test for her.

I know they have a reputation for being unreliable junk, but our curiosity got the better of us.

Every time we take her out we field guesses as to what her mix might be: the girls at the pet store are convinced she's got Shar-Pei in her; someone said (ridgeless) Rhodesian Ridgeback; we've heard Boxer (no way); pointer (well, she does kinda point at birds, but...nah); shepherd (ok, but what kind?); and many others that I can't remember right now.

The only thing we know for sure is that she's a mutt. So we did the cheek swab, and now we are waiting for the results.

If you would like to take stab in the comments as to what her mix might be, feel free; I will devise some sort of (probably dog-related) fabulous prize for the person who comes the closest to the test results. Sound like a plan?

If you read this, you will know much of what has been going on in my life this week.

Eric and I were in Lake Tahoe over the weekend to watch my sister get married.

The lake is pretty like a postcard.

And my sister was beautiful like a girl in a magazine.

(Sadly, this picture of my family in the bare-bones dressing area is the best picture I have on my camera from that evening. But I was in the wedding party and had other things to do besides take pictures, like clutch a bouquet of white hydrangeas and drink a lot of wine.)

It was a fine trip. As I may have mentioned, I got to watch my sister get married, and a lot of other people I love did too.

When we weren't doing wedding things, Eric and I swam in the cold, clear blue lake--colder than Barton Springs, though barely--and watched as a mother duck and her six peeping babies bobbed right past us.

I also lost $30 at video poker in the casino we stayed at and won it all back in the Las Vegas airport on the way home. Last time I stayed at a casino I lost $250 and won it all back five minutes before we got a cab out of there. I can't lose! Nor can I win!

Now we're back, and Austin and all of Texas is still hot and dry. I don't mind the heat much, but the drought is terrible. I try not to let it upset me because there's nothing we can do about it. Still, it's painful to watch the big trees turn sparse-leaved and dusty all over town, knowing that we may not realize the extent of the damage for another year or two.

In much more fun news, I got a cool drawing app recently and have been trying to do a new doodle every day or so. I haven't produced anything spectacular yet; I'm just out of practice and trying to get some momentum going. I hope you won't mind if I post them here occasionally. Today's:

Iterations

Went to replace the printer paper and got sidetracked.

Prickly pear

This week I cleaned my office and cleared off the desk. Now I can use it for something other than piling up empty boxes and and insurance statements.

Things to do in Austin when you...run out of things to do in Austin

I moved to Austin 18 years--jeez, half my life--ago this month. For the most part, Austin has been good to me; that time has gone by pretty fast.*

Eric and our friend John also moved here in the summer of 1993. A few years ago the three of us drank some beer and, after about an hour of brainstorming and good-natured arguments, came up with a list of things we hadn't done in Austin yet.

The criteria for a list item: it had to be a place or activity unique to Austin. It had have been around since at least 1993, be something none of us had done, and be something all three of us would actually want to do.

I found the list yesterday when I was cleaning my office. I don't know about John, but Eric and I still haven't done any of these things!

As I recall, the idea was that we would all go together and knock everything off the list over the course of a year or two (and probably write a series of blog posts about it). But John is often out of town on business, sometimes I'll go a month at a time without a day off from work, and, well, it's hard to get three adults together to do things they apparently aren't that excited about to begin with.

Anyway, here's what we came up with:

Chain Drive

Matt's El Rancho

County Line BBQ (kind of a chain now, maybe?)

UT Tower (tours weren't allowed until 1999, but I think it made the cut because the tower itself was here)

Lamme's Candies (now that I think about it, I have since been to the location at 38th and Lamar, but I'm pretty sure we were talking about the Airport Boulevard store. Damn, I wish I had a pecan praline stuck in my molars right now.)

Poodle Dog Lounge

House Park (I'm assuming we meant the BBQ place, not the football stadium)

Shoal Creek Saloon

Deep Eddy Cabaret (we pass by here all the time on the way back from Deep Eddy Pool, but I always want food with my beer after swimming)

Duck Tour (have these really been around since 1993?)

Velveeta Room (amateur stand-up frightens me, but I'm open to it)

Austin Zoo (I'm going here as soon as the heat breaks; it's stupid not to)

It was difficult to come up with even this many, and while I'm surprised we haven't done a lot of those things because they sound tasty and/or fun, there's nothing on there that seems like a truly egregious omission. I'm glad I found the list and posted it, though. It'll be a nice starting point for the days we're casting about for something to do.

*Please watch this too (NSFW).

Edit, 8/8/11, 11:41 p.m.: On the advice of my friend Larry, I'm adding the Blunn Creek Nature Preserve to this list (unless John has been there already, of course). It's been around since 1982 and I can't wait to go there because it sounds fantastic.