Anywho, living outside the border limits of the city does have one other advantage and that is that I am surrounded by quiet. No sirens, no crazy neighbors smoking cigarettes right under my bedroom window while bitching about how hard it is to be pregnant, no college frat parties on your doorstep. Imagine my surprise then when I got back from Denver and suddenly at all hours of the day and night I was assaulted by the dulcet tones of a goddamn rooster crowing, pretty much in my backyard. Really, neighbs? This isn’t backwoods Maine here! You’re telling me that there’s a Dunkin Donuts right down the street and yet you felt it necessary to buy a rooster? PLEASE GOD WHY.

Sigh. I bitched about it for a while and then just turned the AC on to block out the noise and eventually forgot that my neighbors are cray cray. One day my cousin texted me that she actually saw the rooster standing in its yard by the side of the road and sure enough, the next time I drove by, there it was, cocking its ugly head in my direction. I briefly considered swerving but then thought about the blood and feathers that would ensue and decided to leave the rooster to his devices.

Fast forward to Friday night. The time is 3 am and I am slumbering peacefully with my windows open to let in the cool rainy air. I was slammed back into the world of the wide-awake by an eerie and very loud howling outside my window. My first thought was werewolves, a sure sign I have read too much teenybopper fiction, until the yipping started. Coyotes. Right outside my very wide open window. The hair on my arms was standing straight up at this point. I mustered up the courage to peek out the window with my eyes barely at sill level, the whole time whispering “what the crap! what the crap!” to myself. I could barely make out shadowy figures loping through the yard. Suddenly the yipping turned to all-out barking and snarling and I heard the distinct sound of bones being crunched. And then dead silence.

I was totally creeped out. But, well: no more rooster.

That’s what you get, stupid neighbors, for letting stupid poultry wander around your stupid yard uncooped. I just hope no cats were harmed in the making of this lesson.

Sitting in front of back-to-back episodes of The Wire, on the other hand…

Sadly, today marks exactly ten days till my return to school and a routine that doesn’t involve waking up in time to lunch on lobster rolls at some sunny beach locale. I’d venture a guess that none of you (except my teacher compadres) are feeling sorry for me on that point, which is understandable, but please: the next time you accidentally wake up at 5:15 a.m. and think, “oh thank god, I have two more hours of sleep!”, remember that I am already up and ready to curse the homeroom bell.

But let’s not dwell on that subject too long. I’ve already gotten the obligatory nightmare about going back to school out of the way (it involved lots of anxiety and angst, shocker), so instead I’ll give you the downlow on what’s been going on in the world of NPDubs.

Out of Towners

My fabulous blog friends Courtney and Mickey drove up from Atlanta for a full-on New England weekend in which they toured parts of Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine. Because they are good sports they agreed to bunk in my tiny little apartment and we spent four days roaming around Boston, Salem, Newburyport, and Haverhill. We also hung out with the reclusive Aaron of former Funky Carter fame and had our own Tosh.0  session mocking some sweet YouTube videos, and Howling Hill of the Greenists met up with us for lunch at the Beantown Pub and a tour of Paul Revere’s house.

We also came very close to visiting the site of America’s Stonehenge, which happens to be right down the road from me. Mickey seemed incredulous that I’ve lived so close my entire life and never visited; that is, until we looked at the website and it confirmed that it’s probably just some stone wall built by a farmer in the 1800’s and not actually 4,000 years old. But hey, they have alpacas! That alone was worthy of our grand plans to break in during the dead of night with head lamps on to see the sacrificial altar.

Overall I had a super fun staycation with some of the best bloggers around. It was wicked pissah. I just hope they come back soon so we can see all the stuff we missed!

Rocky Mountain High

Almost immediately after Courtney and Mickey left for Maine I hopped on a plane to Denver to visit a college friend and her family. They live in the picturesque town of Golden, Colorado, complete with amazing views of the Rockies. It was exactly the kind of vacation I was looking for; namely, we spent a good chunk of time on the couch with marathon episodes of the orig 90210.

We also celebrated her son’s third birthday for which I made a (if I do say so myself) damn cute pinata, we visited the Coors brewery (also known as the day I consumed a cupcake, beer nuts, a Twix, and five beers by noon), went to the amazing Casa Bonita (disgusting Mexican food combined with tequila, cliff-divers, gorillas, gun fights, mariachi, and Black Bart’s Cave- so awesome that there is an entire South Park episode about it!), and generally enjoyed the feeling of being in the wild west. I even saw Buffalo Bill’s grave! HOWDY!

Other than having the most irritating seat mates you could imagine on every leg of the flight, overall the trip was pretty damn fantastic.

Blog Pimpage

Most of you know I occasionally write for The Greenists, right? My lovely friend Allie started the green blog and invited a bunch of bloggers to write about eco-friendly topics. If you haven’t been there, you should go immediately. Not the least because they have awesome contests and giveaways.

More recently Allie and Corinne started a new blog for people who love to read and write, Tiny Tangents. To my delight they invited me to contribute, and of course I said yes. I mean, I love to read and write! What could be a more perfect distraction?

Dating Scene

Dating, oh dating. Of late I have been somewhat of a dating recluse, choosing instead to do whatever I want, whenever I want. Not a bad way to live, I think. Somehow, though, the male population has caught up with me and it appears I am now dating an ex-Naval aviator. Trust me, no one is more surprised about this fact than I am.  When it blows up in my face you can all leave comments about how being single is super awesome, but for now: yay for smart, sporty dudes.

I do, however, keep a running tab in my brain of all the things I should probably be doing during the time spent reading 900 pages worth of Stieg Larsson novels. My car currently has four alerts going off every time I start it that I need to get my oil changed and my tires rotated and blah blah blah, plus my brakes are starting to make a sound like squirrels in their death throes when I have to come to a full stop. Something tells me that can’t be good. And I would do all those things, really, if someone would just come to my house, pick up my car, make the repairs quickly and efficiently, and bill me a reasonable price. Why does it have to be so difficult?

Plus my sleep patterns have been a little insane; I imagine they’re something akin to the sleep patters people in an asylum might have only minus the fun psychotropic drugs. Sometimes I go to sleep at midnight, wake up at 3 am, fold laundry, go back to sleep until 9, make some coffee, take my noonday siesta, wake up, go for a run, shower, watch whatever has been TiVo’d. My brain tells me I have no pressing needs. My calendar has random things scheduled like kickball, but my calendar being mostly free doesn’t mean I should wake up at 3 a.m. ready to check email and do dishes. And yet.

It probably sounds like I’m trying to be all WOE IS ME I DON’T HAVE TO WORK about it, but the truth is I kind of really love it. I love to the point where I am probably going to run my car into the ground and starve to death and never leave the house again, thus ensuring that I won’t have a job to go back to in the fall. I love making my own schedule and choosing whether I feel like dedicating an eight-hour block of my day to watching clips of Bob Ross on YouTube. After the rigidity and early hours of the school schedule the summer feels like heaven. I’m very much able to compartmentalize my existence into Things I Want To Do Right Now and Things That Can Surely Be Done At Some Later Date So I’m Not Even Going to Waste Time Worrying About Them.

So as it turns out that I’m really great at being unemployed. Any potential employers out there want to pay me for those skills, you know how to find me. I’ll be the one eating ice cream sandwiches and watching Cartoon Network on my couch at 4 am.

Anyway, if I don’t feel like promising my first-born child for a bunch of grapes the only options available are the lower-end grocery stores; stores like Johnnies Food Master and Market Basket. Here the ramen flows freely like manna at the normal price of $.08 but the floors are covered in sawdust and unidentifiable sticky substances. (Note to Market Basket: seriously. Why with the sawdust? Did someone just vom in the aisle? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.) The last time I went to Johnnies Food Master looking for chicken broth I wandered up and down the aisles for 35 minutes searching. Do you know why I couldn’t find it? Because it was in the dog food aisle. Of course it was! Hahahaha! Oh, Food Master. You so crazy. Look at you with your unconventional aisle labeling, otherwise known as OMFG why can’t I find shit in here?!

Plus, at these lower-end, cheaper grocery stores, space is at a premium. This means that in order to navigate through the narrow aisles one must be conscious of others surrounding you. Common courtesy dictates that if you are going to peruse the shelves for longer than three seconds you pull your cart off to the side so that others may sidestep you. Except remember the part about how we are in Massachusetts? Common courtesy does not compute. We’re not called Massholes for nothing. So instead I spend the majority of my time doling out death glares, and if I become enraged enough, passive-aggressively shoving people’s carts out of my way while they stand there stupidly staring at Hamburger Helper flavors.

It’s especially bad when I go in without a plan. On the way to the store I have to pep talk myself with my list: sesame seeds, avocados, taco shells, GO! If I can get it done in under ten minutes and without ramming my cart into some senior citizen’s heels to get them to MOVE OUT OF MY WAY IMMEDIATELY I consider it a rousing success. Ten minutes is in no way long enough for me to ever get all the stuff I need to construct a proper meal, which is probably why I find myself eating things like brown rice with shredded carrots, feta, and soy sauce for lunch. On the flip side, if I go into a grocery store with no plan at all I end up fruitlessly careening down aisles, not even really looking at items but steadily increasing in anxiety until I just sweep my arm across whatever shelf I happen to be next to, dumping those items into my cart and scurrying to the checkout line.

Alas, my house has no food in it. I haven’t been to the grocery store in a month. My options are to eat out every meal or get myself to a Market Basket, stat. Hmm. Panera sounds pretty good right now.

Take, for example my “work” space. Since my apartment is teensy (no, really, just ask RA or OPH, they’ll tell you), my desk is really the only place for me to work that isn’t in my bed. And believe me, working in bed is tempting but only because it leads to impromptu naps. Currently, my desk looks like this:

You see my dilemma here, right? Or I should say, multiple dilemmas, the first of which is that I have no chair. I guess I thought I could just sit on my piles of laundry?  Note to the bottom left the numerous bags of unopened mail that need to go in the shredder. The shredder that I don’t own nor have access to.

On the desk itself: a bunch of Threadless onesies for my to-be-born-in-October nephew, a sonogram picture of said nephew in a frame that says I <3 My Aunt, three separate external hard drives, USB cords for my camera and iPhone, cords for my white noise machine and laptop and battery chargers and a box of checks and even more mail and OMG I AM FREAKING OUT JUST LOOKING AT THAT PICTURE.

You guys, I am a LIBRARIAN. This lack of organization makes me want to die. And yet I am helpless to fix it! Okay, helpless is a bit strong. How about… I am completely too lazy to fix it? It’s just that it’s been so hot and humid and I’ve been running all the time so I can finish up that Couch to 5K program and my hair takes like eight hours to dry because it’s so long and there’s really a lot of episodes of Buffy to watch and I spent five kajillion hours fielding Twitter requests because the love of my life, Nathan Fillion, retweeted me the other day and really, just knowing Nathan Fillion knew I existed for a second was pretty pleasant, but then there’s also kickball and that writing class that is slowly killing me with its lunacy and, well, you understand, right?

Sigh. Fine. I’ll clean it. And I’ll buy a damn chair. Are you happy now?

We just won’t discuss* what the bottom of my closet looks like. Deal?

*Or the fact that I haven’t gone grocery shopping in a month. Shhhh…

The last writing prompt for the month is just as inane as the rest of them have been, but it is in keeping with the theme of dudes that I seem to have going on this week. Also, I just realized that my last four posts have been mostly pictures. I was tempted to throw some random ones in here just so I wouldn’t confuse you all with my blog having pesky things like words. That you have to read. But then I got distracted by Twitter and didn’t feel like doing the difficult work of uploading images. Too many clicks.

So! On to the writing prompt! “What is the first thing you notice about a man when you meet him?”

Superficially I guess I’d say I look at a guy’s smile first. More than that, though, I look at whether his eyes match his smile, if there’s a warmth and an intelligence there. I also check out the hair and the clothes. Ugly shoes or sandals with socks would be an immediate no. I’m only a little bit shallow.

I tend to gravitate towards the taller guys since I’m kind of an Amazon myself. Poor short dudes, they must have it rough. And they probably sing that Skee-Lo song to themselves all day.

I like when a guy has those little laugh line crinkles around his eyes.

A nice ass doesn’t hurt.

The problem is, I can’t be truly into to someone just based on those things. I won’t lie, attraction is important, but it has to go along with the ability to make me laugh. He has to be passionate about something, anything, unless it’s right wing conservatism, then he can go to hell. Different interests, same interests, it doesn’t matter as long as he has some interests that don’t involve handing out Watchtower pamphlets. He has to be intelligent but if he’s going to disagree with me he has to be able to articulate why unless he wants me to rip him and his logic to shreds. Uh, verbally of course.

I need the entire package, plus friendship. There aren’t many guys who’ve ever made it to the point where I thought to myself, “Oh shit, I’m in trouble with this one.” I could probably list all of them on one hand, in fact.

I almost always go for the artsy type over the science-y type. Also, I’ve never been in a relationship with someone who was raised in New England. We won’t discuss the implications behind that fact- but it is interesting to note.

Most of those things wouldn’t be the first thing you notice about a man; still, they seem much more important to me.

But yeah: smile.

As Rick Castle on the hilarious crime show of the same name. Handsome, yes? And also a writer! I know there are a bunch of Castle fans reading this and to you I say: HOW COULD HE GO TO THE HAMPTONS FOR THE SUMMER?!

My favorite character pretty much of all time, Captain Malcom Reynolds. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Firefly is the best show ever made in the history of television. Period.

He may look like a doof as Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog (yet another Joss Whedon classic), but he does sing a duet with Neil Patrick Harris so he earns his cool points back. Plus, look at that face. What the cute.

I resisted the urge to scribble out Keri Russell’s face in Microsoft Paint, but just barely. It appears I’ve never forgiven her for leaving Scott Foley on Felicity. Still, Fillion was kind of an asshole in this movie (The Waitress), so I left her in. She deserves an asshole.

Last but not least, a strange horror flick called Slither that you probably missed if you are not into B-movies and/or Nathan Fillion. He kind of looks like a tool in that uniform, but believe you me, underneath it he is nothing but a heartbreaker.

And now, while I am at the height of my nerd fandom, I say to you tomorrow is the last day of NaBloPoMo and after that I will be taking a much needed break to do things other than search the internet for obscure movie photos.

Still, I don’t want an Isabella Rosselini situation on my hands so I thought very carefully about my list. You know, in case my imaginary boyfriend would okay me to carry around a laminated card of the people I could sleep with besides him. In any case, I will be so ready for when I meet someone and fall in love and decide to have the “So, who else can I sleep with?” conversation.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Dear Paul Rudd, I’ve heard you’re kind of a douche. I’ve also heard you’re kind of gay, but since I know neither of those for truth, may I please just quietly stare at your perfect face for a few moments? We don’t even have to do it, you can just look all awesome over there reading a book and maybe throw in a couple of lines from Clueless and I’ll be content for life.

Perhaps you are not into hot as hell vampire shows, but I am, and this strapping fellow is Joe Manganiello. He does not play a vampire, alas, but a werewolf named Alcide Herveaux. Unlike Paul Rudd, I would like Mr. Manganiello to be all up in my grill with his hotness and his Louisiana bayou accent and his lumberjack plaid shirts. I think Joe makes it okay again to lust after werewolves, unlike Taylor Lautner who is young enough to make me feel creepy.

Ira Glass is the composite of two of my favorite things in life: hot nerdy dudes and This American Life. Enough said.

Speaking of nerdy, Jonathan Coulton is another of my geeky dream men. He is the singer/songwriter behind such classics as Portal’s “Still Alive” and the perennial favorite “Re: Your Brains“. Even just watching the “Still Alive” video makes me long for Portal II. But then, that’s because I’m a total video game geek myself. A friend of mine told me the other day that he met Jonathan Coulton at a high school reunion party and I was giddy with even that secondhand brush with fame.

If you don’t know this man, you probably should quit reading my blog now. Either that, or get on Netflix right this second to order up some sweet sci-fi shows. Tahmoh Penikett plays both Helo on Battlestar Galactica and Paul Ballard on Dollhouse, two of the most interesting television series I’ve ever watched. Tahmoh: I have no idea what kind of name that is, but we can discuss it over beers. Call me.

So who’s on your fiver list?

There was also a dinosaur in the park we visited at Moseley Woods, but then it rained on me and I didn’t want to get my camera wet. I did sit on his spine though. It was pretty sweet.

The party is for my godson Aidan. He is very big into the Superhero Squad, which means all his presents are Iron Man, Wolverine, Spiderman, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and the Silver Surfer. There is also some scarred-looking guy whose name I don’t actually know. Neither do Aidan’s parents because they decided to tell Aidan that this guy’s name is The Dude Abides. Anyway, he is now wearing a glaringly red and yellow t-shirt that says HERO UP! in lightning-shaped letters and he is very ready to party.

Me too, Aidan. Me too. And someday you will understand what a bitch it is to fit two dozen superhero balloons in the backseat of my car and you’ll thank me.

Happy birthday, kiddo.

I told him to pretend he was going to dive to the depths of the pool. He obliged while saying, “Cheeeeese!”

I’m sure his mother was grateful that during his birthday dinner I taught him about “see food”.

He’s not always a weirdo. Sometimes he’s just a cute kid.

(*if you want to see a funny yet oddly disturbing picture of my sister and father, here you go. You’re welcome/sorry.)