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It seems that nearly everyone in the world has a cold right now, and we are no exception. Even the dogs have been sniffling for a week.

A general feeling of crappiness has descended over Chez Wiener Dog.

For the first time in a long while, Auggie and I were caught in rush hour traffic last Friday. Auggie passed out, which was nice. But I was left to my own devices as far as keeping myself entertained, and the old AM radio, while good for traffic reports, is not the giggle-fest I was hoping for.

So when a sedan crept up beside me, I wasn’t surprised by the round Cardinals-logo bumper sticker. I noticed another bumper sticker beside it that, at a glance, seemed to read, ‘Praise the Lord.’ OK, no big deal. This is the Midwest after all, and that’s actually pretty tame, as far as pro-God and all his wrath bumper stickers go. Upon closer inspection, however, it seems that the bumper sticker actually read ‘Braise the Lord.’

Wha..?

And since it was in this funky yellow calligraphy on a maroon background, for a moment, I thought it might even say, ‘Braise the Cord,’ and for a fleeting instant I wondered it the sedan’s occupants might be some of those disturbing people who eat the umbilical cords of their newborns. Nope, it just said ‘Braise the Lord.’

Again, wha..?

So I take a closer look at the other bumper sticker gracing this particular car, and it says, ‘Scoundrel for hire.’ And then! I notice that the vanity plate reads, ‘LUV PIR8’

I’m totally not kidding. I never saw the guy driving (you just know it was a guy), but I almost wish that I had. How long was his mullet? The mind reels…

When discussing the latest Bear in the Big Blue House video that Auggie has watched, he says, ‘So, that lemur is supposed to be French, right?’

I lost 3 pounds last week. Yee haw! For those of you keeping score, that is 35.4 pounds gone.

I guess that running does help. Who woulda thunk? I mean, 20 minutes of running (much more like jogging in my case) versus 60+ minutes of butt-kicking aerobics with weights, and I lose that kinda weight? I’ll take it…

So, let me get this straight, Mother Nature. It’s snowing outside right now and 28 degrees. By Friday, it’s going to be 60 degrees and sunny. Huh? Once, again, though, I’ll take it.

Some new Auggie words: pee-pee, beep, shoe (did I mention that one already?), sock. And, yes, pee-pee is in reference to his royal maleness. I know it’s more appropriate to use its real name, but I think that little kids who go around saying “penis” and “vagina” are… Well, let’s just say that I’m not quite ready for that.

Last night was another doozy with Senor Wakey-man, but I am committed to deliver unto you, my faithful readers, my inane daily drivel.

It’s so weird, sometimes, when you see someone from your past. It’s especially weird when you see that someone in the mirror.

It seems that I’ve dumped a bit more weight in my face this week, as I am looking more and more like that bright-eyed, ‘watch-me-conquer-the-world’ girl in my senior pictures. Sure, my face is a bit more timeworn now, definitely more hard, but it’s more than a little disturbing how much my hair looks exactly the same.

Sorry for the big ole absence here last week. It was what we would laughingly call a “rough” one. Auggie decided that he wasn’t going to sleep a couple of nights (Tuesday and Thursday, actually), so we were the walking undead most of the week.

We were so tired, in fact, that on Friday night, we joined hands and prayed that he would sleep through the night. I almost wept.

I was so tired that I was nauseous. Now, I can remember some fairly serious bouts of sleep deprivation in college, which more often than not resulted in the dreaded “finals flu” some time afterwards. But I cannot remember ever feeling nauseous as a direct result of exhaustion.

It was not fun.

Something that is fun, though, is that I’ve started running (again). I can’t believe I just wrote that running is fun. What is going on with me? Must still be a little delirious from lack of sleep…

Anyway, I’ve hit a plateau in my weight loss here lately, despite my continued (albeit somewhat relaxed) adherence to the lifestyle program and kicking-butt-ness with my aerobics workouts. But the workouts, even though they are each over an hour in duration, are getting easier. With a couple, I barely break a sweat anymore.

So I need to “take it to the next level” and so forth. ‘Dung Xiao Ping died?!’

I’ve gone out running a couple of times now, and I must admit, it is a lot easier without the extra 30+ pounds I was sporting. The last time I ran seriously was back in 1999, when Tim and I ran a 10K in the spring. After a few weeks of training, I had shin splints, Achilles heel trouble and this weird numbness in my feet. Much of this, I’m sure, can be attributed to the running shoes I was wearing at the time (Reebok DMXs, which are very bad for someone who needs tons of motion control like me).

But they looked so cool.

Anyway, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I guess now you can expect a lot more blather about my running-related aches and pains, along with my knitting blather and my son-is-so-unbelievably-cute/evil blather.

Super!

I have “cuts” on my arms, friends. For those of you that aren’t of the body-building persuasion, this means that I am sporting some muscle definition. Specifically, my triceps are kicking some serious arm butt.

Wait, that didn’t come out right.

I’ve taken the past couple of days off from the ole workout regime, since I tweaked my back during a 90-minute Firm workout orgy of pain on Saturday (sweet Jesus, I can only imagine the referrals from that turn of phrase). I’m not going to enter any contests or anything, but my little old workout tapes are finally paying off…

Also, who came here looking for naked Kentucky Derby pictures? Dude, I know those horses are built, but c’mon! Actually, I hope you read the Hunter essay that was the #3 referral for that phrase. It’s pretty great.

I promise that I’m working on getting all of our pictures up, it’s just that since Tim redesigned the site, he has had all kinds of problems with the nifty little program he designed to upload the jpgs. So, the short story is that I’ve got nearly 200 photos waiting around for your viewing pleasure. Occasionally, I’ll make some small progress, so make sure you check the pictures page often to see if there’s some new ones.

It’s great to have all of these digital pictures of Auggie, but I must admit that it makes me a little nervous that the only “real” photos we have of him are the ones taken by other people. I mean, our regular camera still has the same roll of film in it that has been there since Auggie was born. (Note to self: Finish the damn roll!)

I badger Tim fortnightly about backing up our files, so that Auggie’s babyhood won’t be lost in one well-placed lightning flash. I guess I’m still a little hurt that all of the

pictures of me as a wee lass are purported to be “on slides,” although I’ve yet to see any of them. Ah, the secret pain of the second child…

Anyway, another weekend, another four inches of snow. This is starting to feel like a pattern. Auggie and I walked around outside this evening just as it began to snow, and he pointed to the sky and said, ”Know!’ Aren’t kids who don’t make “s” sounds at the beginning of words just the best?

A surprising number of people want the Internet to tell them how to make swords. On an average day, we here at “Bookerdogs Make Perfect Swords” get about three or four referrals from search engines where people are looking for sword-making information.

Just for the record, the bizarre title came about from my pregnancy-addled mind after listening to the Built to Spill Live record and then deciding to start a blog.

So, in conclusion, forget Saddam, we need to be on the lookout for these homemade-sword-weilding types with an

Internet connection. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (in case you’re a homemade-sword-weilding type with a tendency towards grudges).

Oh, the shame! Mimi Smartypants has linked to us after my last post! And I sound like such a dork! I kinda feel like that time when this cute honors classics professor back in college asked the class, ‘What’s epistemology?’ and I said, ‘Writing that uses a letter as its narrative device,’ or something snotty like that, and the entire class snickered.

It was late, I swear!

Normally, I’m much more clever and, ah, who am I kidding? I’m a dork.

It was so funny though, because I knew that something was up instantly when I was going through my nightly routine of checking our daily hits on Site Meter, then coming to the site to check our referral logs (can’t spoil the hit count by going there first, of course).

I couldn’t get on the site. The error message said that there were too many people on the site.

Needless to say, that has never happened before.

So, anyway, let’s just move on with our lives, shall we? And hello to all of you people visiting us for the first time!

Just to give you a little primer on what bookerdog.com is all about: I’m Beth. Tim is my husband, August is our year-and-a-half-old son and we have 4 dogs (don’t ask), one of which is Booker. If you’re a late-twenties, early-thirties type who is feeling increasingly out of touch with pop culture and more interested in really comfortable mattresses and rereading all your old Douglas Coupland books, we’re probably a lot like you.

We also go to the Kentucky Derby every year.

I think that’s about it.