Flexible Scheduling

I'm in Philadelphia right now.

Actually, I'm not. I'm sitting in my palacial Ohio City apartment, waiting for a pizza to be delivered. But I'm supposed to be in Philadelphia. According to my calender, I am. According to my students and my boss, I am.

But I am not. For various reasons, the most important of which being the infected cyst Smelly Ellie developed over the last 48 hours or so. I didn't really notice it till the day before yesterday, then by yesterday it was obvious it needed to be treated. So I blew off my travel arrangements and took Ellie in to the vet.

I had been leaning toward not going for various reasons anyway, and had already told the people I was supposed to meet up with that I wouldn't be going, but was still not fully certain. Ellie's "condition" made it pretty easy to decide.

So after cancelling her boarding reservation and my own lodging reservation, I headed to Cleveland Heights to see a couple comedians perform at the Grog Shop. The comedians were Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, two of the funniest members of my second favorite comedy troupe (The State) when I was in high school and ranked such things. (FYI - Kids in the Hall was my favorite.) The show itself was ok, Black was funnier than Showalter (as I somewhat expected), though both were pretty lethargic and lazily riffed on various things for about half of their respective performances before getting into the material they were touring specifically. Showalter did this pretty funny thing where he played songs from his laptop, and then pretended the songs were background music in movies where he was playing the protaganists. Black brought a heckler on stage and interviewed her. This chick ended up being so freaking weird. Let's put it this way: she takes karate lessons and carries a photo of the lead singer of A-ha in her wallet and is not trying to be funny or ironic. He also did some funny bits about his kids recent halloween costume, like when he told his 6-year-old son, who wanted to be a pirate, that he might as well dress as a fucking jerk-off because that's what his dad thought of him now.

The whole thing only lasted about 1.5 hours, which - at $17 - was a bit of a rip off, but I was glad to be heading home early. I was a little guilty about leaving Ellie and was pretty wiped from my 1 day work week anyway. (Is it weird that easy weeks make me more exhausted than full weeks?)

Today I woke up and took Smelly to Gateway Animal Clinic around 1030. The infection turned out to be worse than I thought and her exam ended up being pretty painful. She was a trooper, though. And the ladies at the Animal Clinic, from the awesome Dr. Abby to the vet assistants to the secretarial staff, were all extraordinarily compassionate and kind. An overwhelming number of them also had really sexy haircuts. (Is it weird that I was thinking about sexy haircuts while my beloved dogder is having her worst hour in many months?)

After it was over and I paid for her new drugs -- baby gets to be on muscle relaxers for a week! lucky -- we emerged into the freezing rain. That ended up killing my budding plan to drive down to Pittsburgh to see the Polyphonic Spree. The Spree's current tour is awesome, but I've already seen it twice. Besides, my knees can only handle about 1 night a month of the spasmodic calisthenics I call dancing and an Electric 6 show is coming up (also at the Grog Shop) at the end of this month.

I brought Ellie home, played with her a bit, gave her the first dose of the meds and waited for her to pass out. She did relatively quickly, and I headed out on the town. I bullshitted with a friend for a bit, caught a quick buzz, then went to the cinema at Tower City to view 30 Days of Night before it left town. It was a just-ok vampire film, though it had a pretty clever concept (vampires invade the northern-most city in Alaska during the dead of winter, where there is no sunlight for an entire month, as much blood-sucking and vampire destroying ensues). Afterwards, I headed back, stopped for a bloody mary at the Old Angle, then came home to rescue Ellie from her loneliness and pharmaceutical haze. She ate, shat, took some more pills and is now passed out again on my bed. She makes the cutest little cocoon thing with my blanket when she does that...

I am, as I mentioned earlier, waiting for a pizza. How about you?