Death to Nerds

Not the human kind of Nerds... just the kind in my blog that certain people have been whining to me about for months. You know who you are. Or rather, you know who you are if you've had the patience to keep stopping by my blog in the past 10 months in hope that I've actually posted here. I was thinking today that I should just remove the blog link from my website, but since that was effort, I thought: what the heck, maybe I should just do a quick post instead.

So Cindi, Dad, Jenni, James and others... this post is for you.

I'm still actually online quite a bit these days, but my relationship with my computer is a lot healthier than it used to be. That doesn't mean I'm not sometimes still sucked into staying up until 3:00 AM doing ridiculous and unproductive things (though clearly none of those things have been included updating my blog!), but at least Bessie and I are not attached at the hip anymore. Days do in fact go by without powering her up. It's a good feeling.

Here's an amusing story I was going to share back around May but never got around to posting, however it continues to be just as entertaining to me now as it did then.

Back when I worked at AOL, I always had people assume I was vegetarian. After this happened many times with close co-workers and a boss, I finally assumed that it was because I always had "health food" out on my desk: fresh fruit, granola, peanut butter, 64 oz bottle of water, etc. Then sometime around April, I was finishing my second sessions with a dog training client and I told her how a fellow trainer had been feeding chips and cookies to Ebony as treats and how it would never occur to me to feed those kind of things to my dog, but then, I didn't really eat chips and cookies much myself. My client said "Yes, but you always eat so healthy". After I drove away, it dawned on me that it was a weird thing for her to say. How the heck would she know what I eat?

Two days later, I was planning to share the story at a sort of "happy hour" with some of our WOOFS! trainers. We were eating pizza, and as mine was handed to me, our owner (my boss) turned to me, physically took my pizza off my plate, and said "No. You can't have that." I just stared at her until she explained "It has meat." I could only laugh as I said "I'm NOT a vegetarian!"

Since then another co-worker also assumed I was a vegetarian, but he's since learned his lesson. A few weeks ago he had trouble believing me that I was eating a duck sandwich, and didn't believe you could just buy duck at the grocery store. I'm also pretty sure he didn't believe me last week when I brought in bear for lunch. It was just ground bear meat that I used to make a meat sauce for pasta, so it didn't look much different from ground beef. Bear is pretty gamey so I used an olive-heavy spaghetti sauce so that the strong flavor of the sauce would balance the strong flavor of the meat. Honestly, the best part of eating bear is getting to tell people you're eating bear.

I guess I'll always have that "vegetarian vibe", but I think, at least, that my boss and current set of co-workers have pretty well figured out that I'm not vegetarian.