a light aslant

powells x 2
harvard book store x 3
borders
porter square books x 2 (sparkly red bookmarks!)
ripped harvard coop bookmark
2 TWA tickets (one to hartford in september for school; one home at thanksgiving to see jennie back from australia and dump perry)

culled from books en route to powell's. three big grocery sacks worth.

plus not pictured:
- 6 post-its (my preferred bookmark)
- 1 post-it that read "talking on the phone w/ mom about camp -- enlightenment vs. the dark ages" (i still remember this conversation vividly)
- printout of my senior year spring registration, including crossed-out computer science that was replaced with the poetry seminar with eleanor wilner.
- half a new yorker cartoon "if anyone"
- tiny drawing jennie made
- postcard from soul coughing's el oso album
- powell's receipt from 2012
- poem from my sister about birth
- au bon pain receipt from 2003 (kendall square)
- copy of penny's birth announcement
- ups delivery notice from september 2005
- description of floor exercises and machine circuit with a wardrobe inventory on the back ("avoid: linen")
- a photo from my grandparents remarriage in the early 80s, my (dead) great aunt in the foreground, me or possibly my sister in the background, wide-eyed, in a white dress with a red sash

6. Mothers and Others, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

This is the book that resident human observer mordicai has been recommending to me forever and I am so glad to have finally read it. Anyone with a passing interest in Attachment Parenting culture (positive or negative) might be fascinated, as I was, to learn more about the evolutionary psychology underpinnings of AP'ing, which are built on a chimpanzee-mother model, which is actually not relevant for humans, who, as Hrdy so brilliantly writes, are first and foremost cooperative breeders. The evidence for this is multifold and fascinating, I loved reading about hunter-gatherer lifeways and about the many things we can learn about how and why cooperative breeding works in many species. Or about grandmothers! About the benefits for women of living near their mothers! About how siblings practice mothering skills and it's beneficial to have separation between kids, maybe!

I wish I'd read this before having a baby, because it would have made me understand certain things so much better, like passing a baby around, which often made me feel guilty because wasn't I supposed to be doing kangaroo care constantly? In fact, while reading this book I had to frequently stop and process a lot of related hurt and painful memories and reflections; reading about the bonding of breast-feeding and about attachment disorganization disorder were especially big triggers. I came away understanding modern US parenting norms (particularly within AP) as, in some ways, a reactionary movement against to the previous era of destructive, attachment-denying industrial childrearing; but also that some of that reactionary spirit is important because we modern AP-positive parents are maintaining a kind of rift between ourselves and our parents, often. Whereas in some cultures, current and past, a mother could always implicitly trust her own mother (or other mothers) to help rear her child the "right" way, today as parents we often don't have that security. How horrible is it that we have to defend newborn infants from stuff like formula feeding in hospitals, or routine circumcision, or exclusive crib use, or any other thing that we don't like? Or how about my own mother, who breastfed me against her own mother's suspicious advice that I would grow up spoiled (!) and that it wasn't as nutritious as formula(!!). Parenting today is a more isolated act because postindustrial culture and the nuclear family cultivate profound isolation, in comparison to our species' roots, but we also have to cultivate further isolation from people in our "tribes" because they want to do shit to our children we don't like! How fucked up is that?

Hrdy's final hypothesis is that cooperative breeding, which creates a strong evolutionary pressure in the direction of empathetic, cooperative human beings, may be a phase that is now passing; as a species we have capacity for empathy, but it's only expressed under certain circumstances. Not in the sense of only feeling empathy when you trust others, or whatever, but in the sense of being emotionally capable of feeling empathy at all, and using it daily in order to make sense of others actions and produce greater group survival. That is a profoundly sad conclusion, to me, and a frightening one. I put the book down when I was done and felt despair for the direction of our species' evolution, and despair at what harm postindustrial life and the war of scarce resources has done to our nature. But it also gave me tremendous hope that the kinds of cooperative hyper-local cultures that are springing up in urban places and elsewhere are not just trendy, but a genuinely critical species-wide phase of learning and reconnecting that is essential if we are to survive, and if we are to keep from burning up the planet. We can't put industry back in the box, of course, but we can build structures that support little tribes, and I like that. (But you already knew I'm a big hippie! No surprise there.)


7. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, by Suzette Haden Elgin.

This is the book I was supposed to read (as opposed to the one from last time that was the wrong book) and although it wasn't as scattered and poorly organized, it was still pretty awful. Elgin, writing from a very sexist and racist and combative 1979 culture, wants to tell you all about how to use "gentle" verbal self-defense, but ended up giving you a vision of a ridiculously snobbish and combative culture, and I had a hard time seeing how it would be useful. Her advice boils down to "don't rise to insults" and also, learn to recognize hidden insults. A sample "hidden" insult: "Even someone like you should be able to put some effort into it." See? Is that hidden at all? Do people actually talk like this? In her book, 1979 looks like a place where people are just constantly dripping with sarcasm and poorly disguised put-downs. And despite her allegedly gentle technique she's essentially concerned with winning, and with knowing a pretty cutting insult, even if you don't say it out loud. The early chapters go around her Verbal Violence Octagon, which looked (appropriately) kind of like the Dharma Initiative to me:



And the later chapters contain some rather crappy advice about learning to have a "nice" speaking voice and charisma (with the underlying assumption that somehow you'll know when you listen to recordings of yourself, if you sound awful, and you probably do, you terrible nasal-voiced lunatic you) and then the SUPER DEPRESSING FINALE of special advice for college students (you are stupid and lazy), men (you're an abusive asshole), and women (stop being so godamned sensitive all the time). Woooooww I mean I could barely read these chapters they were so dripping with anger and horrible 1970s "That's just the way things are so suck it up" advice that made me wonder, jeez lady, I'd love to send you to a good NVC workshop and also I hope your life got better later, because you sound so very sad and angry about the state of the world. And not because you're a lady! No! Just because from where I stand, in 2012, it is actually considered okay and even encouraged to make empathetic connections with fellow humans and believe that you don't have to verbally win against everyone just to live your life without being a doormat. (Are you a doormat? Elgin believes you get what you deserve and should never complain; it's your fault for being a doormat. Possibly useful advice, but horribly presented.)

Havi asked everyone in this yearlong study program to read this book, so I finished it out of respect for her request, and out of curiosity. Does this stuff really inform Havi's work? I'm not sure. The horrible verbal arguments Elgin plays out sometimes sound like how "monsters" talk (Havi-ism for internal voices of criticism) but every single conversation I read in it made me think, a really good NVC negotiator would be a really good idea right now. And I also felt very grateful that no one in my life (that I can think of) speaks to me with such awful condescension and outright manipulation. Yikes. Very intrigued to pick Havi's brain about this one, someday. I'm still only half convinced I read the right one, because Elgin wrote so many follow-ups and multi-book sequels and special topic versions of this material and it's so outdated now that I had to get it via ILL because the college library didn't have it within the 30-institution Summit collection! Yes. Anyway. Don't read this. Just agree with me that the late 1970s were a pretty sad time for a lot of people, and we're all very lucky that society today has at least a passing acquaintance with the ideas of equality and civility.

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Next up! Having read Mothers and Others, it would be interesting to compare it to handstil's recommendation, Nutureshock. Also ordering from the library Mating in Captivity: reconciling the erotic + the domestic, new recommendation from our new and frighteningly canny therapist. I don't know, I have so many books in the queue, I'm sure I'll think of something.

maybe this is silly but i am going to try to number these all sequentially -- see my first review batch here. apologies in advance, this batch contains one book i abandoned, one book i hated and was not even the book i was supposed to read, and one book that is a qualified recommendation (better ideas than writing?). but hey -- books! reading and reviewing! not so much the pretending-they-are-all-awesome, right?

here we go!

3. The Valleys of the Assassins: and other Persian Travels, by Freya Stark.

I'm not happy that my third book of the year is Status: Abandoned but I'd rather record it and move on than mope around and pretend I'll finish it later. Because even getting two-thirds through was a hard slog, sadly. I was excited about 1930s travel in Persia/Iran with Freya Stark (whose name I kept thinking I had cribbed from Game of Thrones), bona fide fascinating gal, but instead it was dry and awful. This was not in the camp of bohemian adventure, or even colonialist misadventures, it was just straight-up uninteresting writing with the culture-clash anecdotes sprinkled too thinly to keep me interested, even in the titular Valley of the Assassins part. Even once I started skimming the interminable descriptions (she was often map-making for the RGS) it was boring, sadly, so I just stopped. The most interesting part, if you can call it that, was how it made me think about the relative value of culture. Who has a right to sell out a previous culture? In the book the locals are constantly helping her rob graves, which they are okay with because the previous cultures were not Muslim and therefore not worthy of respect, even though there was some genetic links between the older culture and the current (semi-nomadic) one. But even though she was allegedly in an untravelled (by white people) area of the Persian mountains and highlands, almost all the "interesting" graves had already been looted. So I don't recommend this book at all, really. I wanted to add this to my bookshelf of British interesting women's bios and writings but it doesn't quite fit. Maybe what I need is a book about Freya Stark. Ah well.

4. The Last Word on The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, by Suzette Haden Elgin.
It's always a bad sign when you can't even find an image of the cover of the book you've read, but oh well, I'm not recommending this one, either. This was a book recommended by Havi for those of us entering a year-long program she's running. In theory, I love the idea of gentle verbal self-defense, but this book was awful awful awful and I need to process how awful it was. First: reading dialog and descriptions of verbal abuse was very uncomfortable (hi, mom!). On the one hand I had trouble thinking about where the heck this would apply in my life, but then on the other hand I kept thinking, ugh, this is exactly what my mom sounds like. Second: it is super outdated, written in 1987 and I had a hard time translating some of its 80s-ness into modernspeak. Third: I often disagreed with the author. In the sense that I felt her points were sometimes poorly made, but also that there was invisible culture I couldn't interpret, like the Josephine Ferrero anecdote that just made no sense to me. Fourth: Very disorganized. Who is the audience for this book?
Drat and blast and fuck. In the process of writing this and looking up the book I've now discovered that I read the wrong one. Havi's picture is of one book, but her link goes to the wrong title because Elgin wrote a half-dozen different sequels and follow-ups to her original book. Okay. Listen up, imaginary personified feminist American science fiction and also nonfiction author Suzette Haden Elgin, I'm giving you one more chance to not suck. I recognize that this is pretty violent verbal language but hey. I'm trying to be okay with the fact that I wasted time reading this (and disliking it) because of someone else's mistake.

5. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, by Marshall Rosenberg.

This is another book recommended before starting Havi's program (see #4 above) and I went into it with Havi's constant reminder: don't forget to skip the problematic poetry in this book, which truly does suck. It's true. Marshall Rosenberg is a wonderful empathetic listener and a tolerable writer, but his poetry just doesn't do it for me.
Poetry aside, this book is a great, easily digested intro to the concepts and practice of NVC. If you've never run across it before, the basic idea is to listen for observations, feelings, needs, and requests, and reflect those back to the other person. I love this idea, and Rosenberg does a good job of telling lots of stories in which it is useful outside of the academic/therapy context -- such as between street gangs, within hostile work environments, or during boring meetings, or between cantankerous family members. In my own life, I feel like I haven't quite gotten the trick of applying this yet. Perhaps the most mind-blowing idea is listening to the implied-fact statements people make and then respond with language that helps the person unpack that feeling and get down to what they really want. But not in a robotic therapist way -- in a way that demonstrates compassion for what they're really saying or trying to say. This concept is deeply connected to ideas of self-compassion that I believe in -- the idea of not being able to express empathy for others until you can be compassionate towards yourself. We all have trouble being aware of our own needs, and expressing them, and this is a pretty cool system for trying to get closer to that practice.
One of the most powerful parts for me was when he describes choice/value statements. Instead of saying "I hate my job" you make a statement like "Even though I dislike my job, I choose to go because I value financial stability" or something similar. This is a pretty powerful tool for me because it asks me to identify with choices and values rather than ascribing my pain to an arbitrary awful reality, like a job I hate or a house I regret buying or whatever. His techniques also apply to full expression of our emotions, awareness of our motivations, and other related issues behind empathy and NVC communication in general. I think of this stuff as Advanced Practice -- awesome to know, hard to put into work all the time. But when I take the time to be more aware in this way, I can sense that my communication becomes gentler in general, always a good thing. A good example is how the author models the little quizzes at the end of the chapters. No answer is wrong: he says "we are not in agreement" and explains his reasoning. Oh if only every so-called expert was more aware of their language in this regard!
My end judgment: if you're at all interested in this stuff, read it. The writing is not stellar but it's serviceable. Kind of like a pop textbook, if that makes sense. Skip the poetry or send little healing thoughts to the part of you that cringes in embarrassment when you read it, and recognize that this is part of it: recognizing when it's difficult to witness others being vulnerable. And then read the actual book, and maybe you'll love it. Or at least its ideas. But if just reading this review has made you puke a little bit, move along, no harm done.

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onward! i just received hrdy's mothers and others in the mail yesterday, a book has been recommending for oh about five years now. looking forward to reading that. and to using my library privileges at work, too. so many books, so few dollars. yes.

fixed

gas fireplace (diagnosis: SPIDERS BLOCKING THE GAS LINES OH GOD DO ME A FAVOR AND PLEASE CLEAN YOUR GAS FIREPLACE TODAY)


to be fixed soon

dishwasher -- broken since...april? march?

sliding glass door to be reglazed

leak in the toilet upstairs


the someday/whenever list

curtains for the sliding glass door, curtains for p's room

zoned heating for all three floors

fireplace: install fan, insulate walls, fix ugly tiles, install a real mantle

replace hideous tiled kitchen counters

fan/lighting fixture for living room

install dimmer on the dining space light fixture

install peep hole in the front door

interior closet lights downstairs

install pull-out drawers in cupboards for better access


dream list

central air conditioning

rip out carpet, install wood floors in living room to match kitchen

re-do all kitchen cabinets to fix height & increase storage




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what's on your list? i am a little exhausted just writing this all out. as is my savings account. though it's an improvement from earlier this year, when all i could think was "yuck" and "get me out" in relation to our condo.

i'm also exhausted thinking about these repairs...getting our homeowners' insurance to cover our sliding glass door took about two dozen phone calls (with me being *very* insistent) to move forward over a month's time, and meanwhile the dishwasher guy and the glass repair people NEVER call us back. is it because it's december? or because everyone is going out of business? ridiculous.

last night jennie and i went to see martha macy may marlene because the creeptastic previews intrigued me last year ((i don't recommend watching that nyt 'anatomy of a scene' feature if you're planning to watch the movie). trailer:



there was a lot the movie doesn't do perfectly (explain to me why the group is so intellectually uncurious, are they really that young and uneducated?), but what it does do is give you a tight, tense jewelbox of images, relationships, moments. elizabeth olsen (younger sibling to the olsen twins of course) is absolutely amazing in it, her face was by turns opaque and translucent, emotionally. (she reminded me, in character and in face, of the girl lead from rain.)

the movie was gripping and awful to watch at some points, awful in the sense of oh-god-can't-look-away. jennie turned to me at one point and was like, are you okay? i had my hands over my mouth in horror/fear/fascination/etc. sometimes it is perfectly normal and nearly relaxed, other times there is just so much weirdness and tension and unexplained things. the audience did a collective groan when the credits rolled -- one of those.

i couldn't figure out why the male lead was so fucking creepy until i googled him this morning -- john hawkes a.k.a. sol star from deadwood! the nicest guy ever! being a totally controlling creepster! ugh.

but it was a fun kind of terror to fall into. until i got home, of course, and had trouble sleeping. i made kirk promise me he wasn't secretly a cult leader or going to drug me. ugh. jennie had nightmares about it, too.

I've been on a ballet documentaries kick, thank you Netflix instant and YouTube! Watched Les enfants de la danse, untranslated from the French but I followed along okay...it was mainly a general review of the Ecole de Danse of the Paris Opera ballet. Notable for this clip (the dance in the first 30 seconds) which I love for its playfulness. It seems so infrequent that ballet movements evoke the tone of the music, which is baffling to me. If the strings are spinning around, shouldn't the dancer spin? Little short notes = hopping and such? I don't know why all dance isn't like this, but this clip is pretty fun. Anyway, little French bebes dancing and looking amazing, but not much life detail, you know?

Also watched: Only When I Dance about two ballet dancers from the Rio favelas; "Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera ballet" (Netflix instant, not terribly good); "The Dancer," a fun and occasionally weird documentary about a dancer of the Royal Swedish ballet that includes funhouse juxtapositions between dance sequences and dudes making ballet shoes. The Dancer is also on Netflix Instant, I recommend it.

And then, and then! I found the documentary I didn't know I was looking for: Ballerina, which follows several dancers at the Kirov, Russia's premier ballet academy and theatre in St Petersburg. (Netflix Instant! Check it out!)

This movie answered the question, how is it Russian dancers are so crazy good? Oh right, it's because they isolate them starting at age 10 and they basically train night and day for a decade. Footage from the entrance exams to the Vaganova Academy were frighteningly soviet:




This guy would manipulate their limbs all around so the judging committee can score each candidate on flexibility, body shape, etc. Just like in your nightmares!

I mean yes, it is weird and kind of freaky, and some of the other untranslated clips I saw online from the Perm ballet school include teachers yelling at the students etc...I mean this is how Russia does it. They do not coddle. This is the same model and method they use to train most sports, the model they exported to China, too. And yet this is how they produce the most amazing dancers. They say you can tell Kirov dancers and Russian dancers in general, because their arms and torso are more vibrant, alive.

Some gorgeous shots of Evgenia Obraztsova:







Also her outfit here is so lovely. Oxford shirt, sweater, black and white skirt with black bow. She came out to meet her fans. I loved that one old lady brought her this kind of juice box thing, and she opened it and drank it down within seconds while they were praising her performance (this was after her first solo performance, I think?) and asking for autographs. Made me wonder what the heck that drink was.

Another favorite dancer: Diana Vishneva, who had the best craziest workout gear:



Leopard print! Yellow pink and olive falling-down handknits! Later when she danced she would make a joke of kicking off her legwarmer (link). She was described as "nontraditional" which meant...I'm not sure. Somehow her lines weren't as good but she was more expressive? She had the highest scores as a Vaganova student and made Prima Ballerina very young. She was the most fun to watch.

Ulyana Lopatkina was profiled during her return after a two year absence following an injury, during which she also had a child, which was portrayed (by her in interviews) as a pretty radical decision. And they discussed how she'd have to work hard to get back "to her level." The schedule they follow is pretty crazy -- rehearsals during the day and then performances almost every single night. They interviewed a French ballet director at one point who said the Russian dancers mature very young because they are pushed to perform so much earlier -- if you have to learn Swan Lake in a week, then you do it, no questions. And then again the next night. Or onto a different ballet, over and over each night.

Ulyana Lopatkina:



She also has the best swan arms ever, it just looks unreal, like disembodied creatures barely connected to her body.








So that was fun. I really want to see something that follows dancers who dropped out, who didn't make it. Or the ones who've been in the corps de ballet or coryphee status for years and never advance and then in come these amazing young dancers who are made soloists and then prima ballerina within a couple years? What is that like to watch from the sidelines? Are bribes involved? Pretty much everything I've found follows the stars or the aspiring stars. One of the Paris Opera teachers spoke of how when she retired she didn't dance or move for a month straight, and lost two cm in height because her muscles tightened up or something. That was interesting, I wish there was more info like that.

[n.b. spoilers in the links and in my entry, if that's not obvious!]

TL;DR: Rosenberg makes some good points, but ultimately I think her viewpoint boils down to Doyle is wrong because Martin was just writing nuance and reality which is problematic because it reinforces the sexism and racism embedded in Martin's work. Interrogate Your Privilege, yo. I need that on a shirt. IYP.


I've had this bubbling around internally for a while now -- last week I finished the fifth and recent book, A Dance With Dragons -- but more generally I've had the whole Feminism and Misogyny in Fantasy topic on my mind ever since having this conversation with mordicai about Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, and getting into the HBO series and subsequently reading through the books.( Read more... )

another friday, another ill-advised hour wasted on zillow, creeping on houses i'm not buying, just dreaming about.

dear universe, i really like this one:

$200,000 in the southeast 50s.
2 bedrooms. a tiny 636 square feet.

but look, look:



tiny but well-ordered, open kitchen (exactly! yes! this!) and and and!!!



just look at that massive corner lot. all that space for street-adjacent plantings, never mind the yard itself for plantings, playing, etc.




i have to remind myself that it's not pointless to look at stuff-i-can't-have-right-now because it helps me figure out exactly what i do want, when the time comes.

*spoilers ahead*

I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones last night, which was interesting after this lengthy discussion with mordicai last week about rape and misogyny as a convention of the fantasy genre. Mind you, I haven't read the books, which I really feel I should do in order to fully understand it, but it also means I can view the tv series without thinking about what has been altered or left out.

Awesome stuff: Peter Dinklage! Not his best but still pretty awesome. The amazing clockwork cities credits sequence. Beautiful rich sets and real investment in costumes and sets in general -- they are not messing around. Definitely introduced enough characters and plots (and hello, obvious cliffhanger) to keep me intrigued and watching for a long time to come.

Stuff that made me cringe (please note I am too lazy to look up names/care):

1. The queen and her brother having sex
2. The semi-naked weird dance/rape battle scene at the wedding? what?
3. The freaky brother touching his sister who he's groomed to marry the "savage"-coded warrior dude, that whole "I would let 40 men and their horses fuck you if it would get my kingdom back" line (to paraphrase loosely)
4. The "tribe of savages!" coding going on throughout, not as bad as it could have been but still, geez.
5. The whole trembling-girl and savage-coded-warrior scene on the wedding night. Please give this girl some goddamn agency, writers. Has she really been groomed to marry this guy and be some kind of sex goddess? Can we see her be awesome instead of trembly/regretful/freaked out or whatever? Really took this out of believability and went straight into "stock shots of trembling virgin" cliche territory. Lame.
6. The scenes in the whorehouse -- mainly because it made me remember the Rome series and how their whorehouse scenes seemed more realistic (i.e. women who are not giggling caricatures who look like they could be Neutrogena models...this was an uncommonly clean whorehouse and the giggle soundtrack made me think, are we eleven years old, giggling constantly? Wtf, maybe sloppy sound editing but still.)
7. The lusty beer wenches scenes at the feast in general, ugh. Someone needs to make a compilation of clips of these scenes. I have seen ten million of them. They are all the same. There is always some dude grasping the buttocks of the lusty beer wench character.
8. Entrails and beheadings!

Maybe this stuff made me cringe because it was unsubtle; and not as a narrative choice but in the sense of cringing for the filmmaker. Maybe it's just bad storytelling, on the part of HBO writers adapting Martin's work. Maybe the actual effect of some of the scenes was palpably shocking, but there was a pretty obvious male-gaze bias to how they were shot. Sometimes it seemed like I was being shocked/dismayed even though the aim was more about titillation.

I've been thinking about Rome a lot, actually, because I feel that series did so many things right in terms of making an urban place gritty and real when showing the lower class scenes, and showing off the bizarre ethereal realm of the royal class, even when they were also engaging in weird sex or incest or committing rape. It wasn't a perfect series, but I didn't feel like I had to consciously re-orient my mind to remember "these are the conventions of their world" the way I did when I watched Game of Thrones last night. And it's not just because Game of Thrones has its own conventions and is a world foreign from our own, ostensibly: I think sloppy writing and the director's choices can either make you slide easily into an unfamiliar place, or it can make it tricky, and i don't think it was a conscious choice in this case.

And there were other jarring moments. The north warden dude and his wife had a startlingly modern-seeming marriage, warm and talkative and intimate in a way that seemed a bit of an anachronism to me, or out of keeping with the general swords-and-wenching atmosphere; and then she kind of became an exposition puppet in order to ask why he had to do a certain thing or obey the king or whatever -- that was just sloppy writing (and, as I see from Mordicai's review, is definitely handled better in the book; it's a complete mystery why the tv writers made this choice, bad form all around). And how about the freaky blond brother character scheming to get the throne -- has there ever been a more "this guy will lose because he is desperate and stupid" character? I'm desperate for a little complexity and realness. Maybe that character gets better; I certainly hope the writing and acting does. He had zero dimensions last night: cruel stupid villain.


This is not a developed critique and position on the series, which I would like to develop as I watch more of it. But I did want to note down my impressions -- I'm curious to hear what others think!

ETA: My super-secret piratey place to watch GoT is here: http ://whoe2010.blogspot.com/search/label/Game%20of%20Thrones and the password for the protected episodes is waddyh. For MegaVideo n00bs: click on the red arrow, then close the pop-up window/tab that appears, then click the green arrow and it will play. Enjoy!

so, we adopted a dog today from the oregon humane society.



meet levi! (short for Leviticus, obviously)

he is about 1 or 2 years old. a stray from a shelter in california who's been in oregon just a couple of weeks. he has a sweet, relatively quiet demeanor and he is a sweetieface, really. he's some sort of mix of chihuahua and mini pinscher and other stuff, only 11 pounds but the perfect size for us.

and like they say, you can't argue with love :)

i am kind of in shock. when we'd made the decision (we spent about three and a half hours at OHS meeting dogs and deliberating and dealing with paperwork etc) i almost started crying. strangers would say, oh are you adopting a dog? and when i'd say yes i would have an enormous lump in my throat, barely able to squeak it out.

anyway. sweet things and a sweet face and a sweet little guy to join our family.