Breaking Bad

One day out of the blue we started receiving copies of Rolling Stone in the mail. Not just one, but several, every week...never mind that we didn't subscribe or could care less what song Taylor Swift sang the CMA Awards. Instead of throwing it away, the magazine has become free bathroom reading material, along with ZOONOOZ and Gene's homebrewing catalogs.

Despite our general lack of interest in mainstream American entertainment, the rag does feature some good things. Example: Walter White of Breaking Bad, a show on AMC, was mentioned in a list of interesting TV characters. An underachieving high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has terminal lung cancer, "Mr. White" teams up with a delinquent ex-student to cook methamphetamine for profit.

Intrigued, I started researching the show. Called ""the best show on TV" and the recipient of numerous awards, I had a feeling it might be worth watching. When I discovered Bob Odenkirk (co-creator of the quirky, amazingly funny '90s sketch comedy show Mr. Show) plays a corrupt lawyer in seasons 2 and 3, I knew we had to watch.

More than just a show about drugs, Breaking Bad is about a family stretched to the brink emotionally and financially, the absurdity of the drug war and what a man can bring himself do when he has nothing to lose. Brilliantly written and shot, Breaking Bad uses juxtaposition to compare the two worlds in which Walter White simultaneously resides. Case in point: in one episode Walter is at home with his family in his clean, middle-class Albuquerque home while his partner Jessie lies in wait at the squalid home of two dirty, toothless meth addicts who robbed one of his dealers. At home, Walter's wife is expecting a baby girl and the family has lovingly painted and decorated the back room in preparation for her arrival. At the meth den, Jessie passes the time waiting for meth addicts by playing peek-a-boo with a dirty, mostly-silent young boy left to fend for himself in the filth.

Another episode finds Badger, a member of Walter and Jessie's crew, arrested for "slinging" meth to an undercover cop (played by DJ Qualls of Road Trip fame). Unfortunately for them, their compatriot will be forced to give them up, or else spend years in prison. When it seems the only alternative is to kill Badger, or go to jail themselves, White and Jessie look to crooked lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) for an alternative. In the end, the pair shells out 80 grand (a large portion of their earnings) and a pound of meth for a plan that will get Badger out of jail and send a patsy to prison in their stead. When Walter balks at the price, Saul quips, "Conscience gets expensive, doesn't it?"

If you like a good story with unexpected plot twists, just enough realism to make you squirm and a sprinkle of humor to balance out the violence, Breaking Bad could be your new favorite show. Seasons 1 through 3 are available on DVD, or via torrents if you so please. Season 4 starts July 2011!

Trial and Bunnis

Perhaps we're a little crazy, or possibly we just love animals just a little too much. So, despite our better judgment, we added another animal member to our home this September (we also have four cats and a 14-year-old dog). His name is Reginald aka Regg or Reggie (after the Star Trek character Reginald Barclay) and he's a Dwarf mix rabbit (aka bunnis, our nickname for bunnies). We had fostered rabbits in the past, so we thought we knew what we were getting into. However, we were less-than-prepared for the chaos this four-pound cutie unleashed upon our home. 

Don't get me wrong, this adorable little lagomorph has brought immeasurable joy and pleasure to our lives, but it's taken us longer than expected to regain a semblance of normalcy. Two months later we're starting to get the hang of "life with bunny", but not without a lot of trial and error. 

If you've never had a house rabbit and fathom how a tiny bunny could change our domestic lives so much, here are some of the house rabbit basics...

Bunny-proofing:

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but our feline friends have nothing on rabbits when it comes to inquisitiveness. With the desire to leave no territory unexplored, rabbits are the mini-Magellans of the animal world. Of course, many of the places they want to explore are either dangerous or provide too much temptation to do something naughty (like burrow into the underside of the couch!), so we had to block access to such places if he was to have free or semi-free roam of the house. My boss said, "Oh so it's like having a baby?" And my answer to that question is, "Yes, but my baby has razor sharp teeth that can cut through electrical cords and can fit into a space smaller than my fist."

Diet: 

Our cats and dog eat dried kibble, so their meals are easy to prepare - just scoop and serve. Rabbits, however, cannot live on a diet of pellets alone and need twice daily doses of fresh, green veggies and unlimited amounts of timothy hay. I read somewhere that rabbits need one heaping cup of greens per pound of bunny per day, so the first few weeks we were giving him a smorgasbord of greens: kale, bok choy, romaine, collard greens, beet leaves, cilantro, parsley... You name it, if Reggie could eat it, he had some on his plate morning and night. After telling an experienced rabbit owner what I was feeding him, she said it was too much - in both quantity and variety. Now Regg gets a few leaves of romaine and several sprigs of cilantro or parsley twice per day. That cut down on the veggie cost quite a bit, but we still need to make weekly runs to the store for fresh greens.

Litterbox Training: 

Reggie came to our home at a year and a half old and partially litterbox trained. Rabbits apparently poop while they are eating hay and the standard 'best practice' for litterbox training a bunny is to put his hay where you want him to go, i.e. the litterbox. I thought this was gross though, so I tried to rig up a special shelf in his cage that could suspend the hay above the box. This just ended up getting the hay and poops everywhere. Now I've succumbed to the notion that his food and bathroom area have to be combined in one space. In actuality he is very clean and the "bathroom" and "kitchen" areas are well-defined within the box and rarely mix. The hay, and the mess that it creates, is another story altogether. 

The Couch Issue:

Reggie wasn't neutered when we adopted him and therefore has displayed some pretty undesirable behaviors, namely claiming ownership of our couch. Reggie stakes his claim by urine marking and sometimes nipping us when we're on the couch. Despite being neutered in early October, he's still exhibiting this behavior. As a result, Reggie has lost his couch privileges for the time being. However, we're hoping (fingers crossed!) that a) this will diminish over time as the testosterone leaves his system and that b) this behavior isn't already hardwired into his walnut-sized brain.

Enrichment:

Despite the his small brain size, Reggie is quite intelligent and needs enrichment (chew toys, etc.) to keep him from getting into mischief out of boredom. He has toys galore and lots of willow balls to consume, but we discovered another way to keep him occupied - a bunny "kong". Like a dog kong, Reggie's kong is stuffed with treats and he has to figure out how to get them out. For Reggie's kong we used a medicine bottle with a slit cut into the lid and a twist-tie for gripping. Check out Reggie enjoying his food-dispensing toy (ignore the exposed fan cord which I moved just after filming):

Pretty in pink

Time for a review: SoftPaws

My nine-year-old cat Elsa is a huge lovebug, but she can also be very jumpy, which makes her an adorable combination of pleasure and pain. Any strange sound can change her from a sweet, loving lap cat to a flailing, feral fear-beast. The inevitable result of going from domesticated kitty to psycho cat in the span of 1.5 seconds are painful scratches and punctures on my legs, arms, back and anywhere else this little mountain-goat can find to perch and relax. I clip her nails, but it hasn't stopped her from beating me up on at least a weekly basis.

Since I would never declaw my kitty, I recently decided to try out a product called SoftPaws. These tiny, rubber nail caps are glued to your cat's nails to stop them from scratching your furniture (or your vulnerable human flesh). Admittedly, Elsa was a bit reluctant about having tic-tac-like attachments glued onto her claws at first, but it wasn't any worse than trimming her nails.

Fast forward to two weeks later and Elsa has acclimated well to wearing her pastel pink nail caps. She removed a few caps in the first week, but they were easily replaced. The best part is I haven’t been scratched in I-don't-know-how-long and my kitty now looks like she has a manicure - a win-win for all! Oh, I almost forgot - SoftPaws also come in a variety of colors. The next time you see Elsa she just might be sporting Hot Topic, Mardi Gras or Christmas-themed nail caps (it's a girl's prerogative). But seriously, I recommend SoftClaws to anyone whose cat has a lack of self-control in the scratching department. 

Resume received!

Well, I'm back to the job search. I set my career aside for two [glorious] years to play college volleyball, but now it's time to return to the real world and that means a full-time job. I put my resume up on Monster and some other career sites and have received some interesting responses, though, unfortunately none of them legitimate.

Last week I got a voicemail and an email from a "marketing" company who said they had received my resume. Thing is, I never applied to this company. Later, when my phone rang with an unknown number I answered it (against my better judgment) on the off-chance it could be a real company calling about a real job for which I had actually applied. However, no such luck.

The person on the other end was from the "HR Department" of this "marketing" company and she continued the ruse about having "received" my resume. When I mentioned I had not applied for any position within the company, she relented and said they had pulled it off of Careerbuilder.com. And of course, it just so happened that they had a position that perfectly matched my education and experience.

She said they were looking for entry-level marketing professionals (did she even look at my resume?!?) who could move into management positions within one year. She wanted to bring me in for an interview with some of their "managers" the very next morning. When I said I wasn't available the next morning and would need to push the interview to the next week (this was a late Thursday afternoon), she started giving me the hard sell on why it had to be the next day because she "wasn't even scheduling next week's interviews yet." It all sounded quite fishy and as a result I declined the interview. My guess is that the job sucks (probably telemarketing) and that's why they have to hoodwink people into coming in for interviews.

This week I received a message from another company called American Income Life Insurance, who had also pulled my resume from Careerbuilder. I'm glad I looked this company up before calling anyone back. Google is rife with complaints about this company's aggressive recruitment tactics. Oh yeah, and the fact that it's a scam. 

Lesson learned: companies are hiring right now, but they probably aren't the ones you'd want to work for.