It was 102 degrees today at Sea-Tac airport. What that means? Is we just had the hottest day in recorded history for Seattle. So when I come on here and I’m all like “HOTTEST. DAY. EVER.” I just want you all to know that it’s not hyperbole. Today was literally te hottest day ever in this city. I actually didn’t have to deal with the worst of it. I spent the early part of the day in my air-conditioned office and the rest of it in my air-conditioned living room. I did have to take a brief AC break to attend my improv class, which I’ve decided is worth my time even if I never become half-decent at improv, because the thing is I laugh for the entire two-and-a-half hour class. I laugh at the skits that are good. I laugh at the skits that are bad. I laugh at my own skits when they’re really really bad. I pretty much just laugh the whole time. It takes me out of all the insanity in the rest of my life, and I’m just having fun. I think that’s what I’d originally hoped to get out of the experience when I first signed up. Plus I’m making friends! They’re inviting me to their parties! I feel special. :)

So, as I’d mentioned earlier, I’m looking for new career opportunities (and will always follow that statement with “No, Evil Beet is not dying. It may change, but it’s not going away.”) I’m finding myself very intrigued by the casual gaming industry, and it’s at the top of my employment hopes.

As a result, I’ve basically spent the past few days immersing myself in the world of casual gaming — which, by the way, is different from “core” gaming, like the MMORPGs you see teenage boys playing all night long (and, ya know, I had a roommate who was 31 and his bedroom had an inflatable mattress and $10K of gamer paraphernalia and he never, ever left it.) Casual gaming refers to a market of mostly women who play light, fun, simple games that get very addictive very quickly. (Check out GameHouse.com for what I’m talking about.) I’ve played like 100 different types of games in the past two days. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about the industry and where it’s going and how it’s changing. But I find there’s nothing more useful in these things that actually sitting down and talking to the people who are using the product. So if you use casual games (remember this can also include iPhone games, Facebook games, etc), tell me more about you and how you use them. When do you play them? Where do you get them from? How long do you play them for. What do you get out of playing them? I think the audience of this blog overlaps considerably with the audience for casual gaming, so I’m interested to hear your thoughts. You guys are always amazing with the suggestions.

Just checkin’ in. I’m on information overload tonight so I don’t have much brainspace left for this blog.

Good day, though. Yes, we’re still mid-heat-wave, which pretty much amounts to the whole city wandering around saying things like “How’re you likin’ this heat?” and “I hear the worst is yet to come,” and everyone being in a notably worse mood, despite the fact that they claim they all love the heat. This is a city that’s come to define itself by rain and, in its extended absence, must begin a frustrated search for an identity. The hot weather also means that everyone spent the weekend getting drunk, because it’s an absolute imperative to go outside and ENJOY this heat (read: drink outside), so everyone is a little bit hungover and off and grumpy for the start of the week.

Luckily, I have AC in my apartment and at my work, so I don’t have to deal with the worst of it. I love my little AC unit. It’s a precious angel sent from heaven to make my life better than everyone else’s.

After work, I went to my friend Grace’s apartment, because her complex has a swimming pool. I didn’t even know such things existed in Seattle. The pool water was about 80 degrees, but it was still really nice to sit in there and have girl talk with her. I came home and asked my property manager why we don’t have a pool at our complex. “There are too many drunk people here,” he said. I guess that’s a reasonable answer.

So. Like I said. I got nothin’. Heading to bed now.

Most of you were around last year when my precious puppy Charlie died. Charlie was only on Earth a short time, but he brought a lot of joy into my life and into the lives of others. Tragically, Charlie was ill with parvo when I got him (I didn’t know that) and he died just a week and a half later. At the time, I didn’t know anything about the horrible puppy mills that puppy stores buy from, and I’ve since become very informed. I sued the store that sold me Charlie in small claims, and they ended up refunding me the full price I paid for Charlie, but that didn’t even begin to touch the $3500 I spent in vet bills for him while he was in the hospital. They were bitchy and difficult about it, even though all the vets agreed that Charlie was infected before I even got him.

A friend texted me the other day to inform me that she drove by their store in Scottsdale and saw that they were closed. I just saw this, confirming it:

I was told today, Monday, someone had heard that Pets Landing had closed. To verify, I drove to Pets Landing this evening and sure enough, there was a note on their door stating they had closed permanently as of today, July 20, 2008. The note explained that they closed due to the economic downturn which is probably true. But I can’t help believe that our efforts gave them a little “push”.

We have protested in front of their store every Saturday since mid-December 2008. Over the months, many people stopped to talk to us and inquire about puppy mills. We educated them about the immoral and inhumane mass dog breeding business and handed them information on where they could adopt. Many people had not even heard of the term “puppy mill”. I know for a fact that our efforts changed the minds of quite a few people who would have otherwise purchased puppies from Pets Landing but instead decided to adopt. Whatever the reason, this is a “red-letter”day for the movement, but we are just beginning our efforts and will continue our protests at other stores until no more puppies are sold in pet stores here in the Valley. This event today should give us a much needed boost to keep going.

Part of me wishes I’d gone to buy Charlie on a Saturday after December 2008 (I bought him on a Saturday in March 2008), so I would have seen these people and known about puppy mills and about what awful things this store was doing. I just had no idea back then — I learned the hard way. But then part of me realizes that Charlie would have died no matter what, and at least this way he got to spend a short period of his life in a loving home with a family. I know he was meant to live with me for that short time, and I’m glad he was in my life. But I’m also very grateful to this group, BestFriends.org, for protesting these horrid stores and helping to shut down Pets Landing, and I encourage you all to donate to them and support them.

Leo, as most of you know, was adopted from a rescue shelter, which I drove five hours to go to in-person to see and to meet the people running it and to make sure my new puppy came from humane and loving conditions. But I would never have met Leo — who is clearly meant to be my little puppy prince at this point in my life — if I hadn’t come to Seattle because of darling Charlie. I think of him as a little puppy life guide. He took me to where I needed to be. He will always be in my heart and I will always love and miss him.

One more thing, which kind of relates to the post I just wrote:

My apartment is starkly undecorated, mainly because I’m not that big on decorating. I’d hang paintings or something but I just don’t have any that mean anything to me.

But I had this idea the other week that I would LOVE to decorate my apartment with framed prints of rain-related stuff. I know in my life I’ve seen some absolutely gorgeous photos of the rain, sometimes in black and white, sometimes with people in them, or plants, or mailboxes. I had one hung in my apartment in LA, but now I don’t know where it is or how I even got it in the first place.

So I’m been hunting online looking for similar pieces I could order and have framed and hung, but my search is coming up empty. Do any of you have recommendations for websites that sell that style of print?

First off: It is disgustingly hot. I know I complain a lot about the heat on here, but, you know what? THAT’S WHY I STARTED A PERSONAL BLOG. So I could talk about ANY DAMN THING I WANTED ANY DAMN TIME I WANTED. Not that any of you have complained about me complaining about the heat. But the heat just puts me in such a bad mood that I’m creating phantom complaints. It is supposed to be this hot for the entire next week. Can I just say that weather.com is a giant cock-tease? I always look at the 10-day predictions, hoping for rain, and it has a little tiny thundercloud in the final day’s slot, and I get all excited and I promise myself that if I can just live through NINE MORE DAYS of this BITTER, AWFUL sunshine, I will have my rain. Then I check it again the next day and my thundercloud is missing and replaced by a big yellow sun and I am devastated. My days are one sunshine-y disappointment after another.

The one spot of joyous coolness in this misery? My AC unit — or, as I’ve endearingly named it, “Slater.” It just sits in the corner of my living room pumping out beautiful coldness and sending the warm shit outside through the dog door slit. At least someone in this house is using that dog door to put warm shit outside; Leo prefers to use the bathroom floor, because he’s a person don’t you know that?.

But Slater has been causing some trouble (and not with my energy bill, because I haven’t received that yet). Slater is so loud that it makes it very difficult for me to hear my iTunes movies. So today I dragged my friend Kara to Best Buy with me. Actually, I didn’t drag her at all. She doesn’t have a car and her apartment doesn’t have AC and so I think I could have called her and been like, “Kara, I’m heading over to the hospital to let some Army med students use my body to practice how to do invasive surgery in the absence of anesthesia. They need a second volunteer, and they have AC,” and she would have been like “I’m already walking down my stairs, dear.”

Kara and I went to Best Buy, where the very helpful guy there hooked us up with awesomely loud speakers, and he also gave us a cord we could use to hook my laptop up to my HD TV. (Then I played in Target for an hour because, what the hell, it was next-door, and Target is my happy place. Do you think I could have my wedding inside a Target?) But by the time Kara and I got home, we were confused as all hell. We really thought he’d sold me the wrong cord. It took us like half an hour to figure out how to plug this damn cord into my laptop — Kara finally made it work. Then it took an additional half-hour to figure out how to adjust the display settings on my Mac to play nicely with my television. But then — THEN! — I got to watch my precious West Wing reruns on my flat-screen TV with super-loud volume. I’d done it! I was so. Freaking. Proud. Of myself.

I still haven’t cleaned my car, though. :)

This is probably because they’re all asleep and I am not. I had a busy day. Went to a BBQ at Magnolia Park with Leo during the day, came home for a bit, went out in downtown Seattle with my friend Staci for a birthday party. During our bar-hopping, we actually walked through the parade for Seafair. So much fun. I should also note that I dragged Staci into American Apparel with me (she didn’t need much convincing) and I bought one of their new Hypercolor tees. (They call them Thermochromatic, but it won’t stick. Just like today we call all copy machines Xerox, no matter what brand they are.) Oh and I screamed in the restaurant about how Arizona strippers get drunk and naked (implying Washington strippers are prude and also attracting the undivided attention of the nearby diners), and later Staci cat-called a cop on the street and he flashed a peace sign.

Then I came home and found some trouble to create, because that is what I do, and now I’m just getting ready for bed.

Really though I had to share with you these photos my friend Stephen just posted to Facebook. I was probably fifteen in most of these shots. I can’t get over how different I look. I have no recollection of ever having some of these hairstyles — fuck, I have no recollection of ever being in most of those places (don’t do drugs, kids, mmmkay?). I didn’t know my hair could grow that long — it never has since. Is it possible one’s hair can reach a certain length when they’re a teen but then not as an adult, ten years or so later? The other thing I notice: I am so so so skinny. And back then I totally thought I looked fat. But I looked so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and playful and just infinitely fuckable. I’ve certainly aged a lot since then, and most of those descriptors no longer hold, at least not full-strength. I’m glad I have these pics of this me-person, but it also worries me about what I’m going to look like in 10 more years. I will be dull-eyed and pig-tailed. It’s a disconcerting thought, to say the least. Still. I ::heart:: these photos.