Bed slugs and more

As many of you may remember, I've been doing a massage school thing recently. I did one intensive session this summer (two months) and have another coming up this winter (three months) and in between the two I'm supposed to practice. In particular I need to do a series of four massages on strangers. Finding strangers who will let you rub their bodies is actually a bit of a challenge - particularly when you spend the majority of your fall house sitting in places where you don't know very many people. Thankfully my step-brother, Keith, was willing to offer up his girlfriend, Megan, and they came over Wednesday so I could give her a massage. Now, the room (my bedroom) in which I did the massage is somewhat cramped and required rearrangement of furniture, plants and so on to make enough space. In the process of moving around the plants I disrupted a slumbering beast. Hours later, when I was about to go to sleep, I discovered this beast slithering around boxes piled at the foot of my bed, with a shimmering slime trail leading back to one of the plants. Yes, my friends, I discovered a slug in my bedroom. Never a fan of slugs to start with I was moderately disgusted - one doesn't think of slugs as a household pest like mice, spiders or roaches - but I kept my wits about me and dispatched the creature into the depths of the toilet promptly. I then proceeded to have dreams about slugs crawling up through the pipes and emerging in great numbers from this same toilet, but that was probably just guilt at killing an innocent creature. Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed slugs bite.

In other random news -

* I saw Harry Potter and definitely thought it was great but was still disappointed because it wasn't as great as the book.

* I'm still working on my new year's resolution and doing fairly well. My resolution was to be able to do pull-ups. I've never been able to do pull-ups and that has always been frustrating because I like the idea of being able to do pull-ups. So I've been systematically working on the assisted-pull-up machine. When I started I needed 70 or 80 pounds of "assistance" (i.e. I was lifting my weight minus the 70 or 80 pounds) in order to do 3 sets of 10 or 12. I took a good six months off in the middle of the year (moving, India, massage school, scampering about the country) but what with a one-month membership to the club up here I've been working on it again. Now I'm doing 3 sets of 10 with only 40 pounds of assistance, which means I'm lifting about 70% of me weight. I realize I still have quite a ways to go but am optimistic that I'll be able to do at least a few pull-ups by February or so. I am going to try and see how many I can do with only 10 or 20 pounds of assistance at the end of December.

* I stuffed myself last night at our family's Thanksgiving gathering. Though I'm a vegetarian, there was no fear of me going hungry. There were yams, a yummy squash thing, salad, potatoes, pie, cornbread, and more.

* A week or so of unrelenting rain was followed by very gorgeous weather for almost two weeks. This has been replaced, in turn, by more icky rainy stuff. This time with a colder bite to it. Still my mantra remains: At Least It Isn't Snow. At Least It Isn't Snow. And besides, in a week or so I will be heading toward the desert of South East California.

There's other stuff that has been going on since my last post (nearly two weeks ago or something?) but I grow tired of the laptop that is hot and radiating my lap so that will be all for now.