If you're a college student and just recovered from the haze of midterms, portfolios, and projects due, you know what I mean. If you're not, it looked something like this:

...and will continue looking like it at every deadline point.

Busy busy! Test posting from my phone

It's been a busy week at the hunter household. Mark spoke at the Peabody library of Whitley county, and I answered questions. That was the fun part - we used the other vacation days to start winterizing the house, run errands, do writing work... And catch up on some of our shows on the DVR of course. It's Walking Dead time again, people!

As Mondays go, I've had worse.

I woke up with pain today, but I was able to get through the day with minimal trouble. I did at one point say, "I reallllllyyyy should have stayed home," but I made it. I somehow passed it off as being simply tired, because everything that I was doing to alleviate the pain (or otherwise just be a lump) ended up making me want to nap. Either way, I muddled through class by being distracted and attentive to our workshop, and only ended up being minorly grouchy about one of the pieces we 'shopped that didn't look like it had even been proofread before being turned in.

After some good and healthy food and taking Bae on a W-A-L-K, I feel quite a bit better. Not awesome, but not bad. I definitely ran into some people having a far worse case of the Mondays.

Slightly Off the Mark: Missouri Girl Scouts Fight For Their Camps

 My hubs blogs for my cause:

Slightly Off the Mark: Missouri Girl Scouts Fight For Their Camps

Ball python video

This is a video of my ball, Lucius, feeding. I made it to test out my new camera and uploaded it in case anyone is curious (I assume some people are, since there's tons of similar videos on YouTube).

Click the cut to view (hidden for those who don't want to see).

Warning: Rat death. It's the circle of life. Mufasa told me, and he can't be wrong.

What's in a dog name?

"I have no idea what's happening."

This photo is from our trip to SEMO. Bae enjoyed peeing in three new states.

Most of the time when I tell people my dog's name, if they know me or Mark at all they say something like, "Oh! That's perfect!" I still do get a few blank stares, though.

Baeowulf came to us as Goliath, the name the shelter gave him. He's huge, so its easy to see why he got that name. There's not really a good way to shorten "Goliath" to a one-syllable nickname for ease of use, and it was hard to say when trying to train him or talk to him. He didn't answer to it yet, and we didn't feel like it quite fit him - he's big, but he's not mean and doesn't have a habit of trying to crush children.

We ended up wanting to change the name right away, but it took us a week or two to come up with the perfect name.

The spelling is a different story. We added the "a" for a few reasons.

Spelled Baeowulf, it can be shorted to Bae, which makes sense for people if even they haven't heard of the epic. Without the a, the shorted name would be Be, and I'd have to answer 9000+ questions about why I named my dog be or hear it pronounced Bee, and bees freak me out a little.

Secondly, it's a wink to the show Once Upon a Time. We really like my favorite character Rumple's nickname for his son Baelfyre: Bae. We didn't want to name him Baelfyre, so the combination of the two names, Baeowulf, worked for us.

Now, Bae knows his name. And he know's he's in real trouble when he gets the o-wulf added... though he probably recognizes "wulf" from the amount of people that tell us he looks like a wolf (or werewolf, once).

It's official: My dog is a river rat.

Here's a random photo of Bae being cute and knowing it, since I didn't take the camera out on this trip.

Thursday my husband Mark and I did something we do all the time in the summer: canoe at Chain O'Lakes State Park.

This time, however, we took the dog with us.

It was a bit of a challenge since the additional shifting weight in the middle caused some balance and steering problems, but luckily for us we're both canoe veterans. We both learned to paddle in those big honkin' all-metal canoes, and I had a good amount of experience paddling with squirming children - including hauling them into the boat.

Bae took it like a champ. He didn't quite understand the whole thing, but once he figured out it was just like a ride in the car except he could drink water while doing it, he was in. He loves smelling new smells, and boy were there ever new things for him to check out down the canals. He even stayed in the boat when we docked at the side of a channel to adjust his rigged life jacket floatie and help a few boatloads of people who bottomed out.

Not to get all sappy, but there are few things better than being in a beautiful, scenic place with your best friend and your dog.