Saturday I went to the BSPCA or the Bahrain Animal Shelter.  No, I was not looking for a pet, although I wanted to take a bunch of them home with me.  I went with a friend to volunteer there.  The first thing we did was go into the Cat House and help out there.  There was a staff member sweeping and mopping the cages.  We went behind him and put in the food and water and the litter boxes and beds.  And of course we petted the cats too.  There was a Persian there that looked very funny as it had recently received a haircut.  I never knew they got haircuts.  I hope it looks good when it finally grows out.  There was one cat brought in while I was there.  I never found out why.  Some of the cats had been there since August.  One was such a sweetheart she let me carry her around.  I don’t know why she was there so long.  If I could, I’d adopt her.  But I live in a “no pets” apartment.  There were a few kittens there too.  I expect they’ll go quickly.

After the cats we helped walk the dogs.  The dogs are not kept in kennels but in large pens.  There are around 8-10 dogs in each pen.  It’s easier to walk all the dogs in a pen at the same time instead of individually.  If you know dogs you’ll know why.  If you don’t know dogs, it’s because dogs are like people–they get jealous if they think someone else is getting something they’re not.  Fortunately for them on Saturday there’s usually a lot of volunteers.  So everyone takes one dog and thus the whole pen gets walked at once.  On the other days of the week the staff have to do it when they get time so maybe only one pen gets walked a day.  Even on Saturday, when every dog gets walked, there is still a lot of walking.  That is because there is a lot of pens and a lot of dogs.  It would be easy to spend two hours just walking dogs.

All the dogs seemed small to me, but maybe that’s because I’m used to seeing the big German Shepherd military working dogs on base.  These at the shelter looked to be from 30-40 pounds–so in the medium range of dog size.  They were also mutts and most skinny.  The only one I that didn’t look skinny was the one that looked like a rottweiler, and those dogs don’t look skinny.  My friend said a lot of the dogs had some saluki in them, and saluki is a skinny breed of dog.  There were also a lot of puppies there.  Most were half grown.  But they were all cute and definitely wanted attention.  If I were to be able to get a pet it would be hard to pick out just one.  They all need a good home.

Even though it was hard to leave the animals there, I enjoyed volunteering there and would like to go back.  It was fun being around all those animals that just wanted some care and attention.  But then I like animals, particularly dogs.

Later the same Saturday, I went to taekwondo.  I’d missed two weeks from being out of town and having a migraine.  I’ve had a lot of problems with migraines lately.  I don’t usually get this many.  I had one Saturday night too, but I took my medicine and went anyway.  I didn’t end up staying the whole time.  Maybe it was just as well.  My medicine tends to make me dizzy, and he was having us do these exercises that involved turning around (and around), which is enough to make you dizzy anyway.  Once I spun around too fast and ended up on my face on the mat.  I didn’t even realize I was falling until I was lying face down!  I wasn’t hurt.  That’s why we practice on mats.  The teacher applauded.  That’s what he does every time someone falls.  He says it’s so they don’t feel bad.  It does make it easier to laugh it off.  And it was funny.  I wish I could have seen myself.  I probably looked funny flying around and landing on my face.  So now I can officially say I’ve had my first fall in taekwondo.

The klutziness doesn’t end there.  Yesterday when I was riding my bike home from work I wiped out.  That means I came as close to falling down as makes no difference.  I tried to jump a curb and failed.  I guess I need to find some ten-year-old boy and have him teach me how to do it.  They all know, right?  So I scraped some skin off my knee.  It bled a little bit and hurt some too.  But as both my mom and Jeremy’s mom like to say in situations like this–I’ll live.  The ironic thing was that my senior chief talked to us about bicycle safety at work just that morning.  He’d said that even though it’s not required, we should wear long pants and long sleeves when riding.  I thought that was ridiculous, especially with Bahrain’s climate, but guess what?  I wasn’t wearing pants.  But will this encourage me to wear pants in the future?  Probably not.  So have I learned my lesson?  That would be a negative.  I have learned not to jump curbs.  Does that count for anything?

Well that’s all I can think of for the exciting things that have been happening in my life lately.  In blogging news I took down the “dead” widget from the sidebar.  It’s supposed to tell you the temperature in Bahrain.  It’s really cool, but it stopped working, and I don’t know why.  So I will wait until my computer guru husband comes back and hopefully he can get it working again.  Until then, I put a search bar up in its place.  I figured I have enough posts now that if someone were looking for one it would be annoying to page through all the archives; they should be able to search for what they want.  I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know how well it works.  It’s also rather ugly.  Sorry.  Nothing I can do about that.

That’s all, folks.  I’m off to bake a cake–Triple Chocolate Hot Fudge Cake.  All you have to do is add water.  Sounds easy and delicious.  I love chocolate.  I’d share if there were some way to send it electronically. 

But what I mainly wanted to talk about was Google.  You see, Google does an April Fool’s joke every year for April Fools.  And I didn’t want you to miss it, so I am going to post links.  This year they did several.

This year, you can sign up to go colonize Mars.  Join Google’s Mars colonization project called Virgle.  Click on the link to go to the site and learn all about it.  “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.”  You can also take a test to see if you’re colonist material or join the Mission Control community, which is a place to leave your comments or read others’ comments.  (Warning: Some people have a serious lack of a sense of humor.)

If you have gmail–Google email–you can now send emails into the past.  That’s right, folks, never miss a deadline again.  “Just click ‘Set custom time’ from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox.  Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.”

 And if you have trouble getting up in the morning, Google has something for you too.  Now you can purchase the Google Wake Up Kit.  It uses Google Calendar and will send an SMS message to your phone.  If that doesn’t work it will use “more coercive” means: “The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.”

And finally today can be your lucky day.  Google added one of its famous “I’m feeling lucky” buttons to its Google Calendar, according to this source.  Clicking on it adds random events to your calendar like dates with celebrities.  I don’t have a link to it; when I opened Google calendar it didn’t have that link.  So, sorry.

Google has had a lot of fun with this.  I would really encourage you to go to Google Hoaxes, which is a wikipedia article which has the complete list of Google April Fool’s jokes.  It lists them for each year, starting in 2000.  Don’t miss MentalPlex (Google’s search engine can now read your mind), the Google Copernicus Center (known for its state-of-the-art deoxygenated living quarters), Google Romance (“Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.”), Gmail Paper (Google will mail you a hard copy of every email), or Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider).  Last year there were two, and this year there are a total of 11, some of them country specific, like the one for Australia: gDay–”a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.”

My favorite wasn’t listed, and that is the year where they let you type in a person’s name and it would email that person a search results page of news articles about that person.  Of course they were fake articles, but Google picked some funny article blurbs to use.  I don’t remember what year that was. 

So I hope you have fun with this.  I did.  Happy April 1st everyone!

So now I can track where my visitors are from.  Even if there’s only like three dots I think it will still be cool.

I wish I knew why the weather widget doesn’t work anymore….  Any ideas, Jeremy?