Update

She's trying to set up a telephone appointment for me to apply for my DAC benefits. She spoke to someone earlier who took my information, and their going to do what they can on their end to speed up the process. I imagine I'll still need to get my medical records from the joint yOureserve base (formerly Carswell Air Force Base) and the doctor who did my back surgery 25 freakin' years ago. I'd hate to be whoever has to go through the archives to find my records. I just hope like hell they still exist.  :-(

Not much else is going on. I'm still busy decorating the new house, lol. (My roommate and I haven't even gone out looking at houses yet. She's been getting on me a little bit about "putting the cart before the horse", which I admit freely I am. I'm just so excited! I've never had a roommate before, so this should be interesting. And as I've said before, it'll be good for Alaska, cause she'll have other dogs to play with, plus a much bigger living area. We really want a two-story house with four bedrooms and a large (I insist on fenced in) backyard. (I don't want to risk Alaska getting out and maybe running into the street and getting hit by a car.)

I also would love walk-in closets. I'm a huge clothes hound, and I'd love to be able to go shopping and buy nice clothes that actually fit well. I'll probably end up doing a lot of online shopping (Amazon, Lane Bryant, places like that). When you buy alot of stuff and don't have a car, it's just easier to get it delivered. I can take a taxi if a store is close, but not if we don't live close to a mall or something.

I'd like to start saving up for a car. I don't drive, but I'm hoping my roommate knows how. That would be a big help. We could go places we couldn't get to on the bus. I'd like to explore the city, but my knees are getting pretty bad. (Arthritis) Of course, exercise would go a long way in easing the pain, I'm sure. I have a doctor's appointment on Monday, and I'm hoping to get a knee brace. (Hopefully they'll also have the results of my labwork back and can tell me more about what they discovered last time.)

Well, it's half an hour until NCIS starts, and an hour and a half until NCIS: L.A., so I'll end here. Chris O'Donnell directed tonight's episode of L.A., so I'm eager to watch it. I'll probably be tweeting all through it. Might even post on Facebook about it.

Thoughts on NCIS ep "Dog Tags" (S5)

I normally don't watch this episode, because I get so angry at Abby. I don't like being angry at Abby, since she's one of my favorite characters on the show (in fact, there are a couple of episodes I don't watch, simply for that reason.)

At the beginning of the episode, Team Gibbs is at the home of a Petty Officer Kyle Hanson, a Navy dog handler to serve a warrant (they're trying to find out how drugs are getting on the base). When they break into the house, they find the man dead, apparently mauled. Cut to the back of the house, where a dog crashes through the back door and attacks McGee. The team inside hears a gunshot and run out to find the dog down and McGee bleeding from bites to the neck and arm.

Ducky (medical examiner) treats both McGee and the dog's wounds, and Gibbs orders McGee to take the dog back to NCIS headquarters. Cut to the evidence garage, where Abby meets McGee and sees that he's been bitten. She opens the car door and sees the dog muzzled, lying on McGee's blazer, and with a bandage covering the gunshot wound. She then gets angry at McGee, demanding to know how he could shoot "a poor sweet dog" and calling him "Bad McGee!" I couldn't believe it. She wasn't there; she didn't know what happened! (And I gotta tell you, I loved the exchange she and McGee had.

Abby (after McGee tells her that the dog [allegedly] killed his handler): Dogs don't kill people! People kill people!
McGee: People with dogs who kill people kill people!

Yeah. Made no sense to me either.)

Anyway, Abby spends the rest of the episode trying to prove the dog's innocence (which she does; another Petty Officer was responsible for the murder and planting cocaine in Hanson's house to make it look like he was part of the drug smuggling ring.) At one point, she takes "Jethro" (she renamed the dog from Butch) back to Pax River to see if she can find more evidence. What she finds is dog skeletons, which she calls in to the team. When they get to the base, McGee asks her, "Shouldn't that dog be muzzled?" to which she replies, "Muzzle yourself, McGee! It's not like he shot you." Oh, that had my blood boiling. I so wanted to yell, "Muzzle yourself, Abby! It's not like McGee tried to rip the dog's throat out." (See what I mean about being angry with her? To be fair to Abby, though, the team did find out later that the dog was high on cocaine at the time, although at this point in the episode, they didn't know that.)

Another point where I was angry at her was when Jethro had to have surgery to remove part of a knife blade from his stomach (Petty Officer Perilli had broken her knife while stabbing Hanson, and the dog swallowed it). Abby went around collecting donations to get him flowers (I have to agree with McGee: Flowers for a dog?) Abby showed him her spiked wrist cuffs and said, "You see these little spiky things, McGee? Some people wear them just for show. I don't." (Yeah. Threatening a federal agent. That's really smart, Abs! *smacks head*)

And then there's the end of the episode, where Abby basically tricks McGee into adopting the dog. Maybe I wouldn't have a problem with it, seeing as how the dog was proved innocent in the end, but then I'm not McGee. (I wonder what ever happened to Jethro? Except for a picture in a subsequent episode where he and McGee seem to be getting along just fine (the pic is of Jethro licking McGee's face)), we haven't heard word one about him.

*Some quick remarks about how other members of the team (notably Gibbs and Tony) treated McGee:

• As mentioned before, Gibbs orders McGee to take Butch back to headquarters... by himself. Even though Butch was muzzled and had been shot, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that. After all, he attacked McGee once -- what would keep him from doing it again?
• That stupid barking dog CD that Tony was playing when McGee came up from the evidence garage! Good thing the poor guy apparently has a strong heart and nerves of steel...

Well, that's it for today. Maybe I'll start doing the occasional NCIS episode review when the mood strikes me. (If anyone's interested in reading my thoughts on the show.) Let me know if you are?

And just fyi: If a dog ever attacked me, I'd grab whatever I could (a gun, a shovel, a tree branch) and shoot it or beat it off. I love dogs, but I love my life more.

I got my NCIS fix after all!

It was a rerun of the episode "Sins of the Father", where Tony's dad is suspected of murder. Lt. Massey is killed with a wine bottle upside the head, and since Senior was known to have threatened him...

But of course, Team Gibbs found out whodunnit. It was the CEO of the company that Senior was working with to get funding for a resort. He found a backer, but Massey refused to pay him the agreed upon finder's fee because he only had a year to do it in. The CEO had threatened to fire Massey and some other people, and I guess was afraid Massey would try to retaliate. So he killed him.

Gibbs proved at the end that he's a fairly classy guy. When Senior's deal fell through, he couldn't afford to stay at the hotel he was registered at, so Gibbs put him up for a few days. (He also gave Senior a room to keep him out of jail; Senior was wearing a GPS monitor.) It was a great episode.

The thing that was ironic is that the episode aired at the same time that the L.A. County Sherriff's Office reopened their investigation into Natalie Wood's drowning. (Wood was Robert Wagner's (Senior) wife who fell off their yacht around Christmas of '81, I believe, after she got into a drunken argument with Mr. Wagner. A lot of people still believe he killed her in a drunken, jealous rage. He apparently thought she was having an affair with Christopher Walken, who was also on the yacht and whom Natalie was costarring in a movie with.)

I'm just glad that I got to watch it tonight. Mr. Wagner is a wonderful actor, and I love him as Tony's dad.

Edited: You know, I just thought of something -- it would have been funny if someone had had the line "Jeez, Tony, what is it with you DiNozzos being framed for murder? You've been set up three times [in "Frame Up", "Internal Affairs", and "Bounce"], now your dad is!" lol (Okay, maybe not...)

I wish I knew someone who writes fanfic...

I'm in the process of writing one right now; in fact I have the first four chapters up on Fanfiction.net (here if you want to read it), and I'm working on chapter five, which I'm stuck on. I've PMed a few people at FFN to see if they'd be willing to beta and collaborate on my story, but so far no one has responded. Why is it that other people can get help with their fics and I can't? It makes me feel so bad. I'm not asking anyone to  write the damn thing, just help me out with some ideas. Sigh Well, if anyone of y'all could read and let me know what you think, I'd be ever so grateful. I'll also update with what I have of chapter five, just in case someone has any ideas of where to go with it.