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I have five Dreamwidth invite codes if anyone wants one.
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Damn. First time in a long time I've gotten up on a Saturday and not had a bad cold, had tons of household chores to do, had a flight to catch somewhere, had actual they-pay-me-to-do-it work to do, had a torrential downpour happening outside, you name it. I barely recall what it's like to have nothing much at all going on.
Just looked out the back window of the house and saw a pretty sizeable four-point buck saunter by the shed, absent-mindledly nosing at the poppies and roses. Birds are chirping. Flowers are blooming. I feel moderately calm and relaxed.
This can't be a good sign.
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Carole took this of me at the Staples in Williston, VT the other day. I've already forgotten what the heck it is.
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Our neighbors' chickens boldly made the trek through the woods between our houses and up into our yard today. A wave of eight or ten of 'em, all heading up the hill like Pickett's Charge, was something we couldn't recall seeing before. We went down to see if our neighbors were home and found that they weren't, but also found that the chickens' coop had rather obviously been propped open, so we figured that the chickens must be free ranging and that they'd finally decided the time had come to pay a social call. We didn't want them getting lost, though, and since we didn't know any other way to herd chickens down our long driveway, along the road, and back to their coop (or back through the woods), I wound up just picking one up and marching. After a little bit of agitated wing-flapping, it went absolutely rigid, not twitching a bit, and the other chickens pivoted and followed along. Carole wound up grabbing one too and we soon had 'em all home.
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May
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May. 12th, 2009 @ 11:14 am
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A few thoughts:
1) I'm on my way to Portland, Oregon for some training at a customer in Beaverton. It's going to be three long days, starting at 8 and probably finishing close to 5, but I like the people there and it's an interesting topic that I enjoy training on. The only drawbacks are that I'll probably be too mentally fatigued to be of much use any day after work and will probably just go back to my room and watch TV or read, and that I'll be flying back on Saturday. Won't get home until around suppertime.
2) However, at least I'm doing something. It's been a weird last few weeks... a lot of training engagements have fallen through, for all sorts of weird reasons, just sort of a 'perfect storm' of stuff. At one point it looked like I'd be training every week in April and May. Now it's less than half that. There's work to do if I'm not training, but I'm happiest when I'm working with customers.
3) I'll be onsite in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia the last week of May and all of June and the first week of July unless something changes. I'll be flying down every Sunday and coming back every Friday night. Not much of a weekend for five or six weeks, not to mention flying on Memorial Day and having to cut the July 4th holiday short. Beats not having a job, though. The major impact will be that I won't be able to coordinate a lot of training walks for the local Vermonters who are taking part in the Breast Cancer 3-Day in Boston in late July. With severely truncated weekends, I'll have to do mowing and yardwork and so forth, and when I'm not doing that I'll want to be spending some quality time with Carole. Hopefully some hiking, some kayaking.
Not being able to do a lot of training walks won't kill us, personally -- we're not walking ourselves until October when we do the Philadelphia Breast Cancer 3-Day. We're crewing Boston in July, not walking, but I still wanted to do what we could to help with other walkers' preparation and to stay involved. Now, if I was going to be out of town all of September and part of October, that'd be bad. We definitely need to do a lot of training walks in that time frame. You've got to get your feet toughened up and calloused and get your muscles and joints ready for twenty miles of steady plodding. (Very different from running that distance, or so a lot of people have told me.)
4) Our lawn looks like hell right now, and oddly, I'm fretting about that. A spring broke in our riding lawn mower, causing our mower belt to break, and a Sears guy came out to do the warranty repair on it, and wouldn't you know, he doesn't come equipped with said spring. He told Carole how to install it and said he'd have it shipped directly to the house and said it was up to her, she could install it or she could call when it arrived and schedule another appointment with him... her pick. The spring hasn't arrived yet, but Spring sure has -- it rained like crazy all this weekend and our lawn is about to go into serious jungle mode. I did what I could with our gas-powered push mower last night after work but with the time I had before I had to get to bed for my early morning flight, I probably only did 1/5 of the lawn, if that. Assuming the spring comes this week I've got one hell of a lot of mowing to do on Saturday, and it's not going to be fast: when the grass is as high as it's going to be, you have to take it slow if you want to do a decent job. Argh.
5) Carole is still unemployed. She's been doing part-time work for the US Census as they assemble their address database in our area, but that work is almost done and she's finishing her last canvassing area today. She's starting to go kinda stir crazy, spending hours doing crossword puzzles and online games and then looking up going "where'd the day go?" As far as I can tell, she has applied for every accounting position that would reasonably fit her skills, but sometimes she doesn't get around to applying as fast as she could. She doesn't get called for a lot of interviews... but then, there aren't a lot of positions right now either. My main wish is that if she's done all the applying she can do and she doesn't have any census work to do, she could at least be more active around the house rather than leaving a lot of the household chores for me to do. I know she's depressed, but...
Yes, I'm glossing over a lot here. The sooner she gets back to work and can have a regular routine to her life, the happier I'll be.
6) I like bulldogs. I walking up to the door of our local independent pet food store the other day and as the door opened a young bulldog, barely old enough that you might think twice about saying "he's a puppy", came trotting happily out with his people bringing up the rear. Without thinking I knelt down and cried out happily, "BULLDOG BULLDOG BULLDOG". The pup apparently knew just what to do because he came romping right up to me and let me pat his head and tell him what a good boy he was. Carole gets like that with corgis, but the only dogs that make me go "OOOH DOGGY" are bulldogs.
His name was Ollie, an English bulldog, same breed as the University of Georgia's mascot, only spotted where UGA VII is all white. Nice dog. Nice owners. Wish I had a dog, but with my travel, it's just not going to happen.
I also met a Bulldog the other day -- I walked into our local movie theater to pick up our Internet-ordered tickets and a retired gentleman, wearing a Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, was coming out as I went in. I cheerfully cried out "Go Dawgs!" and he blinked at this unexpected greeting and then replied with a hearty "All right!"
We don't get a lot of SEC fans in Vermont and it's probably not real often that he gets that sort of greeting. I didn't stop to ask if he was a local resident or visiting from out of town, but from his accent, I think it's safe to say that he wasn't a Vermont native. :)
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Zarg
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May. 6th, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
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I'm on Dreamwidth as 'jayfurr'. Stunning burst of originality there.
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When I was a kid, I thought a magnifying glass was just about the coolest toy in the world.
I must have gone through a ton of 'em. Lost some, wore others out. Now I don't even own one.
And no, I didn't use 'em to focus the rays of the sun on bugs and stuff. That would have required us to have sunny days, and in the mountains of Virginia, all we ever had was "partly cloudy." :)
Current Mood:  thoughtful |
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/25/georgia.shootings/index.html
The killings took place directly across the street from the apartment I lived in my senior year. Carole says I'm cursed, what with also being affiliated with Virginia Tech and everything.
I'm sad to hear the news. Hope they catch the shooter ASAP.
Current Mood:  sad |
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Go plant some trees, y'all.
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I really, really like salads made from mixed greens, baby spinach, blue cheese crumbles, dried cranberries, little bits of walnuts, tossed with vinaigrette.
So there.
I also really, really like dolmas, but regrettably, Vermont has a tiny Greek-American community and the only Greek restaurants offer Greek items as a side line to traditional diner-style fare. Sigh. For the ten thousandth time, I must remind myself, one does not move to Vermont for the food.
Current Mood:  tired |
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This coming weekend Carole and I will be driving down to Boston on Saturday, doing not much of anything that we know of, and getting up early on the following day to do a Breast Cancer 3-Day event at Bentley University out in Waltham.
If anyone in the area is free on Saturday and wants to, oh, go candlepin bowling or something we'd be up for it. If we don't hear from anyone we'll probably go out to Legal's and then go candlepin bowling *anyway*, so as you can see we're not exactly going to be doing anything we can't change in a hurry.
Mards phelp, meer seen plescu.
Current Mood: tired |
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Yesterday we put around 30 northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) and 30 winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata) in the ground on our lawn.
We got them from the New Hampshire state nursery via UPS -- we've gotten lots of seedlings from there over the years and generally they're thriving. In a nutshell, we didn't want to have to mow our three acres of lawn, so between a large wildflower garden and big stretches of European mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia), dogwood (Cornus alternifolia, Cornus racemosa, Cornus sericea, Cornus amomum, and Cornus cericea), black walnut (Juglans nigra) and European high-bush cranberry (Viburnum opulus) we've reduced the area we have to mow considerably. We also put some forsythia in the ground a couple of years ago but I have absolutely no idea what specific species we wound up with. Five of eight plants made it and are doing very well. Off to one side we have a little grove of completely random trees that we don't have any ID for at all -- they were sent to us free by the Arbor Day Foundation a few years ago and we shrugged and planted them and lost our records of what they were supposed to be almost immediately. Sometime we'll have to go around taking photos and take the photos to an expert and see if they can tell us what we've got. :)
We had some problems with borers attacking the mountain ash but that stopped when we stopped mulching their bases with red cedar bark mulch. We don't know if the borers came in the mulch or they just found it a happy breeding ground. We also had some problems for a few years with something that skeletonized the European high-bush cranberry and had to do some seriously non-eco-friendly chemical warfare but last year we did no spraying at all and the plants grew like crazy and bore lots of bright red berries. Carole thinks that the periodic infestations of tent caterpillars were simply going through a cycle and last year we just got lucky.
A lot of what we've planted is meant to a) look nice, and b) produce lots of winter-fast berries for the local critters to eat. Some of the trees are seven years along now and they're finally starting to do some actual berry production. It'll probably be a few more years before we see much from the dogwood and of course, it's anyone's guess how many of the bayberry and winterberry holly make it and bear fruit. But it's nice to see them in the ground anyway: I remember when we had first planted the European high-bush cranberry and European mountain ash, and look at 'em now!
So anyway: we know Arbor Day isn't until April 24, but hey, we did our planting early, getting everything planted the day the big brown packs showed up in the UPS truck just like the New Hampshire state nursery said to. So sue us. :P
Current Mood:  accomplished |
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