seen on the streets of north attleboro

two statues of liberty and one uncle sam

no two snowflakes are exactly the same

whoops

we had a little water leak problem at oak knoll. the ceiling in the staff kitchen is now covered with little icicles. i know it isn't "good" but it does look rather lovely.

wreath burning, round 2

although we didn't burn all 20 wreaths we collected from the dump, we did torch a few more this past saturday. i can't imagine this ever not being entertaining.

a sawdusty dog tolerates a belly rub

jake works on the ceiling, too

working on the ceiling

matt spent most of the past week in vermont helping with the construction. he really enjoyed having the opportunity to work hard and feel both tired and hungry at the end of the day and i think that aaron, julie, and dad enjoyed having some extra hands on deck. i was able to work with them on friday, where i assisted in the completion of the ceiling upstairs. i really like the way the tongue and groove pine looks.

is it possible? can i be all blogged out. it certainly seems that way. but wait....

i think i can manage a quick story. last night was my first class in the new semester at dean college. i have eleven students in my class, one of whom made my night by telling me i can call him "t-rex." he has now doomed himself to being the most called-on student in the class, because it is so much more fun to say "can anyone give me an example of an abiotic component of an aquatic ecosystem? t-rex?" than it is to say "can anyone give me an example of an abiotic component of an aquatic ecosystem? mike?" also, one of my students stayed after class for about 20 minutes to get my opinion on the existence of a magma-filled caldera under yellowstone national park that, were it to erupt, would spew an ash cloud large enough to encompass the entire united states and would essentially block out the sun for a period of 14+ years. i told him i had never heard of such a thing, and he said, "i saw it on the discovery channel program super volcanoes. you should really get the discovery channel." perhaps i will.

song session at the farm

we planned to have a few people over on saturday night to burn some wreaths that matt and i picked up at the dump. we had so much fun torching the last one, we wanted to try lining up about twenty of them along one of the fences and either simultaneously or sequentially burn them. unfortunately, a high wind advisory ruined our plans and it was looking like the party was going to be a total bust, but fortunately, the other matt invited a bunch of farmers over after the NOFA conference and we ended up with a lot of good food, nice people, and great music. i attempted to entertain everyone by singing "the gambler" by kenny rogers, but people kept butting in with the chorus at the wrong times and totally ruined my solo. thanks to everyone who came over and we hope you'll join us again for maisie's birthday party in a couple of weeks.

watching ellory play the banjo:

even michele grudgingly sings along:

matt and jake watch the cat

the view out the front window this morning

egg diversity

sad news from the vet

we just learned the earl the cat has feline leukemia, or FeLV. he probably acquired this during his rebel years of roaming the plains, romancing the ladies, and sowing his wild oats. FeLV is a retrovirus, similar to HIV in humans, which attacks the bone marrow of infected cats and leads to immunosuppression, thereby making the cat susceptible to other diseases. most cats stay healthy for only a couple of years after their diagnosis. earl is doing fine right now, but we're supposed to keep him out of stressful situations (how stressful is it to have a dog engulf your entire head with his mouth?) and we also need to keep him inside. i think the outdoorsman will soon start to feel a bit stir-crazy. but on these gray and cloudy days, he doesn't mind staying inside and watching the other animals get wet and soggy.

video overkill

i promise that, after today, i won't post any more videos of the dog and cat doing things like this:

unless they do something different and new and funny like this:

jake the dog falls in love

i brought the temporary cat home to the farm on eliot street, where he has now become "the outdoorsman" to matt and "earl" to me. i never doubted that i would enjoy having a cat in our house so am happy to have this new addition living with us. and although matt was not crazy about the idea of a cat, he will quickly admit that he has grown quite fond of the outdoorsman. but far and away the biggest fan of the cat is jake, who gets the whole-body shakes every time the cat walks in the door. i have actually seen him run into a wall during paroxysms of joy over the cat's presence. they have lately started tussling with each other, as it seems the cat, at the very least, is tolerant of the dog, and at best actually enjoys the wrassling sessions and in fact eggs the dog on at times. here is a video that matt took demonstrating some of their hijinks.

a burning ring of fire

matt says goodbye to the holiday season with panache by setting a wreath on fire.

a bird in the bathroom vanity

sometimes we get rather unusual calls at oak knoll. since we are a mass audubon facility, we are assumed to be experts in all matters related to birds. for example, this past saturday, a woman named tricia called because she had a bird trapped in the bathroom vanity (she could hear in fluttering around in there) in her apartment and wanted me to come get it out. she had me talk to amanda, who was an employee of the apartment management company, and i told her, "look, i am going to come over there with a paper bag, shoo the bird into the bag, walk outside and let it go. don't you think you could just do that yourself?" but both amanda and tricia claimed to be "too freaked out" by the idea of this bird in the vanity to attempt any sort of rescue/extraction procedure on their own.

so i drove the 20 miles out to franklin to assess this bird situation for myself. i eqiupped myself as best as possible for this sort of work with a pair of fleece gloves and a cat carrier. i shut myself in the bathroom, cracked open the vanity door and discovered....

a parakeet (very similar in appearance to the blue one in this photo).

tricia told me her neighbors owned birds, so we brought the poor parakeet down the hall to the next apartment to see if this bird was one of theirs. i was relieved to learn that the bird did belong to the people next door, because finding a parakeet had destroyed my plan to extract the bird from the vanity and walk outside and release it. the neighbor said, "oh, he got out of his cage yesterday when we were cleaning it and he flew into the kitchen cabinets and we thought he was gone for good." although i was not familiar with the idea of kitchen cabinets being a no-man's-land for parakeets, i nodded knowingly, accepted her abundant thanks, and left.

out in the hall, tricia told me, "the last people who lived there had hampsters that they kept in the kitchen cabinets and one time they chewed a hole in the back wall and got into my bathroom vanity."

this means that before i arrived at tricia's apartment, she possessed the following three pieces of information:
1. her neighbor owned birds
2. there was a direct link between her neighbor's apartment and her bathroom vanity
3. there was a bird in her bathroom vanity.
if this was an SAT logic puzzle, i'd guess that 99% of students would have been able to answer it correctly.

and who keeps hampsters in their kitchen cabinets?

will ferrell is my favorite george bush impersonator

kids wearing funny hats in the snow

i'm in love

i first became interested when he looked like this:

but my interest waned as other, more flashy singers captured my heart:

• michael jackson (pre-freaky)
• simon lebon (lead singer of duran duran)
• willie nelson (pigtails!)
• robbie (bald guy from eddie from ohio)

thanks to my mom, i finally heard bruce springsteen's new album, "we shall overcome: the seeger sessions" which looks like this:

and it quickly earned the rank of "sarah's favorite album of 2006." i went out and purchased my own copy and now i listen to it over and over and over again. you should definitely check it out.

mysterious and perplexing events on eliot street

the number of bunnies we have at the farm continues to change regularly. just last week, many of the young bunnies (including evie's beloved woodrow) were, ahem, errr, done away with. we still have plenty of baby bunnies left.

this mystery does not concern the baby bunnies, but rather two older, more stately rabbits in the cages closest to the gate of the rabbit enclosure. i went to feed the first rabbit on sunday morning and realized the cage was empty. and so was the second one. there was no sign of visiting predators- the dusting of snow would have clearly revealed any pawprints. i could see tracks from matt and jake who had checked on the bunnies on saturday afternoon. it was possible that there were other footprints in the snow, but before i could really put on my sherlock homes hat (i had to run inside to find both that and my pipe), matt and i had stamped out all the evidence with our own footprints.

two missing bunnies isn't a huge deal on our casual hippy-run farm. one time, matt saw somebody unloading snowy the goat from the back of an SUV. apparently, the gentleman was a board member and had taken snowy to the blessing of the animals at his church. roll with it. we thought perhaps the bunnies had been loaned out for some sort of new year's day celebration- is 2007 the year of the rabbit? we figured the bunnies would show up later in the day. after all, if someone wanted to steal a bunny for a pet, they would take one of the precious baby bunnies.

a little later in the morning, a woman drove up in a volvo station wagon. she was probably in her late sixties and was quite flustered because when she looked out her front door that morning, there were two bunnies sitting on her front porch. her husband thought he had heard the doorbell ring just after midnight. perhaps the bunnies rang it, after somehow opening their cages, closing the doors behind themselves, levitating over the snow, and hopping a half mile down eliot street and up onto this woman's doorstep. they then became too frightened to hop back off again and instead spent the morning eating carrots and mating on the porch. or perhaps a prank has been played. i can't imagine the motive for this prank. i guess we should just be grateful they didn't take a cow. it would have been hard to fit that in the back of the dodge colt vista for the trip home.

white blood cells

as you might recall from your high school biology class, from your work as a medical doctor, or from a recent perusal of the relevant page on wikipedia, white blood cells (or leukocytes) are cells that are produced in the bone marrow and help to defend the body against infections and foreign materials as part of the immune system. when a person is undergoing chemotherapy, that person typically has lower than normal levels of white blood cells. one's blood has to be sampled prior to every chemo treatment in order to determine whether white blood cells are present in high enough numbers to ensure some modicum of disease-fighting ability in the patient.

when matt went in for his chemo on december 18, his white blood cell count was in the 700's. it needs to be over 1000 in order for them to go forward with treatment. so chemo was delayed until december 26. however, on december 26, matt's white blood cell count had dropped to 420. they actually took his blood twice because they couldn't believe the number was so low. it meant they had to put off chemo for another week, and it also meant that matt had to go into the hospital every day last week for a shot of some magical medicine that was supposed to stimulate his bone marrow to produce more white blood cells. i didn't believe that such a thing would work, but it turns out my medical knowledge was proven wrong once again. normal white blood cell counts range from 4,500 to 10,000 cells per microliter. matt's white blood cell count was more than 14,000. apparently he now has super-immune strength (which is supposed to be read like "super-human" to make it sound funnier. try it. "super-human." "super-immune." ok, you're right, it's pretty lame). so matt will have chemo on tuesday for the first time in almost a month. the medical staff will determine what schedule he'll be following for future treatments.