boris bite

boris the boar and i have a love/hate relationship. when i bring him something he loves, like food, he loves me. when i bring him something he hates, like anything other than food, he hates me. unfortunately, although boris needs water to survive, he has no patience for those who bring water (meaning he hates the water-bringer). sometimes i scratch his back in an attempt to buy his love, even sans food, as boris is an extraordinarily large animal (let's say somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 pounds) and i don't want him to hate me. i would estimate that this scratching trick works 8% of the time when i bring him water and not food. last saturday, despite the fact that i was the bringer of his beloved food, boris the boar bit me on the back of my leg, perhaps in revenge for all those times i have only brought him water and tried to buy him off with a backrub.

in general, i would classify myself as a non-bruiser and one who is rather thick-skinned, but boris truly left his mark. i measured the cut and it is approximately 6 cm long.

the last of the wreaths

matt and i collected a stockpile of wreaths from the dover dump and then torched them en masse to celebrate maisie's birthday. we also ate delicious indian food, with homemade paneer created by matt k. the new puppy was a hit with the crowd.

matt superfluously lit the biggest wreath with a match close to the end of the burning event.

little dog in the laundry

walking the dogs

irresistible

we are hard at work teaching the new little dog not to jump up, not to climb on the furniture, and not to sit in people's laps. in these photos, matt engages in a rigorous training session with nina. i think she is really starting to grasp the lesson. meanwhile, jake looks on from his seat on the couch. what good dogs we have!

SMEJ and N

no big surprise- we went ahead and got another dog.

introducing her majesty, the teeniest of wee pups in the non-barking sector, outgoing miniature sercretary of mini-defense for save-a-dog, grand master of picture avoidance and/or blurrence, legal affairs correspondent for the small beings, nina puppy totenberg.

to see her is to want to put mustard on one of her tiny paws and snack on it. just ask jake, who, in the following photo actually has nina's hind leg in his mouth and is attempting to walk away with it in order to gnaw on the leg in the relative privacy and comfort of our bed.

SMEJ

there is a controversy raging en la casa de sarah, matt, earl, and jake ("smej" for short). we at smej are pretty content- matt and i like each other, we like the dog, we like the cat. the cat likes the dog, the dog hopelessly pines for the cat. we truly have everything we need, plus farm animals. so it really doesn't make any sense for us to even consider getting a puppy. we don't need a puppy. matt might honestly tell you that he doesn't want a puppy. but yet, later this afternoon, we are actually bringing our dog over to a shelter to meet some puppies. matt and i have already met them, and both matt and i were more than a little charmed by their cuteness. they seem sweet, relatively calm, and adorable. suddenly the question became, "well, why not get a puppy?" which is the right question to be asking? "why get a puppy?" or "why not get a puppy?" and then if we answer that one the way i want it answered (because they are cute and because jake might finally lay off the cat if he had an animal of the same species to frolic with), the question then becomes, which puppy do we get? these two are sisters, both a cross between a sheltie and maybe an italian greyhound or a leprechaun. do we get the one on the left, currently named sarah (good chance we'd change that), who is tiny but very sweet and delicate and would likely do less damage to our house due to the tininess of herself and what with being tiny. the puppy on the right, current named suzy, is about twice the size of sarah, which means she is bigger than earl the cat and perhaps better equipped to escape from jake and to destroy our sofa with its chaise lounge. or should we just get them both? there's a good chance that that scenario would cause jake's head to explode.

any advice and feedback is welcome, unless you advise not to get a second dog, in which case i don't want to hear it. thanks!

my new best friend

some godsend gave this to julie for christmas and then i took it from her because i "thought matt would like it." and now i eat it for lunch almost every day as the calorie-laden part of my peanut butter and banana sandwich. mmmmmm.

jake

one thing i think we all have a hard time understanding is just how hard it is to be this little dog.

an evening at konrad and jen's

matt has started underconsuming again and i was hopeful that someone else's cooking might inspire him to eat more than mine could. he did seem to enjoy the delicious quesadillas with all the fixings that konrad and jen prepared, but he didn't eat a huge plateful the way i dreamed he would. but after dinner, he did overindulge on marshmallows roasted in the fireplace. i guess it doesn't always matter where the calories are coming from. we also got to play some pool and darts and read some deep thoughts. it was a fun evening.

heard this morning on "sunday morning country"

a song titled, "it's hard to kiss the lips at night that chew your ass out all day long."

jesus in a pirogi

the new york times recently had an interesting article about facial recognition and why people see faces in inanimate objects- in the above photos, it's a grilled cheese sandwich, a shell, and a pirogi. that grilled cheese sandwich recently sold for... wait for it... $28,000 on ebay. in case your own facial recognition skills are not finely tuned, that's the virgin mary pictured on the sandwich. i'm hoping that matt is going to start investing some effort in creating food in the image of famous people or religious figures. how much do you think we can get for a quesadilla with the face of britney spears on it? what am i saying? i wouldn't sell that britney spears quesadilla for anything!

taking pictures of a quick black dog

ineffective driveway clearing

the natick community organic farm is on land owned by the town of natick. therefore, the town is responsible for maintaining the driveway into the farm. and although we do allow animals to poop directly into the stream that runs through the property, we do not allow the use of salt on the driveway- why are we only partially concerned with the health of the stream? therefore, due to what i would consider a poor plowing job, done last-minute after all other roads in the town of natick had been addressed, and a lack of any treatment administered to the driveway post-plowing, our driveway has become an ice-coated pathway of slippery danger for cars, walkers, and canines. jake kept trying to find a good place to pee, but whenever he lifted one back leg, the other one started slip-sliding away. he finally sort of leaned against the little snowbank along the edge of the driveway and let 'er rip.

jake displays some trepidation

matt and i often take jake for walks on an aqueduct behind our house. the thing is totally flat (see it in the background behind the dog?) except for a very slight slope where the trail narrows to wrap around an old wellhouse. last week, what little snow we had had stayed put along this narrow slope and had crusted over and become quite slick. although the slope is no more than seven feet long and there were non-icy patches along the edges that i managed to navigate, jake refused to proceed.

now, every inch of land is covered with a coat of snow and ice. i was afraid that the dog would refuse to go outside and we'd have to set up a second litterbox in the house. fortunately, he fearlessly barreled up and down the driveway tonight, his back end spinning out or falling over every time he attempted to reverse direction.

ice bubbles at lake talaquega

home alone on a soon-to-be-snowy evening

matt is off at bee school, so it is just me, jake, and earl hanging out and getting ready for what might possibly be our first snowstorm of the year here in the greater boston area. i am so confident that we will have snow and the accompanying bad driving conditions that i have not even started to prepare for my class at dean tomorrow night. because most of the evening classes are primarily populated by part-time students who have to commute to campus, evening classes are the first ones to get canned when the weather is bad. having still not outgrown the inability to resist optimistic dreaming of snow days, i will probably spend the rest of the evening checking weather.com every five minutes for updates instead of actually preparing for class. let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. let it not backfire, let it not backfire, let it not backfire.

yesterday afternoon, we had a surprise arrival here on the farm- clocking in at just over seven weeks early (according to the farmer's anticipated date of first lambing), a little black lamb appeared in the pasture. i am sure my father will feel quite gratified to learn that the slacks are not the only ones who can completely fail to recognize when a sheep is about to give birth. it turns out that the ram snuck into the sheep pasture much earlier than he was supposed to and knocked up at least one and maybe more of the ewes. fortunately, the lamb was discovered during afternoon chores and both mother and baby were brought inside the barn and put in a stall under a heat lamp- temps were in the single digits here last night. jake and i just went out to check on them and they are all curled up in a corner under the eerie red glow. this is a picture i took of them yesterday afternoon. the lamb has been out of the womb long enough to be all licked clean, but the ewe has not yet passed the afterbirth, so the baby can't be much more than 30 minutes old in this photo.

sugar crystals

the farm is gearing up for another year of maple sugaring. right now, we're still selling last year's syrup at the farm stand, but many of the big bottles have sugar crystals forming at the bottom.

they best take advantage of syrup season whilst they can- most experts think there won't be any sugar maples left in massachusetts in a few more years, what with all this global warming. global warming? why, that's just a myth cooked up by the crazy liberals.

dance dance revolution

i went to my cousin jacob's bar mitzvah yesterday- i haven't been to one of those since high school. there was an abundance of food, people, and klezmer music.

wide load

annabelle the goat (not to be confused with evie's alter-ego of annabelle the dog) is quite pregnant. the other goats should be pregnant as well, but none seem to be quite as bursting- at- the- seams, god- i'm- glad- that's- not- me, there- must- be- at- least- three- in- there pregnant as annabelle. gandolph the buck did some good work. unfortunately, good old gandolph is no longer with us, by which i mean he died of some sort of internal injuries after getting bullied by the cows and ram he shared a pasture with. not too long ago, when gandolph was in his heyday, i witnessed him urinating into his own mouth. he was a good old goat.

tiny little baby

my co-worker michelle had a wee little baby in the wee hours of wednesday morning. riley anne was born after over 24 hours of labor-ugh- but it seems as if michelle has already forgiven her for that. i spent a while in the hospital with them this morning- i brought michelle some magazines that i was really just longing to read myself and a foam art picture for her to assemble that will say, "he ain't heavy, he's my spongebob." i can't wait for both the artwork and the baby to arrive at oak knoll and brighten up the office.

my dog and his dog

title adapted from becky's blog

cute overloaded again

this is from today's cute overload postings:

unfortunately, our two animals never really hold still when they are interacting, making it difficult to capture them using simple photographs and i am trying very hard to hold to my promise not to post any more videos of the pretty much non-stop wrestling sessions.

desperate times call for desperate measures

in an attempt to clear the congestion in my head, i concocted (by which i mean "mixed up in a pot on the oven based on a recipe i discovered on the internet after googling 'sinus congestion cures'" and not "created based entirely on whim and the potential ingredients on hand") a drink called tomato tea. bearing in mind that i dislike the following: V-8, tabasco, hot beverages of any kind; you can perhaps begin to understand how desperately i was searching for some sort of relief for the pain in my head when i tell you that the ingredients for tomato tea are:
1 cup of tomato juice (i used V-8)
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon tabasco sauce
pinch of celery salt

heat it up and drink it down. to be honest, i couldn't taste a single thing. and it didn't help the congestion at all.

the medicine is making me feel slightly better, but i do still have a fierce pounding in my left cheek- just some pulsating snot waiting to be expelled.

jake helps by licking snot off my hand

i'm hiding my face because my nose is embarrassingly red and i have a piece of tissue crammed up my left nostril to catch the constantly dripping mucus.

on the road to recovery

after five near-sleepless nights, three days of missed work, and two full boxes of tissues, accompanied by a constant fear of exposing my immuno-suppressed boyfriend to bird flu or some other horrible disease, i finally decided to go to the doctor's today and find out if there was something other than the common cold going on inside my head. i now have an armada of medications, both prescription and over the counter, to combat a sinus infection and the associated symptoms, mainly an unreasonable volume of snot and a voice that sounds distinctly kim carnes-ish, but less sultry and more phlegmy.

the christmas cactus flowers again

starting the chores on a snowy morning

matt did the brunt of chore work this morning, as i am down with a rotten cold for the third day in a row. this is also my third day off from work, which means i am gradually losing my grasp on any form of mental calendar. is today tuesday? it sure feels like a tuesday. matt has so far not been cursed with this bug and i'm hoping that he will continue to stay healthy. that little immuno-booster shot he gets every other week must actually be doing something.

matt tries to lure jake onto the railroad bridge

"but the sign says do not enter," says jake. "i am not the type of dog to break the law. you'll need to get a rottweiler or a pit bull or a dog like farley for that sort of behavior. i am a border collie/sheltie/flat coated retriever mix and my motto is "live by the rules, die by the rules" unless, of course, those rules involve leaving the cat alone."

i am the lorax, i speak for the geese

and the lorax told me, "don't run all those geese over with your prius."