a perfect ending to a perfect weekend

as part of the closing ceremonies of domenico's visit, we brought him to the first new york system hot weiner restaurant in rhode island. the hot weiner is a hot dog-like substance that, legally, can only be marketed in the ocean state. to make that hot weiner into a new york system hot weiner, they top it with meat sauce- which is similar in appearance to dirt sauce, all you glens falls folks- as well as mustard and onions.


if you order six or more hot weiners, they are served "up da arm," as the proprietor demonstrates. i didn't take this picture, as domenico and matt only ordered one weiner each, and i wasn't about to order the other four.

horseneck beach

our second-to-last adventure with domenico brought us to the edge of the atlantic ocean. we had such beautiful weather, although temperatures in the 80's in natick equated to temps in the 50's at the beach. we bundled right up, but there were many brave souls pretending it truly was summer- look at that guy all greased up and lying there in swim trunks! we also saw a few people swimming, despite the fact that i thought the water was too cold to even touch.

a backlit photo of matt and jake

a visit from skunk

hello, baby goat! welcome to our apartment.

check out this awesome stuff we have in the closet. maybe you'd like to chew on some of it?

meet our dog, jake. he would like to sniff you.

you can hide behind domenico if you get scared.

although that broom looks delicious, you probably shouldn't eat it.

well, thanks for visiting, baby goat! come back again soon.

a nice present for domenico

because, after all, we got these tickets "for domenico." the red sox dedicated their win to the guy visiting from california sitting in the bleachers.

matt and that other guy in the red check the stats

although our seats were about three-quarters of a mile from home plate, the view was pretty nice. however, one drawback of the bleacher seats is that you need to turn around to see the instant replays and player statistics.

johnny damon will never be forgiven

i thought he was supposed to be pitching

much to my surprise, curt schilling was sitting right in front of us. he looks a lot different in person than he does on TV.

what a game!

for those of you who called it night when the yankees were up 6-2, the red sox scored 5 runs in the eighth to win it 7-6. matt was mildly disappointed that he didn't get to see david ortiz hit a walk-off home run, but i told him a 5-run come-from-behind victory is pretty darn exciting and he shouldn't kick a gift horse in the butt.

or look one in the eye. whatever.

we were all in the bathroom in the fourth when jason varitek hit a two-run homer to tie the game. it was kind of like that one time, when i was a little kid and we went to a john denver concert and my favorite song in the world was "grandma's featherbed" and i was waiting in line for the bathroom when he started to play it. mom stood in line for me so i could go outside and listen, but it just wasn't the same as being in our seats. the five runs in the eighth made up for the missed homer- we got to see all of those.

it was nine feet high, six feet wide, soft as a downy chick. it was made from the feathers of four eleven (?) geese, took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick. it could hold eight kids and four hound dogs and a piggy we stole from the shed. didn't get much sleep but we had a lot of fun on grandma's featherbed.

my knee

i had an MRI done of my left knee today. although the swelling has gone down a lot, i still can't bend it very far and i still walk in an uncomfortable, awkward crooked-type fashion. unfortunately, the soonest i can get in to see an orthopedist is may 2. i imagine things should be mostly better by then. however, if any orthopedists are checking this blog and are able to tell from the following video if i have done something serious to my knee, please let me know as soon as possible. thanks.

score!

i didn't recall ordering a giant box of now and laters, but one arrived at oak knoll today.

actually, nasco, an art supply company, uses now and later wrappers as packaging. i guess they finally gave up on selling them, and used the wrappers for packaging and the candy for some sort of industrial adhesive.

rough morning

i had quite an adventure this morning, which did not at the time, and still does not, seem funny to me, but upon contemplation, i realized that some of you might be entertained by a description of the situation.

because it is a holiday here in massachusetts (patriots day, AKA the only thing good about this state besides the red sox), matt and i are responsible for doing the chores at the farm. and matt went out of town, leaving me alone, but i assured him i had total control of the situation, despite my uneven knees.

so i bundled myself up in complete waterproof gear to brave the monsoon and headed out with jake and nina to feed the animals. everything was going rather smoothly and i was making pretty good time, despite my inability to bend or put my full weight on my left leg. and then i got to the pigs.

it would be safe for you to assume that a story involving bad things about the pigs would focus on boris, but this time it was one of the sows, betty, who barrelled right past me and out of the pigpen when i opened the gate to bring them their food. so now, here i am, with a gimpy leg, in the pouring rain, having to chase a creature who is the biomass equivalent of three of me and who simply does not want to return to her pen (in the pig's defense, i wouldn't want to return to that pen either. there was over a foot of standing water outside their little pig shack and the whole place is disgusting. but still- she's a pig. she's supposed to love that!).

i hobbled after her as she trotted happily down the lane between all the barns and sheds. i was carrying a bucket of grain and hoping to tempt her back into her pen. and then, both the pig and i noticed a soaked little black creature standing in her path- jake the dog. my first thought was, hurray! jake is a herding dog. he'll help me get the pig back. but then i remembered the boris bite. and i realized this pig, which outweighs me by a factor of three, outweighs my little black dog by a factor of eight. i was terrified that the pig was going to eat my dog.

so now i picked up a big stick and started poking the pig with it and screaming at jake at the same time to get away. jake was confused- he loves other animals and really wanted the opportunity to spend some time getting to know the pig. and i was holding a stick- did that mean there was soon to be some fetching going on? jake kept running perilously close to the pig, i kept screaming and poking the pig with a stick and trying to limp ferociously in her direction in order to encourage her to return to her sodden pen.

and then the pig freaked out- started kicking her back legs and bucking like a bronco, grunting and oinking and, i am pretty sure, trying to figure out how to eat my dog. so i turned my attention to jake and finally slapped his bottom to get him away from the pig. jake then announced his retirement from the presidency of the "sarah is my favorite human" club, effective immediately, and took off.

by this point, tears are mingling with rain on my face and i am starting to get hoarse from yelling at the pig and my dog and i am seeing no way out of this situation. i am not strong enough to make the pig go anywhere and, although i feel like i am fast approaching the point, i am not currently mean enough to make the pig go anywhere so we are just going wherever the pig wants to go, her rooting at the ground, looking for food, and me limping along beside her, futilely poking her with the stick and trying not to totally freak out. what could i do? i couldn't go inside and call someone, because who knew what the pig would do if i stopped poking her menancingly? and who could get there fast enough to help me get the pig back inside?

i was cursing jake for being a bad herder, matt for leaving me alone with the chores, and myself for opening the gate to the pigpen, and then, up charges nina. nina, whose whole head is smaller than the pig's mud-covered snout. i wish i could tell you that nina saved the day, but she didn't. she just made me even more scared and upset, because i can't even calculate the fraction of the pig's total bulk represented by the littlest dog. i wanted to give up and lie down and really let lose with a good bout of sobbing, but i remembered reading that if you ever were to fall asleep in a pig pen, the pigs would eat you alive within a day.

stay with me, people- i am almost to the anti-climatic finish.

i practically threw nina out of way, but she just kept coming back, thinking this game was even better than fetch. she also really hadn't had a chance to get a good sniff of the pig's butt and didn't want to leave the scene until that happened. i finally threw the stick instead of the dog, and she went charging after it, oblivious to the panic i was in.

there's not much left of the story now- really just me slapping the pig on the bottom, occasionally leaning on her with all my weight or nudging her enormous head with my shoulder, and first yelling, then openly pleading with her to go back into her pen. and then finally, i realized maybe i could just convince her to go into another pasture instead of the waterlogged pig enclosure. she trotted right in behind me as i carried the bucket of food into a less soggy pen. disaster narrowly averted.

and i think perhaps all the exercise was good for my knee. it is feeling much better this afternoon.

both my knees

these are my knees 23 hours after my soccer game yesterday. i don't have a "before" picture, but i think it is pretty safe to say that the two knees were similar in appearance up until the second half of that game. then i twisted one of them and now i have a mismatched pair.

matt extracts the queen

matt struggles with his beekeeper's gear

it seems like the three pounds of bees (minus a few casualities) have settled in nicely to their new home at the farm. i bet they would appreciate some warmer weather. i hate to wish for that, because i'm no fan of summer, but this spring is feeling pretty chilly.

i went ahead and let the cat out of the bag

yeah, that's right. three tickets to the very first red sox/yankees game of the season at fenway. i'm taking jake and nina. i thought about going with earl and his remaining three lives, but i couldn't afford seats for each of them.

april fools!

i am sure the merry pranksters have been disappointed that i have neglected to mention that a chicken was discovered in our bathtub on april 1. it was funny at the time. and then it became even funnier when, every time i went into the bathroom during the next two days, i checked the tub just to make sure that no other animals were in there. sometimes i still get nervous and take a quick peek behind the curtain before i pee.

studying the new bees

ding dong the witch is dead

it seems i have been so caught up with baby animals and vernal pools that i have forgotten to blog about the biggest news in our lives- matt is done with chemo! totally done. so done that they are taking out his port-a-cath on monday. it has been six weeks since his last treatment and matt is feeling great. his appetite is back and better than ever and he has developed a much deeper appreciation for the humor contained within everything jake and nina do. chew the dickens out of the bathroom rug? good one. jump on the couch with muddy paws? pretty funny. wake him up at 6:18 by licking his ear over and over again? entertaining. eat compost out of the bucket downstairs? hilarious!


matt has also been hard at work filling in for the web manager at mass audubon. he started volunteering there a few weeks ago and is now single-handedly maintaining the organization's website. because he is so powerful, he can pick and choose which pictures to post. check out this page featuring some enviro-friendly folks installing insulation! or this one of people uniting for climate change.

baby goats get in line to meet their new friend nina

the spotted turtle makes her annual appearance (sort of)

scare tactics

i taught a program on "signs of spring" at a local elementary school today. in this photo, i am threatening to eat the next child that tries to tell a story. despite the fact that i told them 16 times, "if you have a story that you want to tell, please save it for the end of the program," they kept raising their hands and i would say, "ok, do you have a question or do you have a story?" and they would say, "a question." and then they would say, "once..." and i would cut them off right there because there is not a single question in the world that starts with that word. i gave the teacher a severe talking-to for not teaching her students the difference between a question and a story. i am just kidding about that. but i am not kidding about this- one particularly savvy first grader raised his hand and said this: "did you know that once, i had a garden snake, and i accidentally took him for a ride in my giant gator, and he got lost?" well, it was a question. and no, i did not know that.

nina can be a pest

look at jake trying to take a nap on the couch and nina attacking first his foot and then his whole head. poor jake is forced to endure so much. the best part about this is that i have titled the video "nina totenberg is a foot biter." i wonder how many people are searching youtube for videos of the human nina totenberg and finding one of our foot-biting dog.

baby goats can be a pain

our favorite goat snowy had two little kids- one is fine (see evidential video below) and the other was injured during birth. the kid, who is the only non-totally white spawn of gandolf, has trouble standing on her right front leg. because of this, we need to help her nurse a couple times each day, just to make sure she is getting enough nutrition. while i hold snowy and try to take a video, matt patiently helps the little goat find the teat and endures the rambunctious attention of her slightly older, significantly larger, and clearly more spastic brother.