when shopping for nina

as the holiday season fast approaches, nina would like you all to know that she is hoping for cowboy country sausage. i have made more than one reference to this ridiculously overdone dog treat that i give to my pups, so i thought it might be useful for you to peruse the tantalizing selection of sausages available at merrick's and decide for yourself which one to buy jake and nina for christmas. here is a brief description of the choices:
Cowboy Cookout Sausage - A chuckwagon of vittles (beef)
French Country Cafe Sausage - An explosion of flavor (duck)
Grammy's Pot Pie Sausage - A home-cooked memory (chicken)
New Zealand Summer Sausage - A diverse adventure (lamb)
Thanksgiving Day Dinner Sausage - A year-round feast (turkey)
Venison Holiday Stew Sausage - An expedition of flavor (venison)

chim chim cheree

Up where the smoke is
All billered and curled
'Tween pavement and stars
Is the chimney sweep world
No where is there
A more 'appier crew
Than them wot sings
"Chim chim cher-ee
Chim cher-oo!"
On the chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-ee
Chim cher-oo!

recycling day

i always forget- do cats go with paper or plastics?

happy thanksgiving

we had a smaller thanksgiving celebration this year than we have had in the past. only two generations were represented and neither of those generations were of an age to need careful monitoring at the dinner table or in the game room. the majority of us went for a pre-gorging stroll along the charles.

a surprise visit from the thanksgiving fairy

around noon today, i looked out my office window for the twenty-third time at the little pile of ice that had collected under the edge of the barn roof and finally realized it was way too warm for there to be a pile of ice collected under the barn roof. i went outside to investigate and i saw that the thanksgiving fairy had visited oak knoll, and man was she pissed at us! she went ahead and broke nine windows in the outbuildings and two windows in the main building at oak knoll last night. not content to just make a wee hole using a baseball or a pebble, she smashed the hell out of the windows using logs, boulders, and perhaps some sort of battering ram.

hoping for turducken

from wikipedia: A Turducken is a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are filled with a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat.

giddy-up.

half of nina

nina is 50% italian greyhound, so 50% the same as the dog in this video. cute overload titled this post "complete and total blitzkrieg".

caving under pressure

i didn't think it would be so challenging to do a blog post a day, but that's where i was wrong. this is too much for me. i'm throwing in the towel and going back to my normal system of doing a blog post almost every day.

and speaking of pressure, i have spent the last two weeks trying to hide the fact that i had invited many people over to the house to celebrate matt's birthday. i gave away much of that surprise after a botched conversation with mancini, of which matt could hear only one half. i was so bad at trying to convey the idea, "ok, we'll see you at 6:00 tonight and no, he still doesn't know about the party," in a deceptive-to-matt yet crystal-clear-to-mancini manner that matt figured out most of what was going on (mancini, on the other hand, couldn't quite grasp it and showed up two hours late for the party and for some reason, brought along a thanksgiving turkey, a jar of marbles, a life-sized cardboard cut-out of george h.w. bush, 2 dozen hotdogs, and his uncle charlie). matt also made the whole surprise party with his friends much more difficult to plan by breaking his cell phone into two pieces last weekend. the upper half (containing all the phone numbers) was completely severed from the lower half and ceased to function. operation "pilfer the digits" had to be put on hold until matt went out and purchased a new phone. so if you didn't receive an invite and would have enjoyed attending, blame verizon.

who cooks for you?

you might think that this is another story like the one where i encountered a hideously-ugly fox in the woods, but it turns out, i am not making this one up- this is a real barred owl. still living and breathing and everything, but also one that is part of mass audubon's "audubon ark" traveling animal program. both the owl and i were presenters at the grand opening of LL bean's newest store in mansfield, ma.

awaiting our departure

seriously, can we get going? i mean, this car will not drive itself, and i am ready to go.

empty bat box on a sugar maple

deconstruction

one of the outbuildings at oak knoll has been declared structurally unstable and needs to come down. just so there is no mistaking which building is intended for demolition, our property worker went ahead and labeled it.

inside this building, there are many sets of drawers that the former owner of this property built to hold all his various nuts and bolts and other assorted paraphernalia. the guy clearly had a lot of nuts and bolts and other assorted paraphernalia. i'm currently looking for a new home for approximately six storage units that look like this:

if you're interested in storing something in one of these, and you have the ability to transport it from attleboro to your own facility, please let me know asap. i can't tell you when exactly the building is going to come down, but it is going to come down soon.

a bump in the road

snuggling in the prius

capivated by a potential treat

what could it be? what could it be? bananas? cowboy country sausage? scrambled eggs with cheese? sweet holy moses, could it be cat food?


no such luck, i'm afraid. eric is holding starburst and doggies don't eat starburst (well, they WOULD eat starburst but they didn't get to).

a little scare

jake ate something that didn't agree with him on friday and we were nervous that it was a toxic amount of baking soda. matt spent most of the day cleaning up burrito-sized lumps of vomited-up grass and stuffing from funshine bear before bringing jake to the vet. by the time they got there, jake was feeling much better but the vet still kept him for x-rays and observations and other associated costly measures (including IV fluids) before releasing him later that night. jake now has a bald patch on his front leg to remind us all of this nerve-wracking time.

cruisin' the streets of montpelier in style

what's wrong with my office at 3:45 in the afternoon

the sunlight shines right in my eyes.

paperboy

i taught an afterschool program today for kids aged 6-11. i had been warned that this was a very high-energy group of kids- but honestly, who can blame them? it's a friday afternoon, for crying out loud. what kind of parent signs their kid up for a nature program on friday afternoons? and what kind of nature center leads programs for 6-11 year olds on friday afternoons? what were we thinking?

i took them on a seed scavenger hunt and they were pretty spastic, running around and screaming and yelling senseless stuff and not really focusing on the task at hand, which was supposed to be finding seeds. i saw this one boy named matt hanging on to a low limb of a white pine tree. the branch was probably three inches in diameter and matt probably weighed all of 40 some pounds, so i wasn't really at all worried about it, but suddenly the branch broke and fell on matt, pinning him to the ground. the little twigs formed a cage that kept him prostrate, even more so than the weight of the branch. i went over and lifted the branch off and checked out the small scratch along matt's nose (i guess we should all feel lucky that nothing poked him in the eye). we called an end to the search headed inside to further assess matt's injuries and a few minutes later he came up to me and said, "miss sarah, remember when that tree fell on me? well, when i was on the ground, i got this seed stuck in my hair." and i thought the kid wasn't focused.

when i got home and told matt the story, he recalled this scene from "while you were sleeping," one of my favorite moments in any movie ever.

the third dog that matt says we can't get

look at this beautiful great dane mix named dwight. he's at save-a-dog, if anyone is interested. apparently, three is an irrational number of dogs for two people to own.

also, matt is creeped out by dwight's ice blue eyes.

first attempt at a christmas photo

lucky thing we still have some time to get this right.

when we're gone

tomorrow night, i'm leading a discussion about the book, "the world without us" at the holliston public library. not having participated in a book discussion since college and never having led a book discussion, and not really having fully "read" the book, i'm trying to piece together some highlights from the text via google. turns out, the book's author was the guest on the daily show. perfect- if anyone knows how to lead a discussion of a book, it's john stewart.

that wasn't as helpful as i hoped it would be, especially since i then proceeded to waste another 38 minutes watching other john stewart clips, having not previously realized just how readily available they are. one thing i am definitely going to do is show a series of images of how new york city would change if all the people disappeared. you can check it out on the book's website. and then i'll show them the john stewart clip and call it a night.

pretty pennies

Old Shoes (and Picture Postcards) by Tom Waits

I'm singing this song, it's time it was sung
I've been putting it off for a
while,
But it's harder by now, 'cause the truth is so clear
That I cry
when I'm seeing you smile.
So goodbye, so long, the road calls me
dear
And your tears cannot bind me anymore,
And farewell to the girl with
the sun in her eyes
Can I kiss you, and then I'll be gone.

Every time
that I tried to tell
that we'd lost the magic we had at the start,
I
would weep my heart when I looked in your eyes
And I searched once again for
the spark.
So goodbye, so long, the road calls me dear
And your tears
cannot bind me anymore,
And farewell to the girl with the sun in her
eyes
Can I kiss you, and then I'll be gone.

I can see by your eyes,
it's time now to go
So I'll leave you to cry in the rain,
Though I held
in my hand, the key to all joy
Honey my heart was not born to be
tamed.
So goodbye, so long, the road calls me dear
And your tears cannot
bind me anymore,
And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes
Can I
kiss you, and then I'll be gone.
Can I kiss
you, and then I'll be gone,
can I kiss you, and then I'll be gone.

fetch

because there might not be time later tonight

i have big things planned for my next blog post, but it might not be ready until tomorrow. therefore, you will have to gaze upon "beech tree in the spotlight" and wait for better things to come.

how you like me now, nablopomo?

three seasons in three trees

waiting for our wonder-twin powers to activate

the trials of being earl

as the mess on my desk grows larger and more precarious, it becomes more challenging for earl to find a comfortable place to bed down for the afternoon. but somehow, he always manages to create a niche where he can both keep an eye on all proceedings and be at least slightly in the way.

"well, you shouldn't have put the manila folder in my bed if you were going to need something out of it. now you must wait until i am done with my chill-time. hit me back around 4:30pm."

testing their balance

the chief export of chuck norris is pain

it seems everyone has stepped up their blog performance for the month of november. perhaps instead of actually posting anything, i will just wait until the end of each day and say, "oh, hey, did you see the neat post from aaron and julie? or what about the one from jen?"

it turns out that moose belongs to my next-door neighbors at work. he was happily reunited with his family yesterday afternoon. the dog warden kindly suggested that moose be put on a diet. i had fun spending the afternoon with him, although he was a little gassy.

the most bloggable thing that has happened so far today

when i returned from my morning meeting at city hall, this was waiting for me in the parking lot at work:

i named him moose and gave him lots of water and all the dog treats i had in my pockets. i hope matt will let me keep him. but if i do, poor moose will have many months of strict dieting in his future. he's a bit on the portly side. but very friendly- kind of like a canine version of earl the cat.

national blog posting month starts today

an entire month of daily blog postings. hang on to your hats! i have realized already that there is going to be a lot of pressure associated with my commitment to update my blog every day this month. it is something i have done before but i never did it because i was working toward a specific goal or deadline. those of you who know me well know that i tend towards procrastination. i imagine you're going to be seeing a lot of postings submitted at 11:59pm. pacific time.