The Hurrieder I Go, the Behinder I Get

"Don't look so happy, Seamus. You're the next one headed for the bathtub."

Sorry, gang. I didn't mean to be away from the blog for so long, but things have just gone from wacky busy to completely freakin' nonstop insane. Some days it's about all I can do to choke out a weak Twitter post (I cannot call them "tweets"; I don't care) or two before sprinting crazily to the next destination and the next task.

Not that it hasn't been more fun than a barrel of Beardies. We survived the local kennel club shows and the associated weather. My camera battery died about halfway during Beardie bitch judging on Saturday, so you'll just have to visit Sue's blog to see photos of the delightful Maine weather (and to congratulate her and Camille on earning two Rally Novice legs there).

I'm also deep-purple-envious of Sue for getting to the NH Sheep and Wool Festival on Saturday. I had entertained notions of going over there today and dragging Dale with me, but I was just so fried after showing on Saturday and driving back late from my friend Daryl's house that I just couldn't move this morning. I never made to the festival or to rally class.

Not that I've been able to knit a single stitch in weeks -- maybe months. Between spending so much time in Second Life and rushing around in First Life, there hasn't been much time left over for just relaxing in front of a movie with the needles. SL has even managed to keep me from buying more yarn, which is probably another reason why Greg likes SL so much!

Guess who else showed up in SL last week: Dale! She's been wandering around with another friend of hers, seeing what she could see. It's nice to run into people you actually know in SL.

Meanwhile, back in RL (Real Life), Daryl had a surprise for me while I visited her down in CT. Her brother-in-law Keith and his wife Mary, both of whom I've known since just about forever, were up visiting from Virginia. They moved down there from the Boston area when the elder of Mary's two sons entered college down that way. I haven't seen them since sometime in the 1990s, so we had a huge amount of catching up to do and rehashing of old war stories. We're all a little grayer and a little heavier, but those two haven't changed a bit. Both of them are now online, so we'll be able to keep in better touch.

Now that the latest work deadline is past and the YCKC show is over, I hope to have a little bit more time to relax and make stuff. I've received my stewarding assignment (my first solo flight) for the Vacationland shows, and the chief steward was kind enough to put me next to the experienced steward who trained me. The Meet the Breeds event has been rescheduled for September in order to coincide with Responsible Dog Ownership Month, so another thing on my to-do list has slipped to a less stressful part of the year.


Fooled Around and Didn't Fall in Love

The company I work for has been redefining which devices are secure enough to work with our email service. Unfortunately, my beloved Blackberry turned out to not be one of them. We Crackberry-addicted employees may still use the devices of our choosing, but we need to pay for a third-party software program-cum-delivery service in order to maintain the requisite degree of security.

With all this in mind, I decided to upgrade to a device on the "approved devices" list when my contract with T-Mobile came up for renewal. I requested a T-Mobile Wing and was assured that I'd have two weeks to experience buyer's remorse.

The Wing was gorgeous -- even more compact than I thought it would be, with a slide-out keyboard, a beauteous display, and Windows Mobile OS. I played around with it, set it up to send and receive corporate email, and even enjoyed Twittering from it.

However, I made it about 48 hours before buyer's remorse set in. The Wing only allows you to set up six email addresses. Six are probably three or four more than most people need, but I have more of them. I was forced to decide which accounts I should check and which I should leave.

Also, I couldn't make that sucker synch with my Mac no matter how hard I tried. Yes, the Mac does boot into XP when necessary, but I am absolutely not going to drop everything in Mac OS and boot into XP just to synch my silly phone. Even ponying up the money for the Windows Mobile Edition of Missing Sync did nothing except cost me the price of the software.

Ah, the Wing was beautiful and I really wanted to love it, but it's headed back to T-Mobile as we speak. All I really wanted was another Crackberry, anyway.

Can the Equinox Be Far Behind?

Now that the snow is beginning to melt, Dinah and Seamus are finding all sorts of buried treasure in the back yard...



What a time for the camera on my cell phone to fink out on me! Last weekend at this time, I was sitting behind the backstop at a spring training baseball game in Phoenix, drinking beer in the sun and cheering for the Cubbies. (They lost in the bottom of the 9th.) Because I'd decided to travel light (and thus, not lose my luggage for a change!), I'd left my camera here at home. I figured that the one on my cell phone could do the honors... but no. It failed. Here I'd been hoping to capture some shots of saguaro cactus, red rocks, and baseball in the sunshine to brighten up my miserable, wintry blog.

Ah, but it was freakin' sweet while it lasted. Spring training has been a sorta-biannual tradition for some years now. My friend Lise, a fellow Sox fan, and I get sick of winter at roughly about the same time, and we agree to converge on Scottsdale to visit mutual friends of ours who live there. Liz and Jim aren't into baseball, but they graciously allow us to crash at their place and soak up some sunshine for a weekend. We all get together in the evenings for dinner and to spoil their two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. (I'm not a small-dog person, but I LOVE Cavaliers. If I ever did have small dogs, I'd have them.)

We were just there long enough to get used to relaxing in the sunshine. We saw two ball games: Giants vs. As and Cubbies vs. As, in two different ballparks. We wore sunglasses, drank beer, and cheered.

Will the Real Maine Maple Sunday Please Stand Up?

Maine Maple Sunday is one of my favorite days of the year. It comes as a sign of hope that winter is on its way out, the sap is rising in the trees, and that spring is just around the corner.

Traditionally, this day falls on the fourth Sunday in March. Unfortunately, for the past few years, the fourth Sunday in March also turns out to be Easter Sunday. Some farmers want the day off, and some want to stay open. Some sugar producers decide to open for both weekends, since many of them derive most of their year's income from Maple Sunday sales.

Greg and I did our Maple Sunday rambling yesterday, since the weather was relatively nice and we didn't have any holiday obligations. I looked forward to the maple cotton candy, maple hot dogs, maple baked beans, and maple whoopie pies -- but by the time we got to the farms, they had all run out of food. They did offer us samples of vanilla ice cream with maple syrup and some pretzels with maple cream, anyway. I'm glad for them that they had so much business, considering that some of them will want to close for Easter.

The Man's Ticket to Tune Town

Greg has been spending Saturday mornings over at church, accompanying some of the singers and instrumentalists who were putting on a concert to raise funds for the church's youth group activities. He allowed himself to be talked into playing, but didn't have time to practice the piece he really wanted to do, Ben Folds's "Philosophy." He decided at the last minute to work up "Bohemian Rhapsody", with "You Get What You Give" for a possible encore.

He ended up playing both. Turns out that the concert was also a "Battle of the Bands," and Greg -- to his surprise -- came in third. He won a $15 gift certificate to Tune Town. Not bad for a day's work.

He has just found out that his two NYC concerts have been moved. One piece (the four-part choral work) is now the first piece of the first concert in the series. The second piece appears in the second concert, along with a work from a friend of his from the composers' forum in Eugene a few years ago. Of course we'll figure out a way for both of us to go, and of course I'm bringing knitting.

Speaking of Knitting...

The watch cap factory is up and running at full productivity, such as it is. I've finally hit on something that Greg likes and will use, so I'm sticking with a good thing for now. Cap #4 is on the needles now, and I have some skeins lying around that will eventually become #5 and #6 (and maybe even #7).

I also sneaked in another scarf for Susannah out of some fantastic reddish-bronze ribbon yarn I picked up at Marden's. If the label hasn't disappeared into the black hole in the living room (apparently we have one in every room), I'll have to dig it out and identify the yarn. It's pretty, anyway.

Time for some more doggie shots...

I like to call this one "Glamour Girl Meets Punk-Haired Boy."




Tug of War, take 2:

Concerto for Nose Honk and Tissue Box

Well, it's time to make the annual announcement: I'm officially Sick of Winter. This is true in both the figurative and the literal senses, since I'm still struggling to throw off the last remnants of a nasty virus that not only hit me once already, but backed up and ran over me again. The paper industry has me to thank for single-handedly increasing sales of facial tissues for this month.

Since I can no longer stand the sight of cold and snow, I finally cracked and bought myself a ticket to Phoenix for the first weekend in March. Every other year or so, my girlfriend Lise (a fellow Sox fan) and I escape winter in our respective areas by meeting at the home of a mutual friend of ours out in Scottsdale, Arizona. We enjoy the sunshine, watch the Cubbies in spring training, wear shades, and drink beer in the bleachers with all of the congenial snowbird Cubs fans who have also converged on Ho-Ho-Kam Park to escape winter back home for a while.

Why don't we go to Florida to see the Sox? Because Liz lives in Arizona, and we get to visit her while we're out west. We don't even know anybody in that part of Florida.

Alphabet Soup

A few weeks ago, I received my certification as an AKC Canine Good Citizen Evaluator. You may now call me Tester #35219 for short. Sue and Judy, my rally instructor, both graciously allowed me to use them as references. Thanks to them, I'm now official!

It sure didn't take long before my newly acquired services were needed. One of the reasons why I became a CGC tester was to help the POC instructors with the "final exams" in their CGC classes. (Instructors may not test their own students; thus the need for an outside tester.) I'll be helping Sue with one of her classes in April -- that's my very first assignment as a CGC tester. I've also been asked to offer the test at the New England Old English Sheepdog Rescue picnic in mid-June.

More Alphabet Soup

This week, I received my membership materials from the Dog Writers' Association of America. One of my rally classmates has been a longtime member, and she suggested a while ago that I join. She and a Beardie buddy both sponsored me into the group. I am now a card-carrying member of the dog press -- literally -- and a pin-wearing one, too! (DWAA sent me a very nice logo pin that also says PRESS across it.)

Why did I wait so long? Although I've been writing reams and piles and miles of prose for my Web sites since the mid-'90s and started blogging in 2004, I've always been strictly a "new media" writer. I didn't feel I had a legitimate place alongside the trained journalists and other more "traditional media" folks. Now that I write the occasional piece for one local print publication and am about to contribute to an online edition of another paper, I finally have some traditional print "clips" to add to my portfolio. I sent a copy of my very first article on the CGC test for Downeast Dog News, plus printouts of posts from this blog and my other blog.

Some years ago, one of my college friends asked me why I never wrote a book. "I have nothing to say," I told her. Wouldn't say that was exactly the case these days--!!

And In Music News...

Greg is pleased that two of his songs will be performed in New York in June at the ACA Festival of New American Music. I forget which one will be performed on which program, but his works get to appear in two concerts this year. April is a song for SATB chorus and soloists plus piano. The Waking is scored for solo voice (mezzo-soprano or baritone) and piano, and I think the soloist for this performance is a soprano. The NYC concert is the world premiere for The Waking. April was first premiered in Boston a couple of years ago, but this performance is its New York premiere.

The best part about this year's programs is that both of the concerts with his songs occur early in that week, when the press is most likely to be present to review the works. Greg's had pieces in the ACA festival for several years now, but they have almost all taken place at the end of the week, when none of the music reviewers are around. He's hoping that maybe a reviewer from the New York Times, or even the New Yorker magazine might come to one of the concerts and include a review of one (or maybe even both) of his pieces. (Yes, I'm a member of the press now, but I don't count. It's unlikely that Downeast Dog News would be overly interested in a music critique.)

Well, At Least We Didn't Go Home Empty-Handed

In retrospect, it might have been a less-than-sane thing to do, but Dinah and I entered the EMAC CPE trial in Manchester, ME a couple of weeks ago.

We aren't really ready for prime time as far as our agility skills are concerned. Whenever I begin showing in any new performance venue I get stage fright, tense up, and am an absolute stumblebum of a handler. My commands are off, my sense of timing is warped, and it's all my poor dog can do to figure out what I want. I do work through that given enough time, but it's rough going at first when you're as coordination-challenged as I am.

Our main objective was to get Dinah to experience the trial environment. Since she's a show dog, she's used to barking dogs, hanging out in a crate, and all manner of noise and confusion at dog events. I wanted her to be similarly used to the sounds at an agility trial: banging teeters, more barking dogs, wild applause, and all that. Dinah didn't even blink.

As for me, I was still coming off a raging head cold left for me by the flu monster that's been smacking me around this winter. It's really quite amazing how important a regular air supply is when you're running around a course! We ended up with three NTs (time disqualifications) and one NQ with time faults, simply because I couldn't get out of my own way and my handling was just appalling.

We did get a first-place ribbon for our one NQ run, for what it's worth. We were the best non-qualifying run in our jump height class. A leg would have been nice, but at least we got a souvenir.

At Least It Was Inspirational

Did I mention how miserably frickin' COLD it was at the trial? It was ONE lonely, wretched degree out in the early mornings when we came in, and the arena was unheated. About the only time I was comfortable was while I was running (and gasping) on the course. You could spot the handknitters in the crowd, since they were the ones sporting the best and warmest wool hats and mittens. A Sheltie person I knew lifted the cuffs of her jeans so I could admire the hand-knitted socks a friend had made for her (out of one of the Regia yarns. I have a couple of balls of that pattern in my stash, so I'd know it anywhere.) Another woman sported a chullo hat with earflaps, for which she'd spun her own yarn. I even met a couple of people from Ravelry when I pulled out a sock and started to work on it during a long wait between runs. People huddled under quilts and blankets until their turn to run came. I ran score sheets for some of the runs just so I could keep moving.

Everyone was so helpful and congenial, though -- I can't wait until we're good enough to come back and collect some Qs! In the meantime, I've been scheming about an entire wardrobe of knitted survival gear: maybe a chullo hat with some agility motifs on it, flip-top mittens, sweaters, and definitely more socks.

Happy ROO Year!

Seamus wants to wish everyone a Happy ROO Year!

He says ROO when he's happy or excited about something, and that includes fresh snow. Sure, he likes to romp in it as much as the next Beardie, but he also maintains that it's not just for breakfast any more.

Enough Already!

Yeah, we got our White Christmas, and our White Boxing Day, and our White Every Other Freakin' Day This Season. I think it probably snowed more days this week than not -- or maybe it just seems that way. Seamus and Dinah have three or four storms' worth of buried toys out there in the snow now -- those suckers aren't going to see the daylight again for a long while!

Heard on the radio that this past snow (the one two days ago, not the one today) set a new record in Boston for snowiest December. Ha! You call this snowy? We eat snow like this for breakfast every morning! Apparently it's only the third snowiest December in the Portland area.

I do feel bad for my across-the-street neighbor, though. The poor man came back from a winter in Florida this past spring just in time to get bombarded with snow. Now, although he really did plan to stick around this latitude until after the holidays, he'll be lucky if he can dig out the camper and get south before the next storm gets in the way.

I have only this to say about all the frickin' snow: At least it's not ice.

The Fudge is Strong in This One

Ever since he was just a little brown puppy, I've referred to Charlie as my "little piece of fudge", especially when admiring his handsome brown fudgy nose and his fudgy brown feet. He is handsome, and he does know it.

Charlie has always kept to his own schedule for things and made his own choices. He didn't care for doggie performance sports, even though he humored me by trying all of them with me when he was younger. We went only because I liked sports, though, and he made that clear by showing the most enthusiasm when he knew class was just about over. Over the years, he has continued to learn things on his own time, and in his own way.

When we had the doggie door installed, Dinah was letting herself in and out within ten minutes. Seamus needed a little more coaching, but soon picked up on the concept. He'll still stick his nose in or out a few times before deciding which side of the door he wants to be on, but eventually, he does decide.

As for Charlie, he was sensitive to the idea of having the rubber flap swinging in his face, especially if he tried to follow one of the other dogs out through the dog door. He'd stand or sit in front of the door, and I swear he wrinkled his forehead in concentration as he figured out how to use the door. He wouldn't go out or come in without me holding the door open a crack, so he could see it was open.

Jokingly, I kept pointing to the door and using Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice on Charlie. "Use the Fudge, Charlie. Uuuuuuse the fuuuudge." What I meant was for him to employ that fudgy nose to nudge the door flap open, and then he could let himself in or out.

For whatever reason, he got it. Now "Use the Fudge" has become an actual command to him, and he will nudge the door on command! Seamus and Dinah, who don't have fudgy noses, still just let themselves in and out at will.

Turbo Holidays

The holidays whooshed past before we had a chance to blink, but I think they were pretty good. Usually I pay at least lip service to the holidays by getting wreaths up on the front door and on the barn, but I didn't even manage that this year.

On Christmas Eve, I made my annual appearance in church (in a skirt, no less!) to hear Greg play and conduct the choir. The service was packed -- standing room only -- and I heard from more than one parishioner that if only the same number of people came on Sunday, then the church's money worries would probably be a thing of the past.

We had been hoping to grab a quick dinner at the Kennebunk Inn again this year, but the kitchen had closed at 8 PM and we arrived at 8:15. We'll go back again sometime, though. We ended up at the one restaurant on Route 1 that was open after 8 on Christmas Eve: a combination Chinese/Japanese restaurant. I'm usually leery of combo-Asian restaurants... but Greg's sesame chicken and my unagi-don were both pretty danged good. I'd go back.

Christmas Day was blessedly clear, so the annual pilgrimage to the hometown wasn't bad -- just long. The twins received lots of musical instruments this year, so they and Uncle Greg had a wonderfully raucous time playing all of them. I almost had to forcibly separate him from the electronic guitar that played all manner of wicked riffs when you pushed each button or combination of buttons. We ate, we laughed, we all played the electronic guitar... all in all, it was a good time.

I'm glad I've had the week off between Christmas and New Year's, though. I needed a couple of days just to recuperate!

We also hit my local kennel club's holiday party on Saturday evening and had a great (and highly caloric) time. Everyone dispersed in time to get home and watch the kickoff for the Patriots game -- well, except us. We're loyal members of Red Sox Nation, and we're happy when any Boston team rocks the house, but we don't generally make a habit of watching football games on TV. Maybe I should have, since this was a historic occasion, but I did sneak off to the team's Web site to check the score.

If Only Life Were This Easy

By far, the world's Most Rockingest Christmas Gift Ever is the TomTom GPS my brother and sister-in-law gave us. I'd been lusting for a GPS for ages, and just couldn't part with the bucks to buy one -- so imagine how tickled I was to pull one out of a gift bag on Christmas Day! For me, this is almost the equivalent of the legendary Red Ryder BB Gun, without the possibility of shooting your eye out.

I've since discovered that you can even download custom voices for your TomTom, in case you get bored with the preinstalled ones. For $10 or so, you can even get John Cleese to tell you where to go. I downloaded a couple of free voices, including Sean Connery ("You have now reached your destination. Shaken, not stirred.") and Homer Simpson ("You have now reached your destination. If only life were this easy.").

Most of the time, the direction commands given by the voices are pretty straightforward: "Turn left." "After 400 yards, turn right, and then get onto the motorway." Greg and I just about howled when the route planning software asked whether we wanted to avoid toll roads where we were driving. The query is, "Do you want to avoid congestion charges?". Homer, however, said, "Congestion charge? Congestion charge, my ass!" We laughed so hard we almost choked. Beats shooting your eye out.

I also downloaded a couple of software updates that locate Dunkin' Donuts and Tim Horton's throughout the US and Canada. I'm waiting for Homer to come out with, "Mmmmmmm, donuts."

My Own Personal Media Blitz

A few days ago, the publisher from Downeast Dog News called me to let me know that my Q&A-style article on the AKC Canine Good Citizen test will be printed in the January issue. I'm working on another article on a favorite subject: obedience clubs. Dale and Sue will probably be able to offer me some insights into that particular subject, methinks. If I can get the whole piece together in time, it'll probably appear in the March edition.

Even though I haven't had much of a chance to update my Dog Show Newbie blogin a while, I've had the pleasure of hearing from some of the nice folks I met while I was doing my newbie tour of the Bay Colony Dog Show. The owner of the PR firm says she loved the article, and she's more than welcome to repurpose it for this year's shows if she wants to. She was also kind enough to introduce me online to Monica, the Dog Lady of Ask Dog Lady fame. Monica and her Web site are both a hoot and a half. (That adds up to three hoots altogether.) Lisa Peterson, Director of Club Communications for the AKC emailed me to say she enjoyed the blog posting, and to say that she used to show against my cousin Marie in the Norwegian Elkhound ring. Small world, isn't it?

Finally, Some Knitting Progress

Maybe I should thank the weather gods for making it impossible to do a heck of a lot outdoors this month aside from shoveling. It does mean that I've made quite a bit of progress on various of my knitting projects. I finished Susannah's organic cotton scarf, have almost closed the toe of the first of Jody's Jawoll socks, and have even started a couple of knitted hats for Greg. (Hey, he asked -- and that's cool enough for me.)

Susannah gave me knitting books from my Amazon wish list for Christmas (Thanks, Susannah!)! She gave me Jackie Fee's Sweater Workshop, which I'm hoping to get inscribed at the SPA Knit & Spin in Portland this year. Even cooler than a blue moose, she gave me the Vogue Ultimate Sock Book. I must knit all of the sock patterns from the magazine that appear in the book, except maybe the "sockies" (ugh). I know better than to make that a New Year's resolution, but it would be nice to come back to this blog in December 2008 and say, "There. I did all that."

Man Paradise: the Return, Plus Snow and Stuff

Things have been flat-out crazy busy (again) of late, what with work deadlines, club stuff, class stuff, holiday stuff, and stuff stuff. Greg actually came home on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, but it's taken me this long to carve out enough time to just sit down and write.

Bless him, he even brought me a present: a robin's-egg blue T-shirt from Crazy Woman Mountain that says (no surprise there) Crazy Woman. He was a bit hesitant to give it to me because he wasn't sure whether I'd laugh, but I can't wait for the weather to warm up so I can wear it. If I have to go around advertising myself as a Crazy Woman, I want to do so in style.

Greg promises to go through his Wyoming photos and share a few with the blog. In the meantime, here are a few photos of the pups from the snowstorm we had last Monday. Here's Dinah enjoying the snow:





Charlie took the opportunity to survey his domain, as a good monarch should...



Taking My Act on the Road

If you've already read this in my other blog, feel free to skip this section. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by the owner of the public relations firm that does publicity for the Bay Colony Dog Show cluster down in Boston. Turns out she reads the blog, and was wondering if I'd go down to Boston and blog about the show for a day. The Boston shows attract quite a large number of visitors, so I composed a newbie's-eye view of the goings-on and posted it to Dog Show Newbie. Eventually, I hope to supplement the first article with a first-person account of my dogless adventures at the show.

At the show, I had a chance to talk for a while with the judge who got to witness Seamus's famous premiere performance in Advanced Rally -- the one in which I sang coloratura. Bless her heart, she either has seen so many such performances she didn't remember ours as being different, or she was very gracious in saying she didn't remember. At least I'm glad (and grateful to her) that I don't have to be embarrassed to show my face around her ever again. Seamus is still mighty famous, but sometimes I get to travel incognito.

Wool Season

Now that winter has dropped out of the sky onto us and appears to have no intentions of leaving for a few months, it's definitely time to dust off the old needles and try to get some stuff done. I have long ago abandoned any pretense that I can reliably complete anything homemade in time for Christmas, but I can usually hit the same season if given a running head start.

I've been doing a lot of "idiot knitting" lately, just because I've been too burned out after chasing work deadlines to do anything that requires even the minutest shred of gray matter. I've completed a scarf for Susannah in black Berroco Bling Bling, and am about 2/3 of the way through another scarf in some lavender boucle something-or-other from my stash.

The front of my Seacolors tunic sweater also qualifies as "idiot knitting," and I've made a teensy bit of progress there, too. I brought it along with me to a couple of dog shows in November. Since this sweater is for myself, it doesn't really matter when I finish it -- though it would be nice if I did it sometime before next July.

Jody's Jawoll socks are still in process. I'm almost done with Sock #1. With a little more time and a little less stress, I should be able to dispatch the foot on that sock and get to the next one fairly quickly.

My company shuts down every year between Christmas and New Year's, so (almost) all of us get the week off whether we want it or not. Although I never would have chosen that week for vacation, I've found over the years that I really look forward to having a week off to recuperate from the stresses of the holiday season, plus whatever wacky stuff I was doing at work before the holiday shutdown came around. I'd sure like to make some progress knitting during that week. I have some Encore worsted that I'd like to turn into some hats and mittens for the twins, plus I'd like to open up the thrummed mittens kit I picked up from Amy at Spunky Eclectic a while ago. A vacation week is a good time to pull apart some bits of roving for thrums and get organized.

At Least My Dogs Have Class

I make no secret of the fact that I despise winter -- the cold, the short days, the crappy weather. I'd be lying if I didn't confess that I've been looking forward to doing a little hibernating this season, though. Since Dinah and I are taking a break from dog showing between Thanksgiving and Easter, we now have a chance to go back to classes and learn some fun things.

I'm very proud of the progress Dinah is making in agility. She still is a little iffy on the weave poles, but she's been happily practicing the teeter and can bang it with the best of them. Cindy, her instructor, declared, "She OWNS that teeter!". Class is on hiatus until the new year, but I'm hoping she still owns the teeter when we get back. Seamus starts another agility class in January, too. It's been a long while for him, since we had to abandon weekend agility classes during the show season. He and I both could use the exercise.

I own a couple of jumps, some weave poles, and a brandy-new agility tunnel that I picked up at the Springfield dog shows. My friend Fran has offered me her old agility equipment, once she unearths it in her barn. Maybe in the spring, I can use some snow fencing to set up a training ring in the yard, and we can do some practicing.

Seamus has always been my "rally-roo" boy, and he's happy to be going back to our Sunday morning rally-roo class. To his credit, he hasn't forgotten much since our last class, and I haven't practiced with him very much at all. Dinah is starting in novice rally-roo. She hasn't had an obedience class in quite a while and has been hearing "Don't sit, stand" from me all show season -- so now she's learning some rally in spite of being a bit behind in the obedience department. The girlie is a pretty quick study, though, and she's beginning to understand that she needs to watch me -- if not always my eyes, then my left hand and knee. Smart girl!

Week of Parties

I have two Christmas parties this week: Thursday's POC Christmas party, and Saturday's BCCME Pre-Christmas Bounce. I've agreed to bring cookies to both -- partly because I'll remember what to bring if I bring the same thing to both parties, and because I can always cheat and buy some at the bakery if I run out of time to bake. Greg said that he wouldn't mind playing Santa at the BCCME party if I can find him a Santa suit, so all the Beardies at the party can get their pictures taken with Santa. I've missed just about every other available chance for photos with Santa this year, which probably comes as a relief to the dogs.

As far as I know, those are the only two parties on Greg's and my holiday schedule until just after Christmas. The local kennel club's holiday get-together is on the 29th. That's about as much festivity as I can handle. I love parties, but general holiday madness makes me want to go find a cave and hibernate until spring.

Dispatches from Man Paradise

I razz Greg all the time about "Man Paradise," which is our nickname for the downstairs family room. Because I rarely go down there, Greg has decorated the place in all his typical manly squalor -- I mean splendor. He has the downstairs TiVo filled to overflowing with reruns of dusty old "Star Trek" episodes (I am the only person in the computer industry who's sick to death of "Star Trek"). The treadmill and exercise bike are set up to accommodate him. Because he'll happily eat the same things every day and likes to water down everything he drinks, I kid him that he takes his gummy microwaved spaghetti and his watered-down water down to Man Paradise every night for his workout.

This explains why I had to squelch a chuckle or two when Greg called from Wyoming yesterday to proclaim that "It's Paradise!" Not that I'm surprised. If you could put together a collection of Greg's favorite things, including mountains and grand pianos, you'd probably get Ucross. This residency is probably going to be the quickest two weeks in his entire life -- but he should be coming home with inspiration enough to last him for at least another year.

He says he took about 100 photos yesterday, and will send me some of the best ones when the network comes back up out there. Apparently the winds knocked something around last night, with the result that Internet access went down. At least the cell phone signal is strong enough to keep in touch.

Meanwhile...

As for the rest of us, we're muddling along. After I dropped Greg off at the airport on Sunday, I did what any red-blooded American woman would do when the Man goes out of town: I went shoe- and yarn-shopping. (Honest, the yarn-shopping part was an accident. I took Route 1 toward Freeport to buy a new pair of moccasin slippers, and the yarn store pulled my car off the road and sucked me in through the door, no matter how hard I struggled to resist. I was forced to buy some of the new Regia sock yarn by Kaffe Fassett, plus some black Berroco Bling Bling for a scarf for Susannah. It was an accident, I tell you!)

My mercantile-therapy excursions haven't stopped there; I stopped over at Lowes to take an in-person look at a storm door I found on their Web site. It's a Larson brand metal storm door that has a large-sized doggie door built right in! That's my idea of Paradise -- no one barking at me to open the door while I'm trying to think (this means you, Charlie Brown). This could mean a whole new level of productivity for me! Isn't technology wonderful? (Hey, Reading Public: I'm eager to hear reviews. If you have one of these doors, could you please leave a comment about it?)

A long time ago, I remember reading an Erma Bombeck column about how much she enjoyed book tours and hotel rooms, because she had the time and the quiet to do things she normally didn't get to do at home, such as paint her toenails in bed. I keep telling myself that these two weeks on my own will be filled with pedicures and bonbons, but really -- who's kidding whom here? I don't even wear toenail polish. I'm thinking I might just take half the junk in the house to the Treasure Chest at the local transfer station before Greg gets back, though.

I took The Lovely One to the beach on Saturday...



Productive People

Sue mentions on her blog that she's learning to spin! Woo hoo! She's been wanting to try it out for a long time, and she was welcomed with open arms at a local spinners' gathering a few months ago.

A bunch of my friends have taken up spinning, including Pam and No-Blog-Rachel. I'm not yet sure whether spinning is for me, even after Pam patiently taught me the basics while she was visiting. I just didn't take to it the way I'd hoped I would. Maybe that's just as well. If I'm having trouble finding room in a 9-room house (with a garage and a barn) to fit a yarn stash, just imagine what the space issues would be like with a roving stash to squeeze in someplace!

I finished the Sockotta socks a little while ago. They please me because I can reliably match up the stripes on the two socks with this yarn, instead of knitting along on faith (as I have with the Trekking and Tofutsies yarns) and come out with two socks that at least show some family resemblance. I'm a bit on the anal side when it comes to making stuff match.

Next on the sock needles: the Jawoll socks in autumnal colors for Jody. The Trekking socks were originally intended for her, but I was so put off by the mismatch in the two socks that I kept this pair and am knitting her another from yarn that won't let me down in the perfection department.

A Rare Day in October

...is one where I'm actually home on a Sunday morning so I can dust the cobwebs off my poor old blog.

If I were a responsible adult, I probably wouldn't be here now, either. Sunday morning is rally-roo day for Seamus and me, and we haven't been to a rally class in months due to dog shows every frickin' weekend since forever. Don't get me wrong. I love dog shows. I love rally class. It's just that sometimes, I love taking a little break even more.

Greg's cousin Dan (actually, his mother's first cousin) and his wife Nancy came to visit from BC for the weekend, and the pups and I just bade them farewell at the door with go-cups of coffee. They're headed over to the church to hear Greg play the organ at the second service, and then they're off to visit Nancy's relatives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. They're the first of Greg's relatives whom I've met, and they're delightful people -- plus they're Golden Retriever folks, so we had plenty in common. We took them out walking on Wells Beach and to the Weathervane for a Maine clambake (using the gift certificate I won a little while back). They and Greg shared stories about the family and old photos, and Greg played piano for them. In addition to the go-cups of coffee, we sent them off with copies of the old photos (courtesy of my scanner and Photoshop) and a CD of some of Greg's more recent pieces. I meant to cook them a proper Danish breakfast, but we ended up at the Maine Diner instead.

Anyway... sloth, glorious sloth. I have to be by myself in some distant locale in order to be able to sleep later than 9 AM any more, but it's still luxurious just to be able to greet the morning at my own pace, armed with a cup of caffeine and a complete lack of an agenda. Oh sure, I have a BCCME Board meeting this afternoon, but the afternoon is still a long ways away.

My busted finger is just about healed, enough so that I've stopped wearing the irritating "buddy tape" on my right ring and pinky fingers. Both fingers are a bit creaky from lack of use, so I have to keep practicing making a fist. At least I can close my right hand now -- a while back, I couldn't even hold on to any coins I received as change unless I did so left-handed.

If You're Ever Hungry in Portland...

Greg's birthday was October 9, already ancient history by this end of the month. His birthday-dinner instructions to me were, "Pick someplace in Portland where we don't usually go." That could be most of the city; I guess we're just creatures of habit. (I should have chosen hot dogs and beer at Hadlock Field, but that would have suited me better than him.)

It's said that Portland has more restaurants per capita now than just about any other city besides San Francisco. I'm not sure whether it's true, or whether they were counting the Mickey Ds along with the fine chef-owned establishments... but no matter. It's easy to be spoiled for choice when looking for a really good restaurant in Portland these days.

We ended up at 288 Fore Street, which (surprise, surprise!) is located at exactly that address, just one block up from the ferry terminal and just outside of the Old Port. The building was a ship's chandlery back in the day, and the interior still features the beams and brick from those days. The kitchen area is situated in the main dining area, and you can enjoy the fires from the brick roasting oven and the roasting spit while you await your meal.

And what a meal it was! Greg opted for a selection of different seafood mini-entrees featuring local crab. (The restaurant makes use of as much locally-grown and raised food as possible.) I opted for the dry-rubbed, spit-roasted pork with locally-made sauerkraut. Veggies and other side dishes are a la carte, so we ordered and split a side of fresh local beets.

What a complete pleasure everything was! The place was a little on the noisy side with a capacity crowd, but it was easy just to lose yourself in the food. Greg and I stole morsels from each other's plates. I'm shocked that we even had room for dessert, but Greg's came dressed with a birthday candle -- and no one was forced to sing.

Reservations are a pretty good idea -- even on a Tuesday, the place was humming -- but the staff does set aside a certain number of tables for last-minute diners. Whether you plan ahead of time or not, just go there sometime.

Dog Stuff

I'll get to Dinah's show news on her blog when I'm done here. Let's just say there's a lot of it to catch up on.

Last Saturday BCCME held a fun match here in my yard. I like to think a good time was had by all, but I'm afraid that probably includes the yellowjackets (like the Bush family, yet another species with no real purpose on earth). Folks inundated us with all manner of treats, from cider and donuts to fresh-picked local apples to birthday cake to cookies to... you get the idea. Greg bundled up a lot of the leftovers and brought them to church the next morning. Everyone had fun at our "practice dog show," and I think we might even have inspired one of the new members to consider showing her new puppy when she gets one.

While all that was going on, Dinah was at the Beardie beauty parlor, getting ready for a show on Sunday. I had to be insane to let myself get talked into driving to New Jersey just for a one-day show, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. That's a story for another blog, though.

Sad to say, Seamus's and my next APDT rally trial, scheduled for next weekend, was cancelled. There were some problems getting the judging panel in order, apparently -- but there will be more trials next year. We might even practice for them ahead of time!

Greg Stuff

I can't believe it's almost November! Greg will be leaving for his residency at Ucross in a couple of weeks. He'll be home just in time for Thanksgiving, hopefully with some good work and some inspiration. By that time, he'll need to start making plans to head to New York for the recording session for the Sax Quartet.

We're still awaiting the master copy of the CD from Prague with the Water Suite on it. Not that Greg's been idle in the meantime. He's finished The Waking (song for voice and piano), and has been messing around with There and Back Again (instrumental for winds and percussion). He also burned a CD of the premiere performance of Clayton's Runaround and sent it, along with a printed and bound copy of the manuscript, to the owner of Clayton Farm in Mabou, NS, where the piece was inspired. (You can see a photo of Greg playing the antique pump organ at the farm here on his Web site.

Knitting Stuff

There hasn't been a heckuva lot of progress to report. Since I shipped off the Tofutsies socks to my sister, I've been putting in occasional moments on the second of the Sockotta socks. I've just about finished the heel turn.

Now that it's fall and my thoughts turn to wool, I hope to get back to the old sticks and string pretty soon. I've meant well -- I've carried my knitting with me everywhere I've gone this season -- but it hasn't really seen the outside of the knitting bag for more than a minute here and a minute there.

Most of the time, my stash lives in the living room on my overstuffed easy chair. Back in the olden days, only a couple of projects lived there and the rest lived downstairs in my work room. Now that the work room is in a complete shambles, all of the knitting projects are crammed into the easy chair, and no one can sit in or anywhere near it. I had to shove everything but the "sock bucket" into the bedroom closet just so our company could sit down someplace in the house. Now that our company has departed, the migration from closet to easy chair will begin again shortly.

Foolish April

Just as the swallows return to Capistrano every year, so do the snowbirds return to Maine every spring. Bless their recently-retired hearts, my snowbird across-the-street neighbors, their Labrador, and their leviathan-class camper returned to the neighborhood yesterday. We didn't have the nicest weather available to greet them, but the husband reported that they were glad to be home again anyway. Kodiak, the Lab, must have thought he would never see Maine again. When he clambered out of the camper into his front yard, he was so happy to see the old homestead that he ran around the yard howling for joy.

I can only imagine what went through our snowbirds' heads this morning when they awoke to their first morning back at home to see this...



...but I won't publish a transcript of what they must have said. This is a family blog, after all.

The Public Has Spoken

I don't know why it's so hard for me to realize that other people actually do read my blog, and that they even check for updates. People actually have called me to ask me if I'm okay because I haven't pubished in a while, and Dale and Sue have been sending emails, wondering what's been up.

The answer: A helluva lot. It's been Deadline Time here at the Baa & Grille, which means I've been spending so much time creating my famed immortal prose for work that the last thing I've wanted to do after work is -- you guessed it -- more writing. I'm happy to announce that after a year's worth of development, my project finally shipped yesterday. I'm taking tomorrow and Friday off to celebrate, and then it'll be time to get started on the next one.

I promise to be more chatty online now that things are a tad quieter at work. I also promise to do something about my desk! At the moment, it looks like the returns counter at Best Buy crossed with an explosion at an office-supply outlet. I have a hard disk here, a wireless print server there, another one over there... all waiting to be installed, and waiting for the piles of papers and documents atop their boxes to find other, more organized homes.

Talk about a busman's holiday -- or at least a geek's holiday: The other thing I've been trying to do in my laughable spare time is to teach myself some more about Web design and its underpinnings. I can drop photos into iWeb with the best of 'em, but my knowledge of the latest tweaks and technologies is dropping far, far behind. It's time to bring myself back from the Stone Age.

Samurai Obedience Handler

Perhaps I'm dating myself when I ask whether you remember John Belushi's old "Samurai" skits from the days when Saturday Night Live was still funny. Of course you do -- pretty much everyone who reads my blog is a baby boomer, and everyone else has DVD players and YouTube. Anyway, whenever something would go wrong and the customer would complain, John Belushi would pull out his trusty wakizashi and commit seppuku on the spot. (Don't get me started about what I think outsourced customer support ought to do!)

Anyway, I'm thinking maybe a wakizashi would make a fine addition to the equipment I take to obedience trials. After Seamus's and my last appearance at the Charles River trial, committing seppuku seemed like the only honorable way out.

The gods have punished me for my hubris. There I was, looking over the trial at the easiest rally course I've ever seen, and thinking we were going to take home all the ribbons in the rainbow. I agonized with my fellow competitors when their dogs didn't respond right away to commands, or if they started to wander, and I was sure that Seamus and I would execute our performance with a precision seen only at military drills or at performances of the Rockettes. (You pick.) When my friend Alison and her Beardie scored "only" an 87, I commiserated, hoping she wouldn't feel too bad when Seamus and I flew through the course with a near-flawless performance. I could have aced that course with my cat. I should have entered with my cat.

Fatal mistake: I forgot to consult Seamus about this. Now, we've been taking rally classes every single Sunday since last May when we completed our RN, hoping to complete our Advanced title this spring before it came time to hit the conformation road with Dinah again. We worked out our bugs at the start line. We practiced our off-lead work again and again and again. I struggled to refine my handwork, my footwork, my posture, my eye contact... everything. We were (I thought) ready.

Honestogod, I never saw it coming. When it came our turn, we lined up at the start. I removed Seamus's lead and handed it to the steward. He held his sit at my heel. His eyes never left mine. The judge, who appeared to be a nice, friendly person as well as the designer of nice, friendly courses, asked, "Are you ready?" I indicated that we indeed were.

"Forward."

Seamus took off as though shot from a circus cannon. He raced around the course, sniffing in all the corners, snarfing the food out of the bowls on the offset Figure 8, jumping on the judge, and dancing around to show all the spectators what fun rally was. He seemed to have completely forgotten all he knew about rally *obedience* -- heck, he completely forgot who I was! I must have gone to fetch him back to heel 20 times for 14 stations, and each time he'd follow me to a station and then take off again.

There are two things you're never supposed to do in the AKC rally ring -- well, three, actually. You get the big "thank you" if you touch your dog, raise your voice, or utter the f*** word even when you need to the most. Since I started my performance "career" in herding, I come from the school of thought that maintains that as long as the clock is still ticking, there's still hope of salvaging a performance on the brink of going wrong. Here's where I should have taken out the wakizashi instead and ended my misery, or at least taken Seamus by the collar and thanked the judge... but noooooo. I actually tried to salvage that performance. I sang to Seamus, and my voice reached a few operatic highs that couldn't quite be construed as raising my voice to my dog... but it sure did wonders for my budding opera career. Stubbornly, I continued around the course, trying to fetch him back to me to perform even one or two of the stations. (We did very well on the jump and the serpentine.) I muttered to myself that someday I would see this as funny. I was careful not to mutter the F word.

Maybe the judge should have given me the hook long before the finish, but she could see that I was trying, anyway. Seamus was very trying.

Finally, we reached the end, where Seamus sat proudly at the exit gate to sympathetic applause. I praised him for at least stopping correctly, gave him a pat and a treat, and then made a hasty departure. Simply disappearing into the air wouldn't have been quick enough for me at that point.

As I carried my camp chair and crate to the car, a friendly-looking woman with a Golden Retriever asked me, "Are you the owner of the Famous Seamus?" I made a motion as though slashing my wrists.

Bless her heart, she went on: "I just want you to know that we've all been there. My first attempt at off-leash handling went pretty much the same way. It will get better."

Then she went on: "But no one will ever forget Famous Seamus. I sure won't."

Neither will I. I've pulled our entries from the two other trials we would have entered this spring, and we're going back to class to do three things to improve our performance: train, train, train.

Wow -- Didja See That Holiday Whiz By?

I can hardly believe it. Here I finally have some time to get ready to celebrate Christmas and it's December 26! The pups are outside enjoying the night air, Greg's napping, and I feel as though I've just been run over by the Christmas bus. Anybody get the license plate number?

Not that we didn't have a good time -- we made the usual pilgrimage to my brother's family's place for the usual feast -- but half the family had a bug that the kids brought home from school, and for the other half of us, the holiday came and went before we were really even ready for it. Because Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday this year, Greg had to play three services at church (I attended the evening service to hear him play). The two of us finally had a chance to have our own Christmas this afternoon. We exchanged a couple of small presents (we're saving our funds for a trip to Italy), sipped pumpkin egg nog laced with rum, and soaked in the hot tub. He toddled off a while back for a nap, and I caught up with a few mundane details.

At least having a little downtime means I have a chance to come back to my poor, lonely, neglected blog. I've been saving news and topics in draft posts, but I haven't turned anything into actual online prose since before Thanksgiving. At least some of the stories I had to tell managed to get told, no thanks to me.

Dale related the story of the POC Christmas party, which has to be experienced to be believed. I am almost disappointed to report that there were far fewer really tacky gag gifts this year, but I ended up with a couple of them. I now possess a lovely figurine of a fire hydrant that I'll treasure for an entire year before wrapping it for next year's party, chuckling evilly all the while.

A Truly Vile Consort

Greg's Consort for Viols was "performed" a couple of weeks ago. I use the quotes because that day was just one of those where absolutely nothing went right. First off, one of the tenor viols showed up to the gig without his music, and Greg had to race all over the Fine Arts building to print another copy from his laptop. Greg's relationship to inanimate objects (especially computers) is tenuous on a good day, but things got really tense when his composition program insisted on printing the parts in landscape mode. About 5 minutes before the concert hall needed to close for the next performance, Greg rushed back in with music in hand.

I suppose you could call what happened next a "performance," but that would require a certain to-the-breaking-point stretch of the imagination and the solid placement of one's fingers in one's ears. The other three members of the consort were visibly rattled by the tenor's having forgotten his music, and nothing worked at all. They didn't play together, the intonation was horrendous, and you could just hear the silent moans of all of the composers in the hall collectively feeling Greg's pain. One of his friends whispered to me, "There isn't a composer in this hall who isn't just horrified for Greg. You can bet we've all made notes to bring extra parts to all our performances in the future. Talk about unprofessional --!"

At least the remaining three members of the consort offered to redo the performance at a later date and re-record it. It won't make up for the sheer freaking stupidity of the tenor viol, but at least there will be a good performance of the work at some point.

But There's More Good News

There really has been more good music news than bad of late, apart from that terrible concert. Greg's been working on his CD project with four other composers and the New Hudson Sax Quartet. At some point in the new year, everybody will be ready to sit down and record this thing, and then the CD will be available for purchase, press reviews, and broadcast. The exact dates have to be worked out, but we're really looking forward to it. This really will be an impressive commercial release -- sometime within the next year, you could search a site like Amazon and find this CD!

He has also been making some progress on his Brass Quintet bit by bit. A Beardie buddy of mine, who plays trumpet in a few different bands and ensembles around the Portland area, emailed me that one of her brass ensembles would just love to play a brass quintet if Greg had one available. This is actually the second such request he's had from a brass quintet for a piece, so he's been working out some variations on the brass chorale section in Ongiara.

America's Next Top Model is a Real Dog

Dinah Moe had her "Day at the Spa" a little while back, and we're eagerly awaiting the January issue of Dog In Sight magazine to see how things turned out. (She'd won a free bath and grooming when I sent in a copy of one of her "mud puppy" photos.) The editor pinged me a couple of days ago to say that he'd tried to send me some photos through email, but that his ISP had choked on the file sizes. I'm now awaiting the CD that he kindly burned for me and dropped into the snail mail.

The little princess (who currently appears on her breeder's home page as their "Merry Christmas" photo) also appears on page 30 of the City Puppies book (Oceanside Edition). The book is available at a couple of stores around the NH/southern ME seacoast area, but you can probably order it directly from the photographer as well.

And the Usual Knitstuff

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Fran and I took a class in Fair Isle knitting at Rosemary's in Cornish. Their resident instructor, Cheryl Hevey, is a designer for Peace Fleece. She designed a knitted Fair Isle pillow top that I'm really looking forward to doing (I haven't quite managed to finish the sample piece yet).

It's nice to be able to approach a whole new class of projects without trepidation now. I really knew less than zip about colorwork, but now I'm looking forward to cramming more colorwork projects into my "someday" list. Knit Picks has a few Fair Isle projects -- including socks -- that I'd sure like to tackle.

My 6-year-old niece has asked me to teach her to knit. I brought a pair of scarves to her and her brother yesterday, and they were tickled. (Scarves make lame Christmas presents unless the recipient really wants them, so I was a little reluctant to bring the kids scarves until they asked.) Emmy is a kid after my own heart -- she wanted something in purple and left all the other details up to me. She ended up with a novelty-yarn spectacular that makes her look like a little purple movie star. Her brother Max said that he'd like something in green, but he flipped for the camouflage yarn I picked up and knitted in a masculine-enough-looking 1x1 rib. He's deeply into GI Joes, and now he can dress the part.

I'd brought a sock on #1 circulars with me yesterday, so I promised Em that I'd bring bigger needles and easier yarn the next time we see each other, and I'll teach her to knit then. Cripes, hanging on to cotton yarn on those teeny-tiny Addi Turbos is hard enough for me to do!

The Knitter From S.A.B.L.E.

We've had an empty video cabinet in the upstairs hall for the past couple of years now, ever since Greg brought it with him from his house. It actually held videos in its previous incarnation, but it hasn't really had much work to do since arriving here.

In a fit of organization, I appropriated the cabinet for my skeins of sock yarn. I've finally acquired enough different colors (and requests for socks!) that I really needed to take inventory, accumulate the colors I needed to accommodate my requests, and reduce the size of the yarn stash pile in the living room. Inspired by my purpose, I pulled yarn-shop bags of skeins from the pile and installed them in the cabinet until I'd filled the thing completely.

You'd think that doing this would have reduced the apparent size of the original stash pile -- but it hasn't. The stuff does multiply in captivity!

In case you were wondering, your standard video cabinet holds 78 skeins of sock yarn, plus about half a dozen paperbacks that I had no idea what else to do with before reading them. Here's the kicker, though: I still have about a dozen more skeins of sock yarn that just don't fit in a full cabinet, plus the 6-8 in my knitting bag waiting to be turned into socks.

Cross-stitchers use the acronym SABLE for "Stash Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy." I'm still new enough to knitting that I haven't managed to acquire a SABLE-level yarn collection (don't ask about the embroidery/cross-stitch/quilting/rug-hooking stuff, though)... but I have been doing the math. It takes me a couple of weeks to knock off a pair of socks, between watching movies and TV shows, hair appointments, and suchlike. If I start now and knit nothing but socks, it'll take me roughly 2 1/2 years to empty out my current sock stash -- assuming I don't buy any more sock yarn in the meantime. (Yeah, right. My Christmas present to myself came from Webs. Need I say more?)

Where'd Everything Go?

You might have noticed that this blog's sporting a somewhat leaner, less colorful look than before. All my links and buttons have temporarily disappeared, but they will be back soon.

Here's the thing. Our local cable company used to be Adelphia. As corrupt as the company and its management were, I never had more than a few minutes' worth of trouble in all of the almost-six years I've had the service. When the local service was sold to Time Warner Cable, I was actually pleased (more, relieved that it wasn't Cox).

Unfortunately, the switchover has been more than merely rocky. I've gone entire days without Internet access, which is a Very Bad Thing if you telecommute. Time Warner apparently told our town officials that the changeover could take up to six months, and that the customers would just have to be content with appallingly bad service until then. I didn't hear anything about their being willing to wait to be paid for six months, however.

DSL has finally reached our little corner of the sticks, so I'm switching to DSL for a year or so while Time Warner irons out its many issues. Unfortunately, I hosted all of my links and buttons on my Adelphia account, so I'll have to remove them from the blog page until I can copy them to another Web account. They'll be back soon, though -- and maybe I'll have the time to create one of my own as well.

Another Week in the Zoo

The Birthday Kids!

It's been a real Animal Week around here, for sure. Seamus had his 4th birthday on 11/2, and Dinah's very first birthday was 11/3. Amazing -- seems like only yesterday, I was looking through newborn puppy photos emailed from Wales and wondering which one of those puppies would be mine.

A flock of chickens dropped by on Friday afternoon to help celebrate. Dinah didn't much care -- they didn't appear to need herding -- but Charlie just about turned himself inside out trying to order them off HIS property. Seamus, who rarely barks outside, sang backup. The chickens were well aware of the fact that the boys were inside the dog-yard fence, and ignored them. Eventually, the neighbors who owned the chickens came to collect them, so the boys' brief career as would-be chicken herders came to an end.

Dinah Does Ducks!

On Saturday, Dinah and I took part in a herding clinic up at Little Dove Farm, put on by the Collie Club of Maine. We had the option to herd sheep, but Dinah was so fascinated by the ducks at the National Specialty that I signed her up for ducks just to see what she'd do.

She did a beautiful job! Not only did she herd them without eating any of them for lunch, but she also stopped and changed direction when told to. This was my first experience with ducks too, and I was so psyched I'm considering keeping a little flock myself just for practice. You can really see what you're doing with ducks (it's much harder when you're moving sheep).

Sorry that there aren't any photos to show Dinah at work. Some of the kindly Collie folks were taking pictures, so I know there are images of her out there. We just weren't able to take any.

New Blogs!

Sue has a blog! It's about time, really. She's been writing articles for the front page of the POC newsletter for ages now, and now her observations on life with animals can reach a wider audience. Welcome to Blog-land, Sue!

More Music News

Last Thursday, Greg and I made the trek into Medford to hear his Consort for Viols rehearsed by the quartet from Longy. Turns out their name, not the name of the piece, is Long and Away. Anyway, they were nice, knowledgeable folks who will really do the piece credit by the time they have it all worked out. They had to wrestle a bit with new instruments and maintaining tune, but when they hit some of those harmonies, they were dead-on. Greg's thrilled to bits. I mostly stayed in the kitchen and worked on a sock cuff, but I absolutely love Renaissance music. Even though the viols were playing a 21st-century piece, they still had that lovely sonority of the Elizabethan era.

The next day, Greg made yet another journey back to Boston to hear the first reading of his arrangement of Arkadia for full orchestra. I've always felt that Arkadia as arranged for chamber orchestra was one of his best pieces, and it generated a lot of excitement among the people involved. Even some of the more avant-garde composers on the composition faculty raved about the piece. I hope there will be another performance, since I couldn't get away to attend this one. Greg says that he does have a good enough quality recording of the reading that he should be able to stitch together a creditable version from all the various "takes."

Knitting News

Two words: Not Much. The Oakley wrap left for LA last week, and I haven't had much time to make progress on anything else. The time I spent on the sock cuff during the rehearsal was about the only knitting I got done all week.

Spam, Spam, Spam. I Don't Like Spam!

Well, folks, I'm sorry -- but I finally had to enable comment moderation on my blogs. You would think that comment verification (as in typing those nonsense words in by hand) would have discouraged all of the bots and most of the lazier spammers, but I ended up getting spammed by someone bearing the moniker of Deep Thapa who actually went to the trouble to post long lines of comment spam for some crummy online Bingo gambling site.

Anywho, I hated to do it, but comments are now moderated. Forgive me if yours don't show up as quickly as they used to, but I still appreciate your inputs as much as I always have. I just have to play Comment Police now, and it bugs me.

Be on the lookout for Deep Thapa, which is code for "I'm a scumbag."

Party Animals, Puppy Puberty, and Profuse Prose

Whew! I can barely believe how much of July has whizzed by since my last post! There's good news, though: Pirate, one of my very first blog friends, is back with a new blog, and Pam has revived hers as well. Welcome back, folks!



Look at what passed over our heads this afternoon. Nothing else, aside from maybe a real fire-breathing dragon, can make that whooshing sound.

Party Animals!



Greg, Charlie, and I attended the first annual Beardie Bash and BBQ of our fledgling Bearded Collie Club of Maine today. Seamus stayed home to babysit Dinah, who is in the middle of her first season. We decided that it would not be a good time to bring the lovely and talented Miss Burfitt to a dog picnic with intact males about. Since she's only a puppy herself, it just wouldn't do to have a bunch of little Travelers (Trav is her sweetie, and he's very much intact) bouncing around 63 days from now.

Here's a picture of the Lovely One herself:




Despite the rain yesterday and this morning, the heavens managed to smile on us just long enough so we could hold a meeting, grill some burgers, and visit with some people and pups. Charlie had a fine time for himself, and slept all the way home.

I'm really happy about how things turned out for our first meeting. 17 people came, another one or two sent regrets, and we're sure we can find even more members. I didn't even count the number of Beardies who came, but we had a goodly number, and they all had a lovely time romping together in our hosts' yard and nudging the assembled humans for petting and biscuits.

Another Musical Milestone (Almost)

Greg has essentially finished the Sax Quartet this week. He needs to add finishing touches such as dynamic markings and other performance directions, but the composition itself is pretty much done. He's hoping to get the score into the hands of the New Hudson Saxophone Quartet soon. They were so enthused when they met him in June at the ACA concert. We both hope they like the piece when they receive it -- maybe they'd premiere it, or even consider recording it.

Showtime!

While Dinah has been out of commission as far as her show career is concerned, I've been busy filling out forms and making arrangements for both the Canadian and American Beardie Specialties. Dinah makes her Canadian show debut at the end of August, and we fly to Seattle in mid-September to do some sheep herding, show in the regional specialty, and see her breeders again. They haven't seen Dinah since she left Wales at the age of 10 weeks, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they think of her now. Wonder if she'll remember them.

Dog Show Newbie will have updates on Dinah's shows as soon as we get out there and start showing again. The Canadian Specialty will be her next show.

Socks and More Socks

Dangit, I forgot to take pictures of the nifty pair of socks I knitted for my sister. I think they were from Socka yarn, and they knitted up into sharp-looking stripes of hot pink, turquoise, and yellow, along with a little black and white.

I pulled out part of the second sock I was working in Trekking yarn, and the yarn tangled up to such a degree that I just balled the whole thing up in despair and stuffed it into the bottom of the yarn stash. Trekking is one of the prettiest yarns out there for socks, but mess with it and it'll make you pay Big Time.

Lisa will be tickled to hear that I've cast on the hand-dyed yarn I picked up from her a little while back. The yarn is in her India colorway, which includes regal purple and gold as well as some other shades. They'll make amazing socks, and photos are forthcoming! If you love hand-dyed yarns, want to support the dyeing and spinning habits of a couple of fellow Beardie-loving yarn fanatics, and want to knit something that no one else in the universe will ever have, go on over to Lisa and Kathy's Etsy shop and feast on the colors.

Just before we left for Greg's NYC concert last month, I picked up some cheap-but-cheerful Moda Dea Sassy Stripes yarn to play with on the plane. I'm about 1 3/4 of the way through that pair at the moment. I finished the first sock in Jody's size, and will send that pair to her while I'm untangling that godforsaken Trekking yarn to finish her second "nice" sock.

When I can't really concentrate on what I'm doing or when I'm watching something like a movie with subtitles, I'll cast on sock cuffs. Oddly enough, I don't really suffer from Second Sock syndrome -- I really love to finish up pairs -- but I like to have various stages of socks in the pipeline.

I think that I've completed five pairs of socks now, not counting the ones I balled up and stuffed into the frog pond. They've all been knitted from the same pattern I learned at sock-knitting class. It's time to explore other patterns and possibilities. Maybe the next pair (or five) will come from Lucy Neatby's Cool Socks Warm Feet.

Also back in the Frog Pond: the Black Sheep Kristina bag. Things were going so well, and then I misread the graph and accidentally skipped some rows in the repeat pattern. I just haven't had the intestinal fortitude to rip them out and try again.

Happiness Is a Warm Puppy and Hot Hardware

Today's post comes to you from my hot new computer. After months of near-terminal gadget lust from installing and setting up my friend Susannah's MacBook, plus shameless urging from Greg and a bunch of my fellow Mac-head girlfriends, I finally broke down and invested in one of those 17-inch stainless-steel beauties for myself.

But Karen, you ask, don't you already have multiple computers? Yes, I do. Current operating population (not counting Greg's laptop or any of the hardware not currently in use) includes my Toshiba laptop, a work-issued Gateway workstation that dual-boots XP and Linux, and a SunBlade 100 that runs Solaris. Somewhere on an Airborne truck is a new machine issued from work, a SunRay 170 (the iMac of Sun hardware, with an all-in-one design). If you saw my desk, you'd either burst out laughing or flee in terror. I'd advise both.

All those machines are okay, and I like them well enough -- but they aren't Macs. Greg is a confirmed Mac user who kept wishing he had a PC until he bought a new Mac laptop with OS X. I was a long-time Macomaniac who had to abandon the platform because the tools I needed for work ran only on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. All but two of the old computers around this house are Macs, and I'd always wanted another one.

After spending the better part of a week at a conference for work where all of the academics worked on hot new MacBook Pros, I couldn't take the pressure any longer. I broke down, availed myself of the employee discount, and sat whining by the front door until the nice FedEx guy delivered my new baby.

Ah, but it's good to be back home again. This is the first OS X machine I've ever had, and I'm overjoyed to see that it, like its predecessors, Just Works. If I'm feeling frisky, I can even open up a UNIX shell and play command-line pilot to my shrunken little heart's content. The truly sweet thing about the new Intel-based Macs is that they can run Windows XP as well. I downloaded the BootCamp utility, set up my Windows partition, and can dual-boot into XP if I should ever feel the need.

I'm still working out a few logistical problems with my byzantine network setup and I haven't yet figured out whether I can successfully migrate my files and settings from a PC to the Windows partition on a Mac, but I'm working on it. It's just plain great to be back using a machine that's more than just okay.

Freakin' sweeeeeet.