Winter Pups Photos

Charlie's thrilled to bits that we have more snow. Someone has to be!



When Dinah's not bugging Charlie to play with her in the snow, she's dragging all the toys in the toy box outside to bury in it. Just think of all the treasures we'll find in the yard come spring! Here is The Lovely One, just back from the groomer with a fetching leopard-print bow in her hair:



Seamus prefers to take it easy...

MacRanting and a Festivus Miracle

If Apple were really sincere about offering OS versions that were completely friendly and easy to install, they'd give them names like "Golden Retriever," "Collie," or even "Newfoundland." The fact that they name their OS X releases after cats should be the first tipoff.

Mind you, I love my Macbook Pro more than I love some of my relatives, and I completely expect upgrades to be relatively painless. I've owned Macs for roughly 22 years now, and have never had an upgrade problem. (Yeah, I know that dates me. Would you believe I was still in diapers when I got my first Mac?)

Then along comes Leopard. All the buzz I've read said, "Back up everything and it'll be easy as falling off a bar stool -- I mean log." Backups are Life Itself, and I maintain a small army of backup external drives just for such purposes, so this advice made perfect sense to me. Little did I know as I was backing up this time that for once, my anal-retentiveness might pay off.

I pulled the shrink-wrap off the Leopard box (wicked nifty packaging!), inserted the disc, booted, and prepared for a simple, un-Windows-like installation experience. The installation routine asked me all the usual questions, verified the install disk, and installed.

At the very end of the installation, it brought up a giant dialog box saying, "Sorry, but we couldn't install Leopard. Seeya." What it didn't say was that the upgrade process had also taken a bite out of the existing information on my boot partition. Not only did I not have Leopard installed, but my old Tiger disk wouldn't even boot! At least my Windows partition hadn't been corrupted, so I could run XP and be glad I had half a computer left. There are Mac users out there who probably have nightmares about only having Windows available, but any OS in a storm... My UNIX (Solaris) box was still running, too -- but I don't have to maintain it. Thanks to UNIX, I can bring this blog entry to you today. At least something in this office is running properly.

I'll say this for AppleCare: You may grow old and gray waiting for your call to be answered, but you always get a competent human being. The most exotic accent I heard on the other end of the phone was Canadian, eh? (Don't get me wrong. I have no beef with people in South Asia earning a living. When you're under a lot of stress, though, it's a blessing to be able to speak with someone who understands you without a struggle. South Asian callers probably hope they don't get someone from Boston on the other end of the line.)

During the first call, I waited on hold for 45 minutes before having to hang up and go attend a kennel club meeting. When I returned, it was too late to call AppleCare again, so I tried a few low-level UNIX tricks, got a few additional error messages, and made no further progress in repairing the damage.

This morning, I went through all of the usual automated quiz questions. If Apple had had an option where one could enter a case number instead of having to go through "MacBook Pro. No. No. Yes. No" a gazillion times, this would have been a good place to add it.

I did finally reach a second-tier tech, who listened to my issues and admitted, "I'll have to escalate this one. I can't help you any further here." While I waited on hold for the third-tier tech, I was accidentally (?) disconnected. Back to "MacBook Pro. No. No. Yes. No." a second time.

Reached another human, and got cut off again. "MacBook Pro. No. No. Yes. No."

Finally, the old cliche "Third time's the charm" proved to be just that. I reached the third-tier tech, told him my tale of woe, and was able to get the disk back to the point where I could erase and install Leopard onto it.

The first install failed, but the erase portion of the program had done its work. My disk had been wiped clean enough so that the installer could actually see it, and it appeared to have been repaired. (There was nothing left on it to corrupt!) Heartened slightly, I attempted a second installation, all the while attempting to breathe normally.

It was a Festivus miracle! The second time, the install actually took the expected hour instead of blowing up right away! I still held my breath, crossed my fingers, and knocked on wood at the restart... but there was the Apple logo, and the little spinning "daisy" thingie at the bottom, and...!

I saw a desktop! It even showed icons for all of my hard drives, including my boot drive! In the spirit of the impending holiday, all I had to say was Halle-frickin'-lujah! I was absolutely sure I'd have to mail my computer out to East Overshoe and wait until Groundhog Day to see it again.

Not that I'm back to normal just yet, but at least Normal is in sight. I still have to restore all of my preferences and get my files back to where I want them, reconfigure my wireless connection and my syncing setup, and reinstall anything I might have lost when I had to erase the disk. At least I was able to back up all of my data and at least most of my installed applications to my external disk, so things could be a helluva lot worse. In the meantime, I have a pretty new interface to explore.

Is there a moral to this story? If there is, it's that it pays to be anal, and spare hard drives are wicked cheap these days. Oh, and never trust any software that's named after a cat.

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.

Photos from Man Paradise and Other Stuff

(photos in this post by Ann Northrup)

Greg's been having the time of his life in Wyoming this week. He gets to work when he wants to, run when he wants to, and his lunches get delivered to his cabin while he's working so he won't be disturbed. The Foundation employs a professional chef who makes some incredible meals. They treat him so well out there he might never come home!

He did ask the Foundation whether he could stay another week, but another composer is coming just after Greg leaves -- so there's no room for him. He has to come home. In the spirit of fairness, he's not allowed to apply for 2 1/2 years after he's done a residency there, but you can bet he'll have his application ready to go the minute those 2 1/2 years are up.

He also mentioned to me that the other artists he's met there are all folks who have been turned down multiple times by Yaddo and McDowell, so he no longer feels like he's the only one they've turned their noses up at repeatedly. That makes him feel better about being rejected.

He's promised me some photos of the outdoors today, if the wi-fi connection there cooperates. Here's one of the hills outside the Foundation:



Here are a couple of interior shots:

This one shows Greg playing the piano in his work cabin. There's one in the main building, too (a converted railroad depot that now contains the bedrooms for all of the artists and the communal space). It's a 7-foot Kawai, and he loves the heck out of it. He likes the piano in his cabin well enough, but he looooooves that Kawai.



The one photo I have of the living room is kind of dark and not really good enough to post, but there are quite a few pictures of the kitchen and dining area. I wish mine looked like this...



I promise some pictures of the Bighorn Mountains and the big sky when he sends them along.

Greg was feeling uncertain as to which of his works to concentrate on while he's out there. He had three pieces on his "to do" list: Ongiara, There and Back Again, and Les sept merveilles. He's finding in practice that he really only wants to concentrate on Les sept merveilles, and he was feeling a teeny bit bad about not wanting to make progress on the others. Les sept, or The Seven Wonders, is a piece for solo piano and very involved, so he's decided to take advantage of the time and the two pianos at his disposal to work on that one. He can pretty much work on the other two anywhere, since he already has the basic architecture of both pieces figured out, and all he has to do is write the music to fit the scheme. The Seven Wonders still needs to be constructed before it can be filled in. He describes it as "incredibly dense, denser than the usual Man harmony."

Here's a photo he took of The Seven Wonders on the piano in his cabin, facing out the window:



Quick musical aside: He says that The Waking will be premiered in NYC next June at the ACA concerts.

Meanwhile, Back at the Homestead...

It's been deadline time at work, so things have been just too wacky for me to get very much done anywhere else. I had grand visions of carting half the crap in the house to the Treasure Chest at the transfer station and cleaning the house so well that Greg wouldn't recognize the place. Neither thing has happened, though I'm making progress in reducing Mount Laundry and in replacing stuff that really needed to be replaced, including a dying lamp in the living room, a busted window blind in the bedroom, and my worn-out moccasins. I've also ordered the new storm door. I'd hoped to be able to just point at it and have it delivered, but our door frame is about 5" too short for the standard size. It has to be a special order... ka-ching!

I'm looking forward to finishing up the dog-show year next weekend. There weren't enough entries in Fitchburg to bother going down there (mainly because some genius decided to hold the Minuteman Club's 35th anniversary party that weekend, so no one from Massachusetts will be going to the show). I wish I'd known that before I paid the entry fees. There goes another $50+ that could have gone toward something worthwhile, like yarn.

While We're on That Subject...

Fran and I were able to get away from our respective packs long enough to attend an Open Knit Night up at Rosemary's in Cornish on Friday night. I've never minded knitting by myself, but it's nice to be able to get out and join a group every so often. The knitters up at Rosemary's are all congenial, and we had ourselves a fine time. I brought Jody's Jawoll socks to the party. Fran worked on a pair of mittens. There were a couple of people working on Cat Bordhi's Moebius cowl with help from Cheryl, the resident instructor, and a couple of other folks knitting the same sweater from Knitting Pure and Simple.

I was strong -- I didn't succumb to the lure of all those rooms of yarn singing "come hither." That's not only a good thing, but a necessary one. I've just had a good hard look at my own stash, and I could probably open my own store.

I just dragged the yarn stash out from the bedroom closet (where I hid it before Greg's cousins came to visit), and I was staggered yet again by the sheer amount of stuff I'd stuck in there. In the name of home improvement, I picked up three of the biggest translucent plastic tubs that Wally World has to offer and stuck most of the stash in those. My tastes have changed radically since I learned to knit a few years ago, and I'm no longer interested in most of the novelty yarns I've picked up. I'm still knitting scarves on request, but even Susannah (who loves scarves and novelty yarn) would admit that I've acquired too much of a good thing. Might be time to put some of this stuff up for adoption.

My current "Idiot Knitting" project is a little skinny scarf for Susannah in black Berroco Bling Bling. The name of the yarn really turns me off, but the yarn is pleasant enough to work with and knits up nicely. I've hit the gusset decrease on the first of the Jawoll socks, so I have to pay a little bit of attention there.

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.

Go West, Mr. Man!

Here's a shot of Greg dancing with the lovely and talented Miss Dinah Moe. Pop Quiz: Which one has two left feet?

(Actually, they're both pretty good dancers, though Dinah's talents lie more in the realm of aerial ballet.)

The Man is headed west on Sunday for his two-week residency at Ucross. He's been packing for a couple of days now -- hiking stuff here, computer monitor there. I take him to the airport on Sunday after he's done with church, and then he's off to live inside his head full-time until just before Thanksgiving. They'll even bring him his lunch so he can work all day without interruptions, and his cabin doesn't have a TV. (Heck, where do I sign up??)

He thinks he'll be spending much of his Ucross time working on Les sept merveilles (The Seven Wonders). He says of that piece that it's possibly the most intense piece he's ever written, and that he had to finish working through The Waking before he could figure out how to approach it. He has been working with headphones on, so I literally haven't heard more than two notes of the piece. He expects to spend a goodly amount of his composing time at Ucross giving it life and form. I wouldn't be surprised if he came home with a new idea or two, either.

The Waking is essentially done, except for some minor cleanup. On occasion, I've also heard phrases from There and Back Again, which is also somewhere close to being finished -- I think. Until Greg declares a piece to be done and stamps the place and date of completion on it, it's still open for changes.

The Man has actually had quite a lot of news of late. Who's Who in America has now officially left the presses and has started arriving at every public library in the country -- and Greg's in it! He ordered a copy for himself, and it came in two ginormous volumes. Volume 1 bears his name on the front cover and contains his biography (as well as those of everyone else who is Who for 2008). I'm in it too -- listed under Life Partner. I always did love libraries, and now I'm in every one in the country, too.

Greg was so tickled when his copies arrived that he opened up the index of names in Volume 2 and pointed to all of the ones where no address was listed (he did so for privacy reasons). "Look! There's Jon Stewart! Look! There's Zach Braff!" You get the idea. At least in the second volume, the talented and adorable Mr. Hall (Greg, not Monty) rubs shoulders with column upon column of noteworthy persons.

The local papers run columns of community news for the various towns that constitute their readership, and each community has a local reporter. Greg called the Biddeford Journal-Tribune, figuring that he'd get a nice little one-liner in the column for our town, right next to the school cafeteria menu and the Cub Scouts' meeting notes. Was he surprised when the paper sent a reporter and a photographer for an interview and several photos! He ended up in the top right corner of page 1 in last Friday's edition, and the article with a huge second photo ran on page 2.

Of course, we needed to buy several copies for friends, relatives, our bulletin board, and posterity. I stopped into the Irving station and picked up four copies after pumping gas. The cashier looked at the papers, looked at me, and shyly asked, "Do you mind if I ask you something?"

"Sure," I replied, uncertain whether I'd have to give a long spiel about the state of modern classical composition.

"Did someone die? Another lady just left here with another stack of those papers."

2008 might well be the Year of the Man. The 21st Century Masterworks anthology, featuring the orchestral version of his Water suite (the one that was recorded in Prague this summer), will be available in March 2008 in every outlet from Borders Books to ITunes. We never did see a master CD from that session. It might still be in production at this point.

The Sax Quartets CD might be released sometime next year, too. It should have been recorded at Town Hall in NYC a couple of months ago, but the recording engineer has contracted Lyme disease and wasn't feeling well enough to do the sessions. He hopes to get back into the booth and get the sessions going soon. Two of the pieces have already been recorded, and the New Hudson Sax Quartet will get extra time to learn the other three works in the meantime.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Dinah Moe turned 2 years old this past Saturday. This video is actually of litter sister Buffy, but I couldn't say it any better myself. Happy Birthday, Puppy Princesses!