OK, OK, I’m back

Go figure.  I haven’t posted anything since April, and still I am Runner Up in the Best Local Blog category of Smitty’s Notes Best of Winston-Salem contest.  Julie emailed me about it; I would probably never have known, otherwise.

Is this thing rigged?  How could I win any such prize?  I’ve been studiously avoiding blogging, blogs, email, computers, and pretty much everything online (except of course work) for months now.  I don’t even have a computer or an online connection at home any more.  And I don’t want one.  I’m still kind of thinking about an iPhone, though.

It was difficult to get the people at the cable company to understand that I wanted my service disconnected — no, not an upgrade; no, I don’t want it reconnected at another house — I just want it off.  No, I’m not switching to another provider, and no, I’m not interested in talking to your Customer Retention Department.  The nice man kept asking me why.  Eventually I said, “because I think the internet is a tool of Satan,” and he said, “Oh. I see.”  And that was that.  I’m definitely going to use that line again.  Besides, it’s not entirely inaccurate.  Not that I believe that there is such an entity as Satan messing around with the internets, but you know what I mean.

Oh, and I moved house.  I know I said I never wanted to do that again — and it was true when I said it – but I did it again, and it was totally worth it.  It’s only about 1300 feet away from the old place, but hey, it cuts my commute down by about six minutes or so. Plus Ruby likes the new place even better than the old one, and so do I.  I guess I’ll have to take some more pictures of her in her new yard.  The emailbox for the blog account is overflowing, mostly with SPAM but also a couple of you have been clamoring for more Ruby pics.

I hear, and I will oblige presently.

Ruby Tuesday

I totally suck at posting stuff every day.

But never mind that, here’s a picture of Ruby! You can click on it to make it larger. I have this photo set as the background on my monitors at work this week, and every time I happen to glance at it, I want to go home and pet the dog, or watch her run in circles in the back yard.  Or curl up with her and take a nap.

Letters

I guess it’s no real surprise that I like letters as much as I do. Sure I like writing — telling stories, whatever kind of stories need telling. I tell stories for fun. I tell stories, sometimes, for money. Not a lot of money, generally, but sometimes someone is buying stories of one kind or another, and I’m happy to oblige. And everything really is a story, if you think about it.

The other thing I like about stories, and writing, is the words. There are so many! And they are so deliciously useful and precise. Or not. They are of course more than strings of letters, but they do in fact consist on at least one level of strings of letters.

I had the good fortune to grow up around adults who liked to tell stories, and who liked to read stories aloud — and furthermore who were willing to indulge any child who wanted to hear the same story over and over. I caught on to the printed word and figured out how to read well before anyone thought to tell me there were such things as words or even letters. My dad would read ‘The Cat in the Hat” or “Miss Twiggly’s Tree” or “Junk Day on Juniper Street,” and it would be the exact same story every time. It occurred to me (and years later, independently, to my sister the mailman), that he was not making this stuff up — that it mattered when he turned the page.

I searched for clues, and noticed entire words and phrases before I figured out that they were made out of letters. But once I noticed the letters, I couldn’t get enough of them — they were everywhere! Looking back, I must have noticed individual letters before, but was too young to figure out their connection to sounds and to words.

But it was around this time that my grandfather gave me an incredible gift: it was a dark green strip of oilcloth or vinyl with the handpainted white outlines of the entire alphabet — upper case and lower case AaBbCcDdEeFfGg etc., followed by my full name and phone number. And for each outline there was a matching plastic letter. And some were italic, some had serifs, some did not — every one a different typeface than the previous letter. Fonts, we call them now. You could place each letter on its spot and roll the strip up to put it away. He’d made one for all fourteen of his grandchildren, if I remember correctly.

My grandfather was a signpainter. So was my dad, for a while, but he did not love it like my grandfather did. I wanted for quite a while to be a sign painter when I grew up, and so did my sister. My fact my first paid (non-babysitting) gig was helping out in the sign shop.

Why I am not a sign painter today, and neither is my sister, is probably best left for another post, but I still have a copy of Gold Leaf Techniques that was my grandfather’s, along with a very battered and chewed-up copy of the Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering (20th ed., 1972).

I think this is good news.

Fafnir and Giblets are back to save the universe!  Maybe it was just a cruel April Fool’s joke, but I am going to be an optimist.  It sounds like they’ve had some adventures since their last post, which was in like July of 2006.  Apparently they’ve been imprisoned, which explains a lot:

“It’s true,” says Giblets. “We were a menace to our freedom and had to be stopped before we could threaten us again.”

There was a daring escape, in which they barely escaped.  Or they will escape, maybe, soon, into a new universe.  And then they’ll come back to save us, they said they would. 

Oh, and PS — Here’s today’s letter:

Dear Joesdog,

Thank you for alerting me in yesterday’s comments to this exciting development. You totally made my day.

Love, Nora

Dear Readers,

How are you? I am fine.

Yeah, I know. I have been remiss. I have been ignoring my blog, and my email. I’ve probably been ignoring your blog too, if you have one. I just haven’t been in the mood, I guess. I spend all day sitting at a computer and I just don’t want to come home and stare at another one. I even ignore the phone, pretty frequently. Plus one of my email accounts got spammed, in a big way, and since they’re all forwarded somewhere or another (my email accounts, I mean), everything got all garbled up and there were hundreds of junk emails everywhere. Multiple copies of them. It was kind of overwhelming.

But the good news is I have new glasses, and I can see a little better. And I got rid of all the e-garbage and started wading through the rest. And one of the emails I found was not junk — it was from that nice lady, Mrs. Kennedy, who sends out the NaBloPoMo emails. Apparently they’ve gone year round with the posting-every-day-of-the-month thing, and April’s theme is letters. I knew I wouldn’t be able to post something every day, but I am extremely fond of letters — typography, signs, actual physical letters — you name it. So I figured I’d try to post a letter, or at least something about letters, every day this month.

Years ago, before we ever lived together or anything, my lovely ex-wife and I had to live about 200 miles apart for almost six months. This was before e-mail and cellphones and even cheap long distance. I wrote letters every day — on pages torn from the backs of phone books, on bar napkins, on the backs of lab printouts — and I’d drop them in the mail as soon as I finished them. Sometimes there would be two or three in a single day. She once said that reading my letters was like watching someone walking from room to room, with one arm in their sweater, looking for their keys. I was oddly flattered.

Well, that’s all I have for today.

Love, Nora

OK, here’s one more

The slight delay on the digital camera plus a dog who is always in a hurry means that I’ve taken a lot of pictures like this one.

Ruby Tuesday!

OK, all you fans of Ruby, here she is in all her glory. You can click on each photo to embiggen it, if you want to. Here she is crouched behind some daffodils, keeping a wary eye on a terracotta flowerpot.  I think there might be something in the photo that is perfectly in focus, but it’s not Ruby.  Sorry about that.

And in this photo, which is also kind of blurry but I decided to post it anyway, she is rolling in something stinky. Why? Dogs do that. I think it is to disguise themselves from potential prey, who might identify them or detect their presence. I mean, what squirrel would feel threatened by an advancing pile of dogshit, or compost, or dead fish? Of course, once the squirrel sees the dog all bets are off. Maybe dogs just think it’s fun to roll around in the dirt.

And this shot is from yesterday afternoon. We were out in the back yard, admiring the late-afternoon light. There are more pictures, but right now I’m going to go get some lunch.  At least this one isn’t quite so blurry.

“You know you should surrender, but you can’t let it go”

I haven’t posted a Friday Random Ten list in a while, but it feels like the randomizer is trying to get my attention. It’s more than ten, but it’s random, and it’s a list. A list of sad song after sad song after sad song. Kind of heavy on the Gram Parsons for some reason — The Byrds, and the International Submarine Band, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Why does the randomizer do this to me? None of these songs by itself would have been completely and irredeemably mind-altering; I don’t associate any of them with any particular breakup or tragedy or anything like that. But there I was in a perfectly good mood, minding my own business, and now I’m riding one serious bummer:

1. Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”
2. Melissa Etheridge - Just Because I’m a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton “I Will Always Love You”
3. Shawn Colvin w/ Mary-Chapin Carpenter - Columbia Records Radio Hour Vol 1 “Come on Come On”
4. Patti Smith - Gung Ho “China Bird”
5. Byrds - Sweetheart of the Rodeo: “You Don’t Miss Your Water”
6. Johnny Cash - American IV “Desperado”
7. Maria McKee - Peddlin Dreams “My One True Love”
8. International Submarine Band - Sacred Hearts and Fallen Angels (disc 1) “Do You Know How It Feels to be Lonesome?”
9. Kitty Wells - The Women of Country “Honky Tonk Angels”
10. Jeffrey Dean Foster - Million Star Hotel “Lily of the Highway”
11. Kate Wolf - Give Yourself to Love (vol 2) “Far-Off Shore”
12. Mary McCaslin - Best of Mary McCaslin “Living Without You”
13. Neil Diamond - Classics: The Early Years “I Got The Feelin’ (Oh, No, No)”
14. Flying Burrito Brothers - Farther Along “Dim Lights”
15. Tom Waits - Mule Variations “Come On Up to the House”

And I only stopped because we got to Tom Waits, but it’s still playing more sad songs. Freddy Fender & Flaco Jimenez for dogssake.  Even a funny song would just make me cry.

Owls, hawks, and falcons

Ruby and I were out walking the other day and I noticed she was looking up into a tree rather warily. Not getting all worked up about it, like there was maybe a squirrel up there or something, but she was very aware of something. I became aware just then of that feeling of being watched myself, and I followed her gaze up the tree and saw an owl. Just sitting there, watching us, not blinking, in that owly way they have. And then there was a hooting noise and some rustling, and another one landed on the branch just above it. I’m pretty sure they were adult barred owls; they looked like grown-up versions of those baby owls my friend Fstorch rescued a while back. We watched them for a few minutes and moved on.

Then Saturday I was in the back yard watching Ruby run in big figure-eights when I looked up and saw an enormous hawk leave the nest on the tree over my garage; it swooped down a few feet, almost touching the garage roof, circled over my yard and the neighbor’s yard a couple of times, gained some altitude, and soared off. Ruby looked up at it and slowly walked over and stood next to me till it was good and gone. No sudden moves. The light was wrong and I couldn’t see enough details to tell exactly what sort of hawk it was, but its wingspan was at least four feet. I don’t think it was big enough to snag a 50-lb dog and fly away, but Ruby appeared to have, for that moment at least, a very visceral understanding that she was not the only predator in the yard.

And there I was, without a camera. Even if I’d had one with me, I doubt that I’d have had the presence of mind to take it out and photograph either of these beautiful birds, but I really should make a habit of carrying one. And I was reminded of this again when I got an email this morning from my pal Fstorch, with photos of a falcon he spotted in the neighborhood.

It wasn’t so much another raptor, though, as it was a shiny orange-red Ford Falcon, nicely restored, with a bulldog in the passenger seat, which you can click here to see. One must always keep a camera handy, Fstorch said in his email. And he’s right.

Another dog biscuit recipe

A while back, on the old blog, I posted a recipe for dog biscuits. And it was a good recipe, but definitely one requiring some experience with yeast doughs and a lot of time. More time, apparently, than a lot of people are prepared to spend baking stuff for their dogs. I got some complaints, and I set about devising an easier recipe. I’m not 100% satisfied with this one yet, but I think I’m on the right track. And rolling them out is optional — plus no yeast, no rising, no poking fork holes in each one.

The dough is made in a manner similar to biscuits or pie pastry, but I think these are easy enough for anyone to try. Your audience, remember, is not overly critical.

Easy Dog Treats

• 2-1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup rolled oats (not the fancy steel cut oats, nor the instant kind)
• 1/2 cup powdered milk
• 1Tbsp. garlic powder (NOT garlic salt)
• 1/4 cup wheat germ
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup peanut butter (don’t use the kind with tons of salt & sugar if you can avoid it)
• 1/2 cup shortening (or any combination of shortening, butter, margarine, lard, bacon grease, whatever you happen to have)
• 2/3 cup cold chicken broth and/or water and/or any flavor broth

Combine all the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. You can add whatever kind of supplement your dog needs at this point: bone meal or fish oil or or brewer’s yeast or glucosamine or whatever.* Then, with the mixer running, add the egg, and the peanut butter, and the shortening — this works best if the peanut butter & shortening, at least, are more or less room temperature. If you’re not using a mixer, you need to incorporate the fat into the flour mixture fairly thoroughly, either with a pastry blender or your hands or a large-ish fork. When it’s a uniformly coarse and mealy texture, sprinkle the cold broth or water over and keep stirring (or switch to the dough hook and keep the mixer running) until the dough sort of gathers together into a ball and will hold its shape. You might use slightly more or less of the liquid than indicated, depending on the humidity, etc.

At this point, your dog will be very much underfoot, and will probably be staring up at you with long strings of drool hanging from the corners of her mouth. Give her a little bite of the dough if you can’t stand it, but keep in mind that this will only encourage her to sit there drooling.

Divide the dough up and make it into four balls that are slightly smaller than softballs. You can roll them out and cut out the biscuits with a dog biscuit cookie-cutter, or just flatten and cut them up into whatever sized treats your dog likes.

Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 350 F for about 30-40 minutes; leave in the oven until they are cool (you want it to be stale).

I rolled out the first two balls, and I got them too thin. Ruby of course liked them, but they didn’t really work very well when I tried stuffing them into her treat ball toys. So I thought that not only would they be better thicker, they would probably be improved if you chilled the dough. So I made the remaining two balls of dough into long flat rectangular bricks, sort of, and froze them for a couple of days. Just now I took them out of the freezer and let them thaw partially (less than an hour) before slicing them about 3/8 of an inch thick, putting them on a greased cookie sheet, brushing the tops with oil, and baking for about 45 minutes at about 340 degrees F.

I turned off the oven, and Ruby is standing in front of the oven door, watching them cool.

*If you are adding any kind of supplement, make sure that it is a stable enough ingredient that it will not be rendered useless by the oven temperature.