Another Meme (since I have nothing exciting to report)

Celeste tagged me for this meme and I have been lazy about doing it. I actually did it some time back so I had to go back and check the random facts so I don't end up repeating myself.

Here are the rules, which I am breaking:

1. Link to the tagger and post the rules.

2. List seven random facts about yourself.

3. Tag seven more people. (This is the one I'm breaking, because I'm running out of people to tag. Y'all friends who don't blog have to get on the ball! However, feel free to list facts in a comment.)

Here are my random facts:

1. I can't swim or ride a bicycle, although I've had people try to teach me to do both.

2. I attended five different elementary schools in three states and a foreign country.

3. I can't stop buying Christmas music (see photo above)

4. I have a large collection of what I call "How to Be Perfect" books -- books on organization, how to dress, how to decorate, how to run your life. It's not clear they have worked.

5. I now write a short review of each book I read and post them on Goodreads, DorothyL, or both.

6. My dog, who weighs 55 lbs., sits in my lap. (See photo below, I love how he looks when standing up looking out the window.)

7. My cat, who weighs about 5 lbs., does not.

Random Thoughts and Events

• Rusty is in big, big trouble. This morning he broke a window! He has a bad habit of scrabbling at the windows when he sees a squirrel or cat outside, but up till now this has only resulted in more frequent window cleaning. But, this morning a neighborhood tabby was on our garage roof, which is just under our bedroom window. Rusty was standing on the bed, barking at the cat, and reaching over to attempt to get it through the window. Then I heard the tell-tale sound of breaking glass. Bad dog! Onkel Hankie Pants reports that the window (like the rest of the house) is both new enough and old enough to cause problems in replacing the glass; it won't be easy to get the window out without wrecking it, so we will be looking for someone who can come over and replace the glass in situ. Otherwise I guess it will be cardboard and a 3M plastic shrinkwrap for us.
• I never cease to be amazed by the wonderful entertainment available on the Internet. (And I'm not talking about the political news, although some of it is pretty entertaining). Lately I've been enjoying listening to Neil Gaiman read his new young people's book, The Graveyard Book.  If you go to www.mousecircus.com , you can hear it too -- in its entirety, one chapter at a time.  I highly recommend it to young persons and older ones alike. Gaiman has a great sense of humor as well as a genius for spookiness.  Hallowe'en fun!
• Mystery readers everywhere are saddened to learn that Tony Hillerman, author of the Leaphorn and Chee mysteries set in Navaho country, has died at age 83. I recently re-read Dance Hall of the Dead, which won him the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and enjoyed it as much or more than the first time.
• We had a bean supper at church on Saturday, and I signed up to bring potato salad. We were out of eggs, and I didn't want to experiment, so mine was the plainest potato salad imaginable -- the basic recipe from Joy of Cooking except that I omitted the parsley, used cider vinegar instead of red wine vinegar (another thing we're out of), and sprinkled some paprika on top.  I feared we'd be bringing home leftovers and eating potato salad for a week. But when we finished our supper, my bowl was already empty and washed! Sometimes plain is good.  
• Casting my mind back, back, back, to high school U.S. History class, I believe that initiative, referendum and recall had something to do with the Progressive movement. How odd, then, that Minnesota doesn't have those options, and Maine does. Hence, we have been faced with two or three ballot questions each time we've voted here. Actually, there's usually at least one that's a state bond issue -- this time it has to do with clean water. But we also have a referendum and an initiative. The referendum has to do with a tax the Legislature passed to fund Dirigo Health(Maine's baby step toward universal health care). It's on soda pop, beer, wine, vitamin waters and juice drinks, bottled iced tea and no doubt, bottled Frappuccinos.  So, there is a heavily funded campaign against it called Fed Up with Taxes! bankrolled by the beverage industry. I was already leaning toward voting No (a No vote lets the law stand as it is), but what pushed me over the edge was the sight of the Coors beer truck with a big "Fed Up with Taxes! Yes on 1!" sticker on it. Somehow I doubt that Coors has my best interests at heart. For the amount of pop we drink in a year, an additional 11 cents for a two-liter bottle isn't going to break us.
• The initiative is for a casino in Oxford County, to the west of us in a part of Maine where the promise of jobs will get people to vote for just about anything. I'm not a big fan of gambling (I can waste money just fine without it, thanks), but if it's going to be here, I'd rather see the Indian tribes running it. Instead, although the initiative started with a young local businessman, the proposed casino development would now be run from Las Vegas. Even its proponents admit that the proposal as written is deeply flawed, and one of its flaws is that it enjoins no further casinos be built in the state for 10 years.  It's going to be No on 2 as well.
• I feel for Cordeliaknits and other Californians. They have 12 Propositions to vote on! Two of them, the referendum on same-sex marriage and the initiative against inhumane practices of factory farming (profiled in this week's New York Times Magazine) have received a lot of publicity, the other 10, not so much. 
• We've had one political call today (in support of Question 1, noted above, and I'd be surprised if the call wasn't made from out-of-state) and one which asked for me by name and encouraged me to vote, without mentioning any candidate, question or party.
• We've had more political surveys taken from us over the phone this year than in any year that I can remember. Is it because we live in a less-populated state now, or because we still cling to our landline? And we're not even considered a swing state, although the McCain-Palin campaign has made a bit of a push in northern Maine since we don't have a winner-take-all electoral vote and they could possibly pick up one vote there.

Magic Mushrooms?

Today is a special day for me, and I'll report more on that later, but it's also a very rainy day here in Maine. We've had a fair amount of rain alternating with plain old humidity here in the last week or so (and we need the rain, so no complaints about that.) Our yard is prone to mushrooms anyway, but recently I've seen some that I hadn't seen before. I wonder if I'll find a field guide to mushrooms in the basement as I clean up the book room there? I did find a nice fossil guide, which will be quite useless here -- it says that New England has virtually no fossil-bearing rock. Anyway, here are some mushroom photos.



Click on the yellow one to see the raindrops on a spiderweb.
And for those of you who prefer mammals to fungi, here is a photo of Rusty in his summer cut -- he doesn't look like a perfect Springer Spaniel now, but it sure makes his trips to the Bowdoinham woods less messy!
And here is a goofy face:

A happy cat and happier books

Just a quick post to show two of SonShineIn's projects. The first was to protect our excess books, which were stored on plastic shelving units in the basement, from the depredations caused by the cat's climbing and the dog's jumping. The idea was from Onkel Hankie Pants but most of the execution was from our own briefly-resident carpenter. Here it is:
Rusty is in the picture, trying to track the cat, who (he thinks) has disappeared. If you click to enlarge the photo, you can see the nice handles for opening; what you can't see is a caster that helps the fencing swing smoothly.
Why has the cat disappeared? SonShineIn also built her a wonderful cat tower so she can escape the dog and look out the window. I have not yet completed my task of stapling carpet on it, but she has found her special perch. Here she is:
The perch in which she's sitting (look for a round fluffy calico object, that's Heidi) was once part of a rather odd little seat that pulled out from our kitchen peninsula, probably for a small child to sit on. We now use that portion for our kitchen wastebasket. Another of the perches was a drawer front from a deceased file cabinet. I love when we can reuse things this way. Thanks again, SonShineIn!

A Quiet Day and a Clean Dog

Yesterday, on his way to work at Big Map Company, Onkel Hankie Pants dropped Rusty off at the Doggie Daycare in L.L.Beanport. I had a day without dog-walking, barking, scratching, or squirrel-spotting. It was nice! I got some laundry done (without worrying about the dog getting into the basement where the cat is), went to the library, out to lunch, and to get my hair cut (observe! no annoying hair down the back of the neck -- of course, the weather is cooling down now. The Knitsgirls will be pleased to know that I made an appointment for my next cut on October 2)




without worrying about how long he could stand his crate, and made 26 servings of peach cobbler for the Tedford Shelter without having to pacify Rusty with peaches.
And, he came back a clean dog, as we had instructed the carers to give him a bath! He smelled lovely and looked very pretty too. Here are some photos showing his nice clean hair before he decides to dig in the lawn and dirty himself again:
A tired dog is a good dog, usually, and he still seems tuckered out today, although he's had his usual long walk with Onkel H. first thing, as well as a walk around the block with me at 9 am or so. When he arrived home, I had no idea where the cat was. I had brought Heidi upstairs under protest from her, and by the time I returned from the library she was nowhere to be seen. Well, it turned out she was hiding under my chair in the living room, and Rusty's inestimable tracking skills found her fairly quickly. There ensued several minutes of barking, jumping, and burrowing on his part, and growling, hissing, and batting on her part, until Rusty was put in his crate just long enough for me to extract Heidi and return her to her underground home. I don't know what we are going to do about this situation. Heidi got her name because she hid for the first week we had her, and was only slowly becoming a more affectionate cat when we introduced Rusty into the home. She doesn't like this. Rusty is interested in other cats that we see on our walks, but if they sit calmly and look at him, he will just point at them and wag his tail. I think her immediate angry reaction to his presence may have poisoned any chance of a relationship for them. Heidi is also gaining weight so I suppose we should limit her food, but then there will be complaints, which will cause Rusty to bark and try to get through the door, floor grates, laundry chute, or any other way he can think of to reach her. Advice welcome!
Today will be a long day of dog care, as Onkel H. has a 7:30 performance and won't be coming home between Yarmouth and Lewiston. I'm thinking my chief task today should be tidying my desk.

You think? By the way, the wallpaper on my computer is of a painting by Robert Spear Dunning, a distant cousin who was part of the Fall River School of artists in the 19th century. I am using the catalog from Daedalus Books to see which of the books I am interested in are available at the Curtis Memorial Library or through Minerva, our state interlibrary loan system. I think it will soon be time for another Book Diet month, maybe October (a month in which I don't take books out of the library or buy books, but only read books I already have, in an attempt to clear some of the To Be Reads off my shelves.)
It's a beautiful day today, and I'm sure Rusty and I will take a few more walks before the day is over. he has a very good memory for places where items of interest to him occur -- a tree where he saw a squirrel, a house where a cat lives, and our neighbor's rosebushes which are covered with rosehips at this season. Rosehips are one of the many fruits he enjoys, and he has an amazing ability to extract the rosehip from the thorny branch it's on with no apparent injury to himself. (I can't! Not without gloves anyway.)