Thursday 5/10/07 6:24 am

Becoming mostly cloudy this afternoon, with showers and thundershowers likely...

Too bad, if I had the camera with me two minutes earlier, I probably would have picked up the detail in the skyscape. But by the time I had fetched it, the sun had risen above the clouds. It is a pretty morning here. Notice all the green. Ignore the dog smudges on the window.

I had something else to natter on about but it escapes me now...

Thursday 5/10/07 6:24 am

This is the Kong Power Chewer

Scooby Dooby Doo...

This is a time for high security, and our fence is now ELECTRIFIED. Never you mind precisely how those batteries are connected to the wiring; rest assured they are. Intruders will be shocked to learn of the effectiveness of this configuration. Especially racoons.


QUICK POLL

a) Rosemary doesn't know which end of a hammer to use
b) Somebody (who could it be...) knows which end of a hammer to chew


Given all the praise he gets, I can't believe Anderson Cooper wasn't on top of this story. I went to the dump yesterday. And here is what it looks like. Actually, it isn't a 'dump' or a 'landfill' - it is an 'Odorless Transfer Facility'. All of us high-styling Ithacans bring our garbage and recycling here, and it gets 'processed' then shipped to some site in Ohio. GOOD. What has Ohio done for us lately? The least they can do is deal with our garbage.


Just a view up Buffalo Street on my way into work from the Odorless Transfer Facilty. You can see a faint twinge of purple in the mid-left to further bolster my contention that spring is here.

Am I desperate for material? No, although if I read this blog much longer, I may petition myself to, I dunno, leave town for a while. Otherwise, all is well.

I worked at home today, and, along the way, created the Ultimate Scoob. OK, for the uninitiated, there is a dog chew toy called a 'Kong', which is basically a hollow rubber grenade into which you insert a snack (aka a Scooby Snack, or just 'scoob'). The idea is that your faithful hound will chew this thing until he or she manages the 'descoob' manuever and gets to eat the treat. And while they're busy doing that, they're not chewing anything else. Which is good. The flaws in the system are a) dogs don't realize the value of being distracted; they just want the scoob and b) when it comes to getting food, dogs are cunning. Ellie, in particular, has discovered that it is much easier to just bounce the thing off the floor (or down the stairs - she's scary smart sometimes) until the scoob dislodges. So the problem is to find a scoob that resists bouncing or an easy chew solution.b It's a classic min/max problem; you need something small enough to get into the Kong, but large enough that it doesn't just fall out. And we've been struggling with this. (One option is peanut butter, but we've found that we wind up with peanut oil all over the place). In search of a scoob this morning, I noticed a hunk of Sopressata (a spicy salami) in the fridge and I was able to custom carve a piece that I could just barely fit into the Kong. Ellie normally De-Scoobs in under 10 minutes. This one lasted from 10 am till 6:00 pm. I finally had to use a screwdriver to extract the thing. Heh heh... The irony is, I cut it up and put it into her dinner and she didn't know what to do with it. She was interested, but couldn't decide whether to chew or swallow it.

She may have been somewhat frustrated. But she was engaged, and nothing else got chewed.

Finally, I gotta say, I LOVE this digital photography. I can take as many pointless, idiotic photographs as I care to (the stuff that makes it here is maybe 20% of the output, you know, la creme de la creme), I can drive down the street holding the camera up out the sunroof, clicking away blindly, and if 99% of the shots are useless, it costs me the same as if I had only taken the one keeper.

Free at last, free at last

OK, looking at our forecast, it appears that we're going to cruise to Bruce's Official Last Day (of Spring) that Winter Poses a Threat (5/12) without going much below seventy during daylight and the high forties at night. I think we are now safe and headed into one of the six week periods that makes Ithaca worth living in (spring, sun, the students all leave, and it's not too hot yet.) Here is a picture of a dive bar downtown (up the hill to the right was the Ithaca Gun factory, and this place would open at 8:00 am to serve the night crew. But the factory is long-closed, so it's now just a garden variety dive bar called, IIRC, The Fall Creek House, aka Tha Creekah). Just through the woods straight ahead is the afore-pictured Ithaca Falls. I was trying to get some good shots of early spring color, but the purple trees downtown that were truly psychedelic last week had already turned white, and the rest of the fauna doesn't quite register on the camera yet. But, the sky is blue, the grass is green, and there are splashes of yellow everywhere. I don't know what they're called, but I'm sure my readers do and will let me know. I could ask my wife, but she's out taking advantage of the late daylight to get in some more gardening.

(OK, now it's really dark and I have my answer. Forsythias. Which actually would have been my guess if I was on Final Jeopardy, but I wasn't sure enough to risk my journalistic integrity here. )



Here is the Welcoming Committee greeting this weary laborer after a long day of figuring out how to do things that I had spent the last three years figuring out how to do exactly the opposite way. On the left is the Head Gardener, on the right is her new Apprentice Digger, although at the moment Ellie seems to be more interested in chewing on fallen branches and wooden handles. But she has shown significant raw talent for, and interest in, Digging.

As you can see, it has been yet another uneventful week. I will continue to search for the images that truly define The Uneventful Life, without delving into the spoilt milk in the refrigerator (although there are some interesting-looking cheeses in there.) More as, or if, it happens.