Video of My Dog Trying to Get a Cookie Out of a Wastebasket

I was going to write a paean to America the beautiful - but I'll spare us all that. (And that is the last time the word "paean" will ever appear here. Promise). See, I sense that the internet is impatient with my boring, self-regarding content. I hear that. So here's a little clip of my dog trying to get the remainder of a "Chips Ahoy" cookie out of a wastebasket.

A little set up: The fun began with Maisy approaching the wastebasket like a commando, inching forward on her elbows and stomach. Then she started to growl and bark, staring intently at the can. I thought there must be a mouse or something behind it. Nope. Chips Ahoy - partial.

I helped a sister out by putting the can on its side. Still, it was a puzzle for her.

Enjoy. (PS She got the cookie in the end). Happy 4th.

Summer Time

Believe it or not, I am full of ambition to write and photograph and blather on. Just no time. I have been taking pictures again. Here are a couple for summer.

Oh, here's a little odd bit of writing for you too, in case you don't have enough to read on your computer:


Welcome to my Déjà vu.

(I just had to write this down the other day. I have thought about it, once in a while, for years. Don’t ask me why because I really have no idea).

I see in my mind’s eye a small house, badly built, higgledy piggeldy, alone on the top of a hill. The walls are made from various materials - salvaged bits, odds and ends. Where it is wood, it is brown but sun-bleached. Where it is stucco, dirt has collected in the swirls meant to be decorative. The roof is flat, though it slopes to the back.

A too-big window a picture window fills nearly one entire wall. There is a bulkhead at the back of the house, like a little shed with steps to the cellar. Though the foundation of the house is hidden by the grass and bushes, the lines of the house are straight and true, suggesting the foundation is sound. There is an old iron water pump nearly lost in the grass not far from the front door.

It is a fall day, but with humid summer air and a cloudy gray and white sky.
The front of the house, where there is a door at the top of three concrete steps, looks down the hill at nothing but hill and grass. The grass is uniformly long and gone brown, like straw. The wheaty tops of the grass bob in the wind, up and down, as the breeze, which is sometimes builds to a wind, rises and falls.

The front door is wood and was meant for an interior door. It has been damaged by the weather. Veneer is popping off all four of the panels. The steps are chipped and in places the aggregate shows through. There is a bald spot in the brown grass at the bottom of the last step.

There is only the house at the top of the hill, with the grass, and a few overgrown bushes around it. A few blowsy pink blooms still cling to the bushes.

?

As far as I know I have never seen this place, but I get a feeling about it sometimes, like a place I knew in some other time... Do we all have these places?

One more summery (weird) picture in keeping with the above and out:

Hon, Where's My Terry Cloth Romper?

"Oh God! I meant to throw that out before you could wear it again."

It serves James Bond right that he has been immortalized wearing this garment. Not that I don't love Bond, and all, but I mean - really. Shack and I settled down in front of Goldfinger this morning (Saturday, and all). The scene where Bond zippers himself into this attractive robins-egg blue one-piecer, with full wedgie functionality, opens with Bond having sun tan lotion applied to his back by one "Dink" (a girl, despite the name). In case you've forgotten, Dink is run off when Bond's CIA contact, Felix, appears poolside. Run off with a slap on her bottom before her blond head gets all confused by the "man talk" that Bond tells her is imminent.

I actually stopped at this point to explain to Shack, who was watching with great interest, that this kind of thing is not done anymore. "Why?" He looked very confused. I think my explanation about the 60s being a long time ago, the evils of sexism etc. didn't clear things up for him. But then there's Bond's "towelling playsuit" and that's some consolation.

Some dedicated fashion blogger has a long explanation about this here, and a few more pictures of Sean Connery having been steered very wrong, sartorially speaking. FYI.

North To Alaska

For those who have been following along, you'll no doubt be relieved to know that we have finally made a decision about where to go for Shackleton's big trip. (When the Understudy was 10, I took her to London and a little bit around the Island. The deal was that when Shack got to be 10 he would get to choose where he went.) I guess the title of the post pretty much says it all.

I am sort of embarrassed about going on a cruise. Not exactly a wilderness adventure - though the boat stops in five different places where we can all race off and stimulate the local economy. Still, we will get to see Alaska, if it isn't raining too much. I even bought new hiking poles for Mendenhall Glacier and Mount Ranier (where we will visit on a day trip from Seattle after the cruise wraps up.)
I also have to admit that the idea of being on a floating hotel, where I don't have to figure out any foreign currency or train tables etc. has a certain attraction. OK. I'm weak. I said it.

Shackleton is sort of excited but with the vast stretch of time before we actually leave (mid July) it doesn't seem to be much occupying his thoughts. I am sure the Internet will be thrilled to see our pictures. Have no fear, they will be shared.

Government Work

I went to the cafeteria this morning in the government complex where I work (the former state mental hospital and poor farm - poorly repurposed as office space for its current population of bureaucrats (i.e., yours truly). This is the hallway at the top of the stairwell that leads to the cafeteria:



If scenes like this didn't make the former occupants of the state hospital want to kill themselves, I don't know what would. It briefly made me feel suicidal.

Well. Now I need a lift. Probably you do too.

Here's a link to a very funny bit of business that the Understudy passed onto me from her cheerful tumblr blog. It will make your day if you click through or your money back. FYI: music will start to play when you click through so if you are looking around the internet at work, you might want to turn your volume down. Also, the Understudy is 13 so when people go to her blog she forces them to work with a cursor that is shaped like bow and trails glitter along the screen. Have fun!

"Confirmed in Antwerp..."

I just read that phrase out on the internet, at the beginning of some longer comment to a blog post. The comment had nothing to do, as near as I could tell, with the content of the post. Maybe it was a kind of artistic statement? Maybe misfiled? Whatever. I just loved it, though - hinting as it does at some important, busy life - some artist. some contemporary eminence. A long way from where I sit, alas, and probably not a phrase likely ever to be said following my name - but there it is. Isn't it poetry?

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In other non news, I have been thinking for a while about those great pop-culture metaphorical places: "Chinatown" (I mean in the sense it was used in the movie of the same name - I know that there are many literal Chinatowns), Margaritaville, Hotel California. What would I call the metaphorical place I currently inhabit? How about you? Looking forward to getting a couple of answers here.

Mirror, Mirror... and a Junk-Free Memorial Day Weekend

Is anyone else out there bothered by the high reflectivity of his or her computer screen? I mean, until the LCDS light up on my laptop it's as bad as having a great horking mirror 18 inches from my face? (Mirror avoidance = peace).

Also I just "invested" in a iPod touch and was dismayed to see it produces the same effect. I was waiting for Shackleton to return from a field trip yesterday and decided to use my new iPod to watch an episode of The Office on Netflix. If I refocused my eyeballs at any given moment, there was my own face, hovering ghostly and malevolently over a tiny Steve Carrell.

I sense a marketing opportunity here... Is there some film that we could put on these screens so they wouldn't force us to look at ourselves looking at our screens?

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In other news, my name is Woolfoot and I am junkaholic. It's been two months since my last auction or visit to an antique store.

As you know, it's Memorial Day weekend and I live in Vermont, where almost everyone is white. In case you haven't heard, White People in general, especially rural white people like most of us here in Vermont, like to pull their stuff out of their houses and onto their lawns and try to sell it during the summer. They like to get off to a big start on Memorial Day weekend.

I drove 60 miles today around our little state and, hand to heart, I saw a yard sale at least every two miles on average. I did not stop at one.

OK, OK, I'll admit I walked into the auction house where I have spent so much time and money in my past life. (They had a sign by the road that said "flea market.") I came late - people were packing - and I left immediately. Really, my stopping in was just a little auld lang syne (I own a blue-and-white jumbo coffee mug from about 1890 with the words to auld lang syne transferprinted on the saucer - FYI). Temptation had vanished. The fever has passed. Why?

I have been wondering about that myself and I have a few ideas.

First, my daydream of opening an antique store ran aground when I set up an antiques booth early last fall at a big event. That booth was work! Miserable, hard work. Not fun, as I had vaguely hoped, nor profitable, as I had argued with Whusband. Also, I just looked around my house one day, and my studio, and the outbuildings on our farm and saw that every available nook, cranny and bit of wall space was occupied - not to mention the drawers and cupboards and I thought: enough! Finally, if you have been following along, you know I pulled together a "Blook" this spring, that is a book made up of old blog posts -- and there I saw how much time and energy I have spent in the last few years accumulating things I don't need and really can't afford and then writing about it. Again, why?

OK, collecting was fun. While it lasted. But I think I am over it. I have a pin, one shaped like and anchor and covered with rhinestones, (from a box lot last year at auction last year). I think I will put it on in recognition of my new-found sobriety.