our street is ready for thanksgiving

No, this isn't the Thinking Post.  I'm still mulling.

I'm also enjoying the wonderfully incongruous place where we live.  500 yards away is a busy road, three gas stations, and an access point to the highway. But 15 yards away? Turkeys. Eleven of them.  We've seen them several times this week, so clearly they live around here.

As long as they don't leave beak-shaped dents in our cars, I'm psyched to have them as neighbors.

Mulling

You ever notice how sometimes a common thread or idea or topic will present itself in various unconnected corners of your life at very nearly the same time?  Or perhaps the various corners of one's life aren't unconnected at all, but that's beside the point (I do love to get sidetracked and express that via parentheses, as you know).

Anyway. I'm taking the universe's hint and mulling over a Thinking Post for later this week.  No yarn or flowers or cute animals.  

I mean, just for the one post.

Soggy Cecil

He hates the rain, but it just might make him cuter.

It's only cute because I know it isn't poisonous.

Category: "Blog Post Titles I Never Thought I'd Use"
Items: 1


This'll be the last garden post of 2011. I think so, anyway. We still have leeks growing, but those will show up in a cooking post, not a gardening post. A garden version would involve some truly boring pictures. Snoozefest.

Anyway, I had my camera with me in the yard a couple months ago because I'd been taking pictures of whatever flowers were in bloom that day. The universe completely enabled my tendency to be lazy very efficient when making trips back in the house, and rewarded me for still having the camera in the pocket of my jacket when I'd moved on to the weeding of the overgrown vegetable garden* -- I spied a visitor next to one of the raised beds, and it was kind enough to model for me.

Have a good winter, my friend. Please stick around and eat more of our bugs next year -- I suspect there will be plenty to offer.


*For those of you who don't garden or didn't pick up on the context clues here: weeding an overgrown vegetable garden is decidedly not a photographically important pursuit.

56 Weeks of Cecil

I missed the opportunity for a post with any real fanfare and will thusly have to resort to the anticlimactic: Mr. Cecil's been with us for... more than a year. See, a drumroll would have been ridiculous there. According to the meet-our-new-dog post from last year, we officially got him on October 8th. Oh well. It's not like we would have baked him a cake or anything had we been more on top of things.

One of the absolute best new skills he's learned lately is the ability to go to off-leash dog parks and not run off into the sunset/after a squirrel/into traffic. Well, honestly, I suspect he's had this skill for a while now, but what's happened recently is that we've had the courage to let him go off-leash and trust him to be a good puppy. Fueled by our own paranoia, we've spent the past year carting around a 50-foot leash on all his adventures to give him the feeling of freedom while still giving us humans a sense of security. Couple that with a plastic baggie full of scraps of american cheese and salami, to be meticulously and consistently deployed when someone's little canine legs carry him back to us, and we've managed to hoodwink him into thinking that it's the best thing EVER to stick with us.

That's him. The fact that he somehow gets the concept of trails mystifies and amuses me.

There's also the convenient part about him being a teensy bit afraid of the whole world, which I suspect keeps him from wandering too far. But also the salami.

Anyway. Being able to let him run and explore and smell the smells and meet other puppies (see? they're not scary!) has been such a turning point. He's gaining confidence, which makes him less likely to have a meltdown on a structured walk when he sees a cat or another dog, and we're feeling better by seeing him make a lot of great progress. All that, PLUS, we don't have to do any fancy double-dutch footwork to keep from being taken out at the ankles by a bright orange leash if he starts running at full tilt. Win, win, win.

His favorite part is always smelling the smells.

This weekend, we spent an hour wandering around a dog park a couple miles from our house. No fences, no leashes. Just acres and acres of trails and fields and a pond. So much to sniff.

One of my other favorite things about Mr. Cecil? He had no interest whatsoever in swimming in that pond. We are so. darn. lucky.

Boring Beer, Just the Way We Like It.

We just sampled our latest batch of homebrewed beer, a caramel apple dortmunder.  The dortmunder is from a kit; The Awesome Husband added apples and, um, special kinds of malts? I think? to achieve a caramel-ish effect.

It's pretty good.  There's a noticeable but not overpowering apple flavor, and  perhaps not as much caramel flavor as I'd like (but then I do love me some caramel so I might not be the best person to judge).

The best part by far is the fact that opening the bottles has been uneventful and catastrophe-free.  We thoroughly enjoyed seeing geysers in Iceland but we don't need them in our kitchen.

not a sweater

I made mittens, you guys! 

It took about a weekend's worth of knitting, and while I won't be abandoning my beloved sweaters any time soon, I will say it was nice to have a finished product in (and on!) my hands so quickly. 

They're not that warm, though, and that's really the point of mittens, so I might try felting them to see if they get less drafty without getting too small to wear.  It's worth a shot, right?