Relaxation. Recreation. Preparation. And Trivia.

Not too much time again - it's late; we just watched "Kingdom of Heaven" with Q. Fun but frustrating experience - he got it clear who were the Muslims about 3/4 through the movie. Hey, he's a kid, I guess. Should be expected.

Here are some pictures from the day, which was spent in a leisurely fashion - beach in the morning, combined with pigeon feeding; late lunch; I took a run, then we all walked to a local park (beautiful) so the kids could ride their scooters. Janneke power-walked the perimeter of the park while I sat on a bench and petted Clarabelle; Janneke used T to ferry trivia questions to me, and I would send back my answers. "What's the capital of Ukraine?" "What are the colors of the Belgian flag?"

I countered by using Q to send trivia questions to her. "What breed of horse is the heaviest horse ever?" "What living land animal is the closest relative of whales?" It was a very pleasant half-hour for all concerned.

Though strangely, the lizards that used to populate that park appear to have disappeared. I see them all over the place in other parts of the city, in people's yards, etc., but that park has lost them. It worries me.

Bought some ice cream at Walgreen's, walked home, Janneke made supper, we ate it pleasantly, and T then collapsed into bed, so we threw in the movie. T walked back out to try to worm her way into watching it an hour or so later, but she was put back to bed. A little too gory.

I also bought some swim shoes at Walgreen's. Janneke got some sea urchin spines in her foot yesterday (forgot to mention that) and has been limping since - too deep to dig out, not painful enough to go to the doctor. Today she's a lot better - mostly her calf is sore from walking to protect her heel (where the spines are) from the ground. She's had them, Q's had them - I run barefoot. I can not get sea urchin spines in my foot. I now have swim shoes. The look sort of kung-foo-ey and yet, strangely effeminate. I figure: I have a beard, and I'm bald. That evens it out.

Tomorrow I hit the market again, all day if I have to, as of about 10:00 AM. Janneke is going to go do some "work" at Starbuck's in the early morning to free up my schedule. WIsh me luck.

All right, all right, quit yer caterwaulin'. Here's some dang pictures.



Q and T feed the pigeons before hitting the beach.



"What is this thing? It rolls - and yet, it tears apart when you bite it, and it tastes of delicious fibrous plant life! Just like a stick!"



"Is it a stick? Is it a ball? My God - It's some kind of wonderful, magical.....Stick-ball! It's the greatest, most fabulous object I've ever laid my teeth into!"



"Arraraaargharahhkkkaraaakkh."

December the 24th, 2010

Hey, folks - again, apologies for the long layoff. It just seems like Facebook has taken so much of the wind out of the blog's sails -I communicate with pretty much everybody that way, and update videos there and give quick news items out and post photos...The blog seems strangely quaint and antiquated. But somehow I don't want to let it go; I like to write, I like to have it out there, like the traps I used to lay for muskrats and foxes, and then occasionally forget about, only to find them, months later, with a skeletal muskrat disintegrating in them. The blog lies out there in the ether, waiting to be stumbled upon or remembered by someone who knows me, and I'm sure somebody occasionally checks it out. I'm attached to it; it's a sentimental space. So I'm keeping it around.

Though I have to say, by the time I have time to sit and write on it, most of what passes for news around here has been communicated. So I wind up painting some particular event in vivid colors. Perhaps that's the tack I should take: it's an outlet for intensely-seen events, things I found moving or which piqued my interest, which I then share in a detailed way. Like what? Oh, I don't know - I could paint for you our Christmas Eve morning.

Rolled out of bed late (for me) - 8:05, which is pretty typical for a weekend day - and found the fire roaring in the woodstove, thanks to the little lady of the house. Well, the larger of the little ladies. Very cozy scene - breakfast had been had by all but me, the pets were lounging by the fire. I dedicated myself immediately to eliminating a minute of footage from the ping pong video in the previous post - I had shown it to Janneke the previous evening, and we both agreed that it had dragged a bit. Didn't take me long. Q watched and approved, but T was uninterested, rapt as she was in a particularly thrilling episode of "Max and Ruby". TV on Christmas Eve?! Yep. We're sometimes that sort of folk.

Mid-morning, the four of us piled into the car to take Clarabelle to the Cole Fields (unofficial) Dog Park, either to let her run in the woods, should there be no hounds about, or to let her cavort and canoodle with her own kind. The kids brought along their plastic toboggans, knowing as they did of the steep path that leads from the football practice locker facilities down to the fields. I didn't think there would likely be much snow to slide on, but I figured, hey, let them have their illusions.

Not a soul around when we arrived - the top of the hill, where the road goes down to the fields, had a sign that said "Road Closed for the Winter". But there was hardly any snow, and the brand-new VW SPortwagen war mit den Schneeraeder ausgerustet. (Sorry - it's hard to talk about the VW ohne dass mein Gehirn sich wieder nach dem Deutschen kehrt.) So, we rolled down the hill, snow tires and all, damn the torpedoes, and parked, then dragged the toboggans back across the field to the slope.

Which turned out to be pretty darned rocky. While the kids scrambled to the top, Janneke and I hand-scooped snow to protect them onto the most up-jutting of the rocks, and they did a few runs without major incident. Clarabelle sprinted up and down after them, her pseudo-dwarfish legs bouncing in that odd, rubbery way she has when she's gamboling along. To me, her legs really look like they have the basic architecture of Basset Hound legs - odd little subtle out-turnings and in-turnings at the joints, high and bulgy, compact musculature - but they're long and quite quick. But that little boing-boing she does, particulary when she's slowing down at the end of a sprint, is the most adorable thing, and I love to watch it happening and ponder whether it's a function of her unexpressed dwarf genes, her rubbery puppiness, or just the way that sort of running works.

Walking around looking for easily-picked-up snow to throw onto the rocky parts of the sledding path, I decided I'd head to the pond, since the vast quantities of uninterrupted snow could be easily scooped into the sled that wasn't in use and hauled wherever necessary. And as I scooped, I was struck by the very fine quality of the ice beneath the snow. "It's too bad we don't have shovels," I said to Janneke. And before long I had convinced myself that the thing to do was zoom back to the house and come back with shovels, and make ourselves a little rink.

Soon all four of us were scooping and shoveling, and in a jiffy we had a small rink cleared. We finally tired out and headed home, but were very excited about the possibilities of the following day. We could spend Christmas skating on our own little rink, with no one else around!

Christmas Eve, Janneke prepared for us a phenomenal meal, with Brussels sprouts, beef tenderloin, and fingerling potatoes. Utterly delicious. Once the kids were in bed, the usual ritual for me and Janneke: Wrapping presents in front of the TV and the woodstove, watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and drinking, Janneke her wine, me the beer I made with Rob Mathews. Just grand. Off to dream land - but not before I had snatched the cookie plate and the milk glass back out of Janneke's hand to replace them by the tree. She's such a fastidious home-cleaner that she'd automatically brought them back into the kitchen. It was a close thing to make sure they didn't get washed and put away.

More later, perhaps - it's starting to feel like a busy day. It's now Tuesday, the 28th, and a few other things have happened - including the Packers dismantling the Giants. It's been a great staycation so far - I feel utterly rested and content. Or as close to it as a guy like me is ever going to get.

Ping Pong Lessons

Check out the latest video: Q beats me in ping pong. What else is new.

Possessed by the Grinch

Dude! What the frag!

So we went to the Williamstown Reindog Parade the other day with Clarabelle. It’s this holiday parade involving a drummer, the local riding clubs, and every dog they can find and dress up as a reindeer. For the first time, we have a dog that’s friendly enough with other dogs to participate, so we got creative on how to make Clarabelle look even more adorable. We dolled up her doggie coat adorably, with little green Christmas tree ornaments all around the edges and red garland looped back and forth across her back, and a tiny mouse dressed as an elf pinned on in the position of a rider. Adorable. But the whole arrangement was pretty flimsy – nothing was bolted on, and every time she rubbed up against something, the ornaments on the fringes would come off. So we decided to take her to the gathering place where the parade was to begin, and wait until the parade started to put it on her.

Turns out, though, the judging all happens while the dogs are standing around waiting for the parade to start. Which nobody told us. So while we were standing there, some person or other was quietly ignoring us because our dog wasn’t dressed up. Just before the parade was to begin, they arranged us all for a photograph on the steps of one of the buildings on the Williams campus, and before the photo, said they were going to announce the winners. “What?!”, I thought. “Winners? We haven’t started yet!”

When T heard that this was happening, she said to me, in a quietly nervous sort of stammer, “It’s OK if we don’t win, isn’t it?” “Of course,” I told her. “And besides, they didn’t even get to see Clarabelle in her outfit. So if we don’t win, it’s only because nobody saw her.” This didn’t calm her, and in fact seemed to make her look a little more upset. So I tried to change the subject.

We had two leashes on Clarabelle, originally so that the kids could walk her on the parade route. But between trying to keep her outfit mostly together by keeping her away from other dogs and people, and fighting through Clarabelle’s constant lunging toward every other dog there was so she could sniff them, the kids just weren’t up to it. She jerked T off her feet during the build-up to the parade, and left Q the dust by jerking the leash completely out of his hands on another occasion. It became clear that an adult would have to hold her. But T had the small leash, and I had the big one, and we marched the whole length of the parade route together.

Toward the middle I cut out the middle man and just grabbed the choke collar, or very close to it, and kept such a death grip on it that she was honking hoarsely much of the time. But what else could I do? She was one giant surge of energy trying to get to and wrestle every dog she saw. And there were hundreds of them, it seemed. T stood quietly with her end of the leash, and at one point actually said, “Dad, I think I can take it from here, she really doesn’t seem to be pulling very hard.” “Well, no, to you, she doesn’t,” I said. “Because my left arm is constantly holding her up off the ground.” It was exhausting.

And the streets were PACKED!, people crowding in everywhere, on both sides, waving at us and grinning, some of them unaware, having not seen us in a while, that we had a new dog. And I’m sorry to report that I was not especially festive as we paraded down the street to celebrate the Holiday That Must Not Be Named. I was exhausted from holding the dog in the air and out away from my side, I was embarrassed by the constant rain of green Christmas tree ornaments we were leaving in my wake, frustrated at having avoided Clarabelle even being considered in the whole goofball contest in the first place, and tired and cold from the long wait and the longer march. I think I had a pained grimace on my face the entire time. T had fun, waving to her friends, and I guess that’s mostly what it’s about, in the end. But boy, it was a long walk.

Once it ended, I stood and pitched all the accoutrements of Clarabelle’s outfit into the garbage can, and then began the long march back to the car. Janneke and T went to see Q perform with the fifth grade band at Images Cinema; I was to take Clarabelle home and then return, hopefully in time to see Q honk his way through a few numbers. But once I’d made the trip back across town to the car, I realized I had no keys. So I marched back to Images, got the keys, and then trudged back to the car again. It’s a good half mile, this little trip that I was doing, between Images and the car. So when I finally did wind up at home, I sat myself down and had a damn bowl of cereal before heading out again.

The event had ended at Images, but Q found me and told me that Janneke and T had gone to Thompson’s Chapel to hear Brad’s choir perform in Lessons and Carols. So we went there for the 4:00 show. The music was lovely, but to be honest, I don’t get this whole idea of sitting in a church, doing church-like stuff (listening to readings, singing, more readings, more singing, a sermon, more readings, more singing, etc), without it actually being a church service. I felt like I was nine years old again, pulling my hair our, waiting for it to end so I could go home. The kids, meanwhile, were just as frustrated – though Q sang the carols and seemed to enjoy at least parts of it.

My patience wasn’t the thickest, either, since I had been up at 4:30 that morning to go hunting. Sat in the woods until 8:00, saw nothing, came home. Story of my sporting life. But now it was 5:20 PM, and I was falling asleep in the pew there. As with most things, I wish I could have done better…Just wasn’t to be.

I’ll try to get some more updates on here soon, but this one took me half an hour to write, and I’m bushed. It’ll probably be a while, honestly. Not that there’s a lack of stuff to write about – bought a car, burnt the pumpkin bread, saw a red fox. Lots of thrilling adventure to relate. Just no time. Take care, brush your hair…

Resumptive Depressive

Hoo, boy...Another post that begins with an apology. I should just copy and paste the apologies from all the other times I've gone months without posting. But that would be still another insult to you, my reader. S. So, no: I will cook up another one, completely original, and heartfelt this time. Here goes:

Sorry, man.

Anyway, on to the hijinks: Q started piano lessons again today. We give him the summers off, what with travel and all (perhaps more about that later on), but then we start him up again in the fall. In the past, he's grumbled about the lessons on occasion - once, famously, he responded to a question about what he would wish for if he had but one wish. And the thing he said he'd wish for was an end to piano lessons. I kind of jumped on him for that one, if you recall - reminded him that he liked to sit and play, that he was proud of himself for what he'd accomplished, that he laughed with Ed every single time he had a lesson.

But this crisis was worse. He cried - yowlingly, sobbingly cried - when we told him it would soon be time to start the lessons again. "I hate them! I hate it!", he wailed. "You're making me waste all my time on something I don't want to do!"

We told him we would talk about it and get back to him.

In the end, a couple of things turned us toward insisting that he start up again. One is the simple fact that we know him, and that he wildly exaggerates his heartfelt emotions into great, combusting fits. He does it regularly - with physical pain, with insults from other kids, with offenses to his dignity doled out by younger siblings and pets. (Seriously. Pets.) He's a wonderfully sensitive, considerate young boy, who is very, very far from being even reasonably tough. So we have learned to read his hyperbolic suffering jags accordingly.

The second clue as to how to best handle this came last Saturday, when Janneke had to take Q to Caretaker Farm with her. Don't recall why, but he would have had to be in the house alone otherwise. (Soccer for T was involved, I think.) And the whole time he was out there with her, all he wanted to do was nothing. "Want to help me pick tomatoes?" "No." "Want to go to the pond and look for frogs?" "No." "Want to go help those guys who are weeding?" "No." Just plain-ol' laziness. Which led us to the conclusion that more leisure time is not what this particular kid needs right now.

So we decided we would say to him, "Fine. If you want to continue just with the trumpet," (a tactic he had deployed through tears days earlier), "we'll find a teacher and you'll have a lesson once a week with the teacher, in addition to your lessons at school."

Convulsions and explosive yowling. "No! I don't need that! The lessons at school are enough!"

"No, they are not, Q. You don't play the trumpet nearly as well as some of the other kids, because you do, not, practice at home. Why? Because we don't make you - you've got plenty of practicing to do for the piano. If you want to continue the trumpet, fine, but we decided long ago not to enforce practicing with that. Well, if, now, you want to replace piano with trumpet, fine - but the lessons to be learned from steady practice and improvement that you're getting from piano, will now have to come from the trumpet."

More squealing and fussing.

But at some point in here, after a couple of ugly stormings-off, we made the following points to him, in just about these words:

"You absolutely do not practice for an hour every day. It's fifteen to twenty minutes, max. Don't exaggerate. And the lesson you go to is not even an hour long, and it's once a week. Which means that four out of five days, you have from the end of school until five o'clock or five thirty to do whatever you want. That often involves soccer practice, but that's your time. You want to do that, and all your friends are there. Four days out of five, you have no obligations. And on the fifth, you lose, effectively, an hour of your two free hours. That is not very much to ask, and the fact that you act as if it were, shows us that you need to learn that it is not.

"You play your Wii every, single, day. This is very generous of us - you play it in the morning for a bit, and then often in the afternoon. You have plenty of time for goofing around.

"Today is Sunday. It's 10:30 AM. You won't have to go to bed until 9:30 - that's 11 hours. You have NO obligations during those eleven hours. The Packers are on, we're going to watch that, your friend Ethan is coming over - it's one long party for you. A lack of free time is absolutely not an issue in your life.

"All kids want to give up on things that start to seem hard. But part of growing up is learning to accept that sometimes, you have to work at something to achieve it. The fact that you're saying 'I'll keep playing the piano, just without the lessons', shows us that you haven't learned that lesson yet either. Because you won't - you've hardly played it all summer. Having a mentor and a teacher who has expectations is an excellent way to grow as a person. It's our responsibility to help you grow into a person who can do that.

"My mother let me quit piano when I whined about it enough. I was very excited not to have to practice or go to lessons. I still remember the giddiness I felt when Mom and Jayne trooped out the door to go to lessons for the first time and I got to stay home with Jim and Jess. I was so excited! You know what I did?

"I don't either. I have no memory of it. I have no idea what I did with that one little hour every week, with those twenty minutes a day. I wasted them. I got nothing at all out of them. And now I can't play the piano."

He got calmer and calmer as the discourse wore on, weaving back and forth between Janneke and me, his demeanor growing more and more free and easy.

"Fine," he said, without petulance. "OK. I'll do it."

And today's lesson? Fan, tastic. Grinning, laughing, never once complaining when I went to pick him up. It may help that the lesson is on Fridays now, and many kids are out of the Youth Center by late afternoon, off to fulfill weekend plans. But I can't tell you how great it was to watch him playing again, watch him interacting again with Ed, that wonderful man. It just made me sigh and smile and snuggle back into my chair.

Which was really uncomfortable. It's held in a practice hall, after all.

So, enough of that. Here's some visual aids.



That's Clarabelle, responding to some obscene sounds being produced by the wife and the boy. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Speaking of which, did I ever show you this:



T showing off her new room. Can't recall if I ever posted it here. If I did, hey, what's the harm in doing so again? And if I didn't, well, good. Now I have.

And finally, here's a video I made to promote the Spanish Guitar Club at my school. On "Back to School Night", it played on a loop on a TV cart in a lobby area. Thought it was a pretty elegant solution to the simple impossibility of being up in my classroom, greeting parents, and downstairs manning the guitar club table. So there was no guitar club table - there was simply this, over and over:



OK, officially punchy. G'night, Grandma...

Barefoot Deck Construction In My Dreams

Hey. Well, the insomnia is back. I don't understand it this time at all - I am bone-tired. Or was - just after dinner I was yawning and groaning, dragging myself to those post-dinner chores like washing the dishes and smiling at my children and acknowledging my wife and pretending to listen to people with the very last fumes of my day's worth of energy. But then Chris, Q's friend who was here for a sleepover, got sick around 10:00, and I drove out with Q to take him home. And then I tried to catch a few minutes of Keith Olbermann. And then during a commercial I switched over and found an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I hadn't seen. (Lame as hell - Wesley frickin' Crusher figured prominently. If that TV hadn't cost us a week's salary I'd have thrown the remote at it.) And then Clarabelle had to go out for one more quick turn so she won't suffer in her crate tonight. And then it was 11:30, and I re-read a couple of portions of "Born to Run". And then I was all wired up, thinking about running.

Because I ran today. Four miles, in one solid loop that didn't repeat itself at all. I've been feeling so fragile lately that I do all my running on a 1.5-mile loop around the house, so that if anything does start to hurt, I can stop and be no more than half a mile's walk from ice and a sympathetic ear. But today, dammit, I was going to go four miles. So I went to Google Earth, mapped out a route exactly that long, and hit the road in the Runamocs.

It was great. I don't try to go fast anymore - I just try to go. Go easy, go light. Just go. Speed will come when my body's ready, when I have slowly built up every susceptible muscle and piece of connective tissue to be up to the job with ease. And in the meantime, I run with an easy joy that doesn't care how fast it goes. Mind you, I do fantasize as I run about the day when I'll once again be able to do six, seven, eight miles. And then about the first marathon I'll run. And beyond that; I do fantasize about going fast. But I don't actually go fast - I just revel in the complete lack of pain anywhere, especially in my feet.

I go barefoot as often as I can. I worked on the deck today (more on that below) for hours and every minute of it was barefoot. I walked the dog around the neighborhood barefoot, dropped T off at day care barefoot. And my feet love it. They love being challenged and stretched with every step, using their muscles in ways that make them interact with the ground. Tomorrow we're going onion harvesting at Caretaker Farm, and I plan to do the whole thing barefoot. Why not? It's bare earth and weeds - the most annoying thing about the dirty work at the farm is the dirt in your shoes. What if you have none? The dirt just rolls off your feet, or pleasantly between your toes. It'll be great.

Re-reading Born to Run, I came across a part where someone who agreed to run the last fifty miles of a hundred-mile race with a Tarahumara Indian runner was struck by the sound they made as they ran. Just a very gentle sort of tap, touch, stroke on the ground, made by their sandals. They didn't pound, they didn't go whap-whap-whap. They treated the ground gently so that it would treat them gently. And it struck me that I have been remarking at that very same sound lately as I run in the Runamocs. There's no scraping, no scuffing. just touch, touch, touch. My feet feel far better at the end of a run than they did at the beginning. It's very exciting and I can't wait to do it again.

Not tomorrow, though. Absolutely not tomorrow. I am not pushing too far, too fast, too soon again.

All that excited thought kept me up. And then the deck! Well, a couple of revelations, first. Here's the biggest one: The Titan Post Anchor. This thing is going to solve every single one of the problems you didn't read about in the last post. The posts are set directly into the wood of the deck, through the decking. Brilliant - I've ordered seven of them for the seven posts I have and will definitely be setting. And then I spent today getting ready to place them. Now I just have to figure out where in hell to get something called a "hole saw".

First, though, before I can set them, I had to trim the edges of the deck to be able to accurately measure where the posts will go. So I did that, with some semi-skilled slicing with my brand-new circular saw. I'm very proud of it - it's this model. I've named it Betsy, in honor of our fallen Wednesday Barefoot Soccer comrade. Not just to honor her, though - Betsy and my new saw have a lot in common. They are both treasured by me; Brad, Betsy's husband, owns an identical model, so she lives in both our hearts; she is precise and exact and causes beauty to be created everywhere she goes; and if you get in her way, she will quickly and efficiently reduce you to sawdust. While making a very strong sound. We evened out that deck nicely, Betsy and I. 'Course, before I could do that, I had to put down the last board. So I did that first.

Now, when I did that, a problem arose. Somehow, I had been hanging all the joists, or at least the ones in the middle, a little too low. Such that this last decking board, which rests on the rim joists, sits a good quarter inch higher than the boards adjacent. Meaning that the spot where I install the posts on that whole side will have one half sitting on the low board, and one half sitting on the high one. There are a number of possible solutions - the Titan Post Anchor comes with washers that you can use to shim up one side or the other to bring it into level. But I'm not going to want a quarter-inch gap on one side (the visible-from-the-picnic-table side) of the post anchor. I could also chisel out a seat for the post anchor in the higher board, but that would then look bad from the angle of the person who walks down the stairs and out into our yard, with the posts quite near eye level. Nor do I like the veeeery visible height difference between that last board and the ones adjacent. I put the board down, and set all the screws, having decided to live with the difference...but now that I think about it in my mind's eye, and picture that damn difference in height and all the problems it causes, I say to myself the following:

"Joe, you gotta pull that board up, trim down the joist a bit, and then replace the board."

I've pulled one board up already - they're made of plastic, so with a little pry bar pressure, they pop right up. Then the screws can just be unscrewed and removed.

How am I going to trim the end joists?

Betsy.

Other news...Heck, you know what? I'm tired now. I think I can go to bed again! Tell you what: If it doesn't work out, I'll come back and tell you all about the nifty parallel I found for our continuing to call Barefoot Soccer "Barefoot Soccer", even though, the next time we do it, people (except probably me) won't be barefoot.

Aw, heck, it won't take long, so I'll just tell you:

It's like people calling two-by-fours "two-by-fours". They're not actually two inches by four inches, and everybody knows it. But they still keep calling them that.

See? Isn't that clever? How I saw that? That those two things are the same? Aren't you proud?

Good night.

The Insomniac's Confession

Cripers! Well, since my insomnia is back, and since there aren't any big-ticket news items that might occupy me at this late hour, I find myself once again pretending that there's someone out there interested in the goings-on of our little tribe, and pecking out some updates thereupon. To whit:

The deck progresses. Although I am lately preoccupied a lot more by the "should have"s than by the "should"s. For instance, I think perhaps I should not have bought the Azek railing that I bought. Mostly because I did not properly plot out just how my railing would attach to the rim joists of the deck. Mostly because my deck-building book didn't say I really needed to. You just notch the 4x4 posts and plop them down as you need then along the edge, and string the rails between them.

(Things get pretty wordy and impractically detailed here for a couple of paragraphs. You might want to skip ahead to the parentheses below.)

But then there's the issue of the rail sleeves I bought, which fit nicely over 4x4 posts that are not notched, and which disappear neatly into the decking as they plunge in behind the rim joists they were bolted to before the decking was applied. But I already applied my decking, and did not build any posts in.

Nor could I have, to be fair - the outer rim joist would up being double on one side and triple on another, meaning I would have had uneven and oddly-inset posts had I placed them that way. Of course, now I'm faced with the notion of having oddly incomplete post sleeving, since once the posts drop below the level of the deck on the outside, the post sleeve will stop.

Probably - I don't think I can fit the post sleeve over the bolt heads that will protrude from the lower faces of the 4x4 posts. Maybe I can, but I doubt it. Meaning that I would have to end the post sleeves at the level of the decking, and then surround the bottom of the posts with the joist-covering Azek sheeting I also bought. Which, I think, will look weird. So it's beginning to seem that all my remaining options are going to look somehow weird. Leaving me feeling paralyzed and pressed for time at the same time - the summer is ending, here, and I have no rails on the deck. Or stairs. It's covered, and that looks fine, but it's still not serviceable. And I'm not sure how to go about making it so tomorrow. Beginning to feel like I'll need advice from an expert, and that this expert is going to say "You should have thought this through better", which will make me feel very hot and trembly and sweaty. A feeling I am accustomed to having in association with carpentry in general.

(There - That should be enough of that for now.)

So, on to the other big news, which does NOT keep me up at night. Here it is:



Her name, in case you haven't yet heard, is Clarabelle.

She has now been in Massachusetts for a week and a day, and it's beginning to be hard to picture what it was like before she arrived. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - there's a lot to describe around this enormous happening.

Beginning with the trip the three of us - Q, T, and I - took last Saturday. We hit the road around 7:30 with Hobie's old dog crate in the back of the Subaru (it wouldn't fit in the Prius) and were humming down the highway to Glastonbury, CT, for the next two and a half hours. It was probably the nicest day of the summer - sunshine, high, white clouds, and temps in the upper 70s. The drive went phenomenally well, with kids playing with their games, and with each other, as only good sports who are being driven to a puppy can do. (Part of it is probably due to T being hopped up on Dramamine.) As we approached the target destination, the kids became active exit-searchers, and navigated me safely into the park-and-ride parking lot just off the highway where the local dog rescue group coordinates the weekly dropoff.

Now, this whole business is painstakingly and professionally catalogued on a weekly basis much more completely than I can do here, on a television show called "Last Chance Highway". Here's the short version:

New Englanders spay and neuter their dogs. Southerners don't. This leads to an imbalance of adoptive households and adoptable dogs -the South has too many, the North, not enough. And vice versa. Twenty different animal rescue groups across the South adopt dogs out ot homes in the North, and put the dogs on a trailer that drops them off every single week in their northern end cities, with the families that have applied for them online and been approved.

One of those families, August 7th, was us.

Q and T were excited, but dignified. The show sends a camera crew regularly to the Glastonbury site, and the camera crews must whoop people into a cheering frenzy, because they always appear on TV to be about to witness their favorite rock stars coming off the trailers. We had no such raucous buzz happening for our big day, but there was definitely a lot of excitement in the air when we were there. Just quieter. We were all pulled into a circle to listen to a spiel on getting a new dog, and then the truck and the trailer arrived, about ten minutes early, and before you knew it all sixty or so people were lined up in front of a card table, where the driver had a box of files and would pull your dog and its medical records up for you, nod to another fellow at the door of the trailer, who would disappear inside and then come right back out holding the exact same dog you had been going nuts over in photographs for a couple of weeks and just plain hand it to you.

It was very, very fun and emotional. We were thrilled - she was such a little squirm-butt when she came off, all white-faced and waggy and peeing excitedly as she received her first hugs and kisses from all three of us.

I have worked up some video, in a very quick and dirty version, which is available here.

We walked her around the parking lot a bit, then drove to a nearby Petsmart, probably all of 200 yards from the parking lot where we picked her up. She scoped out a couple of toys and some rawhide bones (the kids were eager to see what she might be most interested in), which we purchased, and then headed over to a school with a playground that we had scoped out earlier. But that quickly got old - Clarabelle (whose name had previously been Demi, but whom I decided I was going to go ahead and name my own damn self) was doing a lot of sniffing and the kids a lot of following, when what I think they had imagined was more of a cuddle fest. Walking around in the sunshine behind a dog that was picking up everybody's leftovers from under the picnic tables was a little too stressful, to tell the truth. And by now it was near noon, so we adjourned to the local Burger King, where we parked the car so that the end gate abutted a slight grassy rise. We opened the gate so Clarabelle could see us as we sat in the grass, arrayed in front of her, eating our lunch as she gnawed happily on a rawhide bone in her crate. It was very idyllic - in fact, it was very strangely so. If you ever get to Glastonbury, check out the strip of grass and trees that forms the border of the parking lot of the Burger King across from the park-and-ride lot. It's far, far more picturesque than such a place has any right to be. And we weren't the only ones to think so - a very sad, shabby, and shaky man, probably nearly 90, looked a bit put out by our arrival; he had been parked similarly to us, tailgate of his pickup drawn up against the grass, in the shade, windows down, playing a harmonica.

But now it was our picnic spot, so he stopped playing the harmonica. But he did do just as we did - he went inside, placed his order, and retired to the breezy shade. I hope he enjoyed it as much as we did.

Two hours and thirty minutes later, with a couple of stops built in along the way, Clarabelle made her debut in our home. It's been fantastic - she is one smart cookie. She's curious about everything, and cocks her head in the most endearing way, eerily reminiscent of Hobie. That was the expression with which she first confronted Skittles, whom the kids brought out into the back yard to meet Clarabelle before we brought her into the house. Best to have them meet on somewhat more neutral territory, we thought (and I had read). This may have helped - Clarabelle took a couple of days to catch on, through some gentle scolding and some acclimatizing, that Skittles is not a puppy, and does not appreciate or respond well to puppy-like invitations to chasing games. Now, a week later, Skittles will lie there and recoil her head as Clarabelle approaches to sniff her - "Really? Are you sure? No...?" - and then walks off again; the cat will look a little indignant at having had to snub yet another offer, but will hardly ever go hide any more. They aren't pals, but they're coexisting.

The kids have had many a lesson on how to walk her by now, and are getting pretty good at it. Though they are starting to see it as a chore, it is a chore they take on with grace and a sense of humor. Although the bulk of the serious walking still falls to me and Janneke - she in the early morning, so far, and myself just before bed. Accidents in the house have been few; successes far outweigh failures. Progress is steady and ratchets continually upward.

That very first Saturday night, I finally managed to find "Last Chance Highway" on the TV, and we all settled in to watch it together. And there they were - the same guys whom we'd seen that morning, whom we'd been puzzled to observe absorbing celebrity treatment, stopping work to pose for pictures with giddy new dog owners, handing out hugs as much as dogs. Now we knew why - these guys all feature quite prominently in the program. The episode we watched was particularly touching, I find - I've seen three installments now - and by the time it ended Q and I were clapping and laughing to watch these happy denouments, and T was asleep on Clarabelle's bed, one arm draped around the snoring hound. The very end image of the video above takes place as we watched the same trailer we'd picked her up from earlier in the day. All very odd and circular - I'm still not quite able to get my head completely around it.

Janneke and I were snuggling with her this evening after watching an episode of Last Chance Highway (I'd recorded it for Janneke, who hadn't seen one yet) and were struck by just how much we love hounds. Hobie was a hound, and we've had a soft spot for beagles forever - but Clarabelle is as houndy as they get. Droopy skin on her head, ridiculous ears, bony hips, black back, a plaintive, howling wail (that we hardly ever hear), and a soul that wants out of life only three things: To follow that smell wherever it might lead; to be hugged and thumped vigorously by a person; and to sleep. Provide them with those three, and they want for nothing. And I think there is much to admire in that philosophy.



There is other news. I'm up to 3.5 miles on my every-other-day runs in the Runamocs. I'm making slooooow and steeeeady progress, terrified of getting injured again. But determined to work my way back up to longer distances - just not caring particularly exactly when I get there. These things - the runamocs - are fantastic to run in. I think it's the perfect middle ground for me between barefootedness and shoditude - I don't hurt myself, but I can't heel-toe pound without pain. So I find a great, soft, short-strided method of locomotion, and all of my constituent parts - particulary the feet - are happy. I'm still spending as much time as I can barefoot, including all of Clarabelle's walks and much of the time I spend working on the deck, and all of my yard-care time. In fact, today we spent three hours in the mall shopping, and I wore shoes, in deference to the expectations of society (and in recognition of the fact that the Runamocs, while great for running in, frankly look stupid). And my right foot, home of my erstwhile plantar fasciitis, began to really throb. I had run this morning, and apparently the isolation and protection afforded my foot by the shoe caused the muscles and tendons to do so little that the got stiff. As soon as we got home, I took the shoes off - and the pain nearly instantly disappeared. I am a convert to this whole barefoot thing - just provided you don't do too much, too fast, without building up to it.

Like Betsy did. She broke her toe last Wednesday in our weekly barefoot soccer match...which I feel pretty responsible for, I have to say. I mean, I didn't write the Wednesday Afternoon Barefoot Soccer Association Charter or anything - it just sort of happened. But I have been the loudest and the most annoying about the whole "barefoot is better" thing. We've done it a number of times now and it's been amazing. But there was something amiss last week - a lot of us suffered what I'm calling "toe crumples", where you catch your toes on the ground and drive over the top of them as they bend uncomfortably forward under the pressure from your foot, the top and back of which continue forward, and the whole business causes you to topple in a heap. I did it three times, all with the left foot, and Brad and a couple of other players did it too. And Betsy broke her toe!, though she can't quite say exactly when it happened. It's her left pinky toe, and she has to stay off her feet as much as possible, and absolutely not run, for four to six weeks. This sucks so much I can't quite bear it.

As for me, though...I remain convinced that I am far, far less likely to be injured in soccer if I wear no shoes. The big injuries I have been susceptible to in recent years have been knee twists, which occur when you have too damn much traction, and ankle turns, which are a result of the bottom of the shoe getting stuck while the leg topples over to the side. And I just can't imagine either of those happening if I have no shoes on. The toe crumples hurt, but they didn't especially bother me - I have short, rounded toes, and they weren't really adversely affected. I don't know - I'll stay barefoot in future games, I think, but we may be encouraging the kids to wear shoes. Even cleats - I can take a rake from a ten-year-old. But we'll see. Janneke, post-bee sting, remains an adamant opponent of the whole endeavor. I for one hope it does not go extinct as an institution. It's not what Betsy would have wanted.

(Though she isn't dead.)

Well, seein' as how I stopped being coherent some five paragraphs ago, I think I'll wrap this up and head off to lala land, if I can. Not sure whether I've thought through everything I needed to, but let's hope. I think I'm resigned to my fate deck-wise, though I do have an idea or two on how to get around this whole post business, and apart from Betsy's foot, everything else is all brightness and sunshine. So I should be less than haunted as I lay back against the pillow and sigh.

Wish me luck...