I ran out of suet for the woodpeckers recently, and they started hammering on the house. Holly, who is nothing if not resourceful, came up with the plan to make some out of our old bacon grease. I thought it would be a big mess, but it’s working out pretty well. (Hanging the laundry in the rain is not working out very well at all.)
Take a handful of semisolid hogfat. Mix in some of that banana granola that wasn’t very good. Stick it in the birdfeeder, and presto! Hours of fun for all concerned.
Here’s a little movie I made the other day. I had smelled something terrible the previous night, which I traced to a skiboot on my basement stairs. Tucked inside it was a dead chipmunk. I dumped the sad little thing into the weeds, but Holly suggested that a much more respectful and practical solution would be to compost it. So I did. Warning–contains footage of cute dead rodent.
Also, I just got a phone call from my friend Ruth. She was at the gym this morning, watching CNN. They were showing footage from a Christian Broadcast Network report on the gay marriages happening in Iowa today. For a second, she saw me and my ex Amy Rubin on the screen, getting married on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco five years ago. The Christian Broadcast Network? What were they doing at my wedding? It reminded me of this panel from a cartoon I once did about lesbian-specific phobias.
Since the chipmunk incident, I have put a collar with three bells on the cat. So far this has stemmed the tide of wildlife that had been flowing into the house.
Yesterday I had to drive 10 hours from Vermont to Western PA, where I’m doing a school visit at Clarion University. It’s always miraculous traveling south at this time of year because you can watch the grass getting greener and the trees unfurling as you go. Here’s my trip, from the Green Mountains, to the Adirondacks, to the Catskills, then at dusk I plunge off the edge of New York down into the Delaware River Valley, Pennsylvania and the Poconos. Around Scranton the sun set and I had to stop taking pictures.
I went on a lovely hike with Hol out in the woods yesterday. I was thinking about the idea of watersheds because I just read a poem by Gary Snyder called Watershed. He supposedly signs his emails with it because Read the rest of this entry »
Thank you all so much for the magnificent digressions on the last post. Sorry I kinda disappeared. I’ve been working on a review for the New York Times Book Review–a graphic review of a regular book! I’m not sure when it’s coming out, but I’ll keep you posted. And I just took a short road trip to Colby College in Maine, about which I was compelled to create this little slide show for you.
[I'm re-posting the last post, 'you do not have to be good' because some pharmaceutical spammer seems to have lodged a zillion links in it. I was able to delete them, but the comment box is still disabled. So I'm just opening a new post.]
This morning, in the biography of William James that I’ve been making my way through at the pace of about two paragraphs a day for the past year, he described the New England autumnof 1908 as “heartbreaking in its sentimentality.” And indeed, even one hundred years of disastrous human history and climate change later, the foliage is so spectacular, it’s almost maudlin. Here’s the moose yesterday, carrying Mt. Abe on her shoulders.
And here’s a movie I made this afternoon while I was yanking up roots from the garden and flocks of wild geese honked by overhead.
Check out my pal Phranc’s daily variety show on YouTube. If Mister Rogers and Peewee Herman gave birth to a l’il bulldagger, this is what she’d be like.
This morning, in the biography of William James that I’ve been making my way through at the pace of about two paragraphs a day for the past year, he described the New England autumnof 1908 as “heartbreaking in its sentimentality.” And indeed, even one hundred years of disastrous human history and climate change later, the foliage is so spectacular, it’s almost maudlin. Here’s the moose yesterday, carrying Mt. Abe on her shoulders.
And here’s a movie I made this afternoon while I was yanking up roots from the garden and flocks of wild geese honked by overhead.
Check out my pal Phranc’s daily variety show on YouTube. If Mister Rogers and Peewee Herman gave birth to a l’il bulldagger, this is what she’d be like.
As I drove home from the moose’s house in town this morning, there was a story on the radio about bobolinks. Their diet in South Read the rest of this entry »
