Anyone outside the PNW will have heard on the news about “SNOWPOCALYPSE” and “HEAVY WINTER STORMS” and all that sort of blather that the news media seem to love to put on winter storms around here.

It’s all just a symptom of the pussification of this area. Yeah, we don’t get a lot of hard weather around here in the winter, it’s one of the joys of living in the Pacific Northwest.
But when we do it’s started to become national news, the subject of the entire local news casts, and a big apocalyptic thing.

It bugs me.

I grew up here. I’ve lived here for 39 years (well, almost). And I don’t remember this sort of doomsday drama occupying the national and local attention as much as it has been in the past 10 or 15 years.
Now there is certainly the argument to be made that I paid very little attention to newscasts when I was a kid. That is, to a certain extent, true.
But I also know that people used to either stay at home and live with snow, or put chains on the car and just get on with it.

And there is certainly the argument to be made that the local population is far higher now than it was when I was growing up. Also true. An absolutely non-disputable point.
But with all the population growth you’d think that this area would have attracted immigrants from areas that are, well, USED to winter?! Instead we seem to have attracted every thin blooded Southern hothouse flower that wasn’t permanently affixed in a warmer climate.
An example:
When it first started to snow last Sunday it was pretty, but it wasn’t going to stick. The lawns and the landscaping were dusted in a frosting-sugar coat of white, but the roads were clear and wet. I went to the grocery store to pick up more cough medicine for Andrew and the dude in the car parked in front of mine HAD CHAINS ON ALL FOUR TIRES.
Allow me to repeat myself.
There was water on the roadway, it was 42 degrees and the only thing coming down out of the sky was raindrops.
And there were chains on all four of this dude’s tires.

Considerable sighing and eye rolling.

Consider it a symptom of my progressive curmudgeon-ness. I’ll be getting my whittlin’ stick and a rocking chair for the porch any day now.

A few additives to clear out the rest of the ranting that I’ve been doing in my head for the last three days (we had a snow day at work on Wednesday, the power was out at work yesterday so I didn’t go in, and today is my usual weekday off. I’m a little cabin feverish.)

1. We had about five inches of lovely light, fluffy, powdery snow come down Tuesday night and into Wednesday. I spent about an hour and a half clearing the driveway on the assumption that I’d be going to work Thursday. Then the snow turned to ice and by the time I got up Thursday morning there was a half inch glaze of ice on everything that I’d shoveled the day before.

2. I am eternally grateful for the wisdom of my careful and concerned parents that taught my sibs and I all how to drive on slick roads. I may not have appreciated the instruction at the time (I still have nightmares about starting our station wagon from a dead stop on an icy hill), but I as an adult I am willing to sing praises to the wise and cautious parents who thought it would be a good thing for a driving person to know.

3. While I am sick to death of picking up bits of the alder tree that is on the northeast corner of our property and hauling them out of the road, I am at least grateful that the pine tree that fell across a contractor’s truck in the house next door, was in THER yard, not mine. (Note that the house is empty, no one indoors was hurt or even inconvenienced, and there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the contractor’s truck.)
Also I’m pretty convinced that the folks across the street think I’m bats for wandering around in my snow gear and a bicycle helmet. I’m concerned enough about the traffic that I want to keep the (rather large and very numerous) bits of that alder tree out of the street, but I’m not crazy enough to approach that demon child without something hard covering my head. Those ice chunks HURT when they’re coming at you from a height of 50 feet or so.

4. Weirdly, your homeowner’s insurance, or, at least, our homeowner’s insurance, will only pay to remove a threatening tree if said tree has fallen on your house, not just because it might fall on your house.
Doesn’t that seem short-sighted? Allstate could pay $500 (and we’d pay the other $500) to have this tree removed, but instead they’re willing to bet that the damn thing won’t fall on the roof and crush the master bedroom and they won’t have to pay several tens of thousands of dollars to remove the tree and repair the house.
That having been said, part of the damnable thing did fall on the house yesterday morning scaring the both of us out of a sound sleep and outside into the cold which sent Andrew into a coughing fit from which he is only just recovering.
Don’t worry about the pox ridden tree. It didn’t damage the house at all (at least not that I’ve been able to see so far, I’m not crazy enough to get up on the roof to check the shingles when the roof is covered in ice). The hard freeze is over, no more bits of the tree are going to come down in any threatening way, and as soon as the ground firms up a bit again I’m going over to the neighbors’ house to tell them that they’re going to have a tree removal service in their yard hacking that big bugger out. At least I know where we’re getting next year’s firewood from.

5. We have been paying careful attention to keeping the bird feeders and the bird bath open for business. In addition to our usual seed and suet crowd, because we’ve been putting seed out on the ground, we’ve had a hoard of ground feeders as well. At one point on Wednesday there were thirteen different species of birds at our feeders. We’re having a plague of Varied Thrushes which I find quite charming.

I’ll stop ranting now.

I happen to be blessed with a truly award-winning array of nieces and nephews. There’s Ben, the intimidatingly intelligent civil servant with a heart of gold; Sam, the intimidatingly massive yet easygoing Marine veteran with a heart of gold; Caitlin, the headstrong artisan with a heart of gold; and Lucy, the quirky ingenue with a heart of gold. Between them they gots enough gold in their hearts to make even a Glenn Beck program underwriter green with envy.

I sometimes think back on the time I spent with my nephews during their early years. Ben and Sam are a good deal older than their cousins, and they did a lot of their growing up when I was still living in Hawaii, before and during my college years in Washington State. I’m afraid I wasn’t much of an uncle back then: broke, angry, clinically depressed and self-medicating with sacks and sacks of pot. Not often a huge amount of fun to be around unless you were a bit closer to my age and a bakehead. By comparison, my nieces have it pretty sweet with Andrew 2.0: (relatively) happy, (far more) mentally healthy, upper-middle-class and addicted to nothing but coffee. Ben, Sam, if you’re reading this, I apologize if I ever left either of you with the impression that I didn’t care about you. I love you and am heart-burstingly proud of you both. About the only thing I can make up for this late in the game is the change in my income, so if we’re ever in the same place at the same time, lunch is on me.

As for the girls, I really enjoy being Fun Uncle to them. We get to see them about once every year or two and it’s always a hoot. Lucy is a truly sweet kid. Kind of off in her own world, but she checks in with us mundanes fairly regularly to let us know we haven’t lost her entirely. And her citizenship in that singular municipality has provided her with a truly awesome sense of humor and comic timing. She’s a gem.

Caitlin, however….Caitlin’s my buddy. I don’t know what I did to warrant such high regard from a bright, funny, socially adept nearly-sixteen-year-old, but whenever Margaret and I visit the islands she’s stuck to us like she’s held on with C-clamps and gypsum screws. I fully expected her to kind of lose interest in hanging out with me as she got into her teens—I may be lots of things, but “cool” by whatever the standards Da Youf adhere to ain’t one of them—but if anything she seems more enamored than ever. Which is fine by us. Something about her brings my inner goofball into stark relief; things just get a little nuttier when the two of us are in the same room. Throw my brother David into the mix and it’s a 24/7 fun-filled, hijinks-soaked caper-a-minute laff riot, complete with overturned cars and burning dumpsters. It helps that Caitlin is, like all of us Lenzers, intelligent and articulate (and modest, let’s not forget modest), so she’s more than capable of elevating the discourse when it’s warranted. She hopes to join Margaret in walking the Susan G. Komen 3 Day in Seattle this September, and we’re working to make that happen.

Caitlin also has a helluva creative streak….more like an avenue than a streak….coupled with a rather wiseassy sense of humor. She was the source of this amusing depiction of the relationship between myself, my wife and my laptop a few years back. This year, after we got back from vacation, both she and Lucy sent us thank-you cards for the (admittedly lavish) gifts we gave them for Xmas. Lucy’s note was sweet and funny, and I really need to write her back and let her know how much we liked it. But Caitlin’s….well, see for yourself.

Smart-aleck little punk….I do love her so.

Ten years ago when I did my first three day, I thought only to make it a personal challenge. I was in my early thirties, I’d never been athletic, never really had any interest in finding out the limits of my physical abilities.

Ten years and thousands of miles later I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s either a crazed obsession, or it’s a personal passion.

This year, facing my fifth three day, I have family at risk for breast cancer that I am walking for. I have friends that I love who are at risk. And I have a semi-cousin who died, far before her time, and her kids facing growing up without their mother.

I think it was Cheryl that really got to me this year. I haven’t been in that much contact with that section of my family over the last several years, but Cheryl was my best friend’s big sister when I was coming up in the Unitarian church. About the same difference age-wise between those two as between my sister and I. When Cheryl diagnosed with breast cancer about a year ago I thought “Oh! Well, it’s breast cancer. Cheryl is in for a fight, but she’ll do just fine!”
And she fought.
And she lost.
Cheryl wasn’t that much older than I am. People my age are NOT supposed to die. Sure, stupid stuff happens, people get hit by cars and blown up in wars and shit like that….
But people my age aren’t supposed to die of cancer.
Especially if they’ve got a family to miss them. Parents, and sisters, and a husband, and children, and cousins, and aunties and uncles to mourn them.
It’s…. Well, it’s stupid.

And so, as a memorial to my cousin who died before she should, and a memorial to my own grandmother who wasn’t a breast cancer survivor but who died while I was finishing my first 3 Day 10 years ago, I’m doing it again.
My feet aren’t the sharpest weapons, but they’re the best that I’ve got.

If you can, make a donation to support me here

This year it’s personal.

So yesterday I got up, went for my walk.
Odd things occur to me walking along Lanikai.

For one, it must be nice living somewhere where the bus drivers can be talked into letting you off at your front door.
Secondly, I really have to wonder about people who PURCHASE EXPENSIVE PUREBRED DOGS WITH HEAVY COATS WHEN THEY LIVE IN HAWAII! I’ve seen a lot of manky, awful coats on an awful lot of chow chows in my professional capacity, but they were SICK! This was a healthy dog with a horrid, raggy, string mop coat. Damn fools.

Then I’m walking around the other end of the loop and there’s something scuttling along the road in front of me. Something big, with lots of legs and a tail held up over its back. I was semi-interested and semi-ready to shriek and run because I’ve never seen a scorpion outside of a zoo and I’d kind of like to see one, but a scorpion has more than four legs and if it’s got more than four legs it’s a bug and I don’t do bugs and……
Then a car went past and the whatever it was rolled over and over and over again and it was a leaf.
But it looked remarkably like a scorpion.

And walking back through Kailua beach park I passed a young man on a bicycle. Kid was maybe 8 or 9. It was just a wee bit before 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and he gave me the sweetest, most charming smile I’ve ever seen on a kid. Absolutely a pleasure to see that on a kid. I don’t think I was ever that cheerful that early on a weekend morning when I was that age.

Later on Andrew and Caitlin and I were driving along somewhere and saw a dude riding full speed on a bicycle playing a guitar.

But this is what I got this morning.
A peaceful morning’s walk around the Lanikai loop. Quiet, beautiful breeze, and this……

And this…..

Lots and lots and lots of Lenzers.

It’s a little surreal here.

It is truly peculiar. I didn’t go to work yesterday morning, which was a good thing, but we got up, we tidied the house, we packed, the taxi came to take us to the airport, it got dark, it stayed dark, it was dark for a REALLY long time, then we woke up in Hawaii.

It’s really weird.

The weather is great for me. Early ’80s with about 40% humidity and an absolutely gorgeous breeze. It’s mostly clear with the occasional cloud across the sun to cut the glare….

I’m loving it.
All Andrew has to do is to exist in any spot outside of just underneath a ceiling fan and he’s all hot and sweaty so he’s a little less enthusiastic weather wise, but he’s had a chance to sleep in, and he’s currently in the middle of his mid-afternoon nap. Nice dip in the pool, brisk arguments with two of his sisters and both parents.
No island delicacies yet, but he seems to be enjoying himself.

Tomorrow we might go so far as to go into Honolulu.
But we might just hang on the beach as well.

Getting here for the holidays can be a real bitch, but it’s extremely pleasant to be here.

Welcome Della Jane! She has other names too, but I’m not sure of what they are since I was too besotted to ask when we met her yesterday.
Andrew’s got the cool, arty photos that Dad took yesterday morning, but I haven’t got those on my computer yet so y’all will just have to put up with a photo of a very brand new teeny baby in the arms of her totally besotted auntie.
(I think uncle is besotted too, but Andrew is a little shy of babies and wasn’t as obvious about it as I was. )

Last night Annie looked (what a surprise) exhausted and exultant. Shawn a little muddled but thrilled beyond measure.
Congratulations all the way around. Annie has got to be the toughest woman I know this week.

I made a man think I was absolutely drooling batshit crazy today.

Dude calls, he’s concerned because they put up their Christmas tree last night and now they’re missing one of the light bulbs. They’re fairly sure the dog has eaten it.

No, it’s not really that strange an idea to contemplate. Dogs eat light bulbs, particularly during the holidays, all the time.

But the dude wanted my recommendations as to what to do. He wasn’t really concerned about the size of the bulb, it was one of the “twinkle light” sized bulbs, that is to say about 1/2 by 1 1/2cm, and he was fairly sure the dog could pass it on her own, but he was concerned because the bulb had four rather stiff wires at the base which could potentially get stuck in the dog’s stomach lining.

*hee hee!*

I swear I’m serious.

I offered the standard recommendation — if he wanted to be sure the dog actually ate the bulb, he should come in and we could take an x-ray of her abdomen. The plastic bits wouldn’t show up on an x-ray, but the wire would show up nicely.
The other alternative, I told him, was to feed the dog 8-10 standard sized cotton balls mixed in milk or in canned dog food followed by 3 slices of cheap white bread thickly spread with cat hairball ointment.

It’s Andrew’s opinion that the dude was convinced that I was the night janitor and was just trying it on with him to see how ludicrous a suggestion I could get away with. And I’m sure the effect was emphasized by the fact that I’ve never met this particular client nor his dog.

I just wonder if he did what I recommended.

When I was at WSU there was born to one of the cows at the WSU dairy, a healthy calf and a tribble.

You think I’m joking.

But they brought it to the path lab and everyone who could manage shoved themselves into the bleachers in the path lab for lunchtime path rounds.
I didn’t usually attend the lunchtime path rounds. I find gross pathology to be gross enough on an empty stomach. Watching the seniors on their path rotations and the pathology residents dissect gruesome things, let alone pass them around the room, was not something designed to promote good digestion. Come to think of it though, the administration should have required the freshmen and sophomores to attend lunchtime path rounds. Probably would have kept most of us from gaining the “freshman 15″.
Enough babbling.

So what was presented was, in fact, a tribble.

It was a smooth black and white oval football. It weighed about 10 pounds, had hair and skin just like any other Holstein calf and — this is the coolest — it had a heartbeat. At least it had a heartbeat for about 15 minutes after it was born, then it didn’t anymore. After it had been dissected it was found that the tribble had a rudimentary circulatory system, complete with a 4 chambered heart, a partial gastrointestinal tract, and a few bones here and there.
It was a tribble.
What else are you going to call it?

Well now I know.
I was reading my copy of the Journal of the AVMA the other day when I ran across a case study of a very similar situation. And the term is:
Globosus amorphous

Which is, if you ask me, a perfectly wonderful (and wonderfully descriptive) name.

Since my massage therapist has strictly forbidden me to go out and undo all that she has done this day by raking up the hundred zillion leaves, I figured I could do something a little more lightweight.

I can’t remember who, but someone asked me for my cornbread recipe at the recent Pumpkin Pogrom. And Shawn just asked the other day if I could give him a copy of my recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies.

So here goes.

Even though my mother denied it at the time, this is, in fact, my mother’s cornbread recipe:

Preheat oven to 400F

1 1/2 cups yogurt
2 eggs
1/3 cup butter (melted)

Mix all the moist ingredients together and add

2 cups cornmeal (I prefer polenta because I like the texture better)
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Put it in a big bowl because when you add the baking powder and the soda to the moist ingredients it will bubble a bit.
Mix it all up and bake in a greased 9 X 9″ pan.

Now I added some roasted sweet corn *YUM* to mine before I baked it which was the source of the sweetness, but you don’t have to add that.
Hm…
Bean soup……

I’ll have to think about that.

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cookies

Preheat oven to 350F

5 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1-2 tsp (to taste) powdered ginger
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups granulated sugar
1 cup butter (melted)
1-2 tsp (to taste) vanilla
3 1/2 cups (one 29 ounce can) pureed pumpkin
12 (or more to taste) ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips

Sift together all the dry ingredients.
Mix all the moist ingredients well.
Add the dry ingredients gradually to the moist ingredients. When the batter is well mixed fold in the chocolate chips.
Drop on a greased baking sheet and bake 10 minutes or so until the edges are set.
Makes about 6 dozen depending on how big your drops are.

A few notes about this one.
First, be sure that your mixer is good and sturdy. The pumpkin mixture is heavy and I actually managed to catch my hand mixer on fire last year when I was baking these. Now granted, the hand mixer was a little on the geriatric side, but it does kind of put a crimp in your baking to have to bolt out of the kitchen and fling your mixer into the back yard to keep it from bursting into flames.
Second, be aware that these are extremely moist cookies. Eat them quickly (oh the pain, the pain!) and share generously because they mold easily.

I have nearly seven quarts of baked pumpkin to put in the freezer and several more pumpkins to bake. I’d be thrilled if someone had a pumpkin soup recipe to share. Or if someone wanted to just come by and confiscate some of the baked pumpkin that I’ve already got.

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present….

THE VERY FIRST VIDEO ON CUTE OVERLOAD THAT ISN’T TWENTY TIMES LONGER THAN IT NEEDS TO BE.

Mark you all this day, and commemorate it every year on this date.

Summoned for jury duty. Boss lady is incensed — well, not really. It’s more like she’s unwilling to make the sacrifice unless she absolutely has to.
I’d been called twice before and excused both times. The first because I was ordered to appear on the day we were moving from Kent to Normandy Park –um– no. The second time I was excused because I was ordered to appear on the day we were flying to Hawaii. Um… NO!
So I told the boss lady that they were unlikely to excuse me a third time and, despite the grade A sob story letter she sent on my behalf, they did not.

Why do it? Why comply?
A friend of a friend runs his jury summons through the shredder and ignores them. His thinking is that unless the summons is sent registered mail no one can prove that you actually received the summons.
True, I suppose, but not my style really.

So why disrupt my place of business, interfere with the income of the practice, put my personal life on hold and volunteer to drive into Kent to spend a minimum of two days, more if I’m seated, in a room with a hundred or so strangers with whom I have nothing in common except that we’re all registered voters?

Well, to be brutally honest, the first reason is angst. At this point I’m so anxious to get away from the office for a while that I’d volunteer to have my fingernails pulled out if it meant that I’d get away from the godforsaken telephone and one particular brainless receptionist for a few days. Ennui is far behind me at this point. I’m not quite up to active loathing of my job, but somewhere kind of in the middle.

Oh don’t get your collective panties in a wad!
I’m not about to bag my avocation and my career to go off and paint houses for a living, tempting though it may be on occasion.
I’ll be fine after I get some time off (six weeks and counting!).

The second reason is curiosity. Bar my mother’s jury experience when I was in junior high or so, I’ve never had any contact with the court system and just being related to a juror doesn’t count. All of my family and connections are just a little too far into the “lawful” classification for any of us to have had to appear. And so I’ve grown into a voting adult in a representative, such as it is, democracy and while I have some vague notion of how the other two branches of government work (or don’t), the judiciary? Not a clue.
Honestly to my recollection the only time I’ve ever entered a courthouse besides this morning was on Friday afternoon when Andrew and I came down here to scope out where I was supposed to be at 0800 today.

And I can drivel on about civic duty and the responsibilities of an individual to be part of the process for the good of society and all sorts of twee crap like that. And despite my overt cynicism I do actually believe all of that twee crap.
I’m somewhere in the middle between a flag waving, tricorn wearing tea party patriot and a fire extinguisher wielding, bandanna masked anarchist in my beliefs regarding the ability of the American judiciary to function in a manner consistent with the idea of how it’s *supposed* to work.
And if I believe it works then I should do my part to keep it working.
And if I believe the American judiciary doesn’t work then it’s my responsibility to know what I can about how it doesn’t work so that I can help engineer change.

But I’m also participating because I’m having fun.
Even just sitting in the jury assembly room sans computer (I could bring my laptop, but I probably won’t because small as it is that sucker’s HEAVY!), sans phone (I do have my mobile, but I can only have it on in the jury assembly room) I get to do…… what?
Read a book? YEP! First time in a long time that I’ve been able to sit for hours at a time and chew through a book without having to stop so I can sleep or getting distracted by someone or something else.
Knit? Well, mebbe. There’s a sign downstairs by the metal detector that says knitting needles aren’t allowed, but I did see someone else in here knitting this morning so I may actually bring my knitting tomorrow and see if they’ll let me get away with it. Whether or not my wrists, which have been acting markedly snitty recently, would let me sit and knit for several hours at a time is unclear, but I may try it anyway.
Write? Sure! Although said snitty wrists, or wrist as the case may be, may stop me doing this pretty soon.

When was the last time when you weren’t sick that you had hours at a time to sit and do, within some reason, what you wanted? I can’t work, I can’t do any house or yard work, I can’t run errands, I don’t have any computer games, I have no phone calls to make, and I have no one that I absolutely have to talk to.

All I can do is sit and think and wait.
And if I get seated I’ll sit and listen and think and decide.

Postscriptum:
About 10 minutes after I finished writing this on Wednesday afternoon I got put into a jury pool of 40 people. By random chance my assigned juror number put me in the first 14 people — 12 jurors and 2 alternates.
I made it through the jury selection process and was seated and sworn this afternoon. My boss is having an apoplexy because I’m likely going to be away from the office for all of next week and most of the week after, but there’s really nothing either of us can do about it.
Although I do have to say that I rather resent the fact that she urged me to lie during the selection process to avoid getting chosen. And it wasn’t even that she actually urged me to lie, it’s just that she jokingly urged me to lie with the un-stated understanding that she’d be a lot happier if I did get out of being on a jury.
But I didn’t lie and I did get seated and we’ll both just have to live with it. I wish the business didn’t have to suffer for it, but I am happy to live in a democracy.

There are exactly three things that I can say about the rest of the last two days before I have to clam up.
One: I don’t think that all of Subway’s meats are entirely terraformed (carniformed?) turkey. I think if the Subway chain says that you’re eating beef, you’d better be eating beef or there’s someone in a supervisory capacity that is likely to get a bit miffed.
Two: I wonder if the guy who said that he didn’t believe in the jury process as part of his reason to be granted a hardship exclusion (the other part of his reason was that he had a sleep study scheduled on the 27th and would have to meet with his surgeon on the 28th — two weeks after the trial is scheduled to be over with) just said that to get out of serving or if he actually doesn’t believe in the jury process.
Three: What grown adult has to be reminded that you do not wear a baseball cap in court?

Given last year’s dismal then-new low of three Trick-or-Treaters, I didn’t hold out much hope for this year. By seven o’clock—well into the mooching hour, by my experience as a child—I had yet to see a single kid. Imagine my delight then when a—what term does one use to identify a large group of teenagers; a bother? An acne?—mass of Da Youf descended on our doorstep like a hormone-soaked wave crashing upon the shore:

Thirteen teenagers (the unmoving character in the background is Fernando, our zombie). All friendly, all, polite, and all, amazingly, in costume; not an underdressed sponge in the bunch. I was duly impressed When I complimented one girl on her Steampunk getup, one of her compatriots expressed appreciation that I was familiar with the term. To which I replied “I’m old, not ancient.” That got a laugh out of them.

All told, we got maybe twenty or twenty-five kids tonight, which is a dang good haul for this vicinity. Hope your Halloween was at least as fruitful….sans fruit.

….but don’t necessarily get used to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been ages since I posted anything. I’ve been working like a 3-legged sled dog in the Iditarod, so if you’ve been missing the opportunity to bask in the glow of my dulcet prose, that’s just too baddy Daddy, so saddy.

In addition to cranking out this year’s catalog, of which I am fairly proud (renowned mushroom photographer and friend of FP Taylor Lockwood emailed the office to tell us that he liked the cover so much that he tacked it to the wall of his office, which is high praise indeed), two weeks ago I and my IT cohort moved the electronic guts of our call center from its long-entrenched farm setting to a proper GMP-compliant business park, sporting such uptown features as actual conditioned power and real business-class Internet access. This was a serious upgrade from our previous digs, and took a mammoth effort on the part of the entire staff to accomplish. And yet all of our preparation seemed to pay off in a move that went way, waaaaayyyy smoother than I think any of us expected. We’re still ironing out the wrinkles, but so far, so very much gooder (“more goodly”?) than it might have been.

Outside of work (is there really anything outside of work anymore? I simply cannot tell) I’ve been indulging in a few domestic projects. One chief one was to finally address the problem posed by my cat’s constant desire to sit on my lap while I work. I can plompf myself down in one of our overstuffed chairs in front of the TV for hours and she won’t want anything to do with me, but sit in front of a computer keyboard and all of a sudden I am the cat’s pajamas….or in this case, the cat’s Snugli. She first tries to ensconce herself between me and my slide-out keyboard, resulting in the grandpappy of all PEBKAC errors. When that fails to actualize her goals she’ll most often attempt to perch herself between the back of my chair and the back of….well, my back. This works for about three minutes until she begins her inexorable scootch downward, prying open an ever-widening gap between me and my chair and forcing me to hunch forward in increasingly greater discomfort.

After about a week of contemplation and another week of testing, retesting, scrapping and restarting and re-re-retesting I finally perfected a carpeted wooden platform that clamps to the back of my chair, allowing Flit to rest sprawled out directly behind me or, just as often, plastered right up against my shoulders:

Took her about a week to get completely used to it, but now whenever I sit down to work she immediately gravitates to “the catform”, which is a great load off both my mind and my back.

Margaret and I also just barely managed to pull ourselves out of our stress-induced hermitage to throw our world-famous annual Pumpkin Pogrom, which we held last night. About 15 of our friends came over to eat chili and carve Jack-O’-Lanterns. Apologies to you if you were not on the invite list, but this is the kind of event that can really suffer if there is too great a participant-to-table-space ratio.

The hands-down winner this year was JauntHie’s zucchini slug, with baby pumpkins for eyes on Cyalume stalks and blinking LED spots on its back.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

Lastly, if you have not yet seen MC Frontalot’s new music video “Critical Hit” of the most recent album Solved, I highly recommend that you do so, provided you are a fan of geek culture. Many thanks to YakBoy for turning me on to The Front.

That is all. More dispatches to follow as they become available. Please return to your homes and places of businesses.

I’ve gotten very cynical about people — working with the general public will do that to you — but sometimes people don’t suck.

Witness the gift a client brought me on Wednesday evening. It was at the end of my day, I was cranky and tired, and I really wanted to be home where it was quiet and the bloody phone doesn’t ring every thirty seconds.

I euthanized the client’s dog in July. Part of my act, for a lot of the time it is acting, when I’m injecting the euthanasia solution is to tell the dog that there are plenty of bunnies to chase on the other side.
I’m pleased to know that that statement, something that I’d just developed as a habit in the hopes that it would bring some comfort to the occasional client, actually brought comfort to someone. Maybe more people than I think?

The painting is of Miller, the wee brown dog in the bottom center, and one of Miller’s predecessors watching the bunnies on the other side.

I went home happy.

So most of you will be familiar with my opinions about mornings.

I like my mornings quiet, dim, and routine. And especially this week, since Andrew spent most of last week working godawful shifts and driving to and from Shelton every day, mornings need to be QUIET so that Andrew can sleep off some of the deficit from last week.
The rule this week is Thou Shalt Not Waken The Andrew.

So I’m comfortably bumbling around after my shower clothed -um- appropriately for someone who is about to dress for work and lives with only one other person. Hair wet, towel on my head.
Tiptoe from the shower into the master bathroom (which isn’t actually a bathroom since there’s no shower), reaching for the moisturizer and my toothbrush.

BLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOY…… Well, you get the picture.

Alarm!
The alarm is going off!

My adrenal glands immediately go into ohshit mode. I drop my toothbrush and the glass of water I was holding and go slamming out of the bathroom to shake Andrew awake (amazingly with his ear plugs the alarm didn’t wake him. I told you he’s been tired.) and fumble around in the dark for the bigass knife I keep by my side of the bed.

Losing the towel at some point I go bolting down the dark hallway stark naked (BLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOY…. Sorry, that’s still banging around inside my head) with Andrew a few steps behind me with the bigass knife that he keeps by his side of the bed.

Light switches get thrown. I’m not sure who turned on which lights or how often one of us turned off a (BLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOYBLOY) light that the other had just turned on, but there’s light everywhere, absolutely NO cats, and Andrew and I both bolting down the stairs to the control panel for the alarm to shut the noise up while looking for the malefactor that broke in and set the alarm off.

Silence.

Nothing.

And, thank god, no one.

And then we notice the pair of battery operated eyes that we bought for Halloween that had been sitting on the counter top in the dining room. That HAD been sitting on the counter top in the dining room. That were, at that point, sitting on the floor in the dining room.

It’s nice to know that the glass break sensors for our alarm work. It’s nice to know that we can both find some sort of working weapon in a blind panic in the dark.

I am, however, going to slaughter the cat.

And just for the record, having your adrenal glands on high alert at that hour of the morning is a great way to spend the rest of the day absolutely exhausted.
Andrew, after he slugged down a soda to compensate for the fact that his entire supply of blood sugar had been used up in the panic and he was abruptly hypoglycemic, went back to bed and slept –Flitter carefully and quietly at his feet — for another two hours.
I got dressed and went to work, but was drooling into my keyboard by 9 a.m.
I’m not a coffee drinker, but I think I’ll stick with coffee, thanks.

So I came down with some sort of respiratory FUNK last week. Sneezing and runny nose on Wednesday, congested and sinusoid by Thursday. I spent much of my last hour at work Thursday evening running around with a bottle of disinfectant spray trying to de-cootie-ize everything that I touched.
Spending three days sleeping as much as I needed to sleep and not talking unless I felt like it has absolutely been helpful, but it’s still going to be rather a sucky week at work.
I HATE having to try to suppress a tickly throat cough, a sneeze, or a runny nose when I’m in a room with a client. I always feel like I should wear a giant ‘COOTIE’ sign around my neck because to my recollection, I’ve NEVER seen a human physician with the sniffles.
But you have to have arterial bleeding, a blazing fever, hallucinations, or projectile vomiting to be a veterinarian and not come to work.

In my next career I’m going to work somewhere that I can take off from work and not feel guilty about it if I’m unfit for human company.

Sorry, I am being rather a whiny little drama llama here, but I truly LOATHE being sick.

That said, I do get strange when I’m ill.

Note the fact that on Friday I pulled out the ironing board and *gasp* I actually IRONED something. It’s probably been 10 years since I’ve ironed a piece of clothing. And since I couldn’t go out in my garden and play, ironing the wrinkles out of one of my doctor coats seemed a good thing to do at the time.
I still can’t explain why.

Also I would like to offer a wee piece of advice for those who may come up with an upper respiratory FUNK over this winter (or for the rest of your lives, actually).
Don’t, that is *DO* *NOT* succumb to the temptation of Chloraseptic throat spray. If you’ve got a sore throat you’d be better off cutting your own head off to make your throat stop hurting. Gargle salt water, drink hot lemon with honey, drink straight bourbon, suck ice cubes, whang yourself on the finger with a balpeen hammer do ANYTHING but use Chloraseptic throat spray.

That is, unless you like to suck on old athletic shoes in which case you should go ahead and have fun. But don’t come to me for any, I poured the rest of it down the sink (and I’m still thinking that I should have a priest in to exorcise the drain trap just in case).
DAMN that shit’s nasty!

I promise I’ll be less grumpy sometime after my next nap.

It is my understanding that you can be sure that you’re eating a well balanced diet if you eat a very colorful diet. The more colors that you eat, the healthier your diet.

Weeeeeeellllll… to a certain extent. I guess the axiom doesn’t fit very well with the advent of modern foods, bright neon food dyes, and “froot”. But if you imagine yourself eating a very colorful diet 100 years ago then you can imagine that you’d be eating a pretty healthy diet.

Do you think this would count?

(and for the tomato nerds out there, those are, in clockwise order from the top, Pineapple, Golden Banana, Green Zebra, Striped Roman, Chocolate Cherry, and Sungold)

I had a lot of fun with my tomatoes this year.

Our cats sleep at in a different room than we do at night. The cats sleep separately from us for a few reasons. The first of which is that cats don’t tend to sleep at night and humans like to. There’s far too much of the “stomp stomp stomp stomp…..ppppprrrrrrrrrrrrr……Ooo! What’s that on the headboard? I wonder if I can eat it! WAIT! MONSTERS UNDER THE BLANKETS, MUST POUNCE AND KILL THE MONSTERS UNDER THE BLANKETS!” train of thought to make sleeping in the same room, let alone the same bed, with cats too rewarding.
There’s also the fact that Andrew sleeps rather like a tilt-a-whirl which means that any other creatures in the bed would sleep with ME rather than with US and I like to do things like -say- breathe oxygen rather than the hair of the cat heavily asleep on my chest at night.

So that having set the scene, allow me to recount the following.

We were putting the cats away the other night. Usually the cats get herded into the basement and we’ll spend a few minutes petting or playing with them before we turn in.
Pet a cat, it’s good for your blood pressure.

So we’re in the basement talking with the kitties when I spy a spider trundling across the floor. Now y’all will know that I’m not a big fan of spiders. In general I’m willing to let them alone so long as they don’t get too close to me or startle me, but spiders in the basement have the unfortunate classification of “cat amusement” and so I pointed out the spider to the cats.
Flitter is, by far, the better hunter of the two. Pogo is interested in bugs, but generally only because he can sing at them, then stomp on them and walk away when they stop moving. Flitter likes to be sure that a bug is actually not moving anymore then she’ll eat it. This is a big benefit.

Pogo took his traditional poke or two at the spider, but then Flitter muscled in and actually stomped on it.
A few seconds pass and Flitter lifts her foot.
On the floor is what appears to be a ball of mooshed spider. It’s not moving anymore so Pogo walks away. Flitter pokes it, sniffs it, then looses interest.
Unwilling to pick the danged thing up myself, I continue trying to engage Flitter’s interest. No joy.
The ball of mooshed spider just sits there. Both cats wander away.

At which point the ball of mooshed spider, rather like the battle droids in the Star Wars prequels (probably the only thing I will ever find to be notable or quotable about those hideous movies), unfolds itself and goes scuttling off again.
The spider was playing dead! It was actually waiting until the threat had passed it by then running like hell to escape!
I didn’t know that something that is mostly legs and a hydraulic system could be capable of semi-intelligent (or at least something higher than instinctual) thought like that.

Unfortunately for the spider, my higher intelligence cats were capable of learning from the experience, so when Flitter stomped on it and it folded itself up into a ball of “mooshed” spider again, she hung around until it unfolded itself then she stomped it and ate it (good kitty!).

But it was pretty cool all things considered.

So what, I hear y’all ask, has been going on at Lenzer-Hammond & Co. that has kept UADN so quiet this last couple of weeks.

Well, I’ll tell you.

Andrew has been working on the FP winter (to be sent out in time for Christmas) catalogue.

That’s it.

Now he’s been working 6 1/2 days a week and often until 11-1130 or so, but up until about the last week that’s ALL Andrew has been doing since about the middle of July.
The catalogue goes to the printer in a couple of weeks at which point Andrew will be working 6-6 1/2 days per week putting the electronics and wireless systems in to Fungi Perfecti’s new office space which has to be up and functional with all the bugs ironed out WELL before Thanksgiving and the official start of the (shudder) holiday shopping season.
It’s been really interesting trying to have a conversation with him that doesn’t revolve around mushrooms or computers. Do any of you out there with computer nerd cred want a job doing computer support for an up and coming locally owned organic mushroom farm? Andrew would love to have his job cut back to JUST being the graphics guy.

And me?

I have been (very deep breath) picking peas and raspberries and loganberries and rhubarb and freezing all of them for later attention (eventually the loganberries and rhubarb are going to be sauce and preserves, but it’s too damn hot to do that in the middle of August). I’ve been picking and freezing beans and pulling onions and making dried onions and pickled onions and pickled cucumbers and baby blankets.
Not pickled baby blankets, just the regular kind.

And picking cucumbers and tomatoes and drying tomatoes and making raisins. And drying herbs and pulling carrots and beets and parsnips.
Yeah, parsnips. I must be a grown-up or something because I discovered that I rather like parsnips roasted with potatoes and beets and carrots and onions. On the other hand if my father, who is about the most grown-up grown-up I know, who eats every vegetable known to man except for okra (and let’s face it, okra isn’t really a vegetable it’s a bad joke by someone who has it in for caterpillars) ummm…..
Let’s see, where was I?
Oh yeah, Dad and parsnips.
Anyway, if my thoroughly grown-up dad won’t eat parsnips and I will then I must not be a grown-up because….
because….
Ah feckit. I like parsnips when they’re roasted in a little olive oil with beets, and carrots, and potatoes, and onions. A little rosemary, a little sea salt…. Yummy.

Oh, and blueberries, and blackberries. We’re purchasing our blueberries from the Larson Lake Blueberry Farm in Bellevue because the soil in our garden is thoroughly unsuited for blueberries and there’s never such a thing as too many blueberries, but the blackberries are we-pick. Half of them came from Shawn & Annie’s place, the other half from the blackberry patch that is rapidly taking over the vacant lot behind the dentist’s office across the street from us. I’m of the opinion that blackberry picking is a full contact sport and since I just finished picking blackberries yesterday I’m currently looking like I ran into a sack of rabid weasels. Or, if you’d rather, like I fell into a particularly luxurious blackberry patch.

And I’ve been putting in the fall garden — fall peas, carrots, bok choi (I made kim chee with the first batch!), and cabbages.
I’ve still got an unholy load of potatoes to dig if the moles haven’t eaten them all. And if it’s the last thing I do I WILL slaughter the rat that I’ve been seeing skulking around the bird feeder. I will NOT have a rat in my garden.
I’ll take bunnies though. With the final abandonment of the house just to the west of us (the owner’s son had been living in a rec V in the driveway for some months once the power and water were shut off, but the city of Normandy Park eventually got wind of it and chased him off) the bunnies have been more numerous around my garden. I think there’s a bunny den in the back yard next door, but since there’s also a bit of a problem with the septic tank next door, I’m not going to go exploring back there.

And I’ve been working. Holy Zarquon have I been working. Summer is the busy season and our summer has been going gangbusters.
It’s a good thing that I consider all of my garden stuff to be particularly wonderful R & R or it’d never get done.

PART I
Why You Should Spay Your Dog When She’s Young.

You should spay your dog when she’s young because otherwise your veterinarian won’t be half amputating the tips of her forefingers when she is trying to spay your dog.

Okay that’s a little bit of an exaggeration (no really?), I’m being a bit of a drama llama there,but dangitall, that HURTS!
The story is as follows.

Yesterday I spent TWO AND A HALF HOURS spaying a 72 pound 9 year old dog and removing three mammary tumors. On a 6 month old 72 pound dog the spay part of the surgery would have taken -maybe- half an hour. As it was….
There’s SO much fat in a mature dog’s abdomen and there’s SO much fat around the blood vessels that you need to ligate that you have two options.

Option the First:
You can dig around in the slippery abdomen with your slippery gloves (fat is very VERY slippery) while you try to excavate the blood vessels from the fat (making the surgical site that much more slippery) sufficiently that you don’t have to crank on your ligatures to be sure they’re tight enough to hold once you cut the tissue away. This means that you take the risk of traumatizing the blood vessels in the process which would make your surgical site slippery AND bloody. This takes a LOT of time. OR
Option the Second:
You can suck it up and ligate the blood vessels within their sheaths of fat. Which takes far less time and means less risk of immediate hemorrhage, but does mean that you have to use ENORMOUS suture material and you have to crank on your ligatures REALLY REALLY HARD to be sure that the fat and the blood vessels are compressed enough so that when you cut the tissue away the blood vessel won’t bleed. It also means that you have to ligate the blood vessel at least three times before you’re comfortable enough that all your ligatures won’t fail at once and your patient hemorrhage to death.
Most surgeons I know take the second option. It’s never a comfortable feeling to not be 100% certain of your ligatures, but it’s really the best option.

This is where semi-amputating my fingers comes in.
See I was flailing around in a slippery abdomen with my slippery gloves trying to ligate slippery blood vessels inside huge sheaths of slippery fat. I was using 0 suture material (the lower the number, the larger the diameter of the suture. 0 suture material is about a millimeter in diameter) and cranking REALLY hard on the tissue to be sure that my knots were tight. I was, it appears, wrapping the suture material around the first joint of both forefingers and pulling until my eyes popped.
I say that because when I finished with the surgery and finally pulled off my sweaty, slippery gloves, I found that suture material and glove had been pulled so tight at the inside surface of the first joint of my forefinger that suture material and glove had cut right into the skin.

You’ve all had a paper cut on a knuckle, right?
This is like that, only deeper.

PART II
A Multiplicity of Me.

I’ve known for years that there are four Margaret Hammonds living in the south end of King County. One is a plastic surgeon, one is a little old lady in a nursing home, and the other, who was also born in June of 1968, is a bad credit risk.
I know this because I was getting the plastic surgeon’s mail at work for a while.
I got a call from the little old lady’s nephew once.
And for about two months I was getting harassing phone calls at work from a collections agency who were trying to collect on a towing bill for the bad credit risk’s 1982 Subaru Legacy.
Now it appears that there either is a fifth one of me, or that one of the other three is a musician.
Yesterday I got a notice in the mail from the University of Washington’s School of Music. As an alumnus I am invited to the 2011 School of Music Piano Sale on the 25th through the 28th of this month.
Okay, I knew I was talented (pardon the vanity), but I never knew that I was capable enough to earn a degree in music from the UW in my sleep.
Sorry UW. I wouldn’t know what to do with a piano, save to dust it regularly, if I had one. And since I don’t dust very regularly, it’s probably not a good idea for me to have one.
Sincerely,
One of the other Margaret Hammonds.