Unfortunately I had some technical issues with my camera and most of the photos I took of my August vacation on Lake George were destroyed, but I did manage to salvage some using a very handy utility I blogged about a while ago. Anyway I finally got around to posting the images, which you can check out in my AGCW 2005 photo gallery.

Hopefully my friend Dave Goldberg will send me the photos he took, he has some really excellent ones of the same trip that aren’t available online anywhere, including some awesome tubing action shots and videos. As soon as I get my hands on them I’ll post them here.

Well, sort of. She got her intermediate certificate from the trainer last wednesday and is moving on up to the advanced class in a couple of weeks. Her progress is really pretty amazing, she’s a very smart dog. She’s still a puppy and can get distracted (of the “look, a squirrel, a squirrel, a SQUIRREL!….err, wazzat, did you say something?” variety), but as long as I can get her attention she knows and responds to all of the basic commands with solid reliability – sit, down, stay, come, over, drop, ‘get em!’ (ie fetch), Focus! (look at me) and ‘where is it!” (where is your ball, go get it – for when we’re going to go outside and play, or when she has forgotten to bring her ball with us when we’re leaving). She also sort of gets the notion of heel and so long as there are no distractions or temptations can be fairly reliable about it off leash, though she still needs lots of work there. As far as other behaviors she’s very social and gets along with most anything, dog or human. Even when they’re threatening, her approach is ‘whu? Hey let’s be friends!’ and not the aggressive ‘screw you then, CHOMP!’ you often see in dogs. She never excretes inside the house anymore (and really aside from when she’s been sick she hasn’t in months and months), and she has had free run of the house when I’m not home for at least 3 months now. The only issue I’ve had with that was with her dog bed, which, being hers, she saw as something she could chew up. She loves to gut stuffed toys and strew their contents about the house and I think she saw her dog bed as a giant stuffed toy. This was painful to teach her about, I had to be very rough and gruff about it – no actual hitting but some very mean behavior on my part did ultimately work.

I’m not sure how much further I’ll take the training. I have about 9 sessions of advanced training paid up and I suspect after that we’ll be done, though there’s a possibility we’ll continue with some agility training or even some flyball for her. I know she’d absolutely love the flyball but the problem is the nearest league is 45 minutes away in Vermont.

So, that’s about it on the Soolin front. We’re about to return to our hiking now that cooler weather has returned and the car is fixed – weather permitting Saturdays are hiking days from now through the arrival of the real winter snows. She doesn’t know it but I know she’ll be psyched.

OK. Just starting to surface after a really intense 3 weeks of work. Much tougher than anything I ever went through at Bowdoin for a semester launch, in terms of the amount I needed to get done, the number of people clamoring for my attention, and the frustrations I encountered along the way. But the worst of it is now passed and I will now be returning to a regimen of regular posting here.

My mom’s cats have been stalked off an on by a feral cat that’s taken up residence in their neighborhood, and at least once one of her cats has ended up in the hospital as a result. Her most recent adventure follows, in her words, edited slightly by me:

Picture this: I’m minding my own business–taking a bath (okay, don’t
picture that) reading my latest escapist lit when I hear a crash in the
house. I am alone; the door is locked; the lights off in the living
room; only the cats are in attendance. I hear no strange cry out, meow
or anything. So I just wait then call out “everything okay out there
boys and girls?” and hear nothing for a bit. Then I think I hear
something, but it sounds like young girls talking. No TV, radio, etc.
is on. We have no phone machine that records out loud, we have no close
neighbors…so I get out, wrap a towel around me, and go check. I find
nothing wrong in the kitchen, but when I turn around, I see Black at
attention looking toward the living room. I head in that direction. As
I pass the staircase, I see the screen has fallen from the sky light
and is a bent mess midway up the stairs. All my cats are in these days
because of the recent injuries at the mouth of the local bully cat. I
can guess what’s going on at this point. The hissing and growling
confirm that said bully cat has just “dropped in.” What follows was
not fun. The living-room was dark, I’m still barefoot in a towel, so I
get a robe and sandals on and go in carefully to turn on the light. The
other cats are getting defensive so I lock Black in my room. Meuller is
crouched by the corner next to the couch, so I don’t worry about him so
much and Kitty Girl is somewhere out of the way. The feral cat is
throwing itself against the screen in the open window seat window. I go
over, turn on the lights and try to open the other window– that now
has a broken screen thanks to one of my boys– (discovered after Black
kept getting out one day last week). The cat hissed and growled at me
and made those little raised claw gestures to me, then ran out of the
living room. I went to open the front door and he ran back to the
window seat. I followed him and tried to calm him and coax him out and
he eventually figured out it was an opening and he bolted. Such
excitement.

How much do I hate that cat? The cat fell at least 10 feet! It couldn’t
have broken its neck and died? Every time I think it has gone to a new
territory I see it and have to start my “count” again. But this was too
much. Now I have to worry about it falling through in the guest room
which is closed off to keep the AC in the other room. It would tear the
room apart. No one would know it was in there if it happened during the
day. What a nightmare.

I was number 50 something for the have-a-heart trap at the pound two
weeks ago. They said it would be a few weeks.
That cat is damn scary I’ll tell you. It is truly a wild creature.
Beautiful, but wild.

Other than that, sure, I’m fine if you overlook my pulled back gained
when I reached and bent (bad combo) to pick up the lysol can to give a
little relief to the room because at least one of the cats is relieving
him or her self on the bathroom floor just outside the cat box–too
lazy to go in? I think not. They are pissed (literally) cause I won’t
let them out!!!!!!!!

[/end mom adventure]

It’s funny, I never thought of a feral cat as much of a nuisance. We used to see them behind the restaurants I worked at when I was a kid, but they were skittish and seemed harmless. How bold would you have to be to jump through a screen on the roof of a house? That screen she is describing is at least 8 feet off the ground too, it opens over a stairway. Hard to imagine a cat leaping through that hissing the kitty equivalent of ‘I kick all your asses now!’ My mom’s cats are, sadly, declawed, which is why they are getting their heads handed to them. If she manages to do away with the feral kitty from hell or gets it trapped and shipped off to kitty penitentiary I’ll post a followup.

Thanks for being you. This article brought a wistful smile to my face this morning. Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes are to be blown into the sky via fireworks from the top of a huge double-thumbed fiberglass fist. It’s so perfectly appropriate. If you’ve never read any of his books, go get Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You’re in for a treat.

Holy coolness, check out this hand built kayak made from saplings and $25 worth of hardware (most of which is the cost of the tarp that serves as the kayak’s skin). There are plenty of photos of the process to check out. Apparently it actually works pretty well and is really light. I’m very tempted to make one or two of these for when friends visit and just for the fun of actually putting something like this together. I wonder if I’d be legally liable when they crash into a rock going down the rapids on the sacandaga river near my house.

A little change of pace – some talk of coffee, my favorite vice. I bought myself a Bodum mini electric Santos a few months ago, which is a very cool vacuum-based coffee maker. I bought it on a whim after my other pot (a black and decker which was incapable of pouring a cup of coffee without spilling) spilled one splash of coffee too many. After the novelty of the pot wore off I was at first ambivalent about it but I’ve grown to really like it. It has some downsides – there is more cleanup than a drip-based coffee maker and it takes more coffee to make a rich pot than a drip machine does – but on the other hand once properly run it makes a better cup of coffee and it’s much faster than my drip machine was. These things are worth checking out if you’re in the market for a coffee machine. Also if you’re curious I happened across this history of the vacuum coffee pot, where the author speculates that the vacuum coffee pot is poised to make a comeback. Apparently for a period of time ending in the late 50’s the vacuum coffee pot was the preferred pot in american households before being displaced by the drip based pot, but the vacuum pot is trending up.

So there’s a large crab apple tree in my backyard. Soolin and I are in the habit of playing fetch after I work out every day, and normally I stand at the foot of the tree and toss the ball the length of the yard. Two days ago we start playing and after a few fetches, all the sudden Soolin starts doing the doggie version of the funky chicken, writhing about and rubbing her snout furiously. As this is happening, I discover my hair is full of something and it’s moving. It dawns on me that somehow we are now in the midst of a swarm of very pissed off yellow jackets and they are stinging the crap out of poor Soolin. I go into full panic mode ‘COME!’ I shout as I book off towards our barn. We scoot in and I pull the sliding door shut behind us. Soolin is still FULL of bees, they’ve crawled in under her coat and are slithering about trying to get at her to sting. Fortunately there is a pair of leather gloves right there so I pull one on and proceed to try combing the bees out of her hair – all told I get 6 or 7, with occasional pauses to battle other bees who either got in the barn before I pulled the door shut or have taken off her to attack me.

Amazingly I was only stung once, and it was really minor. Soolin took a complete beating though, the left side of her face swelled up so much her eye was mostly closed. To make matters worse, the next day my neighbor took the dogs to play in the yard while I worked out, and 10 minutes later HE came running into the barn in a panic. A slightly less awful version of the same deal had gone down, and he’s allergic to bee stings. So now we’re trying to figure out how the hell to get rid of these bees. They see the crab apple tree and the surrounding area as their territory and go ballistic if you get close. They nest underground which is most likely how the surprised me so completely, and why they went after Soolin more than me (she’s closer to the ground). I should mention that Soolin’s fine – her face was back to normal by the morning and yesterday when she got stung I gave her a benadryl. Wish me luck – this weekend I go to battle with the damned things.

I mentioned some time ago that I had become a contributor to the academic commons, a website devoted to investigating the role technology can play in education. They officially went ‘live’ with their site yesterday, and my stuff is now up and online, though some of it still shows as having been published by my old boss Peter. It’s all content repurposed from here and edited slightly, so if you’re a regular reader it may not be of much direct interest, but it’s worth mentioning. And of course I’m pleased to have been asked to contribute as well.