Spotted while checking out a house on east river drive in Lake Luzerne, NY. I didn’t manipulate the image at all in photoshop. Pretty cool I think.

…if all goes well I’ll make an offer on this house, which is located here. It’s tiny, has really (really) serious leak issues in the basement, and needs a major renovation in the interior (2 rooms with ceiling to floor mirrors and another with one of those giant wall murals of a deer in the forest. mkay, to each their own, it’s not me though), but it’s what I can afford and it hits on a lot of my wants in a house, namely water access (it has deeded beach rights on the Hudson), property coupled with some sense of privacy (it’s on a little over an acre and a few plantings and I should have a completely private back yard), and it has potential in terms of ways I can work on it to increase the property value. Things I might do include: tearing out the ceiling on the kitchen/living room side of the house to give it cathedral ceilings, then stick in a few skylights; put in a pool and hot tub in the back yard, excavate to fix the basement leak issues, then finish one half of it to make an ultimate home theater room, fix the bathroom (to each their own and all, but wall to wall shag carpeting in the bathroom?), and put a gas stove in and convert the fireplace to one of those gas log deals. And that’s just to start. Anyway wish me luck, if all goes well I could be living in the place by June or even the end of May.

Check out the best of the photos from a hike Andrew and I did right before Thanksgiving on Black Mountain, the highest peak in the Lake George region. There’s a decent panorama included. We actually hiked this in November of 2004 but I am just now getting around to posting it. Shows where I am at with my backlog of weblog stuff. Anyway despite being the highest peak it’s not really a very challenging hike from the road side of the mountain, mostly because you drive up into the range and remove about 1000′ or more of elevation you’d have to climb if you tackled the mountain from the lake side. I hope to do that this summer during our annual Lake George camping trip as this year we’re going to be literally right at the foot of the mountain.

Soolin summited her first mountain this week, Prospect up in Lake George. Of course dingus me forgot to bring the flash card for the camera so I whipped it out and discovered I was lugging the camera and case along for no good reason. D’oh! Anyway the hiking was excellent. There were still many feet of snow in places on the mountain and sections of the trail were seriously iced over, but it was warm and everything was coated with a thick frosting of crunchy ice froth, leaving me something to get a grip on with my boots. Highlights of the trip aside from the glorious view looking north along the lake were Soolin doing her best penguin impersonation as she discovered she could slide down the ice, running back and forth along this one ~six foot stretch of trail so she could repeatedly slide down it, and me skitching my way down like 80% of the mountain at a barely controlled pace on the way down. Great fun!

Yeah. So. Been pretty busy, haven’t been posting much. A number of folks have been asking for more Soolin pics, fortunately when I was visiting my Aunt Melissa this weekend she took a bunch ant put some up on her flickr site, so if you crave a glimpse of the ‘growing ever so rapidly’ Soolin, check out the link.

I’m going to let this one speak for itself aside from noting that it is Soolin and I this Sunday at Andrew Bruning’s mom’s farm. Oh, and it was as awesome and fun as it looked, and despite the apparent concern, Soolin liked it too. Check it out (.avi file)

Soolin and David having a blast

I just did my taxes. The move to a new job cost me just over $7k in lost wages this year. I was shocked. I knew I had lost a good bit of income, in fact I was beating myself up over the fact that I ended up depleting my savings by $5k while getting established in New York. Now I don’t feel as bad about that, but damn! And to pour salt in the wound, my tax return is below my average for the last 5 years or so by like $800. Note to self, change jobs as infrequently as possible.

This time done in a stream of consciousness style, and keep in mind it’s one of the busiest weeks of the year for me work-wise. It went something like this:

Puppy puppy puppy puppy! Puppy puppy! Drool! Yay! Puppy puppy puppy piddle! D’oh! Webct webct webct puppy puppy webct epitaph webct puppy puppy puppy piddle! D’oh! Piddle Piddle puppy puppy puppy! Webct. email overload. sleep?

Repeat for the past 6-7 days, and you have my life in a nutshell. Not much sleep, a lot of work, a bright-eyed little puppy looking for all the attention I can muster, and again a very frazzled me. On the positive, Soolin continues to improve in terms of piddling outside – we made it through the entire weekend without any accidents and she totally gets that the bell on the door means she can go out, and she pretty much gets that if she needs to go, she should use the bell.

On the negative side, she is not sleeping through the night anymore, now she wakes up repeatedly and barks up a storm. Last night we went to bed at 10, it took her a half hour to settle, then she was up at 2AM, 4AM, and then finally at 5AM I carried her kennel out of the bedroom into the living room and shut my door, I couldn’t take it. I’ve done everything the books say I should do, rewarding her for going in her kennel, ignoring her when she cries (aside from carrying her kennel out and telling her to shut up at 5AM, I have completely ignored her antics) and trying to make sure she gets plenty of physical activity (Saturday we went to Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Sunday we hiked a mile down the road and then I had her bustling through snow that was over her head for like 3/4 of a mile), but instead of improving things seem to be getting worse sleep wise. Tonight I’m going to try a combination of an even longer hike (about 2 miles) partly through snow and not letting her catch any cat naps after supper. The books advise me to let her take them, but I’m going to try one night without to see if she sleeps better.

So…a long winded puppy update. I’ll get week two pics posted shortly. I don’t know when I’ll get back to posting regularly. The work stuff will start to settle down by the end of this week at least.

First up, for the impatient and the curious – stop clamoring, I’ve done it, I’ve done it! Pics of Soolin’s first week can be found by clicking the gallery link above, or by clicking here.

Next. In terms of how she’s doing, she’s just amazing. I can’t believe how smart she is. To give an example, yesterday afternoon my Aunt Melissa gave me a bell to hang on the door, the idea being to teach Soolin to nuzzle the bell when she needs to go out. Less than 24 hours later, she’s already figured it out, and aside from an over-excitement accident when Andrew and Patty came for a visit today, she hasn’t piddled in the house since, and every time she needs to go out she sits under the bell and rings it. My jaw dropped when I watched her do it this morning the second time she wanted to go out. She’s also basically figured out what sit means, and when it’s just the two of us she pretty much does it whenever I ask, but she gets distracted when other folks are around. She doesn’t really like the leash and collar thing, and getting her to come along after me is sometimes a struggle when she has something she’s interested in, like a stick or a person, but in generally she’s better than I expected after only a week.

Personality-wise, she’s a joy. She’s been coming to work with me every day after lunch (I leave her in her crate in the morning when I head off to work) and she’s met tons of people so far. She loves to meet people and is always excited when someone new comes to say hi. In general she’s just a happy little camper. She also likes exploring the campus with me, I’ve been gradually exposing her to more and more of it. I can’t wait till she gets her shots so she can go to the areas where other dogs congregate.

I’ll keep posting pictures on a weekly basis for her first couple of months as she goes through her growth spurt. So far I couldn’t be happier. As soon as she gets her shots she’s going to enroll with me in an obedience course and from what I see so far my expectation is she is going to excel in it.

…A very frazzled me. It’s been a rough week. Last Friday I got Soolin. She’s gorgeous and an absolute blast, but she places HUGE demands on my time. To give you a sense of it, I haven’t played a single videogame since I got her, and I’ve read less than 50 pages in the novel I’m working on. Meanwhile I had an opportunity Monday to present to a large group of Skidmore faculty for the first time which I was a bit apprehensive about (it all went well) and spent a ton of time preparing for, and then this coming Monday classes start so I had a ton of prep work for the upcoming semester. All this adds up to an extremely busy and frazzled me, with no time to play, post to my weblog, or exercise. It’s all worth it of course, the dog is a joy and despite some launch of semester troubles things went well enough that most faculty are both content and all set. I’ll post some pictures of Soolin this weekend in the gallery and perhaps catch up on some posts I wanted to make here, I’ve got email to deal with first though, and a dog to walk every hour or so, today in potentially -20 degree blizzard conditions.