Porcupine

This morning started off quite early and in a new and exciting way, with Brad coming in around 5:30 and saying that the dogs had gotten porcupined. A new verb: to porcupine. And indeed they had. Kenai only had about 10 quills right at the end of his nose, but Brooks had many more. I pulled 3 or 4 out of Kenai, but he was struggling and at 95 pounds is too big for me to wrestle. And I knew that Brooks wouldn’t go for this at all at a very squirmy 55 pounds. So Brad found the 24 hour emergency veterinarian in Silverthorne and we loaded the dogs up and took them in. The vet, Dr. Mark Cowan, was terrific, and sedation is terrific, too. He had both dogs under, quills removed, and back with their eyes open in no time at all.

Stopped at Starbucks for coffee, and Brad headed to his busy work day in Boulder and I’m back at the Keystone house to pack everything up. The dogs are sleeping peacefully, and maybe won’t be so curious the next time they see a porcupine.

October?!?!?!!

I imagine that I’m not the only one who is startled to find that it’s October. And I’m especially surprised that I let more than a month pass without doing a blog post while I was watching Roger Federer win the US Open in New York and eating Italian food in Rome and turning 41 in Venice and walking through San Francisco with my niece and loving my puppy who now sleeps through the night. I don’t know when blogging became just another obligation, another of the 714 items on my To Do list, another thing that leaves me always feeling behind on everything — and the longer I went without writing, the harder it seemed to start again. I thought I needed to do an update on all of the travels and zooming and scurrying I’ve been doing, but I’m just going to start with today, and try to post again tomorrow. I’ll do September posts in my voluminous spare time. Ha ha ha. Ha.

I started October off right by going to a Monday morning cardio workout class with my friend Katherine and getting my heart rate up to 549 beats per minute, and then going to a yoga class. Tuesday I did an hour of Pilates apparatus and 75 minutes of yoga. Wednesday I did a private Pilates apparatus lesson and 75 minutes of yoga. Thursday I came up to Keystone and then rested since pretty much every part of me was sore. Friday I rested some more. Saturday I rested and took a 4 hour nap. Maybe I overdid the exercise thing a bit?!? Today I took the dogs for a nice 75 minute walk through our neighborhood in Keystone and feel pretty good. It’s definitely harder here at 9,000 feet. I’m in Boulder for the entire month of October, so I’m trying to get into a good exercise pattern before travel picks up again in November. My 20th college reunion looms in June and I’d rather not be a marshmallow for that, and the holiday eating season approaches, and my damn doctor told me I need to lose weight. I’m doing this really radical and strange diet where you eat less and exercise more. Crazy. Let’s see if it works.

And life is good. Brad and I were in the same place at the same time for almost all of September, and he’s not traveling until October 30th, which is an enormous change from the first 8 months of the year. It’s great to be together. We have big plans for the afternoon — watching the Broncos while Brad runs on the treadmill, and then maybe even watching the Rockies, and then napping on the couch.

Tomorrow is Monday again already. I’ll be closing up the Keystone house and driving the dogs back to Boulder and making peanut butter chocolate cheesecake in preparation for a nice dinner with friends at our house on Tuesday. And I’m sure I’ll get some exercise in somewhere. And a blog post, too.

Quote for the Day

One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of the
necessary ingredients of happiness—simple tastes, a certain degree of
courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear
conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain. –George Sand

from The Happiness Project

Heresy

I love a good heretic. Reading through my RSS feeds from 3quarksdaily I found an excellent essay by Freeman Dyson about how global climate change is grossly exaggerated, and other radical ideas. I like to read thoughts of people with actual critical thinking skills. Call me crazy..

Applauding the Landing

My friend Katherine asks why people don’t applaud when their plane lands anymore, and I hope it’s because people are getting better at risk assessment and realize that flying is far safer than driving a car — but that’s probably not the reason. And sometimes people do applaud. On the way home from San Francisco Monday evening, there was a massive thunderstorm between Denver and Colorado Springs that closed the airport because of lightning strikes when we were about 100 miles out. After circling the Denver Airport for 45 minutes, we finally landed at DIA instead of getting diverted to Laramie, Wyoming. And people did applaud. The approach was a little swervy, but the landing was not that bumpy, and not at all scary compared to various and sundry aborted landings and takeoffs I’ve had in Washington DC and San Francisco in fog banks and flying through hurricanes. It was nice to get down safely, and then drive my car at an unsafe rate of speed the 50 miles home.

Q: When is a Sprinkler not a Sprinkler?

A: When it’s a rattlesnake.

Yes, that’s my back patio. Yikes! I was sitting outside reading and letting the dogs run around and wrestle with each other when I heard a sound. My first thought was that it was the sprinkler system starting up with that sputtering sound it makes. I was all annoyed because I was going to have to move or get wet and I don’t want the sprinklers going off at 5:15 and my book is really good. Then I looked around and saw what was making the sound. Pretty damn close to my chair and book and R.W. Knudsen grape spritzer.

I grabbed Brooks and called Kenai in my "dammit, I’m serious" voice and we went inside. I called Brad at work and told him my little story, using his favorite expletive several times, over and over really. Then I calmed down enough to sneak back outside and take these photos.

I’m having dinner with some friends in town, and will check to see if the snake is still there in the morning. Maybe when the sprinklers start up at 8:30 they’ll scare it away.

Puppy Love

Between the jet lag from my trip to France and Brooks still thinking he needs to go outside at least twice in the night, I haven’t had a full night of sleep in about a week and my brain is definitely not firing on all cylinders. Brad says that the only reason puppies survive into adulthood is that they’re so cute you can’t kill them even when you want to. A friend sent me a hilarious dog FAQ from McSweeney’s that sums it up perfectly.

This is Brooks in his different stages of activity, from Asleep to Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Museums and more Museums

Today we went to the Louvre bright and early. We wandered into some galleries I’d never seen before, which was terrific. Morgan and I got to stand in front of the crown jewels without any other people there for about a minute, which was also terrific and quite rare. We saw the Mona Lisa, of course, and lots of Egyptian artifacts and many many many paintings of dead religious people. The Napoleonic apartments are always amazing with the huge rooms and the tiny bed. Morgan really liked the Feast at Cana, which is a massive painting in the same room as the Mona Lisa. We had lunch at Cafe Marly and got to have the truly French experience of it taking 45 minutes to pay the bill. We did go to L’Orangerie with only a 20 minute wait in line. The Monet murals were sublime, and the private collection downstairs was surprisingly extensive and probably satisfied my need to see French impressionist paintings.

Tomorrow we will go to the Picasso Museum and wander around the Marais and the Place des Vosges, then go to Notre Dame cathedral and maybe take another afternoon nap.

We take the TGV to Provence on Sunday and start riding horses through the countryside on Monday. It’s still quite gray and gloomy here. I’m glad I brought an umbrella!

Ah, Paris

I’m in the City of Light until Sunday, taking my 18 year old niece, Morgan, to France for her birthday gift. We took the overnight flight from Dulles on Wednesday night, arriving here to a cloudy gray city yesterday morning. We came to our incredibly tiny, but wonderfully orange hotel room and slept until 4:00 in the afternoon, which isn’t the recommended way to acclimate to a new time zone, but felt wonderful. We’re staying on the Left Bank near St. Germain and walked around the familiar 6th and 7th arrondissement after having splendid pastries and cafe creme at Laduree, which is literally just around the corner. We walked around until 9:30 and had dinner at a sidewalk cafe also just around the corner from our hotel. It’s always delightful to share my favorite city (or one of my favorites) with a new person, especially one as observant and fun as Miss Morgan.

I slept until right at 2:00 in the morning, and then was wide awake. I could hear Morgan starting to turn over and stir around 3:30. We stayed in bed until 6:30, came downstairs to our contemporary hotel lobby and had breakfast. Now we’re going to head to the Louvre, which I think takes up most of a day. The decorative arts galleries are open again after several years of renovation, and I’m excited to see them. We’ll also try to go to L’Orangerie, which had just opened also after years of renovation when Brad and I were here for the month of May last year and had very long lines. We’ll enjoy the Tuilieries, although it’s kind of a cloudy day again and the flowers won’t be at the biggest blooming.

We’re here in Paris until Sunday afternoon, when we take the TGV to Aix-en-Provence for a 5 day horse riding excursion. I suspect the country farm where we’ll going won’t have a computer in the lobby with free internet access, and my phone and texting isn’t working at all here — so I’ll probably be taking a genuine vacation from the computer for awhile. C’est la vie.

Uxorious

I like to think that I’m my husband’s biggest fan. Even though he doesn’t get very excited anymore when he shows up in the Denver Post Sunday business section or when his Feedburner and Wallstrip deals get written up in Private Equity Week — I still think it’s great.

And in my eternal quest for the mot juste, there doesn’t seem to be a husband-oriented counterpart to uxorious. Is that because it’s not possible for any amount of devotion to a husband to be excessive or foolish?