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Huh. Where have I been for the last four months?

Well, working mostly. And on http://twitter.com/paulalfleming/ . Even when I can't begin to summon the energy to blog, I can always muster 140 characters. Have to admit -- I was a Twitter sceptic. Who the heck needs that in their lives? But I use it to follow a bunch of stuff in lieu of going to lots of separate websites. And to keep up with friends and see what cool stuff they're up to and links they're sharing and share my own discoveries.

Back to the working thing: I thought I was putting in about 80 hours/week, because that seemed like the upper limit I'd heard of a workweek being. Then in December I ran some numbers through a calculator and realized it was closer to 100 hours/week, at least for a lot of weeks. That's insane! However, with the economy the way it was last year (and still is this year, so far) and with the ever-present possibility that freelance work will suddenly dry up, I'm *not* complaining. On the other hand, I did get a little crispy in the brain. Plus, my totally sedentary lifestyle -- I see my bed . . . Now I see my desk . . . Now I see my bed again . . . -- led to my old neck injury (from bending over a laptop for six weeks during Clarion 2000) to flare up in a really bad way. Gods, but the pain and pins-and-needles were distracting!

However, I was working on all sorts of interesting and challenging stuff, including doing the equivalent of copyediting instructional videos for Kaplan's new GMAT curriculum.

And we used some of the extra dough to buy a bed with a headboard and footboard (not just the metal frame we've always had) and a new mattress set and everything. In case you're just tuning in or lost the thread of the story, three years ago, when we got the main floor of the house remodeled, we moved all the furniture into the basement to get it out of the way. The king-sized mattress went down the steep, narrow stairs easily enough -- we could not get it back up. No way, no how, wasn't going to happen. The new bed is in a "sleigh" style, and the wood finish goes beautifully with the colors and furniture already in the bedroom. It barely fits in the room (king-sized bed to accommodate the dogs), but we don't care. Sleeping in it is incredible, amazing, beautiful, wondrous . . . It's a really comfortable bed! Definitely worth every penny.

I stumbled across an amazing massage therapist who's done wonders for my neck, I've been making time to work out most days since January 2, and as of about 24 hours ago, I've had no assignments on my plate. I get a long weekend! First thing I did? Sleep for about a day. LOL! I guess I was tired!

Update on Sparky and Bootsie: When Sparky joined our family, Bootsie wanted to rip out his liver. Now they play together every day, and if Cubby Bear is harassing Sparky, Bootsie runs out from whatever room she's in and faces down the mastiff. "Don't mess with my Sparky," seems to be her attitude.

Sparky is technology minded. He is an expert at unplugging my computer -- he figured out very quickly that gets a big reaction! He also enjoys printing test pages on the printer -- finds that quite exciting. Bootsie does that, too, but I think he's more intentional about stepping on the button. He's tried very hard to take apart Doug's laptop, removing one key for sure -- fortunately not an important one -- and working at damaging the ports along each side. He also figured out quickly that sitting atop the aquarium and flipping the lid repeatedly -- bang! bang! bang! -- gets attention. And he removed the little off trigger from the aquarium light timer, so I have to remember to turn off the light manually every day. His absolute favorite thing to do is play with his feather toy, and I try to indulge him at least once a day. Mostly, he's a big pain in the ass, but he's smart and cute and has definitely made Bootsie's life more interesting.

Now watching the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Spokane, Washington, and the Australian Open (tennis) in Melbourne. Is it possible to be in all time zones at once?

Health care: Don't even get me started. Just . . . I'm not even going there.

Sparky! And a hawk!

It is my great pleasure (and surprise!) to announce the addition of Sparky to our family. I really have no idea how we went from me looking at cute pictures of kitties at Petfinder.com to filling out an adoption form at the Animal Humane Society. It just happened (like some pregnancies -- LOL!) Doug and the 9-month-old Sparky took to each other right away, and I thought he was a nice kitty, so home he came. Sparky's been living mostly in my office until Bootsie gets used to the idea, and I adore him. Starting about Day 3, couldn't imagine life without him. Today is Day 8. He loves to sleep on my book or keyboard with his head on my hand. Or slung over my shoulder with my hand supporting his bottom. How can I possibly push him aside to work? Cuddling him is a much higher calling.

Need to give equal visibility to Bootsie. Here's a picture Doug shot a couple of years ago, I think. She loves the back windows in summer when the ivy grows over them, giving her a "jungle screen" to lurk behind as she watches the birds and furry critters that visit our backyard. She is sort of OK with Sparky as long as he doesn't try to play with her or enter her domain upstairs. Unfortunately, he wants to do both those things very much. So they're going to be separate for a while.



AJ is very interested in the new cat, and Cubby Bear is absolutely over the moon at having another kitty friend. Sparky was wary at first, but now he has discovered that Cubby's huge brush of a tail makes a great toy.

This summer, we were visited for about a week by a juvenile Cooper's hawk. He perched right outside my office window for hours! I've always joked that my utter lack of care of the backyard and its subsequent run to weeds was an effort to create an ecosystem. Well, I guess it worked! The hawk eventually caught a baby rabbit! Then s/he took off. They like to nest in Douglas firs, apparently, and our next-door neighbor has a beautiful one, so fingers crossed that s/he remembers that tasty bunny and the nice tree and maybe comes back someday to raise baby hawks. Photo below by Gerry Dewaghe.



Otherwise, life has been about working . . . and working . . . and working . . . and . . . Did I mention I've been working a lot? I'm guessing about 70-80 hours/week. So much housework and yardwork isn't getting done, it's not funny. But with the economy the way it is, and the way it's likely to be for a while, I'm not complaining. One of my clients sent me a chilled box of See's Candy for working on a series of challenging projects -- how sweet! Do you know that See's Candy comes with a nutritional leaflet? That's just wrong! It went into recycling unread.

Wrapped up my GRE class for Kaplan Test Prep. Enjoyed teaching very, very much. It definitely got me the interpersonal contact I needed and used the presentation skills that would otherwise atrophy. Plus I met remarkable people and got to know their dreams and goals and maybe help them a little toward them. I hope they all do great on the test!!! Now I am tutoring a wonderful guy, also on the GRE. I hope to teach a class again in November, but that will depend on enrollment. I'm looking forward to fine-tuning my teaching and continuing to improve in my next class.

It hasn't all been work. At the end of August, we did go on a sort of vacation to Kansas City, where we met Doug's parents for a couple of days. Visited some museums, ate some barbeque. I alternately worked and crashed, worked and crashed. Afraid I wasn't exactly the life of the party. I'd lost 5 pounds since May, but I gained 3 of it back over that vacation -- bleh. How discouraging.

Also carved out some time to watch the U.S. Open. Men's champion Juan del Potro seems like a really nice guy with a great game, so glad he won. And Kim Clijsters -- good grief, just her third tournament back from "maternity leave," and she wins a Grand Slam! I remember her as being mentally fragile, but she was incredibly focused here. And now Justine Henin is planning a return. Hurray for women's tennis!

Garden update: Bunny ate most of what would have been a great crop of broccoli, but tomatoes are producing like crazy, despite the drought. (We've had only 0.01 inch of rain so far in September!) Without time to cook, I've been just slicing them up on a plate and sprinkling salt over them.

Birds, Butterflies, and Books

Stepped out onto my front porch yesterday and saw four gorgeous little yellow birds, two a bright, bright yellow, clinging to my Pincushion Flowers (Scabiosa) and delighting themselves with the seeds. American Goldfinches! Two males, two females. As I've been relandscaping, I've been trying to use a lot of bird- and butterfly-friendly plants -- how cool that it works!

Also, about a week ago, saw a beautiful little butterfly on my bed of native yarrow. The undersides/outsides of its wings were slate gray; the topsides/insides were an intense lilac blue. When it fluttered about, it looked like a flower in flight.

Am sick as a dog: Doug went to Origins in Columbus, Ohio, to sell games and brought back a virus with him. He's been sick, too. Bleh. That's really a pain because . . .

I'm currently working on six books with another arriving Monday and more in the pipeline after that. Not a good time to be sick! Just finished editing a book with a lot of organic chemistry in it. I don't know the first thing about organic chemistry, so it was very challenging, but I think that with the help of Google, I ended up doing a good job.

Sarah Palin is an utter flake. Here's just one of the analyses with which I agree; this one is by Ruth Marcus.

When not working, have been enjoying Wimbledon. Amazing women's semifinal between Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva. Amazing quarterfinal and semifinal between Andy Roddick and a resurgent Lleyton Hewitt and co-favorite Andy Roddick, respectively, and then yet another classic Wimbledon final, this time between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. Being sick, I dozed off early in the fourth set. Woke up quite a while later, saw the score line, and went WTF!?!? and was wide awake. Federer finally won 16–14 in the fifth set. This is his 15th Grand Slam title, and he's now one of a handful of men who have won the French Open (on clay) and Wimbledon (a few weeks later on grass) in the same year.

Funny dog stuff: AJ is perfectly capable of pushing through the swinging kitchen door. She does it from the kitchen side all the time, and she'll do it from the dining room side if I'm standing right there with her. Nonetheless, when Doug is making a snack and she wants to follow him (or rather his food), she never fails to charge into my office, make it very clear that I am to follow her, and lead me to the door, which she makes very clear I am to open for her. Sometimes even when the door is propped wide open, she insists I escort her through it. Funny!

Fun:

• You must view this slideshow at the public radio show Speaking of Faith Web site. A male polar bear encounters chained huskies in northern Canada. The animals proceed to play with each other. The bear came back every day for a week to play with the dogs. Other researchers have observed the same behavior between grizzly bears and wolves in the wild.
• There is a World Worm Charming Championships. It is held each year in Willaston, Cheshire, England. The record now stands at 567 worms. Something to aspire to?
• Therapy chickens! Like therapy dogs, but poultry. This brief article will make you say, "Awwww."
• "Male hummingbirds, swooping in an effort to impress females, achieve speeds 'faster than fighter jets,' [as measured in body lengths] according to a study." Photo below by C. Clark.
  
  
  
  
• Stickleback fish have been determined to use a "hill-climbing" learning strategy. Individual fish learn to find food faster from the failures and successes of their peers. Geez, I could have told them fish do this.

It rained! And I fixed the pipe! And the plants still live!

Graduated from Kaplan teacher training! Really looking forward to teaching. It'll be fun.

Now working on a book to help high school students prepare for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. government and politics. I follow policy and politics pretty intently, but it'll be fun to see how much of the formal knowledge I remember from high school.

The big news of the last few weeks has been my battle to keep my 100+ baby plants alive despite (a) no rain and (b) no working garden hose. We're somewhere between "moderate drought" and "severe drought." (The Drought Monitor map, as well as the other info at this University of Nebraska—Lincoln site, is pretty cool.) The threads for the hose to screw onto had corroded so badly, no amount of Plumber's Goop would keep it on, plus there were leaks from the spigot and another connection. Duct tape actually worked for one watering per wrapping before it fell off -- duct tape is awesome. I ended up hauling more water than I want to think about one 5-gallon bucket at a time. Have I mentioned I'm not big in the upper-body-strength department?

I read up on taking apart old pipes and flinched every time I encountered the words propane torch. Finally at the crack of dawn one morning, I ventured out with my midsized pipe wrench in hand to see what would happen. The bad section of pipe came right off! Doug dimly remembers, and I think I do too, that we had the same problem shortly after moving into the house and had our handyman at the time fix it. If the pipes had only been together 17 years instead of 71 years, that would explain why they didn't act as though welded together. A quick walk down to the corner hardware store for replacement parts and plumber's tape, and it was all fixed and worked great!

And it finally rained last weekend -- over an inch! Lovely, lovely, lovely steady soaking rain!!!!! I could feel the waves of relief coming from the plants -- I swear I could.

I don't think I lost a single plant to lack of water.

Now the big news is that I think I'm going to have over 30 tomato plants. Yikes. So here's what happened. I got 6 beautiful heirlooms from the Friends School Plant Sale. Then Jung Seeds offered a collection of 16 sweet pepper plants at a great end-of-season price, and they came with 16 tomato plants. (I think I didn't read the fine print very closely. I was just excited about the peppers.) Then, weeks ago, I tossed some old tomato plant seeds in the ground in case one might germinate. Well . . . a whole bunch just came up. Yikes. If they all grow and fruit and the rodents and dogs don't eat them, I'm going to be begging people to accept bags of tomatoes!

Seem to have a soil fungus -- verticillium -- afflicting my dogwood tree, causing all the leaves on one branch after another to wilt. Hopefully, I can prune it back and save it. Hopefully, it won't infect all the barberry that covers the hill starting 15 feet away. If it does that, I will cry!!!

The Emerald Ash Borer has come to Minnesota. Its larvae have started killing ash trees in St. Paul. Our block has lost quite a few elm trees in the last ten years, and the city forestry department chose . . . yup, green ash trees to replace them. I don't find the trees that attractive -- I could take them or leave them -- but I really don't want to lose the time it takes to get mature trees lining the street. The ashes are just starting to be a mature presence and offer a smidgen of shade. The critters are really pretty; it's a shame their larvae are so destructive.

Fun:

• Well, it's not fun that she died, but it is fun that I learned about her: Koko Taylor, "Queen of the Blues." What a voice! What a career in the male-dominated world of blues. How cool that she performed shortly before her death at age 80. Must acquire her recordings.
  
• Sharks in captivity can learn visual and audible signals to know when it's their turn to come to their trainer and eat. Some can even be picked up and cuddled after responding to the cue, knowing that food will be the reward. This article says the "brightest sharks" will be trained in three months. Based on what I've seen of my tropical fish, I doubt it will take that long; when it comes to food, fish can be pretty quick on the uptake.


• The news is that fingerprints don't increase the surface area of our hands and don't increase friction when we grip things, so that's not what they're for. But what I found fascinating is that New World monkeys have "tailprints"; that is, ridged areas of skin on their prehensile tails.


• I'd embed this, but you really have to watch tennis full-screen to follow the ball and get the full enjoyment. Here's a "greatest hits" compilation of French player Fabrice "the Magician" Santoro running his opponents around the court and hitting shots between his legs to win points. Roger Federer breaks into a grin at one point as he's being pulled from net to baseline to net . . . Fun stuff.


• Cute Nike ad celebrating Roger Federer's 14th Grand Slam victory, which tied Pete Sampras's record. He won the 14th at the French Open, held on a clay (crushed brick) surface, which was the one major he'd never won; thus, he also achieved a career Grand Slam at the same time as tying the record.