Viewpoint

The days haven't been what I had hoped for or anticipated.

Nor have they been completely ruined.

Creative Endeavors

Over the weekend I visited with two dollmakers.

Their creativity and originality delighted me to no end.

Skill Sets

We lived for several years in rural Vermont. It's a nice place to live and all—very pretty in the fall—but can I just say that making a living there can be challenging, especially if one happens to have moved there right out of college?

One of my innumerable odd jobs during our tenure in the Green Mountain State was shipping and receiving for a small distributor of environmentally friendly products, a job in which I learned to cut down and reconfigure reclaimed cardboard boxes—it was the environmentally friendly thing to do—faster than normal people can pick a box cutter and tape gun out of an ordinary lineup of odd tools that make other people's lives easier. But that was a long time ago, and over the years my familiarity with the vagaries of cardboard and the wiles of packing tape diminished into a vague, "don't I know you from somewhere" kind of acquaintanceship.

Or so I'd imagined until the day I needed to ship something for work and I couldn't find a box for it anywhere.

Anticipation

I'd looked forward to this day for months, but I never anticipated how difficult it would be.

Time Out?

I have no idea why Willow appears to have put herself in time out. But she doesn't seem all that pleased about it.

Dinner Out

Dinner with friends is often more about the company and conversation than the food. Though in this case, the food was wonderful too.

Home

Rose is back home! Her surgery didn't turn up anything abnormal which is great, except that we still don't know why the vomiting and other somewhat related troubles persisted for so long. But she's eating again. And she'd obviously like to take a nap, if only that human with the annoying flash would leave her alone.