chillin'

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Under mostly cloudy skies and only 89 degrees (instead of over 100 as it has been), Ondine and I jogged from home to Cat Hollow, then walked a half-mile and back on a gravel path, then jogged back home from the park.

She's leading me back into running.

o training note

After nine full months of trial and error with a variety of collars and harnesses - including a front-pull harness, a head collar, a limited-slip martingale, and a sturdy Ruffwear harness - and months of carefully timing our walks to encounter as few cars as possible, a scary encounter with a truck last week convinced me to go against my instincts and try a pinch collar. The transformation has been miraculous. Ondine is terrific with it. She doesn't object at all to having it put on (as she does to every other option we've tried) and it really helps her maintain her composure when cars go by. I'm kicking myself for not trying it months ago. It's not a permanent solution - we're working on correcting a very specific, very dangerous problem - so now the challenge will be to work her back into a regular collar by consistently, patiently reinforcing her when she stays calm. Wish us luck!

In other news, I discovered tonight that she LOVES it when I sing her songs from Hair and Godspell. Hippy.

And this is just a gratuitous grab shot of Fawkes. Note that his cheek is a little slobbery. (No worries. He's a more-than-equal partner in that game.)

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ix-xxv-xi, iii o' o

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eve's necklace pods

new mulberry leaf

fawxplorin'

garden camping viii

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fawkes in the grass

terra

September 20, 2011 US drought monitor image.

whatcha reading xxii

The problem of getting horses and mules ashore was solved in typical [General] Shafter fashion: they were simply shoved into the sea and left to find the beach for themselves. Some hysterical animals chose to swim instead for Haiti, until a bugler on the beach thoughtfully blew a cavalry call. The horses, according to one witness, "came round to the right and made for the beach like ships answering their helms."

- The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris

Great biography. I have mixed feelings about the man - on one hand I admire his forthrightness and courage, but on the other I wish he would have had a little more humility. Same with his legacy. Interesting fellow.

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zen path-raking

pattern recognition

kindling

garden camping vii

new running shoes

lol

banana pepper

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grass runners

a neighbor's lawn

ix-xvi-xi

I've been walking an hour or so every evening after work this week. It's been a little over 100 degrees. Penitential heat. That's OK, I have much for which to atone.

But tonight there was a break. High scattered clouds blew across the sky and the temperature dropped to 88 degrees. Walking in it was a nice way to end a hard week, a nice reminder of how much I have for which to be grateful.

hush, soul

truce?

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bee weed

(I don't know what this plant is called but bees like it a lot.)

a trusty steed

prickly pear

tyrannosaurus tree

new os first impressions

I just installed Joli OS 1.2 on my Asus eeePC 900. I had a little trouble booting from the external CD and then later getting it to recognize the onboard SD card reader, but a couple of system BIOS tweaks opened everything up. I'm still feeling my way around the file system. Seems like hardware settings are hard to find. Maybe that's just as well once things are up and running.

The OS came pre-loaded with a lot of goofy apps; I kept about a third and downloaded a couple others.

There's occasionally some lag time on screen refreshes, so it seems like it's slow, but I think it's keeping itself busy in the background, you know, it's not just sitting there frozen.

Screenshots:




Joli advertises this OS as a way to breathe new life into old computers. The whole setup seems more cloud-centric than local storage-oriented, but I think it's kind of dumb to keep a lot of data on your machine anyway. (I like hard drives as opposed to the cloud for privacy reasons. Guess I'm old-fashioned.) There's a whole section devoted to social stuff - app sharing and tweets and product-rating stuff, but I'm not too interested in those kinds of things. Present company excluded, narf.

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potted whoa