Month 2012-11
Activity Walk
Total Distance 84.65 miles
Miles per dog: Ondine - 48.53; Pan - 33.14; Fergus - 2.98.
My favorite running app cured itself of its woes mid-month, so I'll be able to keep better track of pace and calories burned next month. Big fitness goals for the new year. Starting tomorrow. Yahoo yippity.
Fawkes likes to lay on my keyboard. It's warm. But occasionally this leads to strange computer things - he apparently searched for the phrase, "B-19" the other day, and one of my newest browser bookmarks is "oooooouuuuuuuu...." (which continues on for about four thousand characters). This morning I shooed him away and discovered that he had opened a program called "Scratchpad" and typed a short, coded message. I didn't know I had a program called Scratchpad.
Nice walking weather these past couple days. Chance of rain tomorrow morning. We need it.
We have five three- to six-inch seedlings growing from some seeds I gathered from this tree last year.
The Blanton museum has an exhibit on the restoration of works in the Suida-Manning collection - this is Saint Agatha by Francesco de Rosa, circa 1630-1656. It was painted on wood cut at a bad angle and later placed in a "cradle" to help with expansion and contraction, which apparently made things worse. I'd be scared to touch a nearly 400-year-old painting - conservators must have nerves of steel. Great, great exhibit. (h/t dangerousmeta!)
We've been averaging 15 degrees warmer than normal lately but a cold front is supposed to drop us 40 degrees in a matter of hours this evening, with a hard freeze tomorrow night. I took Pan for a long Sunday walk in jeans; it was 77 and balmy when we got home so I switched back to shorts to take Ondine out.
A litter of squirrels is fledging in our backyard - we've been seeing a large one followed by an assortment of smaller ones. This morning five of them were playing together in our neighbor's tree, and they've been chasing each other across our roof all day. They're driving the dogs insane.
(The pumpkin pic is from Pan's walk.)
Here is one of my all-time favorite pictures. (I'm logging it here so I can find it again.) Humans are interesting.
In other news, I've been re-reading The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux. I don't often revisit books (life's too short), but I could read this one over and over.
The spring outside our shelter had a sign on it, which Gregory told me said the water was drinkable. The next morning, though, seeing me filling my bottle, Mr. Suk dashed toward me in alarm. "Ah," Gregory said. "It says do not drink this water."
Reminds me of an embarrassing linguistic mistake I made there: I told a shopkeeper, "Gosh that's expensive (bi saiyo)!" when I meant to say, "Golly that's cheap (saiyo)!" (He was not asking nearly enough for his services, and I was trying to express my gratitude. It took some serious tap-dancing to extract myself from that one.)
Took Pan out for another 5k walk this morning. (The elm tree a couple posts below was from that walk.) He seemed pretty pooped by the time we got home. On our evening walk Ondine and I discovered a festival in the park; instead of detouring around it we plunged right in, and despite squeaky strollers, running children, generators blowing air into bouncy castles, a miniature train with an annoying bell, and many loosely held hot dogs and sticks of cotton candy, Ondine didn't bat an eye and stayed right with me. Whosagooodgirl?
