Category: Adventures in Rufus and/or Otis

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What It Is: 8/24/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick and The Jew of New York.

What I’m listening to: The Lexicon of Love, by ABC, and Give Up, by The Postal Service.

What I’m watching: Inglourious Basterds at a 1:30 p.m. matinee on opening day. I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it really wasn’t about the Basterds and the baseball-bat-to-the-head marketing of it. I don’t really get the spelling thing, but “Variations on Interrogations” probably wasn’t commercial enough. And, yeah, Christoph Waltz’s performance is fantastic.

What I’m drinking: Cascade Mountain Gin & Q Tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Meeting his cousins in New England! (pictures to come)

Where I’m going: Up to Wappingers Falls next weekend for my friends’ 10th anniversary bash. Rufus will have to deal with another longish car ride (as in, over an hour).

What I’m happy about: Having dinner with an old pal from grad school, getting to see my cousins in CT, and seeing an old college friend, all in the span of 65 (or so) hours.

What I’m sad about: That the position at which I lie on my loveseat in order to rub Rufus’ belly and still read from my laptop is wreaking havoc on my neck/shoulders.

What I’m worried about: That realism isn’t realism.

What I’m pondering: What it means that the only book I’m interested in from either of these previews (1, 2) of next season’s releases is R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

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Shred It Up

Rufus having fun with the packaging from Amy’s Crate & Barrel order:

Right at the end, I say his safe word.

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What It Is: 7/27/09

What I’m reading: I finished A Drifting Life, and started Edwin Mullhouse, which came up in last week’s 0-fer post.

What I’m listening to: I had Underworld Day at my office last week. That kept everyone away.

What I’m watching: Things Change, Napoleon Dynamite, Get Shorty, some Arrested Development, and the second-to-last episode of this season of The Deadliest Catch.

What I’m drinking: Juniper Green, another one of my snooty-ass highbrow gins.

What Rufus is up to: Another grey-hike, a bath. We were considering taking care of the latter this weekend, and his decision during the former to start tromping through muddy puddles sealed the deal.

Where I’m going: Scotch-Bowl night this Saturday! It’s a big benefit evening for our greyhound rescue group. I get to show off my dainty wrists by weakly flinging a bowling ball. Joy!

What I’m happy about: That Rickey Henderson’s Hall of Fame induction speech was as entertaining as I’d hoped.

What I’m sad about: Having to revise my opinion that Fight Club was 2/3rds of a good movie before going off the rails. Upon review, it’s turn-for-the-bad takes place almost exactly at the halfway point.

What I’m worried about: That you guys will get get mad if I use bit.ly URLs instead of the original URLs for Unrequired Reading links. Let me know if that would bother you. That is, do you roll over my links and see where they point before you click through? If you do, then my converting over to bit.ly would be a problem.

What I’m pondering: Whether the process of re-scanning all my books for Delicious Library will lead to my chucking at least 100 more of them into the “I’ll never read this in my lifetime” pile.

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Sally Mander

It was one damp greyhound hike today up in Wawayanda State Park. I’m glad Amy brought along the bug spray, because we’d have been eaten alive without it.

And our remains would’ve been noshed on by this guy!

But instead we had a nice, long meander through the woods. Not exactly a lazy Sunday, but hey: enjoy the pix.

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What It Is: 7/20/09

What I’m reading: Killshot, by Elmore Leonard, and A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

What I’m listening to: Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone.

What I’m watching: We tried watching Rachel Getting Married, on the recommendation of Robert Wilonsky or someone else I occasionally trust, but every single character was so boring and unlikable that we gave up and watched Mamet’s House of Games.

What I’m drinking: Bluepoint Blueberry Ale.

What Rufus is up to: Hiking, jumping in more bodies of water, and otherwise just getting used to the summer heat, now that it’s semi-arrived.

Where I’m going: Nowhere in particular, although I keep thinking I should get into the city sometime to visit friends.

What I’m happy about: That problem with the downstairs freezer was a) what I figured (a blown board in the thermostat) and b) easy and relatively cheap to fix (I’ll install the $60 replacement part myself, although we needed an $80 service call last weekend to diagnose it).

What I’m sad about: That my voice is shot because I tried having a conversation in a noisy bar yesterday afternoon. A bunch of greyhound-owners were having a get-together (sans doggies) at a nearby restaurant/bar, and evidently the live music (Celtic band Irish Whiskey or somesuch) starts playing at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon there. So now I sound like mid-game Phil Jackson.

What I’m worried about: Eh. Not much of anything. Which may be a sign of depression, but I think it’s more just a general easing of tension after a rough two-month span.

What I’m pondering: The question, “What’s the movie of the decade?” I think I’ll post about it later this week, from my rather limited perspective. At present, my problem is that the two that jump to mind came out in 1999.

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Lakewalk

I spent a chunk of the morning working on the garage. After clearing out a 40-year-old worktable, I discovered that it was over a square foot of extremely sticky, viscous grease-oil sludge, with decades worth of junk (nails, can lids, lightbulbs, etc.) trapped in it. I scraped up a lot of it (it takes the paint off the floor!), then decided to take a break.

Since it’s such a lovely day — 70 degrees, sunny, nice breeze — I decided to take Rufus out to a trail on Skyline Drive and walk up to Ramapo Lake. Ru decided that he needed to cool down a little, and, well . . .

Here’s the full set of pix from the walk. Now, back to home-work!