What a beautiful day. 50 and sunny and the air is pure autumn. So much autumn, full of rotting and molding leaves that I had a raging asthma attack, but I can still appreciate the beauty. I got to sleep late, until 8 this morning because I had to stay home for the familly trust conference call at 9. I awoke to the smell of dog poop. Chances is having some sort of intestinal problem (again) and has been pooping in the house for the past few days. Man oh man does it smell foul. This is a small bedroom we're talking about, folks. Of course, when she poops in the hallway during the day it stinks up the whole living room too. Oh well, I cleaned it up and sprayed it with my current favorite, OdoBan, opened the window wide and voila! good as new. Had the conference call, during which we forced ourselves to talk for 20 minutes even though we had little to say. Then the dogs ran away. I called and called after a while. Jackson returned but the brown girls were gone. Finally a man knocked on my door to tell me that he was with a group of schoolchildren from Plattsburgh (he's the bus driver) and my dogs had gone in the bog with them. Swell. I was due to leave for work soon but felt obligated to make an effort to get them. They weren't due out until 11:30, I was due at work at noon. I ended up walking all the way to the top of the bluffs (hence the asthma), where I found the group of kids, maybe 2nd graders, all very excited and very cute, just finishing up lunch and posing for pictures, and my dogs mingling happily with them. The teachers explained that the dogs may have had a snack or two and had loved being part of the group. I gasped that yes, I'm sure they did, they love climbing the bluffs with people and they especially love children. Tess came right to me but Chances hid and had to be dragged over to me. pig. Anyway, I made it down the path and home and got to work 45 minutes late. I'd say the walk was pretty but I didn't really enjoy it--it was faster and farther than I wanted to go and I couldn't breathe very well and I was aggravated by the dogs. But it's a beautiful day and the woods are still very pretty. That's a long walk, though, nearly 3 miles I think. I prefer the bog part of it, just a mile.

My week has been quiet. Working away on data entry and weeding. I've rounded the corner on the final row in the stacks, still in the S's but making progress. I finished the batch of 400 or so of the free CD's we decided to make records for. That turned out not to be so hard after all, just time consuming. Such an interesting batch of stuff! We didn't do records for all 3,000, just the ones we sent to our automated libraries. Now I'm back to working on Schroon Lake's collection (you know, doing the work a clerk should be doing, but not complaining about it). I find it pretty relaxing but hard on my back.

Went to the chiropractor and had him snap my neck. I know, crack, not snap. He's working on my sciatica, but there's only so much that can be done. My trip to RI wasn't as bad for it as I expected it to be but I sat on my jacket as a pillow to tilt my pelvis a bit and that seemed to help. I had some muscle spasms in my shoulders which he worked on. I asked him if acupuncture can help tinnitus and he said it might, depending on the cause. Then he got all excited about my hearing and tested it with some hearing forks. Says I have some hearing loss through the air but my hearing through the vibrations in the bones is ok. That's what I would expect with my tinnitus. So I should go to an audiologist. I'm sour on them because the one I used to go out with in RI was such a jerk--but that was 20 years ago and I should move on, huh. As I said to the chirop., I'd just like to hear what silence sounds like.

I got my house so hot one night with the stove fired up that I had to open the door and cool it off. It was Weds. and I was headed to Ken's so I knew it would cool off some by the time I got home but it was pretty funny. Turns out it had been a sunny day and I had left the fire going when I went to work, so the combined effect must have been a strain on the poor dogs. Ken is fine. We had a nice evening together. Ham steaks and macaroni and cheese, plus green beans. He proudly bought Oreos because he's decided those are my favorite cookies. I suppose they are, but I really like good homemade chocolate chip cookies, and oatmeal raisin cookies are good too.

I've been feeling pretty good this week. Liza and I had some good Henry time over the weekend. Talked about him, thought about him. He's everywhere in that house for me, as he is for her, and we talked about that. We cried but we also laughed, as we always do, and she talked about her feelings more than she sometimes does. I liked that. We talked about how much we love each other, just so that we would both know. We talked about whether she should sell her house and buy something near me but I said I thought she should stay there for as long as she can--it's her home, it's where she likes to be, Mark lives there and she'd have to live alone if she lived near me (but where it's warmer). We talked about her sister's situation--Alzheimers and moving to a retirement community but incapable of getting rid of anything that she's collected over the past 40 years. We laughed about being in that situation ourselves. I think we both felt better at the end of the weekend, and we're looking forward to Thanksgiving, when we'll have a little more time together.

And now I have to get to work, if only for a few hours. This weekend is supposed to be really nice, 50's and sunny. I hope to get some winter prep. work done. Remove the screen door, finish stacking firewood (I only have about 4 wheelbarrow loads left to do, then I'd like to move some of last year's wood into the shed), put the mower away, put the furniture under the deck, here's the big one: close the boat house. yuck. big job. I can't do camp by myself so Jim and Keela will have to do that one. Sat. night Lin and I are going out to dinner, which I'm looking forward to. We'll go to Rustique, my new favorite restaurant. I won't feel obligated to take any long walks, I just did that.