All's quiet on the northern front
There's really not much to report. This time of year is quiet and uneventful--nothing going on socially, nothing much happening in the forest. The leaves are pretty much gone, the tamaracks are gold and will be naked soon. I can't take any pictures because my camera broke and has been sent for repair. I miss it, I really like recording my life with it. I got a bunch of prints I had made, some to send to my mother and Mark and some for myself. I'm way behind in organizing my pictures and have just been tossing them in a pile. I'm supposed to be maintaining the family album for camp but haven't had much interest in that since my brother died. Perhaps this winter when I sort my pictures I'll find the ones of my cousins, their children, people in boats and the family group. I'm 2 years behind with this but it's sure not something I give a lot of thought to--I just know how much everyone enjoys looking at all the albums my mother did over the decades.

Work is a bit monotonous today--a whole bunch of large print books for Willsboro, which I just finished. They were a huge drag, totally uninteresting and not at all challenging. Glad to have that done. Not sure what I'll move on to next. I have to catalog 8 decks of cards for kids that were freebies for all the member libraries. Now that's a challenge. I also have part of one book of the Bible on CD for Willsboro. I tried to talk her out of keeping it (naturally it was a donation) but she seemed to think it was vital to her collection. These libraries are so willing to take ANYTHING that's given to them, especially non-print stuff. This means we have to download records for such crap that we really hate spending time on it. We just got Lake Placid's shelf-list for their CD collection. It's huge and will take forever to do. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart--and each one a specific symphony or whatever. Lots of keyboarding for ones we can't find records for in our other databases. Will keep me busy for weeks and weeks.

I'm going to Rhode Island for Thanksgiving and just noticed that it's 3 weeks away. Amazing! The frenzy of Nov.-Dec. has begun. Now that it gets lighter earlier I don't mind getting out of bed early in the morning, but the dogs want me up ever earlier than I'm interested in getting up. This morning poor Tess was sooooo frustrated. She sticks her face right in mine and cannot, no matter how hard she tries, keep her tongue in her mouth. Maybe she's smarter than I think and knows that if I have to keep yelling "DON'T!" to her eventually I'll get tired of that and get up. That is pretty much what happens. Some mornings, if I'm really careful and don't move but just barely open my eyes I can watch them watching me. It's really cute: they're both sitting up and staring at me the way I stare at the television. Willing me to move. Tess has gotten so she recognizes a smile, something I've always enjoyed in my dogs. If I smile at her across the room she starts to wag her tail. Chances, visually impaired can't read my face. Both dogs seem to be especially energetic these days--as opposed to me. I let them tear around the living room--120 pounds of dog bumping, banging and jumping on each other. I think it's funny, but I appreciate the fact that this can go on endlessly because I live alone. I'm not sure anyone else would be so entertained by it. The only thing I can't stand is when Tess sucks on Chances' ears. Yuck, for some reason I just can't stand that. She chews on them as if they were a piece of rawhide, only gently of course.

I got new fish this week. One rasbora died of old age, I think, and my little orange platy was a casualty of cleaning the tank. I don't know why it died, everyone else was thrilled to have clean water and gravel. Anyway, I bought a rasbora, a lemon tetra and a sunburst platy. The platy had jumped from one tank to the adjacent one at Petsmart, so I figured I would end its loneliness and bring it home. It was swimming vertically, up and down up and down. I thought this was frustration, but guess what--it does the same thing in my tank. At least it's a pretty fish, and I do like movement in the tank. The lemon tetra doesn't look like a lemon tetra at all (the guy who helped me--named Jamie--was totally not into helping me and had just had an incredibly long talk with the woman ahead of me after she'd finished painstakingly choosing her fish), it's huge and swims really, really fast around the tank. My pretty littlel danio with long flowing fins swims really fast too and they seem to race each other (yeah, right--like fish race each other). The small lemon tetra I've had for a while hides in a corner, day after day.

Ken is fine, doing well in this cool but not cold weather. He burns his stove so hot that it's hard to breathe in his house. Last night he had the door open when I got there because it was too hot even for him. By the end of my visit, though, he'd cranked the fire up so it was about 80 inside. And he kept checking on the stove, "Don't want my fire to go out." Well, it sure was never in danger of that, and at one point he put another piece of wood in it and I muttered "Yeah, that's right, let's add some HEAT." Of course he didn't hear me, which makes me wonder why I felt compelled to say it out loud. Why do we do that, anyway? I would have been mortified if he'd heard me, it was really rude to say it.

Not much going on this weekend. At least it's not supposed to snow, or even rain. "They" had predicted 1-3" of snow for elevations above 1000 feet (that's me) but so far no sign of it. I'm hoping for lots of bright sunshine to dry the wood I didn't cover, which has become saturated with rainwater and melting snow. Plan to move the wettest of it into the wood shed this weekend. Yeah, right--plan to close the boat house, too. Have planned to do that every weekend since September, I think. No, this time I really mean it, really, yeah, that's right.

Now I must get back to the Lost Items Procedure, which will not die no matter how hard I try to kill it. Everyone seems to have something to say about the final version, even though we've met 3 times and all had a chance to comment, suggest, etc. Ah, people.

My mental state is not great these days. I'm troubled by my OCD and it just isn't getting any better. Have been fiddling with meds without much result. I'm to call my psychiatrist next week to report on progress (if any) after changes in meds. I'm not optimistic.

Onward and upward.