• food - Living

    Fish off a Truck

    A guy came to my door today selling fish. More specifically, a ratty old blue mini-pickup pulled up in front of my house, a truck with a chest freezer in the bed, and a guy got out and came bounding up my steps with the false cheer of a true door-to-door salesman. I was on a conference call at the time, and I tried to get rid of him by telling him I was on a call, that I work at home. “What time do you get off work?” he said. “I don’t buy things from people who come to…

  • dogs - Living

    Cheatgrass in the Eye

    Poor Owie — we came home from a very joyful morning walk today and Owen climbed into a corner of the couch and curled up. Then I noticed something sticking out of his eye! An eye that was sort of swollen and puffy. There was a piece of cheatgrass sticking out of his eye! Cheatgrass is this terrible stuff that grows everywhere around here — it’s a grass seed, with a long tail on it, but it’s barbed with gazillions of little barbs and it’s famous for worming its way into dogs skins, and infecting their blood. So, I pulled…

  • gardening - Living - weather

    So Much For Summer

    It’s 63 degrees outside at 3pm today. Nina tells me from her house down valley that it’s snowing on the peaks. And my tomatoes and zucchini have taken on their late-summer clothing — swaths and swaths of clear plastic sheeting. I’ll probably be able to get a few tomatoes to ripen — last year they all ripened in my basement while I was in France. It may freeze tonight, so this afternoon, I was the Basil Fairy — running around town delivering big ziploc baggies of basil to various friends. It happens every year about the first of August —…