There Are Worse Things Than Staring at the Water

Sorry I never finished the traffic-ticket story. On top of regular-old work and stuff I'm writing two other Very Big Things and going to nine thousand doctors appointments and also -- oh, this'll be fun! -- getting all four of my wisdom teeth yanked out.

So, to keep myself (and everyone else around here) marginally sane, I've also been doing an awful lot of this:

Epileptics, beware. I'm not exactly steady with the camera.

That's the off-leash you-know place a mile from my house. Shhh. We have to call it the you-know place or things get very barky around here. Sometimes we just call it Dog Shit Mountain. Here's what it looks like from the front gate, standing still.

Oh, speaking of which, Dr. One Friend had to say good bye to One Dog yesterday.

Bye, Zuni.

In your short life you saw more of this beautiful country

than most people ever will.

I'll be back in the swing of things soon enough, and when I am I'll tell you all about Johnny's taint and my teeth, our stupid furnace company and our fabulous new refinance, the cop Johnny called about the tree guy in our backyard and the junkie he's seen hovering around, plus the gallons of grape pie filling and all the other kitchen nightmares. But in the meantime, all of those things happened just this week, and I'm exhausted. It's raining, and it's cold, and I'm going back to bed with this dude for a while.

Duh.

Oh yeah, P.S.: I didn't get the traffic ticket. The cop called me "Sir," and I think he was so embarrassed afterwards that he just didn't have the nerve. So now I'm not just old but manly. Plus he identified himself as undercover, gang squad, so I'm a little nervous I might also be a Crip.