It was a good weekend: I am finally getting the humans and the spaniel trained. I'm still not sure how I feel about the Unfortunate Event of Saturday night, but the outcome has been okay so I'll let it slide this time. Around 9:00 pm the little girl went out onto the screened-in front porch to feed her bunny (yeah, she can feed the bunny... to me!) and I strolled out to look at the moon and test the scents on the Atlanta evening air. Well, clearly the little girl was not paying attention to me and she went back into the house and closed the door behind her! No one even noticed I was gone until the next morning. Apparently the little girl went looking for me first thing on Sunday and finally spied me out the office window. There was much exclaiming, much petting and many belly rubs (but still no bacon), and all was forgiven. It would have been better if I could have figured out how to get the bunny cage open while I was out there, but there's always next time.
My night on the porch taught me one good thing though, I need to have more of a presence around here--no more days under the bed. It's time to sleep on top of it--make the humans move. I have finally located the refrigerator in this house, and another good place to sprawl is right in front of it. Every time the humans open the door there is always the possibility that something yummy will drop out, and even if it doesn't, if they are cooking, they will get so irritated at having to step over or around me that they'll give me a treat just to get me to move.
Today I have made my place on the back of the couch here I can watch the rain and snore. Loudly. Ah, just like home.After Note: Moved the video to YouTube as they have better quality than MobileMe and don't require downloading anything to watch the video (Becky got prompted to download some Mac something or other yesterday from MobileMe and so missed seeing Tuffy's antics).
An unexpected amount of my time today has been spent trying to find the perfect rabbit hutch. There are numerous plans on the web for hutches to build--all with their scathing detractors--and expensive pre-built bunny mansions which are nonetheless not for the immediate-gratification-inclined--taking anywhere from a week to 10 days to arrive. I have not yet arrived at the optimal solution, but I will say I am not inclined to spend $350 to get there...
Another thing about bunnies, they are the *perfect* kudzu-eating machines. We ran out of lettuce5r8g[[[[[[[g[[[[[[[[[oooi] (Jasmine had to add a bit to my typing and paraded over my keyboard--Dave's big worry was that she would pee and ruin a $2,000 laptop...). So anyway, we ran out of lettuce earlier today (she may be a bunny, but she eats like a horse--reminds me of Keith's turtle who only wanted to eat strawberries) so when we got home tonight and had to feed her, I went down into the backyard and stripped off a bunch of kudzu vines. Then J and I stripped all the leaves off the vines and filled the cage with them (spritzed with water as she still doesn't drink out of a water bottle). See how she likes them? Then it was cuddle time with various members of the family. I think she makes a great hat for Dave.
The Top 10 jokes were judged to be:
• 1) Dan Antopolski - "Hedgehogs - why can't they just share the hedge?"
• 2) Paddy Lennox - "I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: 'This could be interesting'."
• 3) Sarah Millican - "I had my boobs measured and bought a new bra. Now I call them Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes because they're up where they belong."
• 4) Zoe Lyons - "I went on a girls' night out recently. The invitation said 'dress to kill'. I went as Rose West."
• 5) Jack Whitehall - "I'm sure wherever my dad is; he's looking down on us. He's not dead, just very condescending."
• 6) Adam Hills - "Going to Starbucks for coffee is like going to prison for sex. You know you're going to get it, but it's going to be rough."
• 7) Marcus Brigstocke - "To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!"
• 8) Rhod Gilbert - "A spa hotel? It's like a normal hotel, only in reception there's a picture of a pebble."
• 9) Dan Antopolski - "I've been reading the news about there being a civil war in Madagascar. Well, I've seen it six times and there isn't."
• 10) Simon Brodkin (as Lee Nelson) - "I started so many fights at my school - I had that attention-deficit disorder. So I didn't finish a lot of them."
The sun has set on this last night of our time in Montana. It is a bittersweet night--sweet because the weather was finally perfect for today, our last day, and bitter because we have to leave tomorrow. 
Yes, I am looking forward to being back in the studio again, and J is eager to see her friends and start second grade. We are all missing our home, our beds, our dogs and hamster--our place in the world. But for J and me, Montana holds big pieces of our hearts and it is a wrench to leave.
I am finally caught up on sleep after months of running full out (there were days here I slept 13 hours straight). It is so silent and dark up at the lake that the chattering of one small squirrel in the morning is enough to jar you momentarily awake. Dave did not get a vacation--he worked the whole time we were here, but I hope even he is taking a little bit of rest and peace back with him to Austin. If not peace and rest, at least a respite from the intense southern heat.
Northwestern Montana is about the best kid's vacation there is. You can spy on deer, wild turkeys, bats, and black squirrels. You can catch feral bunnies (and maybe even keep them!), pick cherries and chokecherries, and play with Gramma, Grampa, Gramma's bird Sam, and Grampa's dog Jig (that's Mister Jiggles to you). You sleep quickly and deeply every night, and your days are filled with swims in the lake, rock-collecting expeditions, kayaking, paddling in the paddle boat, and waking up every day to the fresh-air-filled wonder of the wild mountains.
This is one of the best fruit years I can remember. The huckleberries are dark and plentiful, the cherry tree limbs sagged with black fruit, and the apple and pear trees are almost ready to start shucking their fruit. In fact, one of the apple trees in the neighbor's orchard started tossing apples at us tonight as we sat watching the deer. 
To thank Candy and her daughter Ann (our neighbors with the orchard) we got a bouquet of local farm stand flowers that J presented them on our last day.
We bought huckleberries (five pounds) at a roadside fruit stand the other day, and the neighbor with the orchard let Dave, J and me pick all the sweet cherries we wanted. In under half an hour from one tree we had over 14 lbs of the most luscious, ripe bing cherries I have ever tasted. mid-August is the best time for cherries--they're too ripe to pick and ship, and in a week they will be rotting on the trees. but for now they are bursting with perfect black juice. J and I pitted and froze them all in single layers on cookie sheets and then bagged them to bring home. We froze the Huckleberries the same way, but there's no need to pit them.
Then I discovered ripe chokecherries out back at my grandparents' cabin and convinced Dave and the J to help me pick 3 lbs of them from one clump of bushes. Chokecherries are very small, acerbic berries with big pits--not much at all to speak of when they're fresh. They are a native American cherry (prunus virginiana) found all over the US except the deep south. The American Indians made pemmican and wojapi from them, and my grandmother Jessie used to make syrup from the ones my uncle Ed and I picked. I remember sitting up here at the lake and putting that syrup on the sourdough pancakes that my Grampa Cecil would make us all for breakfast. Sweet memory, sweet syrup. I froze mine whole--like the huckleberries--and will make syrup, wine, or some other treats with them this fall back in Atlanta.
We all saw more deer this year than we have in previous years too. There is a doe with twin fawns, and another doe with a singleton fawn that graze by the cabin and in the adjacent orchard. A few properties down the lane two yearling bucks, two older bucks and a small herd of other does and fawns frolicked every evening in a larger orchard. The llamas that have lived around the corner for several years are sadly gone, replaced by a roaming flock of wild turkeys, but there is a small herd (gaggle? parliament? symphony?) of yaks a little further down--next to the restaurant that has all the feral bunnies living under the deck
. Of course the times I wanted to photograph wildlife all I had was my iPhone--I had left the good camera at the cabin. So if you squint through one eye and enlarge the photos a bit, you can see the bunnies, yaks, and turkeys in the accompanying pics.
Montana brings me back to my childhood with a vengeance, so much so that one night when we were having dinner at the restaurant with the wild bunnies living under the deck and J asked if she caught a bunny could she keep it, I gave the answer I always wished my mother would give and said yes. 
Of course I never thought she'd actually catch one, but my child is patient, perseverant and resourceful. Welcome to the family, little Jasmine. A sweeter bunny, I could not imagine.
As a last farewell gesture, J honored Montana with the loss of a tooth today. Well, I pulled it out for her before she swallowed it! Now we just need to hope the tooth fairy can find us here (and has enough cash to pay for the tooth!).
This morning we had breakfast at the Uptown Diner and were served by the same waitress who waited on us last year. I love continuity! Today she told us about her daughter who lives in Troy in a house with single-paned windows, wood-burning heat, and gravity-driven spring water. Apparently in the winter when the ground is frozen, there is plenty of water. But in the summer when a lot of the water seeps into the ground the daughter has to suck on the shower head (the highest water point in the house) to get water down the lines. As she just had a baby, her mother thinks she should have a more reliable source of water, but you know us Montanans--we're stubborn.
The daughter was the 911 dispatcher for Troy before she had the baby, and her last day of work was a doozy. According to her mother, most of the 911 calls in Troy (population 957) are to get licenses and a host of other administrative type things interspersed with the occasional my-neighbor's-mad-at-me-and-filled-my-mailbox-with-horse-manure calls. But on her last day, she heard the burglar alarm go off at the Booze N' Bait (I can't make this stuff up). The Booze N' Bait is listed in the Troy yellow pages under the categories: clothing, hunting and fishing supplies, liquor stores, pawn brokers, and non-resident snowmobile use permits and is the only listing in each of those categories.
When the sheriff arrived, he found two guys waiting in a brand-new (as in one-day-old) pick-up truck and another guy hauling loot out of the store. Now these three were out-of-staters--they'd crossed over from Idaho to to wreak mayhem and maybe their sense of direction wasn't so good. When the guys in the truck saw the sheriff, they peeled off and headed down the road... but not back towards Idaho, instead they headed off towards Libby Montana the next town over and home of the county jail. Rumor has it that when they discovered their mistake--and that the only way back to Idaho was back through Troy where they would be spotted--they decided to create a diversion by setting their friend's new truck on fire and heading off into the woods where one got lost and the other fell off a cliff into the river. They were eventually both apprehended. The official news story reads a bit more dryly, but is entertaining nonetheless.
Today it is overcast and 69 degrees with a light breeze and abundant free wi-fi--which brings me back to our waitress for a second. When we left after breakfast I told her we were going to find some wi-fi and enjoy the passing of the day and she said "I like to call it wiffee. If you look on the internet, it says we have it here, but it doesn't work 'cause the owner can't remember the password." I am so home!
An ambitious father house wren came into the screened-in porch on the front of our house this spring through a small hole that a squirrel had made in the screen. He built a nest on top of one of the porch columns, and this nest, unfortunately, was the nest best liked by Mrs. Wren, so they settled in to raise their first brood of the year there.
The first annual Jessie Griffith Girl Scout Cookie sell-a-thon has begun! We have more boxes than she is tall so pull out those wallets. I went the extra mile today for her (okay, so I indulged my obsession with Internet technologies) and I created a Google Docs spreadsheet (a spreadsheet shared between Dave and me that lives in our private space on the web) to track her cookies and sales. Then I put the iPhone application for Google (which includes Google docs) on my iPhone and now I can pull up the spreadsheet wherever I am to see the address and phone number of the person I am delivering too, and I can also see--and update--how many boxes we have left in each kind. It was too much fun (and I am such a geek!).
Samoas®: These are round doughnut-shaped cookies about two inches in diameter with a hole in the center, covered in caramel and toasted coconut, and then striped with chocolate. Samoas® are made by Little Brownie Bakers.
Thin Mints: The most enduring and universally familiar Girl Scout cookie. These round, mint-flavored cookies covered with dark chocolate perennially sell the most boxes of any cookie. Thin Mints have never changed their name. Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers both make Thin Mints.
Do-Si-Dos®: A sandwich cookie. The round, bumpy perforated oatmeal cookie top and bottom surrounds a peanut butter-flavored layer inside. Do-Si-Dos® (formerly Gauchos) are baked by Little Brownie Bakers.
Trefoils: These shortbread cookies are shaped like the Girl Scout Trefoil design. Scot Teas were a similar, lighter sugar cookie made by the now defunct Burry. These cookies come in a blue box. Little Brownie Bakers calls them Trefoils.
Tagalongs®: These are round cookies with a layer of peanut butter on top, and covered in chocolate. These cookies come in a red box. Little Brownie Bakers calls them Tagalongs®.
Lemon Chalet Cremes™: Featuring a design of Our Chalet in Switzerland, a beloved Girl Scout World Center, this sandwich cookie has a touch of cinnamon-ginger spice that evokes the warmth of a fireside chat on a snowy evening; they are made by Little Brownie Bakers.
Dulce de Leche: New for 2009, and inspired by the classic confections of Latin America, these sweet, indulgent cookies are rich with milk caramel chips and stripes. They come in a turquoise box, and are made by Little Brownie Bakers.
I post here first this morning instead of on Glass Incarnate. I post here first because my spouse informed me that it has been so long since I have posted on this blog that his RSS reader has greyed it out. Whatever. I also post here because we had friends in for the weekend, a southern family, and when we were talking about blogging I said the name of this one and the 14 year-old son asked me in a surprised voice, "You don't like the south?". I feel obliged to answer. After six years of not planning to remain here, I am settled in. With Dave exploring the vast sea of employment opportunities post-CNN, we have the option of living almost anywhere. In fact our options have opened up so much that Dave felt comfortable throwing down the gauntlet and saying if I want to move to Montana, we can do it now...
You see, when we were married--in Montana--he promised me that we would move there within eight years (we lived in Chicago at the time). Well, it's been 13-1/2 years now and I occasionally smugly throw out in the conversation that he still hasn't lived up to that promise. I did so in conversation in front of our friends over the weekend and he replied, "Why not now?"
Beyond property considerations there is all the quality of life I thought I was missing. Turns out, I was mistaken. We not only have friends and a community here, we also have a great school for Jessie. Though we are not geographically centrally located, Atlanta is one of the major airport hubs and we can get anywhere (except Hawaii or Australia--and how likely are we to need those routes now?) quickly and cheaply. And finally, the Indigo Girls had it right and there's no more beautiful place than the southland in the springtime.
.jpeg)
