dusting the buddha
sean twomey
Cooper, my loaner dog, always hesitates on the tiny carpeted landing at the top of the oak staircase while he steels himself for the steep descent.
clear thought for the day
I really thought that the melting of the snow would break his heart
sean twomey
Rolling on the grass suits him just fine, but it's not as clean or photogenic. Okay, so that snow isn't clean. But it was before he used it as a loofa.
dear prudence...
sean twomey
The white morels are starting to appear in the pine needles around my house. It's not uncommon for morels to arrive three weeks later here than in other nearby locations because of the elevation, so I am often lucky to be stumbling upon them as late as the solstice.
This one, and its three neighbors, surprised me today. Usually I need to sing to them for quite a while before they reveal themselves.
...won't you come out to play?
my ISP sent me a postcard
sean twomey
Something happened on the Internet. Perhaps I spoke to a company representative. Perhaps I updated some information when I accessed my account online. They won't say exactly what happened, or how it happened, but they would like me to know that something did, in fact, occur, and that I am welcome to phone them to discuss it.
CenturyLink, née CenturyTel, has been my DSL and landline provider for over seven years, so perhaps they have finally figured out that the quickest way to reach me directly is via my rural mail carrier. It's about as fast as my DSL service if my one neighbor happens to be online. I live in a bandwidth exhaust area, which is a polite way of saying that they oversold the system's capacity.
Mike can get up to speeds of over 50 miles per hour between houses while delivering mail out here in the hinterlands. It makes me wonder who's the snail mail carrier now.
for just $15,900, you, too, could be eastbound and down
sean twomey
It's twice as much as it would have cost you in the 80s, but it's still a smaller price to pay than saying, "Take your hat off—if you want to."
O Bandit! My Bandit!
the snow may be gone at my house
sean twomey
But Little Traverse Bay is still covered with ice. Just to the left of the lighthouse you can see the snow covered slopes of Boyne Highlands on the far shore.
All of my snow is finally gone
sean twomey
My adopted feral cat and loaner dog enjoy each other's company from an appropriate distance during a short break in the relentless fetching.
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
sean twomey
Aniseed-almond meringues a la Kristen Murray of Portland, OR's, *Måurice*
All of the pleasures of *Good & Plenty* from your childhood, but without the need to go to the theater or the troubling discovery that the contents of the box that you're digging into is becoming increasingly more shallow as the movie progresses. In this case the box expands to a size that makes you grateful that you are home. The recipe in Bon Appétit states a yield of 16, but I was barely able to shoehorn my first batch of 32 onto a single, large cookie sheet. Perhaps this is solely a question of portioning, but I have never, ever, approached even half of the number of cookies that a Tollhouse recipe claims to produce. My latest batch of these are in the oven now and produced 64 smaller, single bite meringues. I mean 63. There are 62. But who's complaining?
it's Michelle's birthday!
sean twomey
Her dog, Cooper, is ready for cake.
On my last visit to the other doctor
sean twomey
Unlike the TARDIS, it's smaller on the inside.
A sign in the hallway outside the MRI, which they had also warned me about over the phone. The technician let me keep my arms over my head and partly outside the tube, so I was able to calmly focus on the rainbows and unicorns. I think my days of winter camping in a mummy bag zipped over my face are history.