When my parents left the Camry with me, back in early August, they also left some vegetables -- a couple carrots and a bunch of celery, mostly. I didn't manage to do anything with them before I went on vacation, but when I came back I made, in fairly rapid succession, a batch of pot roast, a batch of my standard chicken soup, and a batch of garlic ( Read more... )

I have a dog!

...For the next two weeks, that is. I am dogsitting Dottie while my parents are off in Cambridge and Casablanca. Dad is giving a paper in Cambridge (he's only mostly retired, you know, and historians can keep on writing without formal jobs), and Casablanca is the site of this year's Meteoritical Society meeting, which of course ( Read more... )

I set my alarm for 8:30am, to make sure I got up and fed the dog at a reasonable time, but I ended up waking at 8am because my feet were freezing. The temperature dropped into the fifties overnight, and the wind continued to be fairly strong -- it just swung from east-northeast to east-southeast. I got up to close a bunch of windows, and figured ( Read more... )

Mom and Dad left for the Twin Cities at 9:30 this morning, leaving me and Dottie on our own. I have been spending a bunch of time online, and have also gotten into part 8 of Anna Karenina -- I have about 40 pages left of a 820-page edition ( Read more... )

Yesterday (Saturday) Mom and Dad went to the mainland and drove west to Grand Forks to visit Mom's cousin Anita and her husband Albert, who spend their summers teaching linguistics to fundamentalist Christian missionary types, so they can record and create writing systems for various tiny languages as prep work for translating the Bible and ( Read more... )