I feel much better since Doctor Buster removed that lesion from my skull.

Yay!

Bert was gone for at least five days, but he finally returned home last night! He seems to be intact, but I'll take him to the vet to have him checked out anyway.

My orange boy is missing. I am heartbroken.

I've felt uninspired for days, and there's no good reason for that.

There's always something going on here.

I find joy in these simple interactions, and in noticing.

I don't know what kind of a bug this is, but now I have seen several of them. They're sort of like huge stink bugs with dinosaur ridges on their backs.

Buster took me on a walk earlier. I got him a new harness that's GUARANTEED to eliminate the pulling he tends to do. We had a good walk with some leaf-chasing, visual inspection of the construction progress in the neighborhood, and the requisite sniffing. Lo and Behold, I looked down to see my sweet puppy sniffing one of THESE:

I just take it for granted that he will stop to sniff every trace of dried-up worm, pee, or dead thing, but it occurred to me then that I had better be paying attention.

When I told my dear friend that I was moving to Ohio, she was flabbergasted. "If you're going to leave us, you should go someplace better than Kentucky," she said. I admit that the impression I have of Ohio has been influenced by that expectation... that I would be going someplace NOT better than Kentucky. Hmmmmm... How could that be? After all, THE MAN was prone to using the term briars to describe Kentuckians. It was an unfamiliar term, one I took to be derogatory. It was often employed in off-color jokes. While Kentucky is my home state, the place of my birth, and the place I have returned to over and over again, I have a love/hate relationship with KY. I agree with another friend who once said that Kentucky is a nice place to be from. Kentucky is beautiful. Can you think of another state whose song is as well known and loved? It still makes me cry each time I hear it. I'm a little sappy. On the other hand, the stereotypes... usually, stereotypes have some foundation in reality. I have met them. I bought a house next door to them. I put up a privacy fence.





Follow this link to one of the cool places I have visited in Ohio:

http://www.pyramidhill.org/

This photo is a couple of years old now. I pass by this house on my way to and from work or the gym when I take the "back way" to avoid traffic. There are usually at least six vehicles in the yard. More recently, a coffee/lunch van has been living there. Other kinds of lawn ornaments are also popular in this neighborhood, like lawn jockeys, gnomes and various animal statues.

If I stand in the middle of our back yard, I can read the signs in front of two local churches... Once the leaves fall, I will be able to view the parking lot of the new Wal-Mart from the same spot. I still haven't been able to figure out what flaw in my newish community will be remedied with the opening of the Wal-Mart. We speculate that the amount of garbage that accumulates in our yard will increase dramatically.

The point of this thing was not to simply blather on and on about ME, or about the pets, but to document the OHIO-ness of the experience. I have lived in a number of places, and there are features unique to each place. This is my first foray into (what I consider) suburban living. Our neighborhood fits into the category I would identify as a "subdivision". I used to sit in the garage, smoke cigarettes, and marvel at how there is no sky between the houses. It's no big deal, I just haven't lived in one of these neighborhoods before...and now I don't smoke.












The term "drive-thru" has an entirely new meaning here than the one to which I was accustomed. Before, I thought of a drive-thru as a business of some kind with a drive-up window for quick service. Here, employee be damned. We have managed to bring the outside inside, cars and all, for the convenience of the beer-guzzling, cigarette-smoking, lottery-playing customer who is in such a hurry that he couldn't be bothered to get out of his car.















These things are everywhere. I can think of five of them that I could visit from home in under ten minutes. There may be more. The sign by the road in front of this one says it all: