No, not David! Oddly enough, it was my new vet! I got the letter in the mail today basically saying that since I obviously didn't trust him I could no longer bring my dogs there. I wasn't surprised as the last time I talked to him we argued and I hung up on him and promptly found a new vet.

The vet's office was a circus. It was obvious they had way more customers than they could handle. You had to wait forever just to get checked in and when you tried to check in they couldn't find your file. It was utter confusion. They were so busy they didn't even have time to really listen to you. And, no, I didn't trust them. With one of the vets it was so apparent that she wasn't even listening to the things I was trying to explain to her. I'm not sure what it was she cared about, but it wasn't the animals. The other vet changed Maddie's prescription without telling me and then acted like I was the problem for wanting him to change it back

And then there's my hat... and Maddie having to stay 2 nights. Maddie has discovered a delicious new world of animal poop here in Vermont. She managed to get 'food poisoning' from it a couple months ago. That was our first real encounter with them. It definitely made me suspicious of their trustworthiness then. Maddie was sick, she was blowing yellow bile out her ass with some impressive force. We brought her in and they were too busy to be concerned, they gave me some pills. It bugged me, but Maddie got better and I figured it was probably okay.

Then, a couple weeks ago I walk through the living room and I see blood on the couch. I find Maddie and see that she has fresh blood coming out of her ass. Blood is coming OUT OF HER ASS!! Granted, it was fresh blood and NOT the kind of thing that would indicate a big intestinal problem, but still, her butt... blood... I'm trying to get her in to see the vet and they are crazy busy. They keep insisting that I leave her over night. I explain (again and again) about Maddie's separation anxiety, the way she will badly injure herself if she is scared and can't find me. The vet, she was totally not listening, but she insists Maddie is sick enough to be help overnight. So I go and get Maddie settled a bit and I leave my hat there with Maddie so she will have something with my smell on it. I explained this to the vet, I let her know about my hat.

They kept Maddie there 2 fucking days and I find out they just wanted a stool sample and Maddie wasn't pooping. I went to pick her up from the vet, walked her outside and boom! She made a boom. We collected it and brought it back inside. That's all they wanted. Maddie's face was scraped and raw, it looked horrible. The vet mentioned that Maddie was sluggish and slow to move that morning. Maybe... JUST FUCKING MAYBE is has something to do with the fact that her elbows are scraped all to hell and they are so swollen that she has sacks of fluid hanging off them. She's limping and sore and they didn't know why.

Then I tried to get my hat back. No one knew what I was talking about. What hat? The hat I told you that I was leaving with my dog. You know, the dog you kept for 2 nights (at $30 a night) just so you could get a shit out of her... that dog, I left a hat with that dog. It made sense, I knew she wasn't listening to me when I told her I left it with Maddie, but I figured SOMEBODY might have had it in their hands and put it SOMEWHERE. No one could find it and after a few days they casually told me they probably threw it away. Because that's what you do when you find a hat you don't know about, you stick it in the trash.

This says to me that they are either so busy that it is easier to throw a hat in the trash than walk 20 feet to the front desk and put it aside in case someone calls looking for it or that they are so indifferent to what is going on that it just makes sense to throw a hat away.

Maybe I was spoiled having Pierce Flemming, International Vet of Mystery as my vet. He was awesome with Maddie, he was awesome with me. The place was really busy but also it was well managed. I could have left my hat there and I would have gotten it back, they'd probably even put a tag on it so that it could be easily identified.

Maddie is almost 13 years old and she is really really healthy and I intend to keep it that way.

Rockingham Vet Clinic in Chester Vt... screw you

A quiet moment with Maddie on Sunset ledge. At the far right you can see Lake Champlain and in the far distance, the Adirondacks. The trail getting up there was difficult as hell for me, but totally became worth it when I rounded the corner and saw the view. Unfortunately, there is no real way to capture how beautiful this is.

After sunset we start a new story that involves not enough water, a forgotten flashlight, fear of hypothermia, me falling down a lot, getting out of the woods after 2 am and hitting a deer on the way home (she survived, the passenger mirror did not).

While we were farm sitting, Flanagan, the big old farm dog passed away. We'd gone out to run errands and have lunch with a traveling Pantster and buy a waffle iron. It was good.

We got back to the farm in the early afternoon, me and David and the dogs. We were, as usual, a tiny hurricane of activity busting into the house. Flanagan was in his favorite napping spot, snoozing away. He didn't respond when we first came in but that was not surprising. I would remind you that back in February Chester and the 2 cats chased a squirrel all around the house (Chester, 2 cats, a squirrel, all together in the house!) and Flan couldn't be bothered to even lift his head. Flan is straight up super-chill. I went over to pet him and say hello. He wasn't sleeping.

He passed away doing one of his favorite things, taking a big old nap on his couch.

Flanagan and Maddie in February.

Most of his favorite things involved getting into food and getting that food into him. He had me trained to feed him his breakfast before letting him out in the morning. He didn't care about peeing, he cared about breakfast. He almost had me convinced that he would not ever go out to pee unless I gave him a biscuit. I did put an end to that pretty quickly. He put up with Maddie and Chester even though they stole his bed and bones.

I loved hugging his whole head, it was so big and calm. I'd jam my face onto his forehead and do super ear scritches.

If there is one thing over and over that I want to say, it's that Flanagan was most definitely a very good dog.

Goodnight, Flanagan. I love you.

Farmsitting again!

Winkler appeared in his first pantomime at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London in 2006, playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan, replacing David Hasselhoff who pulled out when he was offered a TV role by Simon Cowell. He reprised the role in Woking, England for Christmas 2007. For the 2008/2009 season he played Captain Hook at the Milton Keynes Theatre and donned the hook once again for the 2009/2010 panto season at the Liverpool Empire.

Fonzie replaces David Hasselhoff in a pantomime show. Fonzie, The Hoff, Mimes.

"We should have an intervention," she says.

"An intervention?"

"Yeah, an intervention! You know, we have the little cakes and sometimes talk, an intervention. It would be good."

"Intervention? With cakes?"

"Yeah, it be great. We'll have cakes, the little ones."

It is at this point that I realize that Maddie has no idea what an intervention is. Well, easy enough, I tell her that we will have an intervention with little cakes.

We sat around, somewhat rigidly, and looked at our cakes. No one really knew what to do, the dogs were nervously eying each other. I think Maddie totally forgot that this was her idea, I think she completely forgot the word 'intervention' with whatever meaning makes the most sense to her. I took a few half-assed pictures and then we sort of grimly dug in.

I made the regrettable decision to find a cake recipe good for dogs and people. Found a recipe, sounded good, it had peanut butter and honey! Those are flavors, flavors put in the cake. But it's like the cake knows it's being made for a dog and dies all over on the inside. I don't know how they did it, but it had no discernible flavor whatsoever and it wasn't just dry, it was desiccating, it resisted all attempts at being swallowed. My mouth became a cakey black hole. I'm discovering this as Chester and Maddie break into their cakes. Realizing that the cakes were too dry and chewy for good eating, David tried to grab Maddie's cake so he could cut it up for her because she would try to swallow the thing whole. She swallowed it whole. She ate the entire little cake. I had visions of intestinal blockage so bad her legs would be sucked up into her asshole. It was the size of a muffin and she swallowed it whole.

Chester snatched his cake and fled, he takes no chances, luckily he chewed his (unlike the time he dropped a MOUND of unchewed peanuts from his ass onto the ground. Apparently he doesn't chew peanuts). I was able to eat 2 bites, I think David managed a little more. There are 3 left. Seriously, just let your dog eat real cake at their intervention.

The kitchen lies between the living room and bedroom and the kitchen is covered in an expanse of too-smooth laminate flooring.

You know when they try to dumb down quantum dillwhackery and they show you a ball and they drop the ball and then they show you all 11,000,031 possible options for that ball and the ball is just springing all over the place and now 11,000,030 new universes have been created because of that ball. That's what Maddie's legs look like when she crosses the kitchen floor. 44,000,124 legs flailing about around her hippohead. It doesn't help that her vision is poor and getting worse.

Sometimes it's funny to watch her flail about but mostly I have to consider that we have downstairs neighbors who have real jobs and regular schedules. Our schedule is more... fluid (or irresponsible, depending on who's looking) and I think the downstairs neighbor does not need to listen to the birth of millions of universes at 3am. David would sometimes carry her across but that's not really a solution.

I tried walking across the floor with her. I wasn't sure it would work, but we tried it. We would get ready and then start walking across the floor and she actually was able to figure out what I was trying to teach her. I got her to walk with me and I talked to her, giving her encouragement all the way across the floor. When we got to the other side it was all crazy praise and hugs and treats and excitement! HOORAY!! She did it! She got all the way across the floor!! At first she would get about 3/4 of the way across before slipping and panicking, but that was okay, she still got all the huge praise and hugs. And we did it every single time, every trip ended with major excitement and celebration. When she reached the other side she would whip around, piggo going a million miles an hour and puff snuzzle joy all over her face.

Then she got even better. Not just not slipping on the floor but also catching herself when she started to slip. She would even go faster than me so she could reach the other side and turn around and get even more awesome hugs because she did it by herself. Sometimes when I am working in the kitchen she will walk by, usually living room to bedroom and then stand in the doorway and wait for me to notice and give her the 1,000,000 hugs she totally deserves. And, still, even now, she gets the same super excitement praise, partially because she did a good job and mostly because celebrating with Maddie is just so damned fun.

This might all make it seem like Maddie is some intellectual lightweight, but that is not true, she has a very keen scientific mind. She says that the Planck length is the only unit of length measurement that is necessarily wider than it is long. She posits that it is a good thing that photons don't have mass. If they did then the entire universe would be filled with butterscotch pudding (and she insists that I make it clear that 'butterscotch pudding' is just a visual metaphor for what it would be like for photons to have mass. If you opened your mouth and let the light in you would only taste the light which sort of tastes like dust and orange peels). She notes that life would be completely different because you'd be able to suck the light into yourself when you inhaled and that would make breathing difficult.

She also opines that Zeno's paradox of Achilles and The Tortoise, along with the finite measurement of the Planck length, are proof that infinity can't exist except in people's head. Nothing scales forever and eventually you have to cross the finish line. She and Chester argue a lot about this one, but mostly the logic on both sides is pretty circular.

Maddie's a good dog with a mind much deeper than you would expect. Right now she is trying to remind me that there is life beyond the front door and I should be prepared and protect myself from it. She is also trying to tell that extra-apartmental life to stay away from our tiny, boxy universe.

Made more stock and pressure canned it. Five quarts of chicken stock and 7 quarts of beef stock. I know the pressure canning is weird, it's easier to freeze it. But, like I said, my freezer is tiny and I need the pressure canning practice. Also, popping open a quart jar of beef stock is pretty amazing, the great beefy smell that comes out of there. It's straight up beef stock right off the stove smell, you want to chug it. BEEF CHUG! I imagine it is my own bias, but I swear the resultant textures of the stews and soups made from it are phenomenal, way better than my frozen stocks. Yeah, probably bias and also tweaking the proportions to load it up with more collagen than before. Still, though, I'm going to believe it is because of the pressure canning versus just freezing it.

In making my chicken stock I have had to switch from chicken wings to chicken thighs. I liked the chicken wings, I thought the flavor and the extra connective tissue really made for a better result. I know a lot of people use whole carcasses and leftovers for their stock, but we almost never eat chicken in any form. I have no leftovers to save and use. Chicken wings have gotten stupidly expensive lately and thighs are a good second option. And the dogs love the thighs because it is easier for us to get the meat off the bones for them.

Had another sausage and burger making weekend and the results were... disappointing.

I made a common, yet foolish mistake. Instead of making sausage because the stuff I needed was available all cheap or whatever, I decided that the weekend would be the time of sausage making and I would just go find whatever is available and use it. Dumb. The meat counter across the way had no pork shoulder or butt, just trimmed pork loin. They also didn't have any shoulder/chuck/blade cuts of beef so I went with round bottom. The regular grocery had pork shoulder at insane prices and the beef wasn't much better. I basically came home with a bunch of meat trimmed of all fat with no connective tissue or flavor.

I made my standard hot italian sausage. Dry but basically good, it's hard to screw that up. Wrapped up five 8 ounce packages and one 12 ounce pack.

Last time I made breakfast sausage I also added ground bacon because who wants to have to choose between bacon or sausage! Have both! It was good but any subtlety the bacon might have added was overwhelmed by the sausage seasoning, so mostly the bacon just added salt. This time I did it without bacon and it's definitely a better result. Bacon is good, but you really need to hold bacon's hand in order to appreciate it. Six 6 ounce packs of breakfast sausage.

But the bacon wasn't lost. I made up more bacon burgers. 1 part ground pork, 2 parts ground beef and a goodly toss of ground bacon. This is where the dryness of the meat and its lack of character really show. It's just meh. Five packs of two 6 ounce patties, we're eating through them but mostly as an afterthought, something to eat when we don't feel like anything in particular.

Also made burgers with chopped oven dried grape tomatoes and mashed up slow roasted garlic. These are good, dry but definitely good. The bland meat canvas is definitely improved on by the flavors and textures of the tomatoes and garlic. I imagine they will be even better the next time around when I use better meats. I got 3 packs of two 6 ounce patties out of that.

Then I had a bit of a muddled experiment. Using the pork I wanted to make a dried apple and sage sort of sausage patty. Something to eat like a burger, but with pork and apples and sage. As I was putting it together I had an idea! Hooray for ideas! I quickly heated up a bit oil, tossed in mustard seed, cumin seed and fenugreek and shook it around until it got toasty and a bit poptastic and swished it into the meat mixture. It definitely removes any original idea I had about these patties, they aren't apple and sage anymore (though they have dried apple and sage in them). It's an Indian flavor which is good, but not necessary. Apple and sage and some red pepper flakes would have been perfect. I might make more with the cumin/mustard/fenugreek seeds and some other, more focused flavors. For this I got 3 packs with two 6 ounce patties, one pack with one 6 ounce patty. The dried apples are pretty good in there, you should try it.

Lesson learned about scheduling these things. You process and put up food while it is cheap and abundant so that you will have it around when things are scarcer. I just really wanted to make sausage and I didn't want to wait. Not my best work, but we are chewing through it all and the other day they meat counter had pork should for cheap and now I have one in my freezer ready for next time.

The frustrating thing is that as we prioritize our money, there is just no place to put a replacement silverware chest and silverware. Even if our budget were bigger I could never justify it in my head, we just don't need it, not at all. Fancy dinner parties are going to be extremely few and very far apart in the coming years and the money would be better spent on goat medicine or sparkle shoes.

I'm trying to look on the bright side of this. They didn't find and take the china, it was my mother's and it would kill me to lose it. I didn't lose something I very much need, like in 2011 when someone broke into the house and stole my laptop (among other things). It's just silverware, in the scheme of things it's not a big deal. So why am I crying about it?

The thing that bothers me the most is that I want to punch the fuck out of their faces.

I'm not a picky eater at all, I will try most things. I've eaten jellyfish, chicken feet, tripe in both chinese and mexican preparations, tongue, fish maw, bubble tea, though I have not been able to bring myself to eat fish eye when it's been offered (sorry fish eye). Of course there are the things I despise and will not eat, mushrooms, olives, raw onions (and some cooked onions, I have onion problems). It makes me seem like a picky eater because these are things the majority of people like.

GAAAAAAAH! I hate mushrooms. Hate them. The texture, the flavor, all of it. Being forced to eat them, getting the occasional, completely disingenuous, "just try it, if you don't like it you don't have to eat it," which almost always devolved into, "there's nothing wrong with mushrooms... blah blah kids in china. You ate them before!!" Yeah, I ate them before! You forced me to eat them, you ass. Pizza time was fraught with danger. If we were lucky we got just regular style meat covered pizza. If not, we got the supreme pizza with everything on it. I would take a bite and very carefully with my tongue, remove all the offending mushrooms, olives, onions and bell peppers and swallow them whole and then continue with the chewing. A tuna sandwich is completely ruined by chopped onions. The olive bar at the grocery has to be given wide berth because they smell so bad (David had never noticed the stink of the olive bar, but he is 14 inches taller and I think the heavy stench of olive does not waft that high).

Luckily, by the time I reached junior high and high school I was allowed more control over what I ate and I did not have to eat mushrooms or drink milk anymore.

I hate milk but I am cool with most other dairy products, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, chocolate milk. It's not so much that I hate milk, but that I hate the flavor of milk. I don't want that flavor in my mouth, it's nasty. In the last few years, however, people have been suggesting that I try raw milk. They tell me the flavor is different. I am skeptical of such a statement. It is still milk in milk form with no added chocolate flavor or cheese culture. Skeptical.

We move to Vermont and we work on changing our relationship with food. Doing things like getting to know the pigs we might eat later, buying eggs and tomatoes from people's front yards and supporting local agriculture. There's a dairy up the road that sells raw milk. We decide to try it out. It's $7 a gallon which means that we will have to prioritize the budget a bit. $7 milk means not buying Marshmallow Mateys anymore, I'm okay with that. We get our milk and bring it home and it is a delightful wonder to behold. Jersey cows mean higher butterfat content and the cream at the top is amazing. We mix it up and pour a little bit to try. I am still skeptical but open. It tastes like milk. That's all, milk. The flavor in my mouth is the flavor of milk and it's still as gross as it was 25 years ago.

But! BUT! All is not lost. I do use milk in my coffee, on my oatmeal and in other things. Even better, I have started making cheese and yogurt with the milk and it they are so painfully delicious. The cheese is a fromage blanc, described as a 'cream cheese' which is a bit of a disservice, it is nothing like the gummy Philly cheese. It's got the texture of a good chevre, a bit crumbly but not too dry, and the flavor is amazing. Because the milk is not homogenized the cream still rises to the top while the cheese is setting up. You get this beautiful, thick layer of full fat cheese. In the quiet celebration of another perfect batch of cheese you stand in the kitchen and spread a bit on a piece of bread and savor it before you mix the layer back in with the rest of the batch.

And the cheese is so satisfying to eat. Mix in some oven dried tomatoes and roasted garlic, a bit of salt and pepper. Or add powdered sugar and vanilla and serve it with crepes and homemade clementine marmalade. It's amazing on a pizza along with homemade italian sausage and no mushrooms.

The other day I made my first batch of yogurt. It's a bit bland at first but it just sucks up the deliciousness of maple syrup and you could fall into a pit of sugar and high butterfat bliss.

My favorite, though, is accidentally not shaking the cream back in "well enough" and making hot chocolate. It's like a heart attack in a mug. A delicious, delicious heart attack that does not taste like milk.

When I die and my life flashes before my eyes I am going to pay attention and see just how many conversations I have started with "if I had a penis..." I bet it's a lot.

If I had a penis, an uncircumcised penis, I would get it tattooed. Oh yes, it would hurt but it would be totally worth it. I would get it tattooed to look like a turtle, the shell and legs on the shaft, pull the foreskin back and put a happy little turtle head and face right up there in the front. Maybe a box turtle or a painted turtle, I don't know yet.

I would set myself down in front of the tv (I don't own a tv but if I'm going to go through the trouble of having a penis and tattooing that penis I'd probably be willing to spring for a tv and also cable) in my complete nudity suit. Then I would flip back and forth between porn and C-Span. Back and forth.... rubbery sexy times.... live broadcast of the House ways and means committee... silicon bounce bounce bounce... filibuster fever... insincere excitement... insincere outrage....

Back and forth I would go and there it would be, my little turtle penis poking his head out and then back in. Back and forth, in and out, he would look at the world with great interest and then run and hide. Bwoop! Turtle comes out, turtle goes in, turtle comes out, turtle goes in.

It would only work for a little while. Eventually I would just end up with a messed up fetish issue. "I'll be Lincoln! You be Douglas! Let's debate ALL NIGHT LONG!!!" Then I would try to serve 2 terms in sexual congress.

moon boots.

Holy crap! It's been a long time! Sorry, I've been doing...

We sat a farm. Actually, we did farmsitting but my ability to construct this concept into a grammatically acceptable sentence eludes me. We did the sitting of a farm.

Kristin went out of town for the weekend and we were charged with keeping 7 sheep, 6 goats, 2 cows, a llama, a farm dog and 2 cats alive and healthy and we met with success!

It was easier than I expected it to be. I read a LOT of Jame Harriot as a kid and everything I know about farms and livestock comes from that. What I know for sure is that if the weather gets really bad forces will conspire against you so that you have no choice but to be elbow deep in a sheep's vagina at 2am. I've been learning a lot lately and I think the single most important lesson I have learned so far is: insert arm slowly and carefully to avoid rupturing the vagina.

I might get that tattooed on my arm so that I never forget.

Over the course of that weekend we ate pork shoulder, pork cops, bacon and sausage from the pig that so graciously gave his life so that we might get fat on it. It was pretty damned delicious (except I overcooked the pork chops).

Chester and the cats did NOT get along. I'm not surprised about this, he doesn't get along with most animals. BUT! Introduce a common enemy and BOOM!! He and the cats are a horribly coordinated and pretty useless team! A little red squirrel had managed to find a way into the house and would come out on regular foraging trips. The cats are still pretty young and the squirrel was too big for them to handle, they knew that. OH! But that squirrel wasn't too big for Chester! Perfect size for Chester and with the cats and Chester on the case you'd think something would have been accomplished. You'd think that. Mostly, it was a slapstick comedy routine best suited for Perfect Strangers.

Flanagan, the resident leviathan of a dog did not care one bit about any of it and couldn't even be bothered to lift his head or turn his ears during the chaos.

The house was heated on a wood stove and mostly we had it running well, not wasting wood or anything. I will tell you, however, that by the time morning comes around and the stove has burned down, the chill of the tile floor in the bathroom is so cold your pee will force its way up into your lungs and you will die of hypothermia and pee drowning. So cold, so very very cold.

David did most of the hard work, hauling water from the house to the barn (the well pump thingy was frozen), fighting off the belligerent be-testicled sheep, busting ice out of water troughs and generally being very good at the things that needed to be done. I spent my time making oatmeal, slipping and falling on the ice, drinking beer and hugging the livestock.

This was a real confidence booster for me. It's different from anything I've done before but mostly it makes sense to me and with guidance I know it is a thing we can do. And I couldn't be happier to do it with anyone but David.

More pics here.