While having my morning coffee and cigarette on the back patio, I noticed a squirrel behaving very oddly.  He was stumbling about in circles, occasionally flopping/rolling around on the ground for a moment.   I'm pretty sure I know how this ends.

I had a great day of boating, water skiing, and swimming with Brandon and Sean on some of the north Oakland County lakes yesterday.  It was perfect weather for it.   The local pizzeria even delivered to the boat launch.  We swung by Sean's new house afterward, where I abused a Dodge Challenger through a couple of laps in Grid.  It gave Brandon, who ( Read more... )

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I'll be driving to Bombay after work tonight, where I'll have about a day and a half to relax before catching a midnight flight to Amsterdam and then back to Detroit ( Read more... )

It took me about a week to get settled in here.  I think that's because there's no consistency of experience.  Japan had that in spades.  They've got me in very elite hotels, which exaggerate the colonial feel that I sometimes get elsewhere here.  So I'm being served in a formal environment, which is not something to which I'm accustomed.

When I ( Read more... )

This must be what it looks like as a country pulls itself up by its bootstraps.  Or maybe it's always been this way here and will continue to be so.  I don't have the experience or education to know, and I'm still quite over-stimulated.

So I was eating breakfast yesterday, looking out on the front lawn, where I thought I saw a pair of squirrel ears tufting out above the snow.  The hump behind the (likely) ears was the correct and size for the squirrel's body.  I told myself it was a rock, or a fallen branch from the maple tree.  I got out there today for a closer look.  Wrong.  ( Read more... )

Autumn 2006 Backyard Leaf Round-Up Totals: 30 35-Gallon trash cans worth.  After that, I was able to mulch up the rest.  I use a blower to push the leaves in the front yard directly into the street for pick-up, so there's no count.  Probably a similar volume, but a much easier job.  Ground up the ones in the front flower beds with the leaf vac.

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The DSO performance this past Saturday was very, very good.  They had a featured guest pianist, Marc-Andre Hamelin, in to play Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2.  I was unfamiliar with both the piece and the perfomer, but I immediately understood why this guy is a big deal.  This is his recently released recording of the same piece with the Dallas ( Read more... )

All food is organic.

Just an FYI from the Department of Redundancy Department.