Danger, Will Robinson! Cranky Post Alert!

Here's how our yard is looking these days. Unnaturally green from all the rain this summer and fall, with a crown of burnished gold. Oh, these are the sweetest days.

I wish I were in a rhapsodic mood, but Blogger has once again robbed me of my joy. Here's how it goes with Blogger these days. I avoid it. And then the pull of all my blogfriends (I actually typed blogfiends) starts to drag me into the studio. So I heave a heavy sigh, look at my OCTBLOG photos, and decide which ones I'll subject to Blogger's capricious slicer-dicer-julienne fryer of a photo-uploading machine. Sometimes it'll take one, and cut the other three or four in half. Well, I composed those photos, and I happen to like the bottom half of them. So I try four or five or ten more times, and it keeps cutting the same photos in half. Anybody out there, Blogger? I mean, it's been almost a week now, and YOU'RE BUMMING ME OUT. Sucking my will to live, and certainly cramping my style. Before I know it I've been cussing in front of my monitor for an hour and a half, just trying to get one blessed photo to upload in its entirety. I've renamed them, massaged them, sprinkled holy water, done every contortion I can think of to dance the dance Blogger seems to want me to...nothing doing.


It pains me to present to you most of this lovely little Lincoln's sparrow, resplendant in his finely penciled streaks and ochre breast wash, shot right out the studio window. Rest assured that his toes were in the original picture. I adore Lincoln's sparrows. Luckily, they're waterhogs, and they are quite attracted to our Birdspa's never-ending trickle. The LISP's come through in late September and early October, always a treat, always a surprise. We had two gorgeous swamp sparrows blow through (one kind enough to make a cameo for the Big Sit, when I found him from towertop by his melodious, lisping Schpink! chip). A blue-headed vireo paused briefly in the birch today, and a young female yellow-bellied sapsucker posed for her portrait today whilst drilling the bejesus out of the same poor birch. I got a great picture, but it'll have to wait, I guess.
Nobody loves a whiner. Sorry. I'm like a mom with a big pot of homemade stew and a kitchen full of hungry mouths, but somebody stole my potholders, bowls and serving spoon. Frustrated.

The Moldy Hummus diet has been a smashing success, if you don't count the puking and writhing. (That was all over with night before last). I'm back to fighting weight, having lived on a small bowl of rice, two hard-boiled eggs and a mache salad for the last 2 1/2 days. I can hardly stand the smell of food, even though I know I should eat. Soon enough my appetite will kick back in but for now I'm going with it. By my math, it takes 2 1/2 days of fasting to undo one day of Big Sit fooddebauchery.

OK. I've had enough for one night. I'm just too cranky to go on, and you deserve better. In writing this post, I've tried ten times to upload ten different photos, just to see if I could find one Blogger liked enough to swallow whole. Nope. So I'm going to bed, where I'll fall asleep reading Marley and Me by John Grogan. It's well-written, a #1 Best Seller, but it makes me squirm. I keep trying to find Marley, the yellow Lab who's the star of the book, something other than simply annoying. I'm trying to love him, but can't. Don't get me wrong--it's a good read, but I find it upsetting from the perspective of a dog lover. From what I can tell, many of Marley's problems (the subtitle is Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog) stem from separation anxiety. He's left alone all day, locked in a garage while his owners are at work. What's he supposed to do in there, write War and Peace? If Marley wrote the book, what would his subtitle be?