Kali the Amazingly Large and Resilient Puppy

I was just going through some pictures, and realized we've had Kali for just over a year - and WOW has she grown.


This is her in September, 2006 (about 9 weeks old):

And here she was just a few months ago, being held by Scott (and she's bigger now!):

*Sniff* Our babies are all grown ...

Autumn Sky

Tonight the sky is so strange ... the color, the lighting is just so off of normal. I'm sure it's the low autumn sun and the new layer of steel clouds, but everything looks so rose-tinted.

I didn't re-touch this picture at all:

It's here

Too early. The rainy season came, and I'm not ready for it. It's fine, when it's after Halloween, after the kids march around in their costumes, after every last drop of the dry, green season has been wrung out. Not now, though. There's still too much green. Too much life for the cold nights and the rain and the need to find the umbrellas and coats. It's too soon.



This is what I don't like about Seattle. It doesn't rain all the time - far from it. The summer (and, usually, the fall) are indescribably beautiful. It's a promise that the sun will stay, that the mountains will always be "out", that the water will glisten and blind you. More often than not, it's breathtakingly gorgeous here. Until the rains come. Then it's generally three-four months of wet, of damp, of daily gentle non-intrusive water falling on everything. You know it's coming, you prepare for it, you accept it, you know spring is coming. But it's October 7, fer Christ's sake. I's too early to think about spring coming. I want fall, and brilliant colors, and frost, and sunny bracing days and my breath fogging cold dry air. I want that so so so light blue sky that's not gray and metallic and wet, yet.



I want this picture to be brightly lit, for a few more weeks.

Cell Block Tango

Y'all know how much I love the tango. The precision, and more importantly the percussion of it. This, while old, is such a wonderfully and seductive movie interpretation of such a seductive, intimate dance. And, of course, the movie itself (and oh my god the stage production) are sexy as hell. Love this.

Something about the insistence of it ... the intimacy, perhaps the anger? Not quite the right word. The abruptness, the rawness of it. I'm not sure it can be described outside of the music and visual physicalness of it. As in Moulin Rouge:

Hopefully someone understands what I'm saying.

Colour my world

I stayed home sick today. I've got a nasty cold, and this morning it sat on me and choked me until I couldn't breathe. I've tried to work from home and take drugs (which I HATE doing) and stay vertical, but it's a losing battle.

After reading my work e-mail (thanks zod, no fires), I opened the shades above my computer at home. It's definitely fall in Seattle. The colors aren't here yet - they never really are, they get washed away too quickly when the rains come, which is sad - but the grey coolness is everywhere.

I'm looking at the browning leaves of the lilac tree, the pale yellow of the neighbor's house with it's even brown roof shingles, the architecture of the cypress, the horizontal levels of grey from the clouds zooming overhead, the sumac leaves starting to turn bright yellow. Fall came too quickly this time. The sky shouldn't look like gunmetal until the trees along 23rd Avenue are scarlet.

I wish I could have taken a good picture of what I see. I used to love fall ... brilliant and cool and crisp and still lively ... but it's so quick here that I'm afraid of missing it, missing any transition from hot and sunny and overgrown to wet and bare and dark. I miss the reds and golds and bronzes against the slightly whitish blue sky with only the high, faint jet trails crossing it.

I'd love to have one more day in an earth-colored plaid wool coat, walking in the forest preserve with my Mom and Dad and brothers, kicking up dry leaves and then heading to the apple orchard in Lake Zurich. I'm a big softie, I know. Fall always makes me want to be a kid again.