2009 Petoskey Stone Race and Dog

A great quote in last week's New Yorker, in an article about the painter Luc Tuymans, who describes how he creates his work: "It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it."

Peter Schjeldahl, the article's author, notes that "uncertain ends, confident means is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know."

I love how great definitions of this kind of head-space, or whatever you call it, can both "nail it" and still feel great distances away from handing it to us.

Wing Haven

What an insanely nice fall weekend. Leaf raking is only fun for about 15 minutes, so after an hour of it we tried out a new nature preserve we'd never visited. It had a pretty lake with one of those docks that sits just barely above the water and has a rotten plank you have to step over. Those are the best.

Smokey, balking at the top of the stairs. She sat there for a long dog-minute, thinking "no way can my old bones handle that," but she did okay.

This is the side of my face that does not have a scary growth attached to it. The other side has this weird eye-lid thing going on, even though I have given it plenty of time to fix itself. That strategy has not worked very well for me this past year. It occurs to me that "scary growths" are things you are supposed to have "checked out" by "doctors." Maybe that should happen soon.

Haunted birthday

The skeletons threw a haunted birthday party this year.

There were games.

And some music.

And then they started burning stuff and dancing weird. We had to cast some "go back to the grave" spells and stuff to make them leave. Same thing happens every year.