I have featured most of our dogs and our cat on my blog, but realize the only horse I’ve blogged about is Mark. (More on Mark here, if you’re interested. And here.) We have three other horses, so today I present Snoopy.

Snoopy is a draft cross. He was born in Montana. I bought Snoopy when he was three years old, which is technically still a colt. Even at that young age I could see that Snoopy was a very laid-back individual, which was what I was looking for. I wanted a “guest horse” that anybody could sit on and go for a quiet ride without fear of getting bucked off and run away with. A “husband horse.” My friend Jen found him for me.

Snoopy is what they call an “easy keeper.” When horse people say that a horse is an “easy-keeper”, they are really saying that the horse is a fatty. Nervous and high-strung horses, no matter how much you feed them, tend to look too thin because they burn off the weight pacing and worrying. Snoopy doesn’t have this problem.

Snoopy is a gentle giant. My daughter Devin took him to 4-H camp when she was only ten years old and he showed all the fresh ponies how to behave like a gentleman. I have hunted him, paced him, ridden mile of trails on him and Devin has shown him. Snoopy prefers Devin to all of us and he’s her horse now. Today we went on a long ride along some of the beautiful country lanes in our town, Devin and Snoopy and Mark and me.

Snoopy is a bit of a couch potato, he felt that the hills were a bit much for him, so he did a one-horse performance piece at the end, to demonstrate how exhausted and overworked he was. This was the finale:

“I’m dead. Are you happy now?”

Allow me to introduce Pete. Pete lives at North Forty Farm in Roxbury, CT. He’s one of those rare and wonderful dogs who can smile:

Pete’s a boxer-mix. He weighs over 100 pounds. I’d estimate that fifty pounds of that is head. When you first drive up to North Forty, if Pete hasn’t met you before, he will usually rise from his bed next to the riding ring and give you a few short woofs. He’s an impressive looking dog, with those big jaws, and if it weren’t for his slowly wagging tail and his affable smile, you might think twice about getting out of your car.

Pete’s owner Mike is in the army. When he is away, as he is most of the time now, Pete lives with Mike’s parents Mariann and Larry. Mariann and Larry dote on Pete, and when they’re not busy grooming and cleaning and mucking and tending to all the other duties involved in running a small horse farm, they are brushing out Petey’s coat or fluffing up one of his many dog beds.

The other day, Mariann told me that Mike was coming home for the weekend. Pete was lying at her feet. “Yes, Daddy’s coming home,” Mariann said, and Petey lifted his head and stared off down the driveway, his ears alert, his tail thumping the ground, his mouth turning up, ever so slightly, at the corners.

A few months ago, I was introduced to a woman named Lisa Bannon. We were both picking up our dogs from the groomer and Lisa told me that her book club had read my first book, An Innocent, A Broad. My immediate reaction was to spell out my name for Lisa, as I was sure she was confusing me with some other author.

My first book, from what I can see on my confusing royalty statements, couldn’t possible have sold enough books for a whole book club to have read it. Did they share one book, passing it from one member to the other, I asked Lisa. DId one member read it aloud while the others sewed, like they did in “Gone WIth the Wind?”No, Lisa informed me, they had each bought and read and enjoyed my book.

So I told Lisa that I had a new book, Outtakes From a Marriage coming out and that if her book club wanted to read it, I would come and meet with them, and last night I did just that.

Here we are at the lovely Woodward House restaurant in Bethlehem, CT. The book club members are, from left, Lisa Henry, Marta O’Leary, Michelle Casey, Lisa Bannon, that’s me and Kim Pugh on my left. I’ve actually known Kim Pugh for years (and suspect she’s the reason they chose to read my first book, God bless her).

Anyway, I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a fun night out with people I’ve never met before. One of the Lisas has a son at Yale and another at Trinity. The other Lisa has a Dutch Warmblood stallion that she keeps in her backyard! You have to be a horse person to understand how cool that is. I was full of questions about the logistics of keeping a 1200 lb testosterone charged, ungelded beast and she told me about her feeding and exercise program and also shared the fascinating yet disturbing fact that stallions are able to pleasure themselves, thus easing the sexual tension for everybody. Michelle, who is moving to Cape Cod today, has a beautiful 4 1/2 year old son named Samuel who was born in Ethiopia. Kim, who looks young enough to be in college, has a son Jesse who is starting high school. And the beautiful Marta is so sweet that she was blinking back tears while Michele discussed her moving plans, because she hates goodbyes.

I enjoyed these women so much, and they said such wonderful things about my books, that I suddenly hated goodbyes too, and if it was up to me we would still be sitting in that cozy dining room talking about me. Thanks for a wonderful evening Lisa, Kim, Marta, Lisa and Michelle!

Residents of Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood left their apartments yesterday and found that Jay Street had been hit by a bomb. There was debris strewn all over the street and sidewalk, ash and soot covered everything. A fire escape had fallen onto a car.

Being New Yorkers, most people just looked up and down the street for the familiar film crews and catering wagons, and then they trudged through the “ash” and “debris” and went about their day. Because it wasn’t the site of a terrorist attack, it was a Rescue Me location.

I don’t often visit the set but Denis told me that it was going to be a very exciting day with stunts and special-effects and car chases and buildings exploding and, indeed, there was lots to see. Here’s the beginning of a police chase scene:

There were dummies lying around on the ground. This one spent the lunch break leaning against Ladder 62 truck:

And there were handsome actors all over the place. This one spent his lunch break chatting with his wife and daughter:

I don’t want to give anything away but Rescue Me’s fifth season will be explosive, to say the least.

This morning I’m heading into the city to tape an edition of NPR’s “Fresh AIr” with Terry Gross. I’m a huge fan of Terry Gross and am very excited but also anxious about doing the show. I was told that I would be asked to read from my book and have spent the better part of the morning ruling out various excerpts.

I can’t read the opening chapter because there’s too much dialogue and I’m no actress. Whenever I read dialogue aloud, I would like to adopt the persona of the character and try to say the words as she or he might, but just as I begin to form the words in my mouth, I am overcome by a dizzying self-consciousness and I switch course and read the language with all the pizzazz of a third grader reading a term paper about road construction. All the female characters sound like me and all male characters sound like me. The children sound like me and so do the drunkards, elderly and demented.

So I ruled out any parts that have too much dialogue. Then I ruled out some rather funny parts because, taken alone, they sound … not so funny. Ruled out any parts that described fictitious famous people because I’ve run into trouble recently with people thinking I was describing real living famous people. The hairdresser and dermatology scenes might make the book sound too chicklit, while the flashbacks, taken out of context, make no sense. I finally narrowed it down to three words in the middle of the book: “Babies change you.” I would like to read just those three words because, really, no truer words have ever been spoken.

I spent the weekend in Marblehead signing books and catching up with old friends. I also met a “medium” who talks to dead people, which gave me some fodder for the book I’m working on.

There were numerous shipwrecks and pirates and witches in Marblehead’s early history, so of course there are lots of ghost stories, as pirates and witches aren’t much for keeping a low-profile in the afterlife, but instead enjoy shrieking at boats at night and, and casting lights on old cemeteries and chasing people up and down stairs.

This medium, whose name is Maria, sees ghosts everywhere, all the time, and is very casual about the whole thing. I told her that we have a ghost in our house in Connecticut, and that everybody sees and feels her fabulous other-worldly presence, except for me. Denis sees this ghost all the time. I’m really annoyed by this because I like to think of myself as a very sensitive person, but I have never noticed this ghost. Even our dog Lulu can see her, it seems. She (Lulu) stares at the exact corner of our living room, where Denis tells me he always sees this gray lady pass by, and she growls and raises her hackles in a very suspicious manner (Lulu, not the ghost). When Lulu does this, I always run over to the corner, hoping to feel a chill or a draft or the hair rise on the back of my neck, or something, but apparently I’m too obtuse. It makes me feel, I don’t know, rejected … snubbed by the supernatural.

Anyway, as I was reviewing Marblehead history, I came across the story of the “Old Spite House” which was built on Orne Street in the 1700s.

According to Wikipedia, “In 1716, Thomas Wood, a sail maker, built a home in Marblehead, Massachusetts that subsequently received the sobriquet of The Old Spite House. One theory has it that it was inhabited by two brothers who occupied different sections, wouldn’t speak to each other, and refused in spite to sell to the other.[6] In another explanation for the presently occupied, ten-foot (3 m) wide home that is just tall enough to block the view of two other houses on Orne Street, the builder was upset about his tiny share of his father’s estate and his revenge was a house to spite his older brothers’ views. The Old Spite House still is standing and occupied.”

There are a number of “spite houses,” in this country, I learned this afternoon. My personal favorite is the Richardson Spite House that was built on Lexington Avenue between 82nd and 83rd Streets in 1882. Click on the link, go ahead, it’s a great story.

I’m in my beautiful hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts. I drove up yesterday because I’m doing a book signing today at the Spirit of 76 Bookstore, from 2:00-4:00.

This morning I went down to the landing and saw a lobster boat unloading its traps.

Then I walked down to the cove near my mother and stepfather’s house. This is Brown’s Island which sits right off the cove:

When the tide is low, as it is in this photo, you can walk right out to Brown’s Island and barely get your ankles wet. When the tide comes in, it’s a good long swim back to shore. When I was a teenager, I went to a few parties on Brown’s Island and there were times that the tide rolled in with the night and when we were ready to leave, we were forced to whip off our clothes and swim to shore under the light of the moon. I have teenagers now, so I hasten to add that we NEVER consumed alcoholic beverages at these parties. What did we do? Oh, I’m sure we had a campfire, sing-alongs. The usual. Moon-Doggie would whip out his bongos and we’d all dance and get crazy. Good times.

Blogger’s note: Sneakers has been missing for weeks. We found his remains yesterday. A coyote got him, as we suspected. I miss him terribly. He had this weird meow that sounded like a human voice and he used to follow me around the barn muttering things at me that I couldn’t entirely understand. I understood his tone, though. Sometimes he was cheerful and just chit-chatty. Other times, he was cranky and insistent. You really miss a cat like that. So this post is a reprint, it originally ran in April.

Meet Sneakers. Sneakers is our barn cat. He may look cuddly, but he’s not. Trust me. I know him well. In order to survive, I’ve had to learn to interpret his every expression and anticipate all his needs. In the photograph above, he’s saying, “Put the cat food down …and nobody gets hurt.” He is the king of the barn and has trained me, and all other humans who enter his kingdom, to treat him with a fearful reverence.

Sneakers has his own apartment in the barn. It’s a tackroom that we keep heated for him all winter long. He has a little swinging door through which he enters and exits his apartment, and in which he is liable to get stuck if he doesn’t do something about his ballooning weight.

Sometimes in the mornings, if I am very sleepy, I start feeding the horses before I have offered Sneakers his breakfast. Sneakers corrects me when I do this. He always asks politely first. He purrs and rubs against my ankle once, purrs and rubs against my ankle twice, and if I don’t drop the grain buckets and race to get his food, he dig his claws and teeth into my leg and tries to flay my flesh into ribbons. I have scars from this. I’m fully trained now, so he only has to purr and rub my ankle once and I obediently flip open a cat food can and present it to him with a flourish.

Denis has a hockey rink near the barn and sometimes he needs to hook up hoses to the faucet in the barn. Sometimes one of his hockey buddies will offer to do this and the guys allow him, because it’s always funny to see a big hockey guy come running, screaming from the barn with a hissing, spitting cat attached to his shin guards.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I don’t usually post two blogs in one day, but one does not appear on television and in print on the same day, everyday (or at least this one doesn’t.)

This morning, I was thrilled to discover that USA TODAY had run a very nice feature story about Outtakes From a Marriage.. Now, the photograph is perhaps not the most flattering, I usually leave those extra chins at home, but Donna Freydkin, the reporter who interviewed me for the piece wrote a lovely feature, so thanks Donna!

And, I also had the great pleasure of appearing on Better Connecticut with Scot Haney this morning. My fellow Connecticutites (Connecticutians? Connecticats?) know Scot as the meteorologist/comedian/vocalist extraordinaire from the Channel 3 morning news. Denis and I have been Scot Haney fans for years. How can you not love a man who bursts into song in the middle of a holiday forecast, repeatedly meanders into the traffic forecaster’s shots and whose voice threatens to dissolve into sobs when he reads a report about a lost pet?

So, when I saw that he now has a morning talk show, I asked my publicist if she could get me on, because I HAD to meet Scot Haney. Between bookings for The View, TODAY, Extra! MSNBC, etc, I received word from the publicist about Better Connecticut. First they didn’t know if they could have me on. Then they booked me! And then, later the same week… they cancelled me! I don’t know what Connecticut luminary bumped me from my coveted spot next to Scot Haney, but I decided I was out of luck. Then, last week, great news again! Better Connecticut would have me on their show after all!

So this morning I did it. It was a blast. I do love that Scot Haney!

Just this, today, an Edith Wharton quote:

“I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawingroom, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”