Ladies and gentlemen,now that I know how to use the editing software Final Cut, you will no longer be viewing lame-ass videos on this site. You will be screening my short films.

My work, if you will.

Today, I present, “Two Horses, Two Women” a low-budget film I shot this afternoon and which has a score I stole is an homage to the classic French film, un Homme et une Femme

I’m no longer using YouTube and can’t figure out how to embed on Vimeo, so I’m afraid you’ll have to click below to view.

Untitled from Ann Leary on Vimeo.

Now that I have completed my EMT course and my kids are headed back to college, I only have volunteer EMT duties, two books that I’m writing, a book trailer to edit, a political fundraiser to plan and host, 6 animals to feed/train/groom and a husband to feed/train/groom, so, as you can see I have a lot of idle time on my hands. I don’t idle well. I must move forward or I begin to get all clogged with anxiety and self-doubt and eventually I stall out. So, I have a very exciting new project to help me fill up all the spare time. We have purchased a little house on a lake and it needs some work.

It’s a little investment project.

A little fixer-upper.

First, “house” is a rather generous word for the structure that we now own. It’s a boat house that looks a bit like a trailer home. Here is a view of the downstairs. Someday there will be a kitchen here:

I know, just stunning, isn’t it?

But, just out of the range of the camera, to the right, there is a big garage door, which will someday be a series of French doors. When you look out from these doors, you see this:

Here’s the view from upstairs:

It’s tiny. I’ll show you the exterior later, after we have alarms installed. You can’t just go showing your trailer to the world without taking precautions. Somebody might hitch it to the back of their truck and drive off with it.

We’re very excited about the lake house. The kids like to water-ski, I like to kayak and plan to relearn how to sail and Denis likes to skate.  Holly likes to sit on the deck and pretend that she’s on board her very own yacht:

Devin came to the Bridgewater Fair yesterday and took a few photos.  There I am above,  posing in front of the first-aid tent.  The bandage on my wrist?  Just a little oozing, crusty poison ivy courtesy of Holly, who likes to slick down her coat with poison ivy oil. It’s part of her beauty regimen.

Here’s a very lovely cow. Does anybody know what breed she is?

If you can’t read the man’s t-shirt above, it’s for the Washington Septic Cleaning Company. They “do your doo,” according to the their logo.  I like the logo of our own septic cleaning company, which declares, “Your number 2 is our number 1!”  It’s just more satisfying, somehow.  I like something of mine to be somebody’s number 1, I don’t really care what it is.

Look at these sparkling clean and colorful youngsters, all tuckered out from their morning in the show ring:

Here I am, posing with one of our EMS chiefs, Reverend David Peters. Yes, that’s right, David is the minister of the Congregational Church here in Roxbury, so if you get hurt in our town, David will not only drive the ambulance but, if you’re very nice (and especially if you’re not), David will offer a silent prayer for you.  No extra charge!

We did get a call yesterday, as our chief Bernie Meehan mentioned in the previous comments.  He took this photo which reveals my bravery and fortitude.  See how I am practicing body substance isolation precautions with my gloved hands?  Notice the way I’m managing to walk with my eyes closed so I don’t have to see the anticipated gore of the motorcycle accident that we are responding to?  Yes, you can sleep a little easier in my town, knowing that I’m on the ambulance corps.  When you’re asleep there’s so much less chance of me having to rescue you.

Okay, well for some reason I can’t post the photo. Have tried reformatting every which way.  Perhaps I can reproduce it on my iPod sketch pad. In the meantime, one last photo from fair:

Thank you all for the kind words about Steve. I’m in Marblehead with my mom until next weekend.  Here’s a shot of Brown’s Island.

Some quaint streets in Old Town:

The names of the streets? I have no idea.  I lived in Marblehead from 8th grade until college and rode every street and alley on my bike many, many times (I was lazy about getting my driver’s license), but never really paid much attention to the names of the streets.  Fortunately people around here don’t really use proper street names too often, but will say things like, “Across from where Penni’s used to be,” or “Next to the Rippah” which is a great old dive called The Riptide.

Like many Massachusetts seacoast towns, there are a lot of Labrador Retrievers in Marblehead.  Really a lot.  Yesterday my sister and I were outside my mother’s house when a woman walked up with a black Labrador on a leash.

“Is this your dog?” she asked.

“No,” Meg said.  Meg lives across the street from my mother.  ”I think that’s Buddy who lives in the grey house at the bottom of the road,” she told the woman.

“No Buddy is my neighbor,” said the woman. “But I think I brought this dog here once before when he was wandering.”

“That would have been Skippy,” I said. Skippy was my mother and Steve’s old Lab and I explained to the woman that he died several months ago.  The woman then told us that her black Lab looked so much like the one she was walking that she had thought it was hers at first, and then she and Meg ran through all the names of the Labs in the neighborhood and it occurred to me that it was entirely unlikely that anyone in Marblehead has the original black Labrador that he or she started out with.  Later, my mother told us that after Skippy died, she heard a dog’s footsteps walking up her stairs and was startled when a black Labrador wandered into her office.  It was the neighbor’s dog and somebody had found it, thought it was Skippy, and put him inside my Mom’s house.

I think that Marblehead should do with its Labradors what Amsterdam did with the community white bicycles.  People can take a black Lab off the streets when they need one to walk with or to lie by their hearth, and when they’re finished they can just return it to the streets.

I think that’s actually what’s going on, anyway.

People in Marblehead are wicked nice. They’re the balls, as we used to say, and my mother and sister are lucky to be surrounded by such a caring community.

Yes, We’re still practicing the skateboard and ball.

Why must we we work so tirelessly at these difficult and dangerous tricks? Because we know that some day, some glorioius day in the not too distant future, we will be asked to appear on this show:

As many of you are probably aware, it is no longer enough to spend months and often years writing a book. Today an author must help sell the book, and by sell, I mean she must make each and every person in the northern hemisphere aware of obsessed with the book. She must make them understand that they need the book in order to survive in today’s world. She must make them wake up each morning and ask, “if not now, when? If not me, who? If not the …”

Wait, I’m not sure those are the questions.

The point is, like many businesses, publishers are struggling these days and they like it if their authors will pitch in and help. I regret not doing more to push my last book, but never mind, today I got to help my friend Julie Klam with the book trailer for her delightful forthcoming memoir, You Had Me At Woof.

Julie asked me several weeks ago if I would direct her book trailer and of course I was wildly flattered and within minutes of hanging up the phone with her I had launched myself on yet another fantastical voyage of delusion.  I decided that the Julie Klam book trailer would be such a smash that authors would say to each other, at cocktail parties, “You have a book coming out?  Is Ann Leary doing your book trailer?  You have to get Ann Leary to do your book trailer.  She did Salmon’s! She just did Elmore’s! She did Nora’s”  Yes, I would be the Annie Leibowitz of book trailers. Julie Klam is cut from the same cloth it seems, because she told me that within minutes of hanging up the phone with me she was tearfully rehearsing her acceptance speech for the book trailer award (we wondered if there must be such a thing and it turns out, there is).

Julie had been wowed by some of my recent work, but I had to confess to her that I only really know how to use a FlipCam, and so we decided that my son Jack, an actual film student who is working on a television crew, would be the co-director/cameraman/guy-who-does-everything-but-talk.  We discussed a few ideas, but Julie’s hysterical book is all about how out of control her dogs are; how they’ve destroyed her house, upended her relationship with her husband, scarred her daughter for life, etc, so we decided that her yappy, outrageously naughty terriers would be enough to carry the film, just by being themselves.

Here was the hitch: Julie’s terriers are so bad, so utterly devious that they will do the opposite of what she wants, NO MATTER WHAT. So today they conspired to be the most well-behaved dogs ever filmed.  Just to make fools of us. They couldn’t possibly have been more angelic. They made Cesar Millan’s dog, Daddy, look like a thug.  They made Lassie look like a crack whore.  I have never seen three more well-behaved dogs in my life.  Did I mention that they’re terriers? Boston Terriers?

Still, we managed to get some funny antics and we had a blast.  I must admit, I regretted wearing a sleeveless black top, because Julie also wore a sleeveless black top, but she has the arms of a ballerina. And though her dogs are mostly black, they manage to shed only their white hairs.

Anyway, as soon as it’s all edited it’ll be on YouTube where you can see it and tell all your friends. And then it’ll go viral. Next, there’ll be calls from Oprah, network and studio heads. And, of course, Julie and I will be offered our own television show.

I’ve been trying to teach Holly to stay. Yesterday, I told her and Daphne to lie down and stay, which Daphne did quite willingly. Holly pulled her usual stunt. Not only does she break the stay after a nanosecond every time, but then she becomes completely undone by her own wickedness, and puts on a maniacal display of the ultimate bad doggery such as attacking my ankles or ripping a piece of paper to shreds.  Such a naughty pup. She really thinks its a funny joke to do the most extreme opposite of the stay command.  Yesterday, she tried to corrupt Daphne into breaking the stay with her, but Daphne, appalled and unamused as usual, set a very fine example of how a dog with dignity and grace is supposed to behave.

Good girl, Daphne:

Since I blogged endlessly all winter about the reconstruction of our bathroom and the subsequent relocation of some poor tenants that we had, I thought I’d show you the bathroom now that it’s finished. I love it and I don’t miss the bats nearly as much as I thought I might.

Do you like it?  How about a little house tour then?  Here’s our sunroom:

The front porch:

The view from our porch:

Lulu guarding the front yard:

My favorite tree:

And our patio:

And now, here’s a poem I came across, that I love very much. Despite all the beauty around me, I tend to be sad in the summer. I KNOW. It’s a sin.  I’m perverse and ungrateful, I should be happy and joyous. I have so much beauty all around.  Anyway, here’s the poem:

Canal Street Sunset

This weekend I was in Manhattan, attending the final show of Denis’s Rescue Me Comedy Tour, which was being taped for a Comedy Central special.  Very funny show with Denis, Lenny Clarke, Adam Ferrara and Whitney Cummings.  I had seen Denis, Lenny and Adam before, of course,  but had never seen Ms. Cummings perform and she is HYSTERICAL.  You might have seen her on Chelsea Handler or Conan or heard her on Howard Stern, but if not, you will see her on something soon because she is going to be very famous.

And my recent interview with Julie Klam, is now available on iTunes. I’m not sure how to link to the exact interview but this link should bring you to iTunes and you can scroll down to my show.

And my EMT course is winding down. Tons of homework and studying. National and state certification exams are soon.