Okay, I think I’ve figured out how to post pictures on iPad. First I must tweet them. Annoying but in the meantime have found a favorite new way to waste time. it’s a drawing app. No more flip cam. I’m drawing from now on. Portrait of husband to follow.

Though I have been having problems loading photos from my regular camera onto blog, I am able to load iPhone photos.  I really love the quality of the iPhone photos so it might just be the official camera of the Ann Leary blog from now on.

Can we have a contest to come up with a name for this blog once and for all?  Winner will get both of my books and Denis’s book signed.  I don’t usually offer D’s book but I’m desperate here.

In the meantime, here are some photos I recently took.

First, gardeners, biologists, specialists in extra-terrestial activity, would you perhaps be able to tell me what this stuff is?

I was visiting a neighbor when I was shown this.  Our thoughts were bear vomit, alien spawn/ spore or toxic waste bubbling up from the earth’s core.

To add to the horror of it all, ghost girl showed up. How odd that this time a ghost man is with her and he appears to be holding a gun to her head.  Maybe this explains how our girl came to be a ghost in the first place:

Here are some flowers. I know. I’m no Moses Pendleton:

I have to remember to turn the iPhone so that all the photos aren’t vertical.  Will blog later about EMT training.  This is what I’ve taken away from it thus far:  Be careful!  This week I learned how to pack dressing around an impaled object and how to bandage an eye that is coming out of somebody’s head.  I advise all of you to wear  protective body padding and a helmet with face mask. It really should be a law. Not all the time, of course. Just when you’re out of bed.

Stock photo. We don't feed or photograph bears.

Oh that bear. That effing bear!  Though he or she hasn’t returned, the dogs refuse to go outside without human escorts. Instead, they stand at our windows all day and bark at the woods.  Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. All day and most of the night. They have taken it upon themselves to unilaterally de-escalate their watch dog duties. From now on, they will no longer physically confront possible predators, but instead will just report on them from within the safe confines of our house.  They’ve gone from frontline soldiers to annoyingly repetitive reporters. There might be a bear. There might be a bear. There might be a bear, is what they’re reporting. Great. As informative and accurate as CNN.

Now they’ll only go outside if I’m with them, as if I have any method of defending us! I’m going to Netflix the movie Old Yeller for Lulu.  Lulu is a very large dog with a huge head and massive teeth.  I’m a feeble, middle-aged lady with an under-developed sense of coordination and a nervous disorder that is triggered by even the remotest possibility of danger.  I once semi-trampled a group of preschoolers at the Halloween haunted house that they used to have at Stew Leonard’s because I was scared out of my wits.  It was a haunted house that was designed for preschoolers so I think you can picture the level of horror. It wasn’t even dark inside, but as soon as we entered and I saw a dangling rubber spider, my adrenalin took over and, seizing my kids by the wrists, I dragged them from one end to the other in a nano-second, knocking children, strollers and friendly ghosts out of our path in our frantic exodus.

Thank you Amanda for this.  I’m heading out to CVS this morning to see if they have a can of “bear spray.”  Have also heard Raid wasp spray works because it can spray very long distances.  Have recently learned that many people hike with a can of Raid as it can be used not only against bears and rabid coyotes but also against human predators. Like any weapon, I hesitate to use it as it would be my luck that in my panic,  the can would fly from my grasp and then the bear would use it against me.

But enough about scary predators and yeller dogs. I have finally figured out how to use my new photo software. I attended a book party for my friend Sarah Albee last weekend.  Sarah is a best-selling author of children’s books. She writes many educational books and her most recent is about the history of sewage.  This is a woman who knows what kids like to read and learn about.  I once took my young children to a science museum in Paris and they spent the entire time marveling at an exhibit about plumbing. Dinosaurs? No thanks. Human waste and where it goes?  You could hardly see the exhibit through the hordes of admiring children. And though the children spoke many languages, it seems that the word “poo” is universal and almost always accompanied by fitful giggles.

Sarah’s book is called……POOP HAPPENED! Here’s the book trailer.

And here’s Sarah signing books at the party:

Oh for the love of Pete, I can’t get the stupid photo thing to work. Well Sarah’s beautiful, you can see her in the video. The party was at the home of Susanna Salk, also beautiful and also the author of a new book called A Room For Children, as well as several other lovely home-design books.

Well, this has been a long and exhausting post.  Did we set the My Antonia chat for tomorrow evening at 8?  I believe we did.  Hope you all had a chance to read it.

My daughter has forbidden me to post it. My son has left my home in shame after having viewed it with a friend. Still, this is America, where we have freedom of expression and I have made a film so frightening yet empowering, so controversial yet provocative that, though it has been banned in my home, I am going to screen it here, for you, my blog readers.

First a few words about how I came to make the film.  It was inspired by a film that I made the other day.  Yes, I used to call them videos until I posted the last on Twitter and a man commented that he thought the “film” was impressive. In fact, he said that at times, the images of the horse in shadow looked  almost like animation and he suggested that I make a film all in shadow, with a sort of narrative. Well, this got me going.  I realized that I had a gift.  I had made a sort of short film that only needed a narrative. For those who missed the first film, allow me to screen it for you right here, now.  Please note the swing near the end of the film.  Mark, the protagonist (our hero) has always been alarmed by this swing in real life.  He often takes a look at it, and if the wind catches it, he wheels away in fright.  So here is the original film. If you can’t see it on your computer, click here:

So after the wonderful review and suggestion by my Twitter critic, I decided to turn the video into a horror film. I thought it would be very scary if the swing turned out to be haunted. So, I won’t tell you how I came to cast the role of the ghost, but I shot about 45 minutes of the ghost swinging, picking flowers, skipping and then I came home and showed what I had shot to my son and one of his friends. Both of these boys are in college studying film so I saw them as my colleagues.

“Isn’t it scary?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say scary, so much as ….disturbing,” said son’s friend.
“Besides,” said son, his face scarlet with shame, “you can see your sneakers in almost all the shots. And Holly is leaping around.”
“I’m going to cut all that out, you’ll see,” I said. “And then I’m going to edit in into the film and have the horse galloping away in fright.”
“You do that,” they said, backing away from me slowly.  This was two days ago. I’ve not seen the boys since, but Denis assures me that they are staying in New York with him.  Apparently the footage was so powerful and disturbing that they refuse to speak of it, even to him.

Anyway,  it turned out that I don’t have the software required to cut videos into each other. And once I cut out all the shots with my sneakers and the dogs, I was left with a very, very short video film.

Still, I think you’ll agree that it shows promise. I warn you that, though it’s short, it’s very, very scary.

DO NOT WATCH IF YOU SUFFER FROM A HEART CONDITION, SHORTNESS OF BREATH, IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME, OR ARE PRONE TO FITS OF SHAME BY ASSOCIATION:

Click here if you can’t view.

Here’s the director’s cut with all the outtakes. Interesting shot at 0:28. Director has utilized terror inducing device of having Ghost Girl almost step on something HORRIBLE. Very effective sequence at end leaves the audience wondering if there isn’t a little Ghost Girl in all of us, and if so, how do we get rid of her?

Also, music is called “Kiss Me Deadly.” I swear!

The other night when I returned from my class, my sister Meg informed me that Holly had brought something in from outside.  At first we thought it was a rawhide chew toy but we soon learned that Holly was trying to help me with my anatomy lessons.

The review section of my text book is filled with multiple choice questions and I thought it would be fun to test your knowledge.  So here goes:

1. The woman in the picture above:

a)    Is about to scream

b)   Will have to resist the urge to throw adorable puppy across the room

c)    Is about to fall to the floor, clinging to her laughing/crying sister

d)   All of the above

2. The animal pictured above is:

A)  A cutie-pie who has retrieved something useful for her mistress

B)  A naughty rascal who is carrying the remains of a shoe

C)  A filthy, disgusting scavenger carrying on with carrion

3. What is sad/ironic about the above picture?

a)    People pay good money to feed this dog

b)   People share their pillow with this dog

c)   The dog is carrying a jaw maxima bone with its maxima/mandible bones

d)   All of the above

4. CASE STUDY: You are a certified EMT and arrive to find the patient pictured above. Your first step is:

a) Ask patient for consent to provide treatment

b) Check that pulse is normal

c)  Reassure patient that he/she will be fine

d) Clear airway and begin to administer CPR

I’m an early to bed, early to rise kind of gal. But for some reason, last night at 1:00 in the morning, I was wide awake and working away at my computer and I decided to check out the old blog. This blog. Just to see who had commented and everything.  Maybe to have a little peek at somebody when he was all clean and not covered in mud again (as he is now).

So, I clicked the appropriate “bookmark’ and was brought to a strange and awful place that was not my blog.  I logged out and tried entering my blog name in the URL line.  Again, no blog, just this eerie place with a picture of bright, heavenly skies and a message that said something like, “Welcome, we are your new servers. Please help us to serve your web needs better.”  Because of the lateness of the hour, I thought I might be dreaming.  There were other strange things going on.  A coyote – just one coyote – had parked itself up on our hill and was trilling away with a very high-pitched solo that was answered by nobody, not even our dogs.  I watched the dogs’ ears twitch at the sound of her song, but they didn’t bark as they usually do, they just lay sprawled around my bed, blinking, ears twitching.  And no other coyotes joined her in her midnight recital. Also, the puppy was sniffing and pawing at my breast.  Unfortunately, somebody had sent me a link to yet another story about how dogs can detect cancer in humans. I knew that I had eaten a few late night snacks in my pajamas last night and usually manage to have some food attached to my person by the time I make it to bed – actually, it’s sort of constant thing, having food stuck to me – here I am at the beach last summer with a sandwich attached to my shoulder:

Still, it troubled me that the pup was so eagerly sniffing that area.   Back to the blog went I and I was again met with this “Welcome, we are your new server” message.

I was on twitter and asked people if I was imagining this, and others tried to log on and they confirmed that my blog, my dear, dear blog, had been hijacked by what appeared to be some kind of religious cult.

I cycled rapidly through the seven stages of grief – denial, anger, self-loathing, hunger, lust, shame, and then finally acceptance.  My blog was gone.  Gone were my world-changing views on puppies and gardening.  My poems and photographs.  My stories of attack sheep, killer mice, witches, ghosts and, most heartbreakingly, gone were all the funny and wonderful comments from my readers.

Then, a tweet of hope. Somebody on twitter alerted me to the fact that my blog was back.  It was back!

Where did my blog go during that strange hour?  Perhaps it was abducted by aliens who recognized it as a perfect sampling of earthling intelligence and wanted to analyze it so that later it can woo us into space with promises of free puppies.  Perhaps it found itself on an island, like in LOST, with other hijacked blogs.  We’ll never know.  But let’s not delve too deep.  I’d rather pretend that my blog never left than to imagine the dark and forbidden places it might have been last night.

It’s back, that’s all that matters.

The photos are from a hike I took yesterday with my friend, Jen.

And here’s a link to some DTV.  Another Holly vs. Lulu match.  You will see that Luscious Lulu surrenders to Hellacious Holly’s ferocious battering, not once, but twice during video.

(No animals were abused or mistreated in the making of this video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJkrlQRd_CU

Somebody very kindly posted my (Leo) horoscope yesterday or the day before and I’ve been scanning all the comments because I’m wondering if it warned that I would break a tooth and then a computer in one weekend.  I still can’t find the comment with the horoscope, but did get a new laptop today. Mine has been on it’s way out for a long time. It didn’t close and I had to tape it shut when I traveled with it. I guess you’re not supposed to keep dropping the laptops on the ground.  And it wasn’t really my tooth that broke, on Friday, just a veneer. On one of my front teeth. Oh, you thought those were my real teeth?  No, no, my real teeth have been filed down to scary little nubbins in order to make way for the veneers. You see, I had a less than perfect smile.  I had a big gap between my front teeth that somehow looked cool until I was 35, and then, overnight, made me look like a witch.  I’m not sure how that happened but the exact same thing happened to a friend of mine when she turned 35.

But yesterday nothing broke.  Denis and I went to see our daughter play her last high school hockey game.  Holly came along. She is sometimes timid in unfamiliar places so I’m trying to expose her to stuff.  The last time I took her to a hockey game she shivered under my coat, so this time I found a little hoodie for her.

Yes, it’s a hockey sweatshirt! I found it on a stuffed bear.

Lord almighty, ain’t she a cute ‘un, though? (Still missing part of tooth).

She rode on Denis’s lap on the way to the game.

And she rooted for Dev’s team.

Sorry, the hockey photos all came out a little blurry, but that’s our Dev with her stick on the ice (I think).

GO BIG RED!

Yesterday I returned from the city just in time to feed the horses.  As soon as I parked the car, I opened the door to the house and the dogs came tumbling out and we all started jogging up to the barn.

The horses get very excited at feeding time.  If they are in the lower field and see the dogs and me approach they come galloping up the hill and meet us at the fence:

Yesterday, however, as I approached their fence, they did their usual canter up the hill, but when they reached the top, still about 20 feet away from the barn, they all came to a slamming halt.  Then, their necks raised like giraffes, their ears pricked forward and their eyes wide with alarm, they started blowing and snorting with fright.  They were staring at a spot just above my head – at the field behind me it seemed, and suddenly they all wheeled around at once and galloped back down the hill.  I didn’t even look behind me.  I just ran into the barn, the dogs tearing in after me.  After the discussion here yesterday I was sure there was a pack of coyotes in that field, or worse – a bear.

I peered out from the barn door and looked at the field opposite and saw nothing.  The dogs were sniffing around the floor of the barn for mice.  I called Daphne outside, made her look at the field, but she was uninterested, so I knew there wasn’t a giant predator.  I filled the horses’ buckets with grain and went downstairs, to the lower level of the barn where the horses’ stalls are, and filled their buckets.  Usually this will create a stampede into the barn, but when I opened the barn door, the horses, who had tentatively wandered back up the hill, again, gaped above me in horror, and then galloped down the hill.  At this point I was thinking ghost.  There was clearly something unGodly hovering above my head that had spooked the horses.  I looked up, but all I could see was the fuzzy fringe of the fur hat that I had worn up to the barn (it’s fake fur, relax).  The hat that I sometimes wear in the city and to hockey games but never in the country.  The hat that, I now realized completely altered my silhouette for the horses and what they saw, standing in the door of the barn, was a two legged beast with a bulbous fur head.  Some kind of horse-eating manimal.

This is the hat. The photo was taken at the winter classic hockey game in Boston and I’m eating pizza, not horse, but how could my dear beasts know this?  I was unrecognizable to them in the hat.  Either that, or they were just refusing to be seen near me when I wear it, like the rest of my family.

Anyway, I took the hat off and called them. They stared at me from afar, trembling in fright.  I tried to approach, but again they wheeled away and trotted off.  I left the barn doors open, thinking they’d come in on their own once I left.  Hours later, I returned to the barn, hatless, and only then, with some very gentle coaxing, was I able to get them to come into the warm barn, out of the cold, for their supper.

The horses have confirmed what my family has been telling me since I bought that hat.  It’s scary.

But it’s so warm.

We had a full “wolf moon” the other night. I was heading out, and though I was slightly late, I had to stop to snap a few photos before I got into my car.  According to the Farmer’s Almanac, Native Americans named the January moon, the “wolf moon,” because the wolves howled so loudly on the nights when it was full.

Here in Connecticut, the coyotes enjoy a night of song and merrymaking whenever there’s a full moon.  I think it’s because the night’s brightness makes the hunting easier and when they mate,  it’s as if the lights are on, which makes it sexier. There was some very loud hunting and carrying on the other night.  It gave me goosebumps. It made my dogs bark until they were hoarse, and I made the mistake of letting them out too close to my bedtime, and had to wait up for them to come in.  I stood in the freezing doorway yodeling out into the night for them to come. Calling and cursing like a witch. The moon was so bright  that the trees cast shadows across our white fields.

Yesterday I came into the city and stayed over night, for the first time in months.  We went to a party  and then out with some friends.  It was exciting to be in the city.  I always feel a little dazzled by all the beautiful people when I come to the city after having been in the country so long.  All the beautiful, stylish people, all the delicious smells coming from restaurants. The cool hair. The fashionable babies and dogs.  Today, having breakfast with a friend, and then back to coyote country.

Guess who stopped by again? This guy (warning, it’s Bonehead).  Steve knew that if he buried it, the dogs would dig it up again so I guess he hung it high in a tree, deep in the woods.  Today, it was back on our front lawn, being tossed back and forth between the two dogs.  How did it come out of the woods? My guess is that it used its fangs and sort of dragged itself along, grinning and leering, teeth clacking, all the way down our driveway to where the dogs awaited

So, the dogs have had another bath and Steve has tried once again to get rid of the THING THAT WOULDN”T LEAVE.  But it you click on the link you will see that it’s mostly bone.  Steve pasted a bear skull next to it and we’re pretty certain that’s what it is now.

Did I mention that we’re leaving for a trip to a beautiful place this weekend?  It’s a city.  A place without skulls that get hung in trees (I thought Steve had buried it – I didn’t know he got all Blair Witch Project on us) and then mysteriously show up at our doorstep.  Honestly, if I woke up tomorrow morning and the thing was grinning at me from the other side of the bed, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Why do we live in the country again?

Oh yeah, now I remember:

Photo by Andrew Sullivan for the NY Times