What is somewhat disconcerting is the location of the glass block window. It the top half of the wall between the bathroom and the rest of the house. It’s unique. You can’t REALLY see through it unless you put your nose right up against it, but the blocks aren’t frosted or anything. It freaks Ken out, so he strategically positioned a bookshelf in front of part of it outside the bathroom. My opinion is that this is not a permanent solution (I want the bookshelf in the office/loft). I figured that somewhere in the vast expanses of the internet (but probably on Apartment Therapy) someone would have come up with an attractive way to modify a glass-block wall. It seems that this is not the case. So… We get to be creative!

Any clever ideas for attractively increasing our sense of privacy?

In less philosophical and more troubling news, Klaus escaped from his stake, cable, collar, and then from the fenced-in yard last week. I guess we know how my manager found him without a collar. The good news is that when I came home from work he came bounding up to the car to meet me, so at least he didn’t go wandering two and a half miles like he did when left in my manager’s yard. So, what do we do?

1. Tighten his collar, shorten his cable, and try again?
2. Leave him in the yard, no cable – when he gets out and wanders away at least he’ll still have a collar.
3. Electric fence.
4. Wood and wire fence – 5-6 feet tall, wire buried underground to prevent digging.
5. Leave him inside.

My inclination is number 2. Ken thinks only #4 will suffice. We’ve been leaving him inside, but that’s no fun for anybody.

Now I can be truly depressed by how slowly I run instead of pretending I’m zooming.

I started training on January 1st with two days of skiing. What? It counts as training. My schedule at this point is to run and do a short bike on Mondays, swim Tuesdays, long bike on Wednesday, run and short bike Thursday, swim Friday, and run on Saturday. When the sun starts coming up early enough I’ll start riding to work again, so then I’ll be biking 5 days a week.

I’m contemplating the purchase of a heart rate monitor/GPS. Because I love data… Anybody have one they like? I was looking at the ones you can swim with, but it doesn’t seem like they’re worth the extra money because reviews say the GPS doesn’t work in the water. On the other hand, I could just get a heart rate monitor without GPS, then get a more sophisticated variety of GPS that we could use while we hike or whatever and just carry it with me. Hmmm. Advice welcome.

“Yeah, it was great! We talked about youth in Asia!”
“Pardon me?” (Actually it was probably more like “What, huh?”)
“Youth in Asia! We had a very deep and meaningful discussion about it.”
“Aah, glad you had a nice time.”

I thought that was a really weird thing to talk about with her crush, but I thought if Asian juveniles were what the boy was interested in then good for her for being a good sport about it.

Then several months later I saw the word euthanasia and connected it with youth in Asia and I realized what they were talking about. Suddenly everything was clear!

In retrospect, it still seems like a really odd thing to talk to a boy about when you’re 14.

See my stocking? It’s very green. By the way, apparently trapezoids are not the normal way to make a zig-zag pattern. It’s triangles. So I guess I invented a pattern. Go me! I’m having lots of fun making these stockings. Maybe next year the dogs and cats will get them. I have plenty of cotton scraps around.

We’ll plant the tree in the spot where we tried transplanting another little evergreen. It promptly died, so hopefully this one will survive a bit better.

Ooh, look, bokeh. Haha, look at me throwing around photography terms like I know what I’m talking about. Imposter.

Note to myself: I spent several hours after this photo was taken cleaning and oiling the kitchen floor. Therefore I should take another picture tomorrow and see if it made any difference and decide whether it is worth repeating the somewhat laborious process on the rest of the soapstone floor.