Ashley caught a vole! I wouldn’t let her eat it, because who knows what parasites she’d get from eating a raw wild animal, but she took it very well when I made her drop the vole.
It seemed to have survived being in Ashley’s mouth for several seconds. So Ashley will get to try to catch it again!
Have I mentioned lately how jealous I am of Ashley’s lean, muscly physique?
In Central Illinois fall colors are often a bit diffuse: the early trees turning brown and losing their leaves while the later trees are still green, with only a few trees showing their full autumn colors.
This year is something of an exception.
At 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, the county tests its emergency sirens. #dogsofmastodon
The very first month we had Ashley, we happened to be walking right under one of the sirens at the moment it started up. Ashley started howling along with it, which made me laugh. And Ashley looked a little embarrassed, thinking she’d done something wrong. I didn’t want that, so I started howling as well.
Since then, Ashley and I (and Jackie when she’s with us) have howled along with the emergency sirens every month.
Our neighbors have not complained, although I suppose they think we’re rather weird.
Most years about this time I’ll see a couple praying mantises, like this one I saw yesterday.
There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.
It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.
I wish I had as lean and muscly a physique as Ashley. But I don’t wish it enough to switch to eating nothing but dog food as a way to get it. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
My new Sigi Forge rapier arrived!
The default length (normal), is probably several inches longer than ideal for Meyer rapier fencing, but there are advantages to having a longer blade.
I’m very pleased.
Right from the start I referred to Ashley as my “pupperdog.” After a while though, I realized that she was actually my “pup ur-dog”—that is, some proto-dire-wolf aspect of a pit bull / boxer cross.
You can see it in her eyes. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
