I washed my hands first, so the dogs don’t smell like gasoline (much.)


For Mother’s day, I filled two previously-placed gift orders and made sock dogs for my mom and Kate’s mom. They turned out pretty well; that is to say, they all have the correct number of legs and tails, and I only drew blood once during the process. I made them out of some expensive-but-deeply-marked-down socks I found in a Nolita boutique in January. Which is about the first time I’ve ever found anything useful for me in one of those stores: the women’s clothes are always really cool, but the men’s shirts are usually only for tiny hipsters with forward-combed hair.

Other news from a suburban lifestyle: I raked out the moss in the shady areas of the front lawn, overseeded with fresh grass, and put down a bed of granulated Scott’s fertilizer. Before that, I mowed the lawn while wearing a set of turf aerator sandals, which have two-inch spikes attached to them, making me look like some sort of GWAR golfer. I had a good time stomping around the lawn on those.

Kate’s dad came back from France on Saturday with lots of good stories, including major surgery on his bike in the watertight hold of the Channel ferry, in which he had to reassemble his Triumph Bonneville from parts in time to drive it down the ramp when the boat arrived.) He was enthusiastic about my new BMW, which was a great relief, and he and I caravaned to Main Line BMW Motorcycles, in Devon, where Joe the local airhead mechanic will tell me what’s going on with the bike’s innards. Fingers crossed for no bad news.

We also visited the “Vassar Show House”, which felt a little bit like when Captain Haddock returns to Marlinspike and finds a road rally parked in the front yard. I kept trying to fight feelings of possessiveness, though: while I may have spent a lot of time at Ivy Cottage, I never lived there, and I’m very glad that Vassar seems to have stabilized a lot of the past ten years’ neglect. Kate and I seemed to have missed the Valley’s heyday by about fifty years: when we knew the big houses, they were already dark and relatively empty, not filled with revelling fox-hunters and madcap adventuresses in sheepskin flying helmets. Pictures here.