The nose has it.

All our dogs have had different ways of going for a walk. I think it's because they had or have different values. Some dogs are really into running, and thank heaven none of our have been, because the humans in this house were never fleet of foot and are not likely to become so soon. But there are other differences to note. For example: 

1) Large Guard Dog (Tralfaz): The late Tralfaz was by breed a farm dog, meant to tow small carts and protect the herd--making him a guard dog, not a watch dog. His walking habits reflected this: straight line, watch everything, be suspicious of deer and squirrels and any other critter but not immediately aggressive. Walks with him were usually brisk, of varying length.

2) Medium Retriever (Nipper): Nipper was a fuzzy, fun-loving chap, the kind who would love to go on a hunt and retrieve things. Not having been trained as a hunting dog, though, he would probably freak out at the gun and grab the dead duck and eat it. Walks were very brisk, but with long stops to smell what there was to smell, and could be quite long. 

3) Medium Retriever Redux (Izzy): Izzy is a sweet mush for the most part, with protective instincts but a scientific interest in smelling every blade of grass along the sidewalk. Walks are slow and include many stops. 

The fact is, Izzy's walks are not great exercise because he stops constantly. Ants outpace us. Every walk is a snurffin' sniffari. I mean, it's better than nothing for me (who leads the majority of his walks), but it's not taking excess weight off either of us. 

But it doesn't much matter to me about the exercise. Since I work at home, any day that isn't tempting by its pleasantness would probably be a day I stayed in and gathered dust. Having a canine companion guarantees I am going to be outside however lousy the weather is, and I think on the whole that has done me a lot of good. Not that it always felt good, mind you. 

So thanks, fuzzy friends, for keeping me moving, not letting me become a potted ficus. But seriously, can we move someplace warmer?  

Cellar dweller.

It's been very cold for several weeks now -- really, since winter began. Usually we get a few warm spells in the winter here in the Hudson Valley. We'll have a couple of wind-blasted days of misery, ice and snow, the usual, but then a few days in the forties to kind of reset, melt some of the snirt, and wash off some salt with a little rain, before it's back to the cooler. Not this winter. One below-freezing day after another. Regularly colder here than in Anchorage. 

So my basement, which I never finished nor cared to, remains chilly. 

Unfortunately I have a lot to do down there. 

Artist's depiction of my cellar

As the Great Lileks is doing, we are aiming to get the house ready to show. This has meant a number of steps, all challenging, like:

• Paint the porch -- a frantic job done in late October before winter hit
• Spray wash the siding -- reluctantly accepted this recommendation, but it made the house look like new
• Dumpster rental -- frantic tossing of decades of old stuff
• Large item removal -- old fridge in cellar, book shelves
• New carpeting -- another great idea, painfully expensive, and made for one exceptionally stressful day for us and the dog
• Professional deep clean -- this also was nice, but I'm not used to strangers cleaning up after me
• Prepare for real estate photographer -- frantic removal of all personal effects and making rooms look like hotel rooms

And now:

YOU ARE HERE →🞋←

And here means getting ready for showtime. 

The problem is that all those other steps resulted in box after box of things going into the cellar, with no time to arrange them. That was okay to this point, as the photographer wasn't going to bother with pictures of the basement or garage. But NOW, we have to make the clutter neat. And this is where I am today. 

It's all for the good, but man, I am tired, and I am cold down in the cellar. I hear it's warmer down south, and they don't bother putting cellars in houses. I think that's where we'll go. Any suggestions? 

Keeping tabs, Christmas style.

People around here move a lot. What would you expect? It's New York, a state that actively hates its elderly. People retire, they flee. The kids move out, they flee. Or they just flee. This state is run by criminals, stupid heads, and criminal stupid heads. 

It's still a hot market here in the lower Hudson Valley, because as lousy as it is here it's worse the closer you get to the city. So it can be hard to tell from one month to the next if the occupants are the same as they were a month earlier. Sometimes there are indicators of a change. 

Way back in 2016, while walking the dog, I noticed the Christmas tree in one family's picture window. It was there through December, of course, and into January 2017. Way into January. ALL the way into January. Way into February. It became a topic of some conjecture on this blog. Was there a family member who has volunteered to take the tree down and was just lazy? Did someone die and the house just fell into chaos? Or was it a bone of contention between warring factions of children? ("I'll take the decorations down but BILLY has to help me." "No way! That's YOUR job!") I never knew. But one day as spring was peeping over winter's transom, we saw the tree was gone. 

Whatever caused the tree to stay up so long, the incident was not repeated in subsequent years.

But this year, the moment I saw the house decked out in lights, I knew it had new owners. 

Not that the previous owners did no outdoors decor -- they were just more reserved. Once your house lights require ladders, your reservations are out the window. The new people went game.

And indeed, I was right. I checked in Zillow, and the house had been sold over the summer. Fast, too -- I don't go that way every day, but I never saw a For Sale sign out front. 

So welcome to the new folks, and thanks for bringing some light into a darkened world. Especially in New York, where our governing class has dark hearts and occluded brains. We need all the hope we can get. 

🎄🎄🎄

Lingo-Fact! The phrase "keeping tabs" goes back to tabs as in bar and restaurant tabs, and is believed to have come from the tablets upon which one would write the debt. But that's not certain; in fact, the origin of tab as a noun is simply unknown, according to Merriam-Webster.

Moving and rudeness.

Anyone who has been reading this blog -- extraordinarily smart and good-looking that you are -- probably knows that among my many characteristics, I dislike unrequired rudeness and I admire the men who provide the basics of sanitation in our lives: clean water and trash collection. 

If one were to go back in Earth's history to any of the cities of the past, even 150 years ago, the first thing one would probably notice is how horribly filthy everything is. We are naturally repelled by filth, as nature's way of telling us to back off, but since we discovered the microscopic causes behind disease, we are more repelled than ever. Go back to New York c. 1840 and your nose would probably be the first thing that alerted you that you were not in 2023 anymore. (Not that it's exactly a bouquet of roses these days either, granted.) There are still plenty of places on the planet where clean water is a luxury, not a given, and trash collection is little other than wherever you can dump it; places where cholera and dysentery are still common. "Public health" is an oxymoron there.

So we ought to be as respectful of our garbagemen as we are of any service provider who performs an important function in a clean and peaceful polity. Which means stuff like this is a no-no. 

This family is in the process of selling their house, and this is the third huge dump they put out for the trashmen. I'm wondering if they're bringing anything at all with them, because it seems like everything in the house must be going in the garbage. They even had a set of tires -- with rims -- out there at one point -- and it's illegal to throw away tires with the trash. (The trash pros left the tires the first go-round, but they disappeared later.)  

The town says you can put out one large item (like a piece of furniture) per week. They flew past that limit a while ago. Old tires, of course, were mentioned as something you can never throw away, but state law says you can bring them to any place that sells tires and they have to take them (a small fee may apply). 

The county says you can bring your crap to the dump for about $130 per ton. In my experience they usually don't even bother charging if you don't bring a dump truck full of debris in with you, as long as you can prove you're a county resident.  

And it doesn't seem like very many of us are aware that these guidelines exist. This crazy thing called the Internet, where you can look things up instantly, is getting to be a thing. These people ought to check it out.

The best and most efficient option if you have a lot or junk is to rent your own dumpster and throw your garbage away yourself. Just chucking everything on the curb is inefficient. 

It also is the height of rudeness -- taking your problem and making it someone else's problem without asking. Like littering, drunk driving, useless mask mandates, and silly games involving personal pronouns, taking one's own problems and shoving them onto someone else's back is at the very least showing no consideration for one's fellows. 

Well, the trash legends did not take all that junk on the Tuesday run. The scene this morning:

Will they be willing to cart it away Friday? Will the slobs add to the pile by then? Will they ever learn? The drama continues unabated. 

Am I being nosy? Is that rude? Yes and maybe, but rudeness is A-OK in our neighborhood now.

I know the feeling.

Welcome to the new place.

Come in, sit down, make yourself at home. Yes, I had to move the ol' bloggeroo. Why? Because my previous host sucks harder than a nuclear powered Dyson, that's why. Six days ago they severed my sign-on from the blog itself, so I could log in, but not access my blog. That's helpful! Every day I sent an e-mail (no other way to contact them) and every day there was no reply. So, the hell with it.

Not that I want to name names. Okay, it was Blog.com; you beat it out of me.

I really, really wanted to like Blog.com because they seemed to be small and plucky and personable compared to the big boys, but their ability to keep the site afloat was, shall we say, lacking, and their customer service was virtually nonexistent. So, here I am, Google!

If you're new to the wonder that is Fred, just note that I have been writing and editing for a long time, and had I known it was going to be like this, I might have gone into a real job. Well, it's too late now. I have novels, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, available at quite reasonable rates. I also have grit and determination. I also have a pounding headache, but that's not important right now.

I solemnly promise: No cat videos.

On this page you will continue to get daily updates on all things Fred. I will probably retire some of the features of the old blog, like the dollar store reviews -- I think I've bought about as many different things from the dollar store as I ever need to. We'll see about the others.

The old blog will be up for a while, but remember to change your bookmarks, all of you! (Looking at you, Mr. Philbin.) Meanwhile, I hope to see you around here.

I hate moving, I really do. Everything is in boxes and I can't find anything. And who put the toilet brush in the kitchen box? It clearly says KITCHEN on the side. Come on, people, work with me.