January 15th: Jeff’s Bath

January 14: Broiler Chickens

January 13th: Anne’s perogies

January 12th: Walking nostalgic

I used to walk at Memorial Park with Huckleberry just about every single day. It was not just my exercise and routine, it was my social life. One New Years’ Day, I even arranged for all of us to drink mimosas while we walked that first morning of the year. I can’t remember what year it was, but (of course), I brought the champagne.

Yesterday, Saturday morning, I went there for the first time in a long time with Grashopper and Charlie. Charlie had never been there before, but was appropriately initiated, all mud and vigor and happiness.

January 11: Caboto Friday

January 10th: Munch, post-apple

January 9th: The last decked hall of the season

The wreath was pretty, and we debated leaving it up for awhile longer. (Well, the truth is,every time we noticed it was still hanging up, during this post-holiday freezing spell, we realized one of us would have to take it upstairs to the ice-cold attic. So we pretended it was cheerful and pleasant, decorative for all winter.) The problem was that every time Grasshopper glanced up at the door when a certain kind of light thing was happening– the wind playing with streetlight angles, a passing car with headlights– she saw a slight movement and thought someone was standing in the doorway. It wasn’t just the incessant barking that drove us crazy, but her startling first bark kept scaring the life out of us. So finally, I took the wreath down.

As you can see, though, it was still too cold to move it all the way up to the attic.

January 8th: Birthday car!

January 7th: The funniest thing….

I think it’s going to be pretty tough to get through the year without too many of these types of pictures. I could self-impose a ban, a sort of “Keep of the Grasshopper” 365-photo rule, but that seems silly because there will be some pretty funny ones.  I like the above one because of the lighting. Well, it’s also funny.  She looks funny.

But she looks funny here, too.

And here…

She just can’t stop laughing….

It’s like she heard the funniest joke in the world.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t so funny anymore.

She’s really a very cute and dignified little dog.

January 6th: Sunday Routine

People walk their dogs by our house every day, but on any given Sunday, I’ve noticed that the neighbour from the torn-down, in-progress, perpetually-being-rebuilt house across the street, for some reason,  drives to Walkerville with her gentleman friend and walks her dog. When she first started doing it, I thought it was sweet, that she was gradually acclimatizing herself to the neighbourhood, walking the dog to meet neighbours, while her house was almost done. That part is sure wrong:  a year (or two??) later, now that it’s clear she has no interest in finishing the house anytime soon, and certainly no interest in fraternizing with any of us, maybe she’s just keeping an eye on things? Or it’s just become some sort of Sunday routine.

I have no Sunday routine to speak of. Sometimes, I go to Malden Park with Grasshopper, like I did today, with Charlie, too….

But for the most part, it varies. Maybe that’s why I’m so fixated on the most useless little section of the Sunday New York Times, called “Sunday Routine.”  They basically just pluck somebody off the street, who generally has some kind of interesting title, and they do this little bitty column about how they spend their day.  It’s astonishing that I can be completely turned off and  completely jealous at the same time, reading about how some municipal worker spends Sunday mornings reading the newspaper at a Manhattan coffee shop, eating real bagels.  That’s sort of what the column is about, what some person eats for Sunday breakfast, or where they buy organic cheese.  They don’t even give you enough information to determine if the person is interesting enough. You’re suppose to kind of figure that out for yourself.   In November, they did a profile of Joanna Coles, the editor of Cosmopolitan. She gets up ridiculously early to walk her dog, then goes to exercise class, spends the rest of the morning preparing a fancy Sunday lunch (she’s British), then goes for a long family walk and then for a nice dinner out. I always wonder about the veracity of all the posts, though. For instances, Cosmo-editor is 50, with 11- and 13-year old sons, and she seems a little too peppy for me.  I am equally suspicious of the time they Sunday-Routined CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. This is a woman who gets up at 2.15 am during the week (yet has a lie-in until 6 am on Sundays), works out in the morning,  trains and rides her off-track Thoroughbred, take her kids out to their riding lesson, has board meetings in the afternoon for the foundation she started, do CNN work before dinner, then watch tv.  I’m not buying it.

I’ve come across some interesting people in Sunday Routines, too, though. Like the Barefoot Contessa lady, Ina Garten. Before she opened her little shop and became famous, she was a nucleur budget analyst for the Carter administration.  Her Sundays generally consist of coffee, lunch, testing new recipes in her barn, and getting a massage.  That one I can believe.