For Your Reference

You can't tell me this makes any sense.

I need to quit checking my work email.

I am not working. But Robbie has no other way to talk to me during the day! What am I supposed to do?! And then I see the subject lines of the other emails waiting in my inbox, but I do not read them, because then the senders would be able to see that I had.

Except the snake guy. He doesn't work for us, so like the entire rest of the world besides my agency, he is not using Novell GroupWise, and I can look at his email without him knowing it.

Only it's an email I really need to answer, so I do. I have to apologize to him for the difficulties we are experiencing in scheduling him (and his amazing snakes!!) to present at our December safety training. He's going to describe how not to be bitten by snakes. He's a pro and it's perfectly safe and should be no problem at all, but someone in my department likes to make a big fuss about how scared she (or he) is of snakes, so a few hoops have been generated for me to jump through.

Yesterday evening, as my dad and I were walking along the pretty, if amply horse-poop-bedecked, trail that wends up the hill just a (careful) hop, (careful!!) skip and a (Jesus, watch where the hell you're putting your foot!!!) jump from my parents' house, a teeny tiny little itty bitty baby snakie-pie wriggled across the path right in front of us. I wanted to catch it and bring it back, and let it live a happy little life among the plants in my cubicle, but it disappeared into the underbrush before I could quite finish working out the logistics of transporting it safely and comfortably in my luggage. I emailed Robbie about this, but he said he'd prefer something larger.

There are other emails in my inbox with subject lines that tempt me to open them. Intriguingly, there's one entitled "Go paperless" which was sent today from, um, somebody who's extremely frightened of snakes, or at least wants everybody else to think that he (or she) is. But I can't see who the message is addressed to without opening it, so I don't know if I was the only one who received it. Maybe so. Maybe she (or he) is peremptorily ordering me to get rid of all the paper files in my office, on the grounds that they are likely to harbor snakes.

It would make about as much sense as anything else.

Anyway, today we went to Onondaga Lake Park, walked approximately 82 miles, and got a lot of pretty pictures of the lake, fall foliage, some boats, some wildlife, and more. Don't feel like you have to look at them. I don't want to be one of those people who sits you down in front of a slide projector (remember those, kids?) and subjects you to hours of vacation slides from a place you were never particularly curious about.

I promise that the reference marker is the only work-related photo I took.

Thought for the Day

Don't wear flip-flops to hike on a trail used by horseback riders.

Well, somewhat more to the point, used by their horses.

But I'm glad to be able to tell you that this is an abstract, rather than an object lesson; I only had to pay a little more attention to my footing than to the scenery. The above picture (and, if you click through on it, the others with it - or click on yesterday's link; I've just been adding photos to that album as I take them) was taken from a trail under some powerlines that march up over the hill near my parents' house. Their subdivision sits in a small valley, and was very recently farmland. There are still a few old farmhouses and barns scattered about.

It was an unseasonably warm day, with a high somewhere around 90; very unusual for this time of year. It's enough to make me forget that, come winter, there are likely to be several yards of snow covering pretty much every surface. You might not even be able to go outdoors in shorts!

We went to Thornton Park, to survey Syracuse spread out beneath us from the city's highest vantage point:


We visited the rose garden:


And coming back, we drove up to Tipperary Hill. To give you a very brief, probably wildly inaccurate outsider's description of the story there, Tipp Hill is an old Irish neighborhood, and boasts the *mumble's* only upside-down stoplight. The Irish residents took umbrage at the old red-on-top stoplight because it reminded them of the English, or perhaps because they were drunk; so they threw stones at it and kept knocking it out. And finally they got not only their very own, special, green-on-top traffic signal, but also a rather naffy bronze statue commemorating the event.

That just goes to show you what fierce, alcohol-fueled nationalism can do. Not that there's anything wrong with that: I'm approximately 1/8 Irish myself, and quite fond of wine.


Driving back, we passed so many beautiful old houses, I think the three-martini break group should all move up here and go to work for NYDOT, which probably has a massive budget because they get all of Texas' hard-earned gas tax money and squander it on incomprehensible, very frequently-placed reference markers, of which I have not yet been able to get a clear picture due to the fact that my father insists on driving past them at speeds that won't cause a 15-car pileup.

Some people need to work a little bit harder on their priorities.


Two or three of these adorable places would easily house us all. And if the NYDOT thing didn't work out, we'd have a sitcom just waiting to be filmed. Can't you hear the theme music now?

Every episode would have to end with one of us stepping hilariously into a fresh pile of horse dooky.