Idaho

It’s gorgeous and…potatoey. The leaves are changing and the state is also experiencing a wonderful Indian Summer. It’s like being in a John Denver song! We are having a wonderful time going on long hikes with the dogs every day. They like to run ahead on the trails so they have plenty of time to roll with sensual abandon in any greasy slick of putrefaction they find on the trail. After grinding the decaying matter as deeply as they can into their fur they smugly trot away, wrapped securely in their cloaks of invisibility and stink, believing themselves undetectable to any rodents they may come across. Spoonie rolled in some large animal's urine/and or remains and her smell rivaled the worst of my patrons. Thankfully through on the job training at the library I have learned to mute my sense of smell.



The Tennis Ball: Billy's teacher, mother, secret lover



I have written before of Billy’s relationship with tennis ball, which is unhealthy and obsessive, and maybe a little bit disturbingly sexual. Something about the essence of tennis balls hits the addiction section of his pea brain. He can only be given tennis balls under very controlled circumstances or destruction and mayhem will result. In a mystery worthy of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of. Billy was able to find TWO tennis balls 3 miles into a trail that was pristine. Besides the trail itself there was absolutely no evidence of man, not even a cigarette butt or Power Bar wrapper! It was as if the tennis balls had fallen from a plane in a The Gods Must Be Crazy type situation, or that Billy had regurgitated them. He had a wonderful time rolling it under our feet so we would kick it and ‘make it alive’ and he could stalk it, seize it and shake and snap its 'neck,' always on narrow precipice or on a hairpin turn.