Josie the dog, hiking, breakfast at noon, house gazing, concert, star gazing.

[derien]

(Another backdated entry - I'm writing this almost a week later, so some details have already gone out of my head.)



First order of the day on Saturday was to take cyberquail's Mom's little dog back home.  Josie is a little toy terrier of some sort.  Yorkshire?  She looks like movie!Toto, with very long, silky fur on her ears, and one ear tends to lollop down all the time - really adorable.  She was the fiercest creature when we walked into the house Friday night - of course we didn't stop and ring the doorbell, we just walked in, and she had no idea who we were, so she was a bit freaked out I imagine - and she barked and growled and we laughed at her, but as soon as cyberquail scooped her up to introduce her at eye level she was trembling, poor thing.  She soon took to eor, though, because he played with her (he has a knack for that), and by Saturday morning she liked me well enough to hang around with me in the car on the drive back to her own home.  It's hard to believe, with how energetic she is, that she's really on her way out.  Her body is riddled with tumors, apparently.  One is on her foot, and that one annoys her, but otherwise the only obvious (to us, as visitors) indication that there's something wrong is that she has very little appetite, and will often take a treat into her mouth and just carry it somewhere else and drop it.  I guess she also needs to go out to potty like every six hours, too, which is not convenient if one cares to sleep, but cyberquail wasn't seeming to mind too much. 


So, we all accompanied Josie back to cyberquail's Mom's party because Mom wanted to see eor, again. :)  And then we went for a walk in the woods, and I was surprised that it turned into more of a hike than I expected.  I was like "Ptht!  Ohio!  Rolling 'hills' - there won't be much difficulty here!"  But there's a lot of huge sedimentary rocks back in the woods, that have fallen together and been eroded around to the effect that the path would lead us down into these crevasses that turned into chimney tunnels and then became black holes that looked as though trolls should live there.  I backed out of some because I was just wearing my flipflops and the mud got a little deep. 

Although, incongruously, you get to the top of the hill and it all suddenly becomes level, and there's a chain link fence, behind which is a pond (man-made, I imagine) and a camping area, which, cyberquail says, is where they keep the hippies. :)  We didn't manage to spot any of the elusive hippies that day, though.


And now, I bet you haven't noticed, but we haven't mentioned breakfast.  There hadn't been any, as yet, and it was noon, so we went back to Quail Manor and made lovely omelets with tomatoes from the Quail Manor garden, hot peppers or green peppers, onions and of course cheese, I did fried potatoes, and there was some really good all-meat sausage.  Yum!! :) 


The afternoon was spent in chasing around Ravenna and Kent looking at a few houses for sale, just to get the lie of the land and such.  Cyberquail has been singing the praises of Ohio as a place of residence, so we thought we'd see what we could afford.  Some of them really were rather cute houses.  One which we found most amusing, though, was actually just a capped cellar hole with stone facing.  We wandered 'round and 'round that one, discussing how we could berm it up with sod, add a few rose trellises (trelli?) and turn it into a hobbit hole.  If it weren't for the water marks halfway up the inside walls we might possibly have been serious.  We  haven't got any money to spend at the moment, anyhow, so it doesn't really matter all that much. 


We adjourned back to Quail Manor and recuperated from the dehydration of driving around the towns, and cyberquail packed a lovely picnic dinner of cheeses, french bread, three bottles of wine (including  cyberquail's own home-made Quail Manor blush, which was by far everyone's favorite), cooked jalapeños and I don't remember what all else, and we went off to meet this David guy and James at the concert.  We got a lovely spot on the top of the hill, under a tree, and laid out our blanket and repast.  David brought salsa, salsa con queso, scooping Tostitos and pico de gallo flavored rice chips, so for the whole night I kept singing that Trout Fishing In America song under my breath ("even if your from Ohio it'll get you by-O!"), but nobody besides eor understood that.:)

The concert was really cool.  I have no idea what the first set was, just some random classical to fill up time until it got dark enough to see the projection screens.  After the first break they had the full orchestra doing Buggs Bunny cartoon music, with severely edited versions of the cartoons playing on the screens!  I managed to spill red wine right down the front of my shirt right away, by jumping in excitement when I thought they might be getting ready to light up the screens, and I spent most of the night squeeing and giggling with delight. :)


And THEN, as if that weren't enough for one day, we went to her friends' Sandy and Ben's house to watch the Pleides meteor shower. :)  They were very pleasant people, and I wished we could have stayed longer, but by that time we were just about dead on our feet, so we looked through their very excellent telescope at the moon and craned our necks, saw a few shooting stars, and then found we really had to go sleep.