Lies, Lies, Lies

Confession: Trina
Photos: Greg

This post has been edited and its content censored for entertainment purposes. We now present photos of our exotic Assyrian Moth Hound.



...in him (the deep chest, the double suspension gallop, the loooove of running, the profile)...



(the size, the coloring, the ears, the curling tail, the non-shedding and odor-free coat).





...that this dog is "a hardy little fellow who is proud, courageous, loyal to its master, spirited and alert, with high energy, intelligent, lively and brave," prone to burrowing under the covers at bedtime, ridiculously goofy, ridiculously fast -- well, ridiculous in general.



...he really is a Moth Hound.

Dream of the Long Way Home

Words and photos by Greg

There is a convoluted web of trails that flow through my nighttime dreams, where connections are found and lost, where the flow of trails can be sweet and smooth or where I can find myself again in the thick, wet forest, bumping and sliding over logs on the edge of the stream where the trail disappears or I can no longer find it.

The trails I ride are familiar, or so I believe, those mornings when I wake with the lingering sense of them. Dreams, for me, are rarely remembered, but the trails that live within them seem to lay out patterns that I have ridden through many nights, where I have become intimate with the turns, twists, intersections, and obstacles of each, the way a tongue becomes familiar with teeth.

The rides I dream of take me to places that the trails of my waking life do not. But they are not over-glorious, nor extra vivid, nor idealized. I do not ride in a magical landscape past unicorns. I do not fly over massive gap-jumps or charge effortlessly through horrific jumbles of rock. The trails of my dreams are hard-working journeyman trails of serpentine singletrack, bread-and-butter step-ups, corners that rail but are not bermed, sprinkled with moves that keep me alert but allow me to flow. There is dust. There is mud. My dreams are not all downhill. I pedal up climbs and breathe the hard breath of honesty.

I ride these dreams with a friend or two. I ride these dreams alone. There are trails warmed with companionship and there are times when it is only my own motion that heats the trail.

I have a sense that within these dreams I always choose the long way home. Some nights I return on strands of familiar trails. Some nights I seem to leave the known trails to experiment with another way. I roll onto trails that I have not ridden before, in directions that could be right, but lead into unknown places in the forest of my night. Sometimes these trails become a new long way home. Sometimes they end in tatters where the only way forward seems to be to wake up and leave the dream for another night.

Perhaps the trails of my dreams actually are vivid, idealized and glorious. Because they are very much like the trails I ride in the waking world. Trails that are filled with rough flow. Trails that weave through colors and contours. Trails that pull the sweat of effort from me. Trails I've ridden a hundred times and trails where I have never been. Trails that, dreaming or not, make me want to take the long way home.

You call this Dirt and Dogs?

Words and photos: Greg

I guess I'll go ahead and apologize to all of you who started coming to our blog because it had something to do with mountain biking. I will take full and complete responsibility for interrupting that line of photos and stories, even though the only thing I did to make it stop was to, er, go out mountain biking. And to subsequently suffer the consequences that occasionally swerve into an otherwise pleasant activity.

If you are here, once again, to view something pertaining to mountain biking, you may be disappointed. If, however you're here for Dirt and Dogs, you are in luck. There are a couple photos of biking on dirt. And there are some dog photos. So, hey, we're sticking to our theme, anyway.

But yes, I have been wearing a cast on my right arm since the middle of August, and I have been healing. The awkward over-the-elbow cast was traded for a forearm cast almost three weeks ago, and I've gone from doing everything with one arm to doing most things clumsily with two again. I've been riding the whole time, but now I'm hanging on and using the brake with both hands (sorta) again. And riding around town holding a leashed dog again, too. Progress.

Meanwhile, while Trina has been obsessing over spiders (and more spiders), I have not been sitting idly, but have been accumulating photos that didn't seem to fit any of our recent posts. So here they are.

Dirt, dogs, and a long-arm cast.


Dirt, no dogs, short-arm cast, and pushing up a steep hill to the safe flat part.


Evening ride with Trina (and dogs, on dirt) indulging me on a flat, boring trail.


Colorful garden-to-kitchen fare.


Aesthetics of junk.


Some colorful (or otherwise captivating) creatures I have met recently.








Dirt and dogs.


Dirt and vegetables.


Dirty wet dogs. And Trina.

Spiders: They are Busy

Story: Trina
Photo: Greg

"Spiders: They are Cuddly" was, admittedly, a hastily composed post, just sort of thrown together as an excuse to link to the Hyperbole and a Half blog to which we've recently been introduced, and which has been making us hoot and snort and laugh ALOT.

But, in all seriousness, being way more mature and sophisticated than that Allie girl over at Hyperbole - well, we are -- we feel obligated to post something a little more serious in defense of our unfairly maligned (and squished) eight-legged friends.

Which is where Fluffy the Spider comes in.



We've been watching Fluffy for a week or so. She has built her web in the upper corner of the doorway that leads from my kitchen out to my courtyard. Not the most convenient place in terms of using the door as a -- oh, I don't know, maybe a thoroughfare? -- but certainly a convenient location for seeing what she's up to, seeing how her web has fared the daily ravages of bugs, wind, birds, clumsy passersby. She's nocturnal, tucking herself into the upper corner of the doorframe during the day so that you wouldn't even know she was there if it weren't for the dinner plate sized web that nearly wraps itself around your whole head when you forget to duck as you step out to the courtyard.

Every day the web gets damaged in one way or another so that every evening when she emerges, her first task is to repair, if not entirely rebuild, the web. It has only been entirely obliterated once when Greg plowed right into it face first. He barely got out before she came down and latched onto his face and sucked his eyeballs dry. Watching her work in the evening is truly amazing, way better than TV, and realizing how much work goes into her web on a nightly basis is simply daunting. Every morning the web is in pristine condition.

A couple of days ago a smaller but otherwise identical spider, Mittens, suddenly appeared, with a web off to the right of the kitchen door in a rose bush. His web was there for 24 hours and then just as suddenly as it had appeared, both web and spider were gone. With no sign of a comeback from Mittens, I was pretty sure he was in my hair for a couple of days until last night at bedtime when he showed up in Fluffy's web. Wooing? Mooching? Invading? Is he Fluffy's offspring? Potential mate? Rival? Sibling?

He proceeded to stumble around Fluffy's web a little, causing great apparent agitation, and I started to get excited for some late night spider drama... until he scuttled to the safety of the door frame and started what promised to be his own web in the adjacent upper corner, so that in order to go from kitchen to courtyard we'd have to practically crawl. But his web ended up being merely a random mess of disorganized silks sort of glueing the door into its frame (until I pried it open this morning), bringing me to the conclusion that Mittens is probably, sadly, retarded. He is most likely, as my life experience informs me, Fluffy's retarded little brother who was dropped on his head as a baby.