Instructions to Violet

Being a young dog who’s rather full of juice, as they say, Violet needs to learn a lot of things. Here are a few of the instructions that we give her from time to time, beyond “Stay” and “Come”:

So much to learn

“The couch is not a napkin.”
“Your mother’s lap is not a
butt-chewing platform.”
“Get your snout off the table.”
“Get your face out of that trash can.”
“Gus is not a chew toy.”
“Out! Out!”
“Drop it right now.”

The Sidekick Husband

Mrs. SR 013 and I moved from California to southern Ohio because she was offered a terrific career opportunity here. For many years before that, our careers and our individual incomes were more or less on equal footing. Now she spends her workdays wowing people at corporate meetings and flying around the country on an expense account, while I work part time locally and have more time on my hands than I’ve had in many years. I know she’s under a lot of stress, so I do the grocery shopping, the cooking and stay after the house cleaning, too. At this stage of my life, I’m OK with all that, but my role is essentially that of sidekick.

Oddly enough, there seem to be a lot of men in the Cincinnati area who are in the same position — they have jobs or careers that are subordinate to their wives’. I’ve met several in the short time I’ve lived here: smart, well-educated and relatively well-adjusted guys who work part time or not at all, while their wives earn six-figure salaries and climb the corporate ladder. My theory for this is that the national corporations headquartered here, and the many large local advertising and marketing companies that support them, belong to industries that women — particularly creative women — gravitate to. These companies tend to fill their positions with women from around the country, but often enough the process wouldn’t work without a husband willing to adapt to the relocation. And for the guys, that often means changing careers or moving into a less active phase of one.

This dynamic certainly gives new meaning to Cincinnati’s longtime moniker: The Queen City. The unspoken reality is that behind every queen is a sidekick husband.

The Memory of Snow

Evidence of nocturnal visitors

Snow has a clear, sharp memory. It’s like a recording device, like film: it provides a snapshot of what’s taken place on it. After each snowstorm here, we find deer, bird and small mammal footprints in the snow pretty much without fail. What’s particularly interesting, though, is not just what footprints are there, but how many there are and where they lead. After another storm dumped several inches of new snow yesterday, for example, deer hoofprints showed how these animals frequent the fruit trees along the driveway (see pic), although there’s little enough for them to eat there at this time of year. The multiple trails are also an indication of just how many deer there are around this place, i.e. lots. (You can see the drag marks, by the way, where they dragged their hooves across the snow as they went, planting them at intervals on firm ground, leaving a roundish hole.) We also found deer hoofprint trails to the bird feeders, where I’m sure they nose around for seed.

Update: The Winter Weather

No kidding

It has been a cold and snowy winter so far. The locals say, “It’s usually not like this.” But I’ve heard them say that about several different types of conditions in the six months I’ve been here. The truth is the Cincinnati area gets extreme doses of almost every kind of weather, by turns — heat, drought, wind, snow and yes, tornadoes. It’s very unpredictable, and whatever the weather is, it doesn’t hang around for long. The pic is of our neighbor’s pond across the road, where a group of nine geese stayed last summer. We’ve also seen great blue herons in this pond. No sign of either species these days.