Ode to my bitch.

A poem, jointly composed with Secundus while walking the lady Leila around a pond on Halloween. Not that those last two facts have anything to do with it.

Our dog
Is not a possum.
When bigger dogs diss her in the street, she doesn't lie down and play dead till they go away, thinking she's just put one across 'em.
She fearlessly barks right back, which makes her
Ossum.

(Note to international readers: That Og de Nash-ian last rhyme doesn't work with an English accent.)

I need a minder.

A few days ago, I put my kettle on the stove for some tea, got distracted by something, and forgot all about it. I didn't hear the whistle through the closed door, but an hour or so later, I distinctly heard the kitchen smoke detector. The kettle had boiled dry, and although still intact, it had taken on a smoky odor on the inside.

Not wanting all my tea to taste like lapsang souchong (I'm decidedly either green or Orange Pekoe), I survived for a day or two by sticking my mug in the microwave.

But I broke down and spent the $60 for a cordless electric kettle, on the grounds that it has an automatic cut-off when it reaches boiling point. Safe, right? Foolproof.

Not if you come down for breakfast, fill your new electric kettle, and then absent-mindedly put it on the gas burner. This time my nostrils detected the stink of scorched black plastic just before the smoke detector started shrieking.

Tea addiction and ADD -- not a good combination.

Hitchcock should've had these problems.

I've just left the house with the beast when I hear the noise of a sudden hailstorm in the road ahead.

A black splattering of grackles -- the collective noun is a "plague" -- has flecked the treetops around the nearby pond, several hundred birds that all sound as if they need oiling. Their greedy scamperings in a high oak tree causes a cloudburst of acorns, which pelt me and Leila, and, to the surprise of its driver, bounce off the paintwork of a car that attempts to nose its way down my Dead End street.

Leila barks, and they flee, in concerted cowardice. But they're back by the end of our walk, and we're pelleted again from above.

Now if I were a true poet, I'd be trying to make this into a metaphor for something.

Or for Doctor Who fans . . .

Separated at birth?

Tertius's latest portrait of me and . . . oh, surely not.

What don't like it?

Right-click with your cursor on the stripe along the bottom of the screen in Microsoft Windows. You get a menu with an option to "Lock the Taskbar."

Wasn't that a song by The Clash?

Discipline!

Multi-tasking! Not a male strong point, but I'm doing my best with some much-needed time management.

The fair Leila requires her daily exercise. So do I. So I've combined them into my new regime -- no less than an hour of non-stop walking around the streets of Rye and Harrison and occasionally Mamaroneck*, at a brisk and calorie-consuming pace of 4 mph, apart from those days when I'm dragging children behind me. With varying four-mile loops plotted on Google Earth.

Ah, but it doesn't stop there -- that's also a good hour for thinking and planning and plotting, with the blood gushing through my brain and my lungs filled with air. Or I can listen to informative BBC and NPR podcasts on the iTouch, which did dry out after its recent dunking in the john. Or I can make a personal phone call or two, as long as the person at the other end doesn't mind the heavy breathing or the pause (and sound effects) when I have to gather dog poop.

(Given the praise she gets when she delivers and the care with which I pick up after her and carry it away in those little blue New York Times bags, Leila must think I'm some kind of collector.)

Sometimes I get more exercise than planned. A couple of weeks ago, I was about two-thirds of the way around my loop when I noticed my glasses, which I'd hooked over the neckline of my shirt, were missing. I turned around and retraced my steps, scanning the ground. Amazingly, I found them in the middle of the sidewalk, just a hundred yards from home. It would have been quicker to complete the original circuit and then go round a second time. Instead I covered five and a half miles that day.

Yesterday, the same thing happened. This time I was going the opposite way round the same loop, but two-thirds into it, I looked down at my jeans pocket and realized my new pedometer must have fallen off. Again, reverse course, retrace steps, study the sidewalk fruitlessly, get home after a much longer walk than planned. But I found this missing item, too. I'd dropped it on the bedroom floor.

*I like Mamaroneck because it's easy to spell. Just one consonant per syllable. None of that confusing Massachusetts or Mississippi stuff.

And they say it's snooker that's the sign of a misspent youth.

I'm telling the boys about the movie trivia game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." (Very happy that Secundus immediately spots the assonant similarity between "Kevin Bacon" and the word "Separation" from the original phrase. He also thinks Bacon is a funny name.)

Ignoring their initial challenges -- I'm not sure that Miley Cyrus or Miranda Cosgrove* have exactly the body of work that makes this worthwhile --they give me John Cleese to Harrison Ford.

Hmmm. But I got a three-degree answer within two minutes: John Cleese was in Rat Race with Rowan Atkinson; Atkinson was the comic relief in Never Say Never Again with Sean Connery; Connery was in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Harrison Ford.

What pleases me is not the speed, which was only average, but the unlikely members of the chain: Basil Fawlty -- Mr. Bean -- James Bond -- Indiana Jones.

(This morning, while walking the dog, I got that elusive two-degree solution -- I don't think there's a one-degree, because I don't believe Cleese and Ford were ever co-stars. Cleese was in Time Bandits with Kenny Baker as one of the dwarves; Baker was inside R2-D2 in the original Star Wars trilogy with Ford as Han Solo. Of course, Sean Connery was also in Time Bandits, so I could have just skipped Blackadder in the earlier chain.)

Am I boring you?

*She did do a voice in Despicable Me, which connects her to Dame Julie Andrews, no less. And that's a link to the Bride of Frankenstein (Elsa Lanchester in Mary Poppins.) And, incidentally, to John Cleese in Shrek 2.

Later addition: Okay, I had to hit up the Internet Movie Data Base to see what Miley Cyrus could offer in her brief movie career. She did a voice in Bolt, which connects her to John Travolta, who starred in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, which featured a guest appearance by second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin. (Two steps.) You can also get through Travolta to Abe Vigoda (Looks Who's Talking.) And to Jamie Lee Curtis (Perfect) who was in A Fish Called Wanda with  . . . John Cleese.

But the scariest is that Malcolm McDowell also did a voice in Bolt, and he starred in Caligula, which also featured Sir John Gielgud. The greatest Hamlet of his time to Hannah Montana in just two steps. Oy.

Cereal filler.

Doing a Whole Foods run to equip the kitchen, I also load up on my favorite breakfast cereal, a nutritious blend of kamut, spelt, and quinoa, which doesn't taste like an Ikea tabletop and which, combined with say banana slices, blueberries, and blackberries and a sprinkling of toasted wheatgerm is the perfect way to start the day, unless of course there's cold mushroom pizza in the fridge.

When Tertius was in nursery school, he dictated the captions for a clutch of his drawings that were bound into a book and presented to me for Fathers Day. It all seemed a pretty accurate assessment, until it got to my favorite food. His teacher had transcribed that I "like to eat Harry T. Jones."

More recent portraits of me by Tertius.

A little distracted by the homoerotic overtones of this observation, I protested that I didn't know anyone called Harry T. Jones even to talk to, let alone, well . . . (The nearest name in my experience was "F. Harry Stowe," which isn't a person but the way to pronounce the Greek word for "thank you." Benefits of a classical education, which I freely bestow on you, dear reader. Oh, you're welcome.)

It took me a while to realize that Tertius had quite accurately offered up the name of this Cheerios-shaped breakfast cereal. It's called  "Heritage O's."

It's (something, something) gone mad, I tell you.

From the instructions for a new purchase:

"Use a qualified electrician for installation of this lighting fixture.

Before installing fixture disconnect power by turning the circuit breaker or by removing the fuse at the fuse box . . ."

It was only a bloody reading lamp!

Mind you, it reminds me of the joke: How many Rye housewives does it take to change a light-bulb?

Two. One to call the electrician and one to mix the cocktails.