I cannot wash the smock I wear to Bird TLC every Tuesday in the same laundry load as the sheet I use to cover my couch to protect it from dog hair. Otherwise I spend half a day picking dog hair off the smock. Excuse me now, I have some picking to do.

Growing up Italian - and being Italian myself - I’m used to moles appearing at various parts of my body and the faces, arms, necks and other visible body parts of my relatives. So when both my dogs starting developing what seemed like moles, I figured it was no big problem. I can love them moles and all. This euphoric feeling lasted until I noticed that the mole on Blondie’s face seemed to be taking on a life of its own. Ditto when I finally took a close look at what was happening on Blue’s face. So next week we go to the vet in the hope of being told not to worry, they really are just moles and not new life forms.
Why do I suspect I won’t be that lucky?

It’s the sound of national Democrats salivating over our Senatorial race. Alaskan Democrats, meanwhile, stick their heads cautiously up from the foxholes and wonder if that light in the distance is truly the sun or a cruel trick being played on them.

In the primaries that occurred last week, Alaska Republicans voted for a Senate nominee who thinks we should basically end all government spending and a House nominee who is one of the kings of pork. Am I the only one who thinks that’s a little schizophrenic?

For the Oscars, I wear a tiara while sipping a smart cocktail.
For the Emmys, I wear a clean babushka while sipping sugar free juice.
And that’s the way it will remain until NCIS or CSI gets the recognition it deserves.

Today I bring Captain and CB for their favorite thing in the whole world… getting their beaks and nails trimmed. I will need to be careful the rest of the week so that they never get a chance to rip my face open as an expression of their great joy.

As far as I’m concerned, summer arrived at exactly the right time in Anchorage… after the hot weather and before the snow. I can walk without beating back mosquitoes, the sun is warm but the breeze is cool and the whole world seems big, alive, clear and clean. I watch birds getting ready for their trip south, geese practicing their take offs and landings, all our little brown birds storing food for winter, my Stellar Jays putting down impossible amounts of peanuts to stash all over the neighborhood… yep, this is definitely the way to do summer… and even as I finished those words, the rain and wind returned. Sigh.

Last year, it took me about two days to realize that the noise wasn’t the wind shaking the flue in the chimney. When I finally opened it, a bird fell into the towel I held in my hand below the flue. I put the silly little Stellar Jay outside, gave him some peanuts and a dish of water to wash off the dust while he regained his composure. He finally flew off looking fine.
So this year when I heard the noise, I knew exactly what it was. Only I forgot that I didn’t have the flue shut and, because the fireplace itself was dark and so is a Stellar Jay, when I opened the little screen to place the towel under the flue preparatory to opening it, a Stellar Jay immediately flew at me with some level of frantic purpose.
I fell over backward and hit my head, allowing the jay time to fly across my living room and up to the top of the closet door. My two parrots and cockatoo reacted as though Voldemort had entered their home. They screamed and ran frantically all over their cages while the Stellar Jay checked out the lay of the land from his lofty position.
Once I was on my feet again and my head stopped throbbing, I opened the sliding glass door to the porch. I recognized the jay as a regular visitor and figured he would recognize the porch and trees and fly to it. Only he didn’t. He just sat on the closet door.
So I got a towel and tried to grab him which led to a merry chase through my living room and kitchen with my dog Blue running around frantically at my feet and, since she’s pretty blind, tripping me up every other step. My birds continued to scream and the jay continued to circle the room in silence as though determined to ignore the open door and inviting porch until he’d seem everything he’d come to see. Then he flew straight out the door and perched in the tree for a moment before descending to the porch to get a drink of water from the dog dish out there. He completed his adventure by grabbing a peanut before heading home to tell the family about his day.
Meanwhile, I got left behind with two hysterical parrots, a cockatoo hiding in his little house and a nearly blind dog who clearly had no idea what had just happened except that suddenly his mom had started running around like a mad woman and if she went nuts, they who would be left to feed the dogs?
And then I went off to my public broadcasting board meeting and pretended I had a normal life.

Yesterday my kid sister Judy got older than I ever thought she would. And still she dreams of actually, someday when she’s all grown up, having an ass. Alas, the Sereni curse is to have none. So if you see this butt anywhere in Atlantic City or its environs today, will you please wish it a happy belated birthday.

If you read popular literature or follow popular culture, you definitely get the idea that every girl goes through a period of ripping wedding dress pictures out of magazines and fantasizing about what her wedding will be like while planning all the details in her teen years.  Am I the only one who never did this? I feel so stupid sometimes because it seems as though I’m the only person in the world who never even imagined doing that.
Maybe it has something to do with my distinct lack of taste in clothing and lack of interest in acquiring any taste in that area. Maybe I just always instinctively knew that would never happen for me. Or maybe I just had enough of a life that the thought of planning for my wedding when I was in 4th grade never really occurred to me.

When you spill an entire cup of coffee on your keyboard, you have to REALLY, REALLY make sure to dry it all off or some of the keys will stickkkkkkkk.

A friend told me she might have to have her gall bladder out. She asked me if I’d ever had mine out. I had to stop and think because I, for the life of me, couldn’t remember if they took it out when they did my gastric bypass. They might have. I just don’t remember.
How pathetic is it that I’ve reached an age where I can’t recall with any surety which body parts I have left?

I went up from my office to my kitchen to start preparing the evening meal for my little flock and two dogs. I glanced out the sliding glass door going to my porch and saw three Stellar Jays sitting on my deck chair staring in the window waiting for their evening peanuts. I guess I was late as their stares indicated a certain level of impatience with the timeliness of the service being provided. And they’re the wild birds that hang around. You don’t even want to know about the crap I get from my companion birds if the almonds aren’t on time and properly cracked.

The company that owns Fox News has apparently made a donation of about a million dollars to the some national Republican governor’s group.  And yet somehow we are supposed to think that their coverage is fair and balanced.
Somewhere in heaven, Walter Cronkite is weeping.

On what passes for a news show on Fox, Sarah Palin recently explained her opposition to an Islamic Center being built a few blocks from ground zero this way. She said that the argument for the center was that it could promote understanding and tolerance and counter extremists. If that’s so, said our lovely gal Temporary Sal, then why is it that New York City already has 100 mosques and they didn’t stop the 9/11 terrorists.
Really, Sal? Somehow mosques in NYC were supposed to affect the behavior of young men raised and schooled in the Middle East who didn’t live in NYC ever? Because unless you are privy to secret information that’s been kept from the general public, none of the 9/11 extremists was from America or NYC or anywhere near those 100 mosques.
Hmmm.... you might actually have to say that those mosques did their jobs since they did not produce one terrorist involved in the 9/11 attacks. But then, if you said that you wouldn’t be on Fox (pretend) News because you would actually have brains that you were using to think logically. And as anyone knows who watches some of the more popular fake news shows on Fox, making sense and having a brain are not half as important as using lies and half truths to rouse the rabble.