All things squirrel. I’m convinced Taylor has a squirrel obsession. She spends hours in the house running from window to window as the squirrels run by, bouncing up and down and yipping frantically. Lately she’s also has taken to eating acorns that drop onto our lawn. I’ve never seen a dog do that before. Evidentally she taught Trammell the joys of a squirrel diet as he’s joined in on the buffet. Weird.

The movies I always enjoy the most and tend to come back to for repeat viewings, I think, are those where I can see myself in the role of the lead character, a ridiculously cool lead character, of course. I suppose this is normal. I’m a big fan of the Bourne series. I liked the original Matrix when it first came out. Right now my movie of the moment is Layer Cake, an awfully slick British gangster movie. Daniel Craig oozes coolness like nobody’s business. By far the best movie I’ve seen all year.

This time of year more than any other just feels like change. Not just any change but good change. The kind of change when everything can be fresh and good all over again. Where it really feels like this time around things can be different. We had a significant downpour last night that brought with it significant drop in temperature. The leaves seem like they’ve started popping off the trees overnight. Everything is dying I suppose, but it feels like brand new life. I want this weather year round.

Ultimately, my entire decision-making process, big or small comes down to one guiding principle. Simplicity. I’ve been thinking about this theory for the past two days or so, but it really hit me tonight. I was watching the dogs play in the sand volleyball pit at Jaycee Park. Just bounding around in the near dark, crounching, pouncing, running, summersaulting. Then I noticed the sand was cold and that’s what made the difference. In that instant I was happy. Because I was present in the moment, noticing details, feeling the cold, feeling the grains swish to the side as I stepped, watching uninhibited joy, feeding from that joy.

And I thought, you know, really that’s what I need. I need to be able to get caught up in more of these little moments, free from thoughts of work or bills or deadlines. I need to strip things down to the bare essentials. I want to buy a bike (with fat tires so I don’t have to worry about any more bent rims) and live close enough to work that I never have to worry about $3/gallon gas or an exhaust system that rusts up every two years. I like having clothes on hangers rather than in a dresser. I like having a mattress resting on the floor. I like shopping at Goodwill for used t-shirts. I miss my old job at Wedgwood with its lower expectations and would gladly return to it if the pay were better. I loved my old room at Ethel straight out of college with my apple crates for furniture and my cheesy nature posters on the walls. Full of stuff that you like enough, put wouldn’t be devasted if you one day instantly lost it all (say in a freak act of nature).

I guess this why I sometimes get frustrated when Mary buys $100 sets of sheets or crazy Pottery Barn knickknacks. Because, suddenly it’s more stuff that you have to care and worry about. Nobody cares if the dogs track mud all over the $15 set of blue Target sheets, but with Ralph Lauren eight million thread count sheets it becomes a mini freakout session. But, of course, this is all very subjective as I will happily drop $100 on another piece of technology. “But, we use it all the time,” I exclaim. Very subjective I suppose.

Really, I shouldn’t complain too much though. The entropy in my life definitely seems to be fading. Maybe it’s just that ever never be truly at peace or satisfied until I own my own cabana on the ocean with a couple of surf boards, a couple of dogs, and a high speed interenet connection in a back room somewhere. And a kayak. And some mountians in the other direction. But that’s it. Really.

And while we’re on the subject of dogs shredding things. Trammell and Taylor got ahold of my old high school wrestling head gear last night. Obliterated. Scattered across the basement floor in a flurry on teeth and growling, I’m sure. I had a 100 plus wins in that head gear. And a 100 plus memories to go with it. I wrestled in conference championships, district, regional, and state finals. I sweated my tail off through hundreds of high school practices and dozens of college practices. I had, what I still claim to this day to be, the greatest single moment of my life in that head gear. It hung proudly on my hip on game day and on my wall in off season as motivation. It was ugly and battered, but it fit like an extension of my body and never once snapped off my head in the heat of battle (like the fancy new one I briefly replaced it with senior year). But then how can a couple of one year old dogs ever know all this? Looked like a toy to me! I didn’t even yell at them. Just gathered up the pieces, swept a few memories through my head, and tossed the scraps into the trash. Glory days, right? Moving on…