Day 24.

I am in a rotten mood, and I attribute this to three things:

1) The low-battery indicator bleep of my phone, which started around 6 in the morning and continued, every 30 seconds or so, until I woke up. My phone now has the battery-life of approximately 13 minutes, and the fine people of Motorola designed this indicator bleep to be the most annoying sound ever created or heard by man.

2) The insistent licking of the dog, who ignored my suggestion that he go outside before I went to bed and bugged me from sunrise on. Having done so he's now curled up on the bed, having gone back to sleep. That little shit. It's a good thing he's so adorable, or I would've made his legs into ham a long time ago.

3) The dream I had in which everyone I know—indeed, perhaps everyone who has ever lived—came up to visit me here, packed in like sardines and constantly bickering. "I want to sit near the fire!" "No, I want to sit near the fire!" "We're all out of cereal! Who are all the cereal?" "Don't look at me! It was him!" Thus begin my returning-to-society anxiety dreams.

Anyway. I am now listening to my surefire, knock-my-ass-out-of-a-bad-mood soundtrack. It never, ever fails, and I'm already feeling better. Would you like to know what it is? Yes? Promise not to laugh? Okay. It's John Deby's score from the Back to the Future trilogy. My favorite track is number eight, "Doc Returns."

Anyway. I made pie last night, which was lovely, since I don't consider myself much of a baker. Graham cracker crust, whiskey caramel-tossed apples. Mmmm. It really made me wish I had some ice cream, but I settled for a glass of milk.

I heard wolves again last night, but these were farther off. I was also going to take pictures of birds I thought were snow geese this morning, since my father took the curmudgeon's side in the Great You Didn't See a Snow Goose Argument of '09. It turned out that these were not, in fact, snow geese, they were swans. But, this doesn't mean that all birds I saw weren't snow geese, only that these specific birds were not. My greatest goal is to get a picture of snow geese and put this whole thing to rest.

Okay. I have to drink some coffee and wake up suitably enough to operate a chainsaw.