Report from the sticks

-'My poodle broke a nail' is not the world's greatest problem, but it's a slightly larger one than it seems like it might be.

-In which local food is bad for the environment: There's a great nearby farm that sells eggs. I drove over, in part for said eggs, in part to test my own navigational skills in farm country - vast stretches of what to me seem like undifferentiated green-ness. Navigational skills, check. But they were out of eggs. Drove back empty-tote-bagged.

A different nearby farm. Monty Python was right - llamas are bigger than frogs.

-In other farm-country news: there's nothing like your hairdresser finding a tick on your scalp to a) make you completely lose focus from the haircut in question (which, oddly enough, I now see, turned out great!), b) up the hypochondria quotient of what is generally one of your tamer beauty procedures, and c) make you feel very rustic when tossing the creature out of your hair mid-haircut. What I ought to have remembered is that one is supposed to save, not stomp on, the tick in order to properly identify it. What I did remember - well, realize on the spot - is that one must leave a >20% tip on occasions when your hairdresser must double as an entomologist.