Lori was upstairs having a nap; I was in the living room on the desktop computer. Jasper was in the kitchen playing Minecraft on my laptop, and Millie was streaming shows off of Netflix, when I heard the word “crap” in a familiar voice.
A trip into the family room confirmed — Millie had stumbled on to the South Park Christmas special featuring Mr. Hankey. Yeah, I put a stop to that pretty quickly, and am keeping a sharper ear open.
No, I didn’t kill him. I did remember how inconvenient the old “run as close to owner as possible without getting caught” game can be.
His punishment: the cold shoulder from me for ten minutes. He hates that, especially when Roxy gets attention.
Roxy is the little gal further from the camera; Jet is the big boy closer.
Mr. Man:
Can we watch Dave and Becky now?
Daddy:
I don’t care what we watch as long as Daddy doesn’t have to struggle not to bawl.
The Great Hop Shortage of 2008 convinced me to take up hop gardening this year. It’s something I’d always wanted to do when I had space, but it took five-dollar-an-ounce hops to give me the real kick in the pants I needed.
I ordered a half-dozen hop rhizomes from The Thyme Garden but, due to the strange weather this Spring, waited until April 19 to put them in the ground.
Some of them took longer than others, but they’re all up and doing pretty well. The varieties I planted, and photos, below the break:
Last weekend I cut down some old yews that were becoming overgrown near our deck.
Today I dragged the carcasses to the burn pile. My 4-year-old son is going through a particularly helpful phase, and dragged a lot of this wood to the pile with me.
Later, as naptime approached, I flashed the fingers of both hands at him, telling him that he had “this many minutes” left to play before his nap.
“And then this many?” he said, showing me the fingers of his left hand.
“No, this many,” I said, repeating the original offer.
“I helped you lots today,” he said.
“You stinker,” I laughed, “you’re calling in a favor on me!”
I gave him fifteen, and then some.
So here I am watching The Polar Express with the kids; we’ve just gotten past the point where the boy says “I believe,” then Santa shows up and asks “What was that you said?”
It took manful effort not to say “you heard me just fine, Fatso” at the screen. (Note: I failed to resist on a later viewing, drawing a sharp glance from Lori.)
I’ve seen too many Tarantino flicks.
The best dog in the world, Barney, died tonight around 10:30 on the kitchen floor.
He’d had a cough for a couple of weeks, nothing so severe or frequent as to worry us much, and was supposed to see the doctor on Tuesday to get it checked out. This evening, though, he seemed a lot less lively than usual, and his cough was much worse, so we called to try and move the appointment up to tomorrow morning.
Tonight, I was in the family room, and he’d settled down on the kitchen floor where he sometimes would lie. I’d just finished playing a computer game, and he was making sounds that sounded at first like the cough had died down and he was resting a little more comfortably, but after a few seconds it was clear that something was wrong. When I got to him, he was limp and drooling fluid profusely. I even tried holding him upside down, just in case draining the fluid that way would help, but it was no use. It was frightening how quickly he had gone downhill.
I wish I had noticed something was amiss earlier, and I wish to hell we had taken that cough more seriously than we did. He was a good dog, and I’m going to miss him.
