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.

His punishment: the cold shoulder from me for ten minutes. He hates that, especially when Roxy gets attention.

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.

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:

Cascade

Centennial

Magnum

Oh, wait…

Mount Hood

Sterling

And the undisputed champeen of the growth competition, Willamette

They’re doing about as well as I expected, mostly. I’m a bit surprised to see the Sterling outpacing, well, anything, as it was the runt of the litter, and the Magnum looked like it was going to take off a little better than it did. Otherwise, the state of the bines is roughly reflective of the state of the rhizomes as they went into the ground.

Note that the rod in all these photos is around a half inch in diameter.

This post brought to you by my assistants:

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.

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.

Happy 1st birthday, Millie