Our dog is sick. We don’t even know what that means just yet, but we know she’s far from the spry days of her youth.
It might be cancer. It might just be old age. Fifteen years is a hell of a run for any dog. Look May right in the face, though, and you’ll see that she’s not done yet. Not by a long shot. Continue reading
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds –
and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of –
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I’ve chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
“Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God.
“High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Every generation has at least one event during their formative years—childhood, young adulthood, & such—where they remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. It’s something of a cliché, really, but it’s still a moment frozen in time for each of us.
For my parents’ generation, it was the Kennedy assassination, November 22, 1963. For many, many people, myself included, it was September 11, 2001. For me, and many people around my age, it was also January 28, 1986, the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. Continue reading
Three things I learned recently:
Back in college, my time-management skills were about as terrible as they are today (although I didn’t have the benefit of an ADHD diagnosis back then, whatever that benefit might be.) I would occasionally find myself facing a due date for a paper—for which I had not even started preparing—that was, in the context of the time, “tomorrow.” This necessitated that time-honored college tradition, the “all-nighter.” I couldn’t tell you how many of those I pulled back in the day. (Left entirely to my own devices, I think I’d still be primarily nocturnal, but that’s a story for another day.)
Unlike many college-age kids, though, I was never very good at going without sleep altogether. Upon wrapping up my 5-to-7-page tome comparing and contrasting Henry Kissinger’s The White House Years to William Shawcross’ Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon & the Destruction of Cambodia at around 4:00 a.m.*, I still felt the compelling need for sleep. I developed a technique I referred to as “the sneak” (mostly because I was too tired to think of a better name for it.) Continue reading
I’m taking a much-needed vacation for a few days.
That’s pretty much all I have to say about that, but here’s a useful reminder that it’s not cool to jump out and scare people:
“Isms” in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an “ism”, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Good point there. After all, he was the Walrus. I could be the Walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off of people. – Ferris Bueller
I have struggled for some time with how to describe myself. I have finally concluded that no single “-Ism” defines me. If you want to know what I believe or what my stance is on a given issue, you are going to have to ask me.
![Joe Flintham [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via Flickr](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/5655067309_3927925973_z.jpg "Joe Flintham [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via Flickr")
I’m not interested in any ideology that doesn’t think lambs are cute.
Photo credit: Joe Flintham [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.
I was going through posts on my old law blog, and found a post from about 3½ years ago in which I tried out something called the AgeAnalyzer. Using what I’m sure are extremely advanced socio-dynamic algorithms, the site examines a website and guesstimates the age of the writer. Back in 2012, it estimated my age, based on my law blog posts, as 51-65 years of age. I was 37 at the time.
My last post to that blog was in 2012 sometime. Now that I have moved my erstwhile blogging activities to this site, and refocused my efforts much more towards animal GIFs and WTF moments, I thought I’d see how this site compares, in terms of computer-estimated age.
Yup, AgeAnalyzer thinks the author of this blog (who is the same person as the author of the other blog, plus three years) is 26-35 years old.
A 26 year-old would have been born in 1989. I was in high school in 1989. People born in 1989, based on a quick and lazy Google search that made me realize how little I know about anyone who became famous after roughly 1999, include:
I hadn’t heard of anyone else.
Meanwhile, famous people sharing my birth year include: Continue reading
My dog and I recently celebrated our eighth adopt-a-versary. Since I also treat that day as her birthday, and the vet estimated that she was about two years old when I got her, that means that last month was her tenth birthday. She has been recovering from knee surgery since early June, so it was a very low-key celebration. I do plan on doing a bit more to celebrate when she’s off restricted duty.
She likes to sleep a lot anyway, so her “light duty” assignment works out okay most of the time.
In all the excitement of the past week or two, with my dog’s knee surgery, the removal of multiple squirrel nests—and the associated squirrel urine stench—from our attic (more on that in a later post, perhaps), and this weekend’s 48-Hour Film Project, I nearly forgot that today is a pretty important milestone.
Eight years ago today, a beautiful young blonde woman came into my life. I can’t really think of many other ways keep this vague: I’m talking about my dog, Zeta.
Since I have no idea exactly how old she is, or when her actual birthday is, we treat June 14 as her birthday. The vet estimated that she was about two years old at her first exam back in 2007, so we’re treating today as her tenth birthday.
Or we would be treating today as her tenth birthday if we hadn’t all gotten so distracted by everything else going on. Zeta’s pretty oblivious to everything, anyway, given that she’s only one week into her surgery recover. Here she is earlier today: Continue reading