Events

Quick: who's cuter? OK, no real contest here. He's also better looking than I am:

Parker had a well-needed bath today, complete with an unfortunately sweet-smelling shampoo and a bandanna that even Parker thinks looks silly: Now he's pooped. The first spot he chose to lie in happened to be the spot I was just about to vacuum, so his day just keeps getting worse. He might not even get to play with his friends tonight; last night, the park was so muddy we had to move across the street. Poor Parker. It's a dog's...well, you know.

The overnight low temperature in Chicago has dropped below freezing every night since January 12th. This is the longest stretch of below-freezing nights in at least seven years. It's getting really quite old. That is all.

Parker's new crate actually has more than double the area of his old crate. He has enough room to flop on his side and to turn around comfortably. Plus, he has his favorite crusty old bedspread to sleep on: A note about that crusty, old bedspread. Anne informs me that she paid about $150 for it a few years ago, and it only acquired its patina of puppy puke and peanut butter (along with several gashes and other miscellaneous defilements) in the last six months or so. She volunteered no thoughts about how...

One of the side-effects of obedience training I didn't know ahead of time is that Parker is now crate-trained. Since he's also more than double the size he was when I first met him, the crate I had for him was a little tight. So I bought him a new crate, with more than double the footprint of his old one, and with a lot more light and air. Enough light and air, in fact, that I can point the ParkerCam at him when he's in it: Check for Parker during the day. If I remember to bring the camera to my office...

Parker went to the vet yesterday because I noticed this lovely thing growing in his lip: The diagnosis? Dogwarts, also known as canine oral papilloma. Seriously. He has the doggy equivalent of HPV, in that it's pretty much the same virus and it's also just about as common (most dogs have it). It's spread through saliva, so most dogs get it when they play with lots of other dogs. It's the doggy "social disease." There's no pain, but there's no cure either, so it will just go away on its own—after he...

Heel, heel, heel, sit, down, stay...it's all so tiring: Also: good news to ParkerCam fans. The ParkerCam will return Thursday.

MSNBC reported overnight that U.S. troops have entered Sadr City in Baghdad. That's newsworthy in itself, but they added an extra level of irony by running their nightly headline-roundup email through an over-zealous spell check: U.S. troops enter Sadder City Hundreds of U.S. soldiers entered the Shiite stronghold of Sadder City on Sunday in the first major push into the area since an American-led security sweep began last month around Baghdad. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17450016/ Sigh.

The clouds broke this evening just long enough for me to see the eclipse. As they say in Boston: wicked cool.

The eclipse will be total from 4:44 pm CT to 5:58 pm, so when the moon rises over Chicago at 5:39 pm it will appear a deep red. (If it appears at all, of course; the weather will likely be cloudy.) Observers on the East Coast will have a better view; Europeans will get to see the whole thing.