dakota

Here’s my dog, Dakota, when she was a puppy:

This picture was taken a couple of weeks after I got her. She was about 4 months old. She's 2½ now but she's still just a puppy. Her most recent vice is that she loves to get my socks from the bedroom and bring them out to her bed in the living room. She doesn't chew them up or tear them apart or anything, she just brings them out and lays them on her bed. I'm guessing she knows she'd get in trouble if she ruined them in any way, but she still wants to protest the fact that we leave her everyday. A single sock...laid nicely on her bed...almost daily. Oh well, it's better than when she chews on the blinds!

Here is a more recent picture of her:

I'll post some pictures of her counterpart, Delana, another day.

Later...

P.M.E...

I've recently been wondering whether I'm named after Philip Michael Thomas

or the good catholic Bishop Philip Michael Ellis, O.S.B., son of John Ellis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Michael_Ellis

Mom? Dad? Anyone?

global warming

While listening to Rush the other day, I heard about 86 year old Reid Bryson who is an Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. Back in the 60s, he was laughed to scorn as he was one of the first to pioneer the idea that humans can affect global climate change. Since then, he has reversed his views, and once again he challenges mainstream thoughts on the causes of global warming.

Here is an article the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative wrote about his recent views:

http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson says. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

To put it simply, the earth’s climate changes are independent of anything humans have done, are doing, or ever will do.

Did you know that the Vikings used to farm on Greenland for about 300 years? That’s how Greenland got its name. Then, sometime after the 13th century, it froze over and began to look like this:

Now, as glaciers are melting all over the world, can you guess what archaeologists are finding underneath? Mature forests, agricultural water-management systems, and in the Alps, silver mines complete with tools stacked up outside waiting for the following mining season after the winter snows melted. The only problem was that one year, the snows didn’t melt. They didn’t melt the next year either…or the next…or the next. Enter the Little Ice Age. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ mastery of deduction to figure out that the earth used to be a lot warmer than it has been for the last several hundred years. Things are just now going back to normal after the earth’s “cool season.”

Al, you really need to wake up and smell the silver mines.

siesta anyone?

One potentially good thing about illegal immigration - a majority vote for daily siestas! I don't know about you, but I'm having a pretty heavy afternoon crash today! I could go for a nice siesta right about now!

ahh, the memories...

I was reminiscing today with some of my coworkers about the fond memories we have of our childhood. We talked about the games we would play, like Stuck-in-the-Mud and TV Tag. We also talked about how we determined who would be “it” at the beginning of each game. Here are just a few examples that I remember:

Eenie meenie miney moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers make him pay
Fifty dollars every day
My mother said to pick the very best one
And you are not it.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more

Skunk in the graveyard
Pee-yoo!
Somebody ate it
That’s you!

Inky binky bottle of ink
The cap fell off and you stink

Bubblegum bubblegum in a dish
How many pieces do you wish?

First, second, third,
Military turd!

So anyway, we’re sitting around, reminiscing about all the good times we had, when suddenly I remembered how my sister used to torture me with scary stories of the china doll, the whistle man, and dead man’s curve, just to name a few. For years I could not bring myself to close my eyes in the shower for fear that the china doll would jump on me and scratch me to death. I remember shuddering whenever I would hear the long, shrill call of the whistle man who lived outside near the fire hydrant. Kathy would spin these tales, scare me half to death, and then relish in the fact that I believed her every word, no matter how ridiculous it seemed. I lived half my life in fear of her stories, and the other half was lived in fear of her. Pretty nice system she had going.

Maybe I deserved it, though. I’m not sure if Kathy or any of my other friends ever knew this, but I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how not to be it according to the games I mentioned above. I would simply figure out who I needed to start counting with in order for me not to be it by the end of the game. It took a long time to figure it all out ahead of time, because it all depended on how many people were in on the game.

For example, if there were only two of us and we were doing eenie meenie miney moe, I would start counting with the other person, that way the “and you are not it” would land on me, and I would, therefore, not be it. If there were three of us in the game, however, I would start counting with the person on my right, thereby ensuring that I, again, would not be it. It was simple arithmetic that I’m sure all of us were capable of figuring out, but because the system has the potential to continue ad nauseam, I doubt that any of my friends would ever devote the amount of time necessary to decipher such simple schoolyard games. It did, however, provide me with a certain childish satisfaction.

So anyway, Kathy, thank you for all of the childhood nightmares you so lovingly provided for me through the years…but at least I never had to be it!