Food? What food?

We feed our dogs once a day, in the morning.

Unlike Jack and other dogs we’ve had, Dora doesn’t wolf down all of her food at once. She prefers to revisit her food bowl several times during the day and sometimes goes to bed at night with something left in the bowl for a late night snack.

But she doesn’t want Jack or any other dog staying with us to know she still has food, so she takes great pains to cover it with the old beach towel she keeps in her kennel.

Sometimes she’s a little sloppy and some of her kibble gets dumped out onto the bedroom carpet. If it doesn’t get cleaned up later in the day, she’s likely to wake us in the middle of the night with the sound of scrabbling around in her kennel, trying to reach as much of the kibble as possible by poking her tongue through the bars.

Aussies can be quirky dogs and covering her bowl is a pretty cute quirk.

Yes, I’m crazy about our Aussies

I finished the 2014 Adventures of Jack and Dora Calendar on lulu.com this morning and advertised it on my “Adventures of Jack and Dora” Facebook group.

Actually, I made two calendars. The first was the deluxe size which I was chagrined to realize would have to be priced at $24.99 to turn a modest profit.

So I went back to the lulu.com software and created a standard size that I’ve priced at a more reasonable $14.99.

You can view them here.

BFFs

Dora and Jack are inseparable – Best Friends Forever. Their personalities shine through in this iPhone photo.

No cookies for Christmas

An oven, it turns out, is a bad place to hide a plastic container full of cookies from big counter-surfing dogs.

Maria and a neighbor boy made a huge batch of Christmas cookies last week while schools were closed for ice and snow. It was clear that they could not be left out on waxed paper on the kitchen counters pending icing because Liese and Jack are tall enough to reach stuff on the counters.

So, as an interim measure, Maria put them into a plastic Ziploc container and a Pyrex baking dish and stashed them in the oven.

Fast-forward a few days when Maria was preparing to cook something in the over and set it to 350 degrees to pre-heat. The next thing I knew, she was shouting about a fire in the oven and the house was filling up with nasty smelling smoke from the burning plastic.

The melted plastic fused to the oven rack and dribbled down onto the oven floor. We left it in place for a few days while we busied ourselves with other chores.

I tackled the problem yesterday morning. We dumped the contaminated cookies into the trash and pulled both racks from the oven.

I got out the owner’s manual and determined there are three self-cleaning cycles – 2, 3, and 4 hours. I set it for four hours and minutes later the residual plastic on the oven bottom burst into flames. The oven was blowing pungent smoke, so I turned on the exhaust fan above the range and opened a couple of windows before turning to the task of chipping the melted plastic from the bottom oven rack.

I got almost all of it, except for a little residue, so we put the racks back into the oven this morning and ran a 2-hour self-cleaning cycle to get rid of whatever plastic remained.

Now, I can get to work on replacing the screen on Maria’s iPhone that Jack chewed and broke the other night.

Working out

On the treadmill.The earphones that came with my iPhone 5 don't fit my ears and keep falling out. Makes me crazy.

Sunday morning update

The fact that I have not blogged since Thursday has not gone unnoticed. I am mindful that the best way to get readers out of the habit of reading your blog is to not post fresh content daily. I have no excuse except to say I was uninspired and was busy taking care of Maria who is ill and requires lots of bed rest, fluids, and electrolytes.

When she’s not in bed, she’s on the couch or in a chair in the living room, while we watch hours of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Jack, as this photo from last night attests, is very interested in videos with dogs in them. He is the first dog I’ve ever had who can perceive images on a TV screen. Happily, Dora has the same ability. For all his brilliance, Pete was never a TV watcher and neither was Ruthie.

BTW, the little ceramic Christmas tree on the curio cabinet belonged to my mother. It used to have a golden plastic star on the top, but it is broken and lost. We haven’t put up a Christmas tree in the six years we’ve lived here, so Mom’s little ceramic piece will have to do.

Back from the dead

I had the Subaru battery on the charger all day yesterday, pulling the plug last night when the arrow moved into the green “Finished” area.

I let it sit overnight to see if the charge would hold, then fired it up about 10:30 a.m. to drive to the post office. The engine started quickly and it appeared the battery had plenty of cranking power.

I’m guardedly optimistic that it has several months of life left, which will spare us the expense of a new $100+/- battery. I’ll toss the heavy duty jumper cables into the back, just in case.

To-do list

I have two things to accomplish today and there is urgency attached to both:

1. Buy and install a new battery for the Subaru Forester
2. Set up internet banking with Centennial Bank, which bought Liberty Bank where our finances live. Until I do that, we’re flying blind when it comes to tracking our cash flow.

I must be off.

Ice wars

I got a call around noon yesterday from one of the businesses in our downtown building expressing concern over the parking lot being ice-covered and insanely slick.

So Maria and I went to Lowe’s and bought 120 pounds of rock salt (they had to bring down a pallet of 40 pound bags for us) and a couple of 50 pound bags of calcium chloride ice melting compound which is supposedly less damaging to concrete.

Then we spent a perilous hour spreading the stuff on the sidewalks and asphalt in the hope that it would clear the lot by morning.

Unfortunately, it did not.

We checked about 9:15 a.m. and there was no significant improvement, but the tenants appreciated our effort and agreed the only thing to do was wait for the sun to melt the ice. The temperature is expected to reach 33 today and 43 tomorrow, so the end is in sight.

In terms of inconvenience, this has probably been the most significant weather event we’ve experienced here in northeast Arkansas since the Great Ice Storm of 2009.

I’m guardedly optimistic that I can get the ice off of the Subaru hood and open it to charge the battery before the sun goes down today, but I rather expect that all three of the school districts where Maria subs will be closed again tomorrow and she won’t need the car.

We shall see.

50 years ago tonight

I became a pledge of Zeta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity 50 years ago tonight.

There were 23 of us on Preference Night when this photo was taken at the Tirey Memorial Union Building on the Indiana State College (now University) campus. Three guys, whose faces are blacked out and whose names I don’t recall, dropped out.

I’m the guy in glasses in the front row.

The actives then took us to a union hall in Seeleyville, about 2 miles east of Terre Haute on U.S. 40, where we all got thoroughly drunk. One of my few memories of that night was watching Alan Freeman (front row, second from right) sucking beer out of a can faster than it would flow on its own. Al is a retired college prof living the life of an expatriate in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Being an ATO was probably the proudest achievement of my rather spotty college career. I still cherish the memories and the friendships and I can name most of the guys in the photo.

We had to surrender our pledge pins when we were initiated into active membership in the Fraternity, but I bought one on Ebay years ago. Maybe I’ll wear it today to mark the occasion.

Liese is back

Dog-sitting again.

Coping

The wipers on the Lexus froze in mid-stroke yesterday morning while struggling against sleet and freezing rain.

I tried to thaw them out with a hairdryer but to no avail.

So I cleared a space in the garage last night, scraped enough ice from the windshield to see where I was going and humped the car over the frozen sleet-drift in front of the garage door to bring it inside for the night.

I’m about to fire it up and see if the wipers work or if the motor is burned out. I know it didn’t blow the fuse, because the driver’s side blade continued to twitch after they stopped making full sweeps.

The Subaru’s doors were frozen shut last night, but I hope sitting in the direct sunshine will thaw the driver’s door today.

+++++++++++++++

LATER: The defrosted wipers are working. Unfortunately, Maria forgot to turn off the dome light in the Subaru Thursday night when she went out to retrieve her cell phone, so the Subaru battery is dead and the hood is sealed shut with ice. Hoping the sun helps us out so we can get a jump start.

Dora’s first snow!

It's Dora's first experience of snow and she loves it. Jack spied a birdfeeder Maria made from a 2 liter soft drink bottle and dared Dora to take it away from him. Hilarity ensued.

Bad weather on the way

The digits have flipped on the temperature: it was 73 yesterday and it’s 37 right now as we await the freezing rain.

The leading edge of the freezing rain is just west of Walnut Ridge, which means it has to creep another 35 miles or so to reach us, probably sometime after 6 p.m.

I gassed up the Lexus this morning and filled an empty 5 gallon gas can, giving us about 20 gallons or so to run the generator if we need it. My guess is that we won’t need it, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Maria is subbing for our neighbor Sophie in her history classes today because Sophie had a death in the family that requires her attention. Maria just texted me to say there are no plans to close the school early.

But considering that we will get some unpleasant weather overnight, it’s a safe bet that all of the schools here will be closed tomorrow.

It looks like the same weather mess is headed for friends and family in Indiana and may reach them about the same time the crap hits us.

Nothing to do but wait.

This could be the last time in ‘13

It was 73 degrees this afternoon – just two degrees short of a record high for Dec. 4.

With a winter storm headed our way on Friday, this looked like the last really good day for a ride this year.

I left about 3 p.m., which means the sun was diving toward the western horizon already, so I only got in about 40 miles.

But they were quality miles, up and around Crowley’s Ridge. I stopped at Lake Frierson State Park for this iPhone shot, then worked my way back east to home.

The K75S performed beautifully, of course. I think it enjoyed a nice little romp before the weather goes to hell for several weeks..

It’s painfully obvious that Cigna doesn’t want to talk to its customers

My friend Charlie noticed the Cigna Medicare Part D card in my wallet last Saturday and mentioned that he has Cigna and his premium is going up significantly.

Since I have until Dec. 7 to change insurers, I called customer service several minutes ago and am now enduring their music-on-hold.

The voice messages are crystal clear, but the classical music is hideously garbled to the point of being painful to listen to. I can only conclude that it’s intentionally distorted in an effort to drive callers away. I’m willing to bet they hired a recording engineer to create this hideous noise, masquerading as music, to discourage callers from remaining on hold.

It’s like listening to a weak station on a short wave radio with a tinny speaker where the signal fades in and out, but is never clear and distortion free.

They try to nudge callers in the direction of hanging up by suggesting they call back after 5 p.m. local time.

I endured it for about 20 minutes before I got to talk with a customer service rep. Turns out my premium for 2014 will be less than I’m paying in 2013. How strange is that?

Keeping score

I’m still using the Automatic driving monitor, plugged into the Lexus RX330’s data port, for a month now.

I drive sensibly, so it hasn’t improved my gas mileage noticeably, but being a gadget geek, I love having all of this data at my command.

Here’s the log from last week, which included a Saturday trip to Memphis for Boscos Mug Day. It was the highest-mileage week of the month. At 25.6 mpg, my car is delivering optimum mileage for a week of city and highway driving. That’s just 6 tenths of a mile better than the EPA rating for the car.

Here’s the data for the return trip from Boscos. I lost points for a couple of aggressive stops and for less than a minute over 70 mph, but I still got 29 mpg for the trip.

The Automatic app on my iPhone 5 got updated recently and added this Daily Scores feature. Compared with other Automatic users, I guess I’m doing okay.

I think they like her

Maria has been serving as a substitute teacher in three nearby school districts for the last month or so and she loves it.

She filled in for an elementary art teacher yesterday and brought home several works of art from her pupils. Here are three of them.

At the beginning of the Long Strange Trip

I’ve been rotating through a bunch of photos of myself as Facebook profile pictures and I hit upon this one to use for the next day or so.

I shot it about this time of year in 1966 with the first 35mm camera I owned – a Minolta HiMatic-7 – mounted on a tripod. The scene was a mobile home I was renting behind a house on South Independence Street in Tipton, Ind. The cigarette was a Viceroy, a brand I favored after bumming several smokes from Jim West, who lived next door to me in Gillum Hall during my freshman year at Indiana State University.

I needed a shave, but it would be nine more years – on a backpacking trip to Isle Royale National Park – that I would get around to growing a beard. I was wearing an Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity sweatshirt. I still have it. I saw it this morning while rooting through some storage bins under the bed in the guest bedroom.

I started my first newspaper job on Sept. 1, 1966 as a reporter/photographer for the Tipton Tribune, so by December I had a pretty good handle on how things worked at the paper. My trailer was about a block south of the newspaper office, so it was a pretty short commute up the alley to work in my gray 1965 VW beetle.

I was 21 years old, engaged to be married the following June. Like most 21-year-olds, I thought I knew a lot more than I did. In retrospect, I was embarrassingly naïve about how the world works, which is why I fancied myself a liberal Democrat. I had all sorts of dopey reasons why the Vietnam War was wrong and how peace and love would rule the world just any day now.

And I hadn’t yet had my interview with Indianapolis News City Editor Wendell Trogdon that would lead to a new job as a rewrite man at The News, starting two months after this photo was taken.

Claiming my 2014 mug, bad hair and all

It looks like I was having a bad hair day yesterday afternoon when I drove down to Memphis to claim my 2014 mug and bring home my 2012 mug.

That’s my BMW riding friend Charlie on the right, looking pretty good for the weeks of chemotherapy he’s endured. The guy behind me is also a BMW rider. I forget his name, but he rode his 1990 K1000LT to Boscos for the occasion.

The Boscos mug club is a semi-exclusive organization that costs $60 a year. You get your own numbered mug that is stored in racks above the bar. When you visit, you get a larger portion of the beer of your choice at a reduced rate. And the first beer in your new mug – yesterday was Mug Day – is free.

I opted for Boscos Olde Fool, which is the brew celebrated on the 2014 mug. I had 1½ mugs of it, giving the rest to Charlie because I was getting a bit of a buzz and was mindful that I had a 75.2-mile drive home ahead of me.

I’m starting my third year as a member of the club, although I don’t think I visited Boscos a half-dozen times in 2013. Even so, I guess it gives me street cred as a mid-South resident.

And it’s slightly more exclusive than the Radio Shack Battery Club.