Something I may never learn

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A date at the dog park

My date was handsome, charming, attentive, interested in the surroundings and in being with me. His company made for a lovely, relaxing hour that kept me nearly fully distracted from the muggy warm rain and terrible onslaught of mosquitoes as we explored the bog together.

I was so enamored of him, in fact, that I took him home with me and gave him a thorough, languid full-body rubdown which pleased us both immensely. He is lying spent on my bed while I head off to take a shower. His tail is too relaxed to thump and so is mine.

Uncle Walt said it

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

- Walt Whitman

In the doghouse

Guess who isn't going for a nice walk this morning, because he's already been, only it wasn't nice for either of us. Hunter decided to slip out as I was loading up to haul stuff - I put the cover on the load and saw him through the van windows - way down the block. He slowed but didn't freeze when I bellowed, was too scared to let me catch up and too scared to really take off hard running too. He isn't traffic savvy, so this all went on in the middle of the streets as everyone is exiting their driveways for work. He finally stopped loping and went down to just enough of a scurry to stay 10 yards ahead, then let me catch up to him a few blocks over and we had a terse walk home. Let the strangling commence.

And you should see the butter

I went here on my drive from Pennsylvania to Alaska last fall, while visiting my friend Lenette in Columbus, OH. We mainly went to see it because hidden in one of the Osage orange trees that flank this 'sculpture', there was a letterbox. The phallic cornfield was just a bonus.