Skip to main content

Another New Family Member

I have never been much of a dog person but that is nothing against dogs - I just have not been much of a pet person, period. Sure, there was the rabbit that I had in secondary school who mysteriously ran away in the middle of one sweltering summer night. And there were the cats that hung around my parent's house, first to catch rodents and then to amuse my siblings. But after moving out for college and going on my own, I had traveled alone without animal companionship. That is, of course, until I met wife-to-be who turned my pet-free world upside down.

Needless to say, my family has expanded - but it is not just the in-laws 10 minutes down the road. Last summer, three new family members moved in to the koi pond in our backyard, who somehow brought along a fourth. And when my wife started begging me for more life around the house, I finally gave in for one more - a particular Pomeranian pooch named Rose.

Having Rose around has been an initial shock to the system, but she has made herself at home hopping up and down the steps of the townhouse. And as I have gotten to know this sassy lassy a little bit more, she has started to grow on me. Although it is an adjustment having a new little one to take care of around the house, I think I might turn out to tolerate dogs more than I might have cared to admit. But I think it is just Rose and the way that she cocks her head when looking at me to melt my resolve.

So, we have another new family member, and it looks like my world will be pet-free no more.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...