I thought this would be harder for Sparky.
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I brought Sparky home just short of 2 years ago. It was a mild winter, but I was concerned that he’d be too cold when we went on walks. He’s got that short, seal fur, but didn’t have the fat layer. I got him the Carhartt jacket.
Now that I know Sparky, it’s clear that even in the snow, he has a lot of dog stuff to work on. When we are out, Sparky stuffs his snout into the snow like this all the time.

I also know that if Sparky gets cold, he will head for the house. I could lead him on a longer walk, but he would not be reluctant to give his opinion.

The best in the sense that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home gives fans what they want. Media critics and fancy people sneer at fan service because it is catering to the audience without giving proper deference to “the art”. Whatever, I just want to be entertained, and Star Trek IV does that very well.

After a week of use, Sparky appreciates his heating pad Christmas present. It’s on low, and keeps the back half of his bed warm. It got down to 20o F last night and we’ve been burning consistently. The bedroom was in the low 60’s.
If Sparky was cold, he’d curl up like a pill bug. If he were too warm, he’d be in the front of the crate. FYI, that’s why only a part of the bed should be heated. His eyes are open, and he stayed in bed for another hour.
My guess is that Sparky stays in bed so I have time to stoke the stove. When he did shamble out of bed and had gone out for a piss, he settled in for a comfy morning.


Oh boy, this is going to sound bad.
Rain Man is a movie that doesn’t often get mentioned, but it should because it’s relevant to what’s happening with children today. While watching it tonight, it struck how looking after an autistic person is like having a dog. Yeah, that doesn’t sound good at all, but hear me out.
Dogs succeed while chimps fail at following finger pointing
Ever since we watched Inside the Mind of a Dog, Sparky has been telling everyone that he’s smarter than a monkey because they said that dogs understand human pointing, and primates don’t.
There are times when I suspect that Sparky is stretching the truth. To start the new year off right, I challenged Sparky to demonstrate that he understands human pointing. It took some training, but he is getting the idea.

We just watched Lord of the Rings, and Sparky thought Gollum made a good case for eating raw fish and rabbits. Sparky wanted to post a picture as Sh-beagle.

Sparky wants me to feel better, so thinks I should lick his paw a bunch of times. He says that usually helps him.

It’s an obvious game. Nobody cares about dictionaries, so at the end of the year, dictionaries get some attention by coming up with a word of the year. Then, because journalists are lazy, they get a column out of it.
This is too mundane for anyone to address, but a couple of words come to mind that we use frequently, but just aren’t very descriptive.
I have a cold. That happens all the time to everyone. That’s too close to being cold. If I say a head cold, that is a little better. Doctors call it an upper respiratory infection, but that sounds too long, and could be a sinus infection, which is much worse. Just come up with a word that is definitive and isn’t dependent on the rest of the sentence.
Dream is another one. If someone says that they had a dream, you know a boring story is coming. If someone says that they have a dream, you know something important is coming.
In Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, he goes on to refute everything that the modern progressive holds dear. MLK wasn’t talking about something that came to him while he was sleeping. He could call it a fantasy, but that sounds disjointed from reality and conjures images of dragons and heaving bosoms. We need a word that means a future reality that we should work toward.
Does anyone have sleeping dreams of the type portrayed in media? Those dreams are always carefree fantasies that write themselves. Some people have vivid dreams and some have vague dreams. People remember them, or they don’t. Freud thought that dreams addressed an issue that came up the previous day. That sounds more likely.
I don’t know. The word “dream”, just sounds like a romantic notion that can be tossed into a sentence, and people can take it a bunch of different ways.