On my morning walks with the dogs (usually at about 3:30 am), I take advantage of our clear skies and low light pollution to do a little sky-watching. On Sunday morning, I spotted a satellite (I don't know which one, but it was brighter and bigger than most – might have been the International Space Station). From my perspective, it crossed from NW to SW, covering an arc of perhaps 100° of sky. One of the best satellite crossings I've ever seen.
This morning I took a gander at the constellations. Usually I start with Orion, which is for me the most recognizable constellation – but Orion has already set by this hour in the winter time. The Big Dipper was almost straight overhead, though, and I tried (and failed) to see the double in Mizar. Sigh...
Two of our dogs (Mo'i and Lea) are being medicated for various ailments (nothing serious) and all of our dogs get some supplements every day. I have an elaborate schedule of twice-a-day “pill events” where all this stuff is dispensed. This morning was the grand conjunction of all schedules, resulting in a veritable pile o'pills for me to administer. Believe it or not, it's actually kind of fun to do this. The dogs are all very eager, because some of the pills are (apparently) quite yummy.
The favorite one for everybody is a fish oil supplement, which comes in rubbery capsules. The dogs squeeze these between their teeth until they pop (audibly), squirting fish oil at high pressure into their mouths. The dogs get the funniest looks on their faces when this happens – a brief period of pure canine ecstasy.
Some of the pills are crunchy-tasty, and all the dogs act with them just as they would with a dog treat. No problem with those pills.
Then there's the rest of them – horrible smelling and tasting things that no self-respecting dog would ever consider eating. Unless, of course, they were embedded in a small dollop of cream cheese, in which case they will battle each other for the right to gulp it down. Debbie discovered this cream cheese trick a while back. We get the cheap little tubs of generic whipped cream cheese – quite awful stuff, really – and just wrap the pills in it. Works every time.
Debbie and I have had these nice Motorola flip phones for quite a while now. They have all sorts of features that we've never used, especially texting and sending photos. But now that Debbie's back in Indiana with her mom, and without a computer, we've started to learn how to use these features. To our surprise, it's possible to send emails from a phone, and to send emails to a phone. So despite her being without a computer, we're still able to communicate much as we normally do via email. Debbie really hates typing on the phone, though. She wants an ordinary keyboard to plug into it
