Burying a friend, Lucy the Cocker Spaniel

    Last week my little black Cocker Spaniel, Lucy turned 15. On Saturday morning she died in her bed.
   
    I kept a bed for her on the floor next to the side of the bed where my wife and I sleep. For as long as we have lived in Trexlertown, she has followed me in to bed at night and slept in her place. Whenever I rose frome bed, the vibration of me walking by her would wake her, and she would follow me throughout the house.
    We called her my little black shadow for that reason. She would  follow me to the garage whenever I left, and be there waiting at the kitchen door when I returned.
     On Thursday I was working in the yard, and she was in high spirits, even running along the sidewalk when I threw a tennis ball for or other dog, Sally. I was trying to weed the flower beds, and she kept nudging me with her nose, begging me to pet her. I could never resist her happy eyes, and her tail wagged like the perpetual motion machine it always was.
  
      I knew the day would come eventually but I still was not ready for it. When I looked down and realized she was not breathing or getting up to go outside, I went numb. I still had to go to work, so I picked her up in her bed and carried her to the garage. I wrapped her up to secure her body until I came home from work. Then I would have time to dig a grave out back next to where we buried Ethel less than two years ago.
     All day Saturday my thoughts went back to all the happy moments Lucy had brought me in her years with our family. Lucy had a habit of creating circular formations on the sidewalk with her crap. Creations that we referred to as "Poophenge," because of the similarity to the British landmark Stonehenge.

     She was an accomplished beggar for treats, having mastered the pitiful face that would have you believe that she was starving to death. A few years back, in response to her chubbiness, our vet had tested her for metabolism issues. The phone call to my wife with the diagnosis still makes us laugh today. "No Mrs. Casey. Lucy does not have a thyroid problem, she's just fat."    

     What I miss the most is her company. Whenever I sat down at the computer, she would lay in the bed beside my chair, and wait for my hand to drop and stroke her head and belly. She would wait patiently for those few affectionate touches, and I would be rewarded with a thankful lick or two.

      Putting her down in her grave was hard, and I cried throughout the entire process, from digging to  filling it in. I comfort myself thinking that she is running around heaven frolicking with her old friends Fred and Ethel. Her age had taken away much of her mobility, I want to believe that in God's heaven it has been restored as her reward for being such a loving and faithful creature. That's what I want to believe, and that is what gives me comfort.

A visit to the PEEPS! Emporium in National Harbor Maryland

   You can't live in the Lehigh Valley and not have at least once in your life tried those joyous sugar lumps of color called peeps. We know them and we love them. I'm sorry, but I think it is downright un-American not to enjoy peeps.
   My wife discovered while planning this trip that the only Peeps Emporium on the planet was within walking distance of our Hotel and the site of her conference. There was no doubt we would have to visit the Shrine to Sugar that the Peeps Emporium is. Like God above endearing the greatest pleasure to our taste buds, the front door of the store looks directly out onto the Potomac river and gives you a spectacular view of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

  But who cares about that?!

    This Store doesn't just sell candy, it sells an incredible collection of merchandise for the Peeps fanatic.
     Mrs C purchased many gifts for friends and family as well as herself, but was disappointed that the "Peace, Love Peeps!" shirt only came in junior miss sizes. Like adults wouldn't want one of those shirts? Hear that Just Born? You are missing the boat on that market!
     I didn't buy any souvenirs but I was unable to resist temptation as I eyed the Peanut Chew and I broke down at the register and spent $1.06 for one single packaged milk Chocolate coated Peep.
    Really, how could I leave that store without having one? Could any of you?

    I have more pictures from inside the store, but Blogger won't let me add them for some reason. I will try again later. In the meantime, Have a Peep! and literally enjoy a sweet dream.

Judgment Day Comes! And goes until December 2012....I hope!

  I was surprised last week tto learn that the date of the Apocalypse had been moved up from December 2012 to Saturday at 6 PM. I remember back in the early 1980s when people were claiming that because all the planets would be in a certain position, crazy gravitational forces would tear at the Earth and cause Earthquakes and other unimagined phenomena.
   Didn't happen.
   Remember all the worry about the millenium? Computers crashing, people getting bar codes, all that stuff? Nothing happened. Bush did get elected President, but I didn't consider it the end of the world. We survived.
   So Saturday at 6PM Eastern time was the latest deadline.
  I admit that the Volcano going off in Iceland made me blink, but that's happened a bunch the last few years. I don't think that we are going to get much warning when the Tribulation starts. It will just happen.
   Personally, I don't think it could be anywhere as dramatic as the faux crises faced by those poor Real Housewives in New Jersey, Miami, Atlanta, and Hell's Kitchen or whatever.
   The World could end, and most of the nitwits will be home watching Bravo. They won't notice anything is wrong until their sattelite dish/Cable signal goes out. Likely at the height of another cat fight between two vacuous house wives over dueling Christening parties for kids whose names they can't even spell correctly, such as spelling the proper name Bethany as Bethenny. That isn't only stupid, it's lazy, as if opening a book and looking it up took too much effort.
    If as the book of Revelation claims, there will be people sucked up into heaven to avoid judgment when it all goes down, the airheads who watch reality TV won't have to worry about any of their favorite characters disappearing. I bet all the TV ministers stick around as well, and they will argue that it is God's will that they stay around to help guide us.

Lawnmower Man

  I was watching the one pre-10 PM show I enjoy Sunday night, The Amazing Race, when my doorbell rang. This incited a large amount of barking from two black Cocker Spaniels, and broke the tension of the shows finale.
    I wasn't expecting anybody, and I was surprised to see it was one of my neighbors across the street.

   And she was not happy.

    You see, she goes away for weeks at a time, and doesn't mow her lawn. She doesn't mow it much when she's home either, for that matter, and it usually looks like hell. The lady next door to her is a regular customer of mine, so Sunday afternoon when I mowed hers, I mowed the small part in front of the doorbell ringers house that was across the shared driveway of their town homes.

   To make a long story short, doorbell ringer has demanded that I never cut her lawn again, because I cut it too short. She mowed it before she left, and she wants it that way. She berated me for trespassing on her property.
   I thought I was doing a nice thing, but she doesn't see it that way, and I respect her wishes. After all, it is her property, and if she wants to live in an unkempt forest on those rare occasions she is home, more power to her.
     I should go take a picture of her back yard and post it, to show you what it looks like, but I don't want to anger her further. Lets just say that her back yard resembles a wheat field and leave it at that.

   You guys think I was wrong to mow her yard while she was away? It screams to passersby that nobody is home. It really looks like hell. I never mowed her back, only the small part facing the street and the small slice along the curb. I won't mow it anymore, but it's going to be tough. It is going to really contrast the every ten day treatment I give my customers yard and how I keep the sidewalk edged and borders weed whacked. Oh well, no good deed goes unpunished.

I assemble the New Grill... in 17 so called easy steps

     On a recent Sunday afternoon Mrs C and I went Grill shopping, The grill on our deck is one we purchased the summer we married in 1996. Trying to light it involved holding a flame close to the propane tank, and I decided it was time for it to go to a better place.....like the junk yard.

   We had been looking around the last few months, getting prices and surveying the selections at local stores, so off we went. The first stop was Lowe's. Nice selection, but nothing really spoke to us. Then we went to Home Depot. The selection there was pretty diverse, but the ones we liked cost more than we wanted to spend. Eventually we ended up at the Sears Hardware Store in the Trexlertown Shopping Center near our home.
    There wasn't as much of a selection, but there was a Kenmore brand grill there that met all our requirements. So we took one home.(After paying, of course!)

   I get the box in the garage, and I clear an area to work in. The first thing I do after opening the box is read the directions.
   Now if they are correct, all I need to assemble the grill is one phillips head screwdriver (supplied) and to follow the 17 easy steps.
   Oh, if it were only that easy.

   Why is it that they (manufacturers) provide multiple pictures and diagrams for the blatantly obvious steps, but for the more complex ones, such as use 4 D Screws to attach the side mounting plates. they don't supply any pictures, not even a few words of encouragement.
   Those plates are odd shaped with multiple choices for how to be mounted. I ended up getting in the car, driving over to the store, and looking at how the model we viewed was put together. Something I should have done in the first place.
    But the good news is that the grill is all together and ready to go. I felt pretty good about getting it together in under two hours. And that was with the two spaniels bouncing around in the garage helping me sporadically.
    That turned the 17 easy steps into more like 34, because it is difficult to assemble anything with two dogs begging for attention and wanting to play. Even if they are old dogs, it's hard to ignore them.

   So the grill is done, and I'm sure the dogs will be waiting at the foot of it for that first wayward piece of meat.