Things one should never outgrow:

Tex

fetch.

This dog has energy! And it's tough. And it's relentlessly playful. And it stinks. And that orange ball is basically a petri dish six weeks into some harrowing experiment.

But come on, you can't not play fetch.

Things that deserve the stink-eye:

sweating like a pig. Literally.

#piginanarmpit
#takeapigtoworkday

Wordfuse (Feline Edition)

Need this? Source

I'm a cat fan. Always was. I grew up with cats: Tig, Mouse & Bigfoot. Even Satan. I get it. Grumpy cat is really quite ingenious. And I appreciate a cute internet cat pic meme. I do. But cat throw pillows? Especially for a mere $71.95? I'm sorry folks but I've reached my catpactity. 

This is my hood.

Look who followed my brother home to have breakfast with us this morning.

Born very recently (perhaps yesterday) and apparently much too late in the season, it seems this tiny runt of a deer was abandoned. My brother found it standing on the road and when he reached out the fawn ran right over to him. He waited for the doe but she did not appear.

Starving and trembling but otherwise seemingly uninjured, it roused after a bottle of milk and took a tentative walk in his farmyard and then up onto his deck with its impossibly dainty legs. Suddenly it seemed to remember it was wild and attempted to bolt, so my brother returned it to the spot where he found it.

Yup. It's just another day on a farm in Saskatchewan.

Wordfuse (Family Rodent Edition)

1. buninhibited (adjective): bunny + uninhibited = one free-from-her-cage bunny, unhampered, unrestricted, just chillaxing. Bunfettered? Bunflappable? See picture.

2. bunholy (adjective): bunny + unholy = one wicked-and-unreasonable bunny when she wants to be (growling, ninja type posturing, you-can't-stop-me stubbornness; when you rearrange the items in her cage she will wait patiently until you are done, then (Oh snap!) she puts them all back exactly where they were before. No picture available: I think she senses when to vamp it up for the photogs.

*To me, she resembles a rodent Rorschach test. What do you see?

Memory Lane Meanderings

    Lots of guys love hunting. I'm not a hunter though. Yet, I've killed several animals. (Don't hate me.)
    Every single animal I killed was by accident. Well, except one. Okay, two. But I only considered killing one and I didn't! But one other may have died later. This is all sounding very shady, isn't it? Let me explain.

1. I was about five. My cousins and I were playing with the new batch of kittens, unsupervised. Were any kids supervised in the 1970s? Anyway, I recall climbing a ladder to our attic, and I'm sure I dropped one of the kittens we were basically handling like toys. Remember Lennie Small in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. It was sort-of that kind of thing, minus the mice or men. Anyway...
2. When I was about ten, my Mom let me have one of the fuzzy yellow goslings as a pet. I made a little fence in our farmyard. I dug a small pond and filled it with water. Classic farmboy stuff. After school one day, I returned home to discover a bantam rooster carrying around my gosling in its beak. That bastard rooster broke my goose's neck. I went completely postal and killed the rooster with a two-by-four. Yeah. Childhood anger issues.
3. My third animal death, again involving a kitten, occured when I was about eleven. Let's just call this the La-Z-boy recliner episode. 'Nuf said. Yeah. Grimace. Not pretty. I had a complete anxiety attack.
4. I hate turkeys. They peck. And they like to hang out in schoolyards. All puffed out with that disturbing wattle. They're terrifying. Believe me. Barely a teen, I returned home one day and one particulary agressive gangsta' turkey was waiting for me on our front step. So I chased it away then it chased me away then I threw a rake at it and broke its neck. Yeah I freaked. Not proud.
5. I ran over a dog while on a date. We witnessed its prolonged death throes. She cried. I dry-heaved. The farmer came out and shot it. Worst. Date. Ever.
6. After years of cleaning the fish bowl that my children repeatedly assured me they would clean every Saturday, I contemplated the perfect goldfish murder: a few drops of bleach. My conscience wouldn't let me though.
7. We hit a moose. Little then, my kids were in the back seat. It floated, spectral-like, across the road on a foggy March night. In the split seconds before we rolled it into the ditch off our bumper, I debated: death by snowpacked ditch or death by oncoming traffic? I chose the moose. After we determined that everyone was unhurt and our vehicle had sustained only minor damage, I remember asking my kids: what did I say? My six-year-old son explained that I yelled MOOOOOOOOSE and my eight-year-old daughter noted that my wife yelled F*!K three times. Ah yes, family moments.

Patting my Pate

Since shaving my head as part of a cancer fundraiser, I have noticed something that I suspect is similar to what pregnant women experience. Instead of rubbing my belly though (which might be somewhat appropriate considering the current state of my belly's bulge-ness), people like to rub my head. Yes indeed, people--even strangers--enjoy patting my pate, caressing my crown and okay, enough with the excessive alliteration. Sorry.
Anyway, I sort of love this. A group of people surrounded me recently and one person rubbed my head forward and said, "kitty," then rubbed it back and remarked "porcupine." Back and forth, back and forth, this went on for a while and I just waited and smiled. This is what pets experience all the time I guess.
And who wouldn't want to be a pet? Adopt me. Feed me. Scratch me. Pet me. Tell others how much you love me. Take excessive photos of me and include me in your updated status. Let me put my head out the window while you drive. Hold news conferences when I am treated poorly. Thrown me a bone every once in a while. Isn't this like every guy's dream?

Damn Disney

Another nefarious plot by Walt Disney: make us all love rodents.

My teens now have pets, pet rodents in fact. We must be insane.

They requested pets for years and years. They whined. They begged. Once, my wife's parents surprised our children with a goldfish and I had ongoing and very inappropriate secret thoughts about eyedroppers and bleach but indeed that slimy fish died of natural causes after a mere three years (!!!) during which I cleaned its bowl every Saturday while my children ignored it.

After it died, the whining and begging resumed. My daughter's homepage for a year was a rabbit with a pancake on its head. Cute, but we held firm (mostly) year after year after year. During that time I never said no. (Nod to parenting guru Barbara Coloroso.) Instead I told them they could have a pet if it met my one main criteria for ALL pets: they can't poop.

My daughter just shook her head. But my son sought a way to somehow meet my unreasonable criteria and still get a pet. We had several conversations about this that included questions such as these:

• Dad, do worms poop? Yes. How do you know? Son, what do you think dirt is?
• Dad, do tarantulas poop? Yes.
• Dad, do frogs poop? Yes. (But we did keep frogs for a while until the big ones ate the small ones. Pure carnage.)
• Dad, this is so unfair--everything poops! Yes, it's true. (When my son finally made this conclusion, I must admit I laughed manically inside myself but I still used the patented "aw shucks" parent face while he stared at me in frustration. I'm not sure if Barbara Coloroso would approve but it bought me more time.)

Time ran out though. We now have a dwarf hamster named Greg. And a dwarf rabbit named Echo. My teens are in love. They are adorable. But they poop. A lot.

And I blame it all on Disney.