Sailor The Dog: Ex-Con

As I mentioned in yesterday's Blog, Sunday afternoon my friend Mark and I went to a barbecue at the house of one of my former DU Bookstore colleagues.  He and his wife have both a cat and a dog.  The dog was quite a handful when it was a puppy, and because of this they packed it off to a Colorado Women's Prison which has a program that allows inmates to train dogs for a very reasonable fee.  After he was released, Sailor was okay for a while, but reverted to his old ways and was sent back to prison.  I believe this is called the recidivism problem.  In any case, after doing another stretch in stir Sailor came out a reformed dog.  At first it was uncertain whether he could make it on the outside, but happily, he did.  Congratulations Sailor!

Going To A Barbecue With Mark

My friend Mark - who works at the University of Denver Library - and I went to the house of one of my former DU Bookstore colleagues last night and had a great time drinking beer, eating hamburgers, and catching up with what each of us has been up to lately.  The three of us also discussed politics and the world situation, but could not come up with any solutions.  Surprise!  We probably just needed to drink more beer in order to come up with something workable.  In any case, the photograph above shows Mark showing us some of his cricket  moves.  Mark tried to explain the game to us, but it seems pretty complicated.  He told us that games can last up to 7 hours at a stretch.  I imagine that is because the game is so complicated it takes that long to figure out the rules and declare a winner.  No wonder the British Empire fell into decline.

The Bookstore Cat

My office-mate Peter has been complaining about his allergies lately, and wanted to know if I had brought a cat - which he is allergic to - into the office.   No, strangely enough, I had not, but a few days later I caught sight of a cat - or a very large furry rat - darting quickly under some book carts in the stockroom.  Aha! After making discreet inquiries, I learned that the cat actually belongs to the owner of the bicycle shop next door, and the cat has found a passageway between that store and the bookstore's stockroom.  The stockroom people are very mellow, and actually like having the cat around.  Of course, if the cat can get through, various other types of creatures that aren't as cuddly can get through, too, but nobody seems worried about that but me.

Living The Dream

If you dream a lot about floods, that is.  My apartment flooded for the 5th time in approximately 5 years the other night, once again from a leak in a pipe behind the kitchen wall.  Since my bedroom is right next to the kitchen, all the water goes right in there.  I spent the night and the next morning mopping up water, in a vain attempt to keep the carpet dry until the plumbers arrived.  This routine is becoming as regular as the Nile overflowing its banks each spring.  A sure sign from nature that it is time to start planting.  And in Colorado, you know what kind of apartment based crop that means.

A Rare Walk Downtown

I used to walk from work each evening to Denver's Union Station and take the light rail train home.  Now, however, since I often have to go immediately from my Bookstore job to my part-time job in the University of Denver neighborhood, I usually wind up driving to work.  Yesterday was an exception, however, since I had to leave my car at the dealership to fix the "pinstripes," which came off my new Hyundai after I washed it for the first time ("What?  You washed your car?  Never do that again!").  In any case, it was a very pleasant walk indeed, letting me mix with the beautiful people, the homeless, the kids, and the crazies.  Of course, that's just my opinion of them.  I'm sure they all had their own opinion of me.  After all, I used to be known as "Crazy Old Man Hoyt" when I worked at the DU Bookstore.  Although it was the DU Bookstore that made me that way.  I'm just sayin'.

Visiting With TuTu On A Saturday Night

Last Saturday night I featured a photograph of my brother-in-law George sitting in his favorite easy chair with his and my sister Susan's dog Blackberry, and so in the spirit of fairness, today I am featuring a photograph of their other dog, Tutu.  Do not be fooled - this dog looks big in the photograph, but is only the size of a medium rat.  He also spends the dinner hour barking beside the table, demanding table scraps.   He cannot climb stairs, and therefore also barks when he wants to get to the next level of the townhouse, which can be conservatively estimated at about every five minutes.  In other words, he runs the place.  Go figure.

A Nostalgic Photograph of Susan

As I mentioned on this Blog a few days ago, the last time I tried to take a photograph of my sister Susan, she chased me out of her kitchen with a knife.  Which I assume meant she didn't feel like being photographed at that particular moment.  Therefore I am featuring a photograph of her taken a few years back at a restaurant called the Pirates Loft, in Port Salerno, Florida, when cutlery was not an issue.  In the above photograph, she is posing with the pelicans, which would hang out around the docks waiting for the charter boats to come back and provide them with fish remains to eat.  As I recall, Susan often referred to the pelicans as penguins, which confused me a bit at the time.  We are, after all, originally from Chicago, where, as you might or might not know, neither pelicans or penguins are plentiful.