I instantly slammed in all the CD-ROMs that accompany the Net magazine. I have ten of them, and while they contain Mac programs, there's never anything I don't have ten copies of already. Now I could see what Intel riches were contained in these rainbow coasters! Dreck, mostly. Demos of games I'll never have time to play, crippleware for programs I'll never buy, and software for 3d VRML chatboards I will never visit.

Not having a lot of time makes life much easier, in an odd way. I don't play games anymore, just the demos. Ran through the Duke Nukem for Mac demo, even though I had killed and killed again on the PC version last year; it was a nice nostalgic romp. Played some "FallOut," which is a role-playing game set in the same old dusty post-nuke terrain populated by bald guys with mechanical prosthesis and muscle-hunk brutes. I walked around a while, picked up a few things, talked to some people, and was killed: fine, thank you. For me, death is final. I die once in the demo, and I don't go back. Save time and money.

Also played The Pegasus Project, the third iteration of the Journeyman Project. The first game was just awful; it took agonizing minutes between mouseclicks, the writing was stupid and the acting banal, and you dreaded making a misstep, because it meant ten minutes of waiting to reset to your pre-death position. Number three moves at an amazing speed, and instead of clomping around from one point to the other with the speed of Frankenstein dragging a boxcar through quicksand, you move with remarkable fluidity through 3D landscapes. At one point I stood looking over a cliff in a primeval jungle, and pterodactyl appeared in the distance - the range of movement in the beast and the shadows cast by its wings through the humid air was just beautiful. The demo was very, very short and took up 56MB of real estate, so I imagine the game will come on a stack of platters as high as a tennis ball tube. I might buy it, if I ever decide to have that kind of wasteful life again.

My enthusiasm for "The Last Express" is petering out slightly - I have this fear that I am missing things. That's the problem with these real-time games - while I'm sitting in my compartment or wandering around the train looking for something to do, people are sitting in the bar car having a conversation I might need. And I feel slightly silly wandering around the car all night. The conductors keep standing and touching their caps: bonsoir, monsieur. Pardon, m'sieur. Even though the game takes place over 40 hours, I am somewhat certain I will not sleep, and absolutely certain I will not have to use the bathroom. Not even so much as the pissoir. Anyone who's ever taken a long train trip via Amtrak recalls the appalling sanitary conditions of the loos, so I can easily see three days of costiveness. But three days without easing up to the white porcelain maw and relieving one's self? That's probably why everyone loved Duke Nukem. It was the first game where you could walk up to a urinal, hit the spacebar, and take a break from the mayhem.

I worry about these details, and that's probably why it's a good thing I didn't end up doing the Myst books. I wanted to explain the things that nagged at me in the game, such as the mix of technological styles. A little Jules Verne here, a little 1930s there, some Deco, some Renaissance - where did these items come from? The hero, after all, was raised in a subterranean cave that was barely medieval in its character; where in God's name did he learn electrical engineering? I wrote two long sequences that explained this to my satisfaction - in one, he journeyed to a place much like Manhattan in the 20s, a reverse version of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - which, after all, was what the ending of the damn book resembled, although I doubt the Brothers Miller swiped the idea. Parallel development. I loved that sequence, but it will never see the light of day. Some of my favorite writing was in that book, and no one but me ever saw it. Or will.

Wonderful weekend: I slept. Watched a little TV - one half an hour, Cops - and slept, walked, did the lawn, pecked away at the Strib column here and there. I keep the laptop ready and a notepad open so I can scribble down ideas all day. In fact it's time to get to work on that right now, and write up the weekend's ideas so I can look at them tomorrow, and get rid of them. Also have to do my Newhouse column now, and then perhaps hop aboard the Orient Express for thirty minutes. Too bad I've had so much coffee. At least my character never looks like he has a bursting bladder. Enemies can sense that, and use it against you.

Again, the rain. Again. It began last night, continued through the dark, and greeted us as we woke: steady rain from clouds that hung about ten feet from the ground. Jasper Dog did not want to go outside this morning, and just stood out back with his ears back, giving me a miserable look as the drops pattered off his head. No beseeching could make him do anything, and since it had been half a day since his last micturation, this was a problem. Down to the creek, then, where the scents of many dogs could give him the idea.

But all the scents were gone. All the paths were gone. The little trails through the woods were gone. The creek was about three feet over its banks, and had flooded the entire basin save for a little isthmus by the curb. I stood there agog - this incessant precipitation is bad enough, but when the clouds actually start to claim the land as its own and post troops to keep me out, that's when I start to get mad.

What can you do? Thank God, really; if every day was sunny and 80, sitting indoors would be torture. I'd probably be in a foul mood if I was stuck in the house, peering at the dim world through the window. But the dog would be happier. I think he's actually depressed lately. Just not his merry self. He's not used to being alone this much. It's not the inactivity - when I was home, he sat around waiting for me to do something interesting. But we were together, guarding the den while Sara was off foraging and exploring. Now I've gone too. Every morning Sara and I go off on our expeditions into the big world, and he can't come. For a while he watched me go from the window, ears up, watching me until I disappeared; this morning he just went to his beanbag in the downstairs bathroom and tucked himself into a ball. He goes there more and more, too. He looks disconsolate. Every day is Monday.

I've been advised to get another dog, which seems exactly the wrong thing to do. That would mean two sad dogs. In some ideal combination of circumstances, they would amuse each other, but that's not always the case. What I need to do is spend more time with Jasper when I am home -I think of the times he's trotted up with a toy and wanted to play, and I've been intent on using my small free time to finish a hobby project or answer e-mail. Well, all that can wait today.

Later -

Another shift at the Diner concluded, another leg of our on-the-road week. Monday we took the Diner off its foundations, loaded it on a truck and sped through the cities, broadcasting live from the streets of Minneapolis. Tonight we got stuck backing up, and the Diner was stuck at the edge of the overflowed Minnehaha creek, listing at 19.5 degrees until the tow truck could pull us out. Tomorrow it's back on the highway, but I fear something bad will happen.

A good show; the audience, as ever, amazes me. One caller explained the nature of the little lights on top of phone poles - devices related to emergency vehicles, I guess. They're called "opticons." This brought a long-buried word to mind - "Panopticon." I asked if anyone could define it, and warned them not to look in the dictionary, because it wasn't there. Bing, bing: two free lines lit up. Eleven o'clock at night, and the audience has people who can call up and explain Jeremy Bentham's theories of prison construction, and have fun doing it. Perfect.

Well, it's one AM now, and time to return to the Stribwork. I may stay home tomorrow to consolidate the work. I've been dashing off notes and lines every day at the Strib, which surprises me - I've never been able to write in an office, or compose a decent line before noon, and now I can do both, simultaneously. It used to be I wrote at night and edited in the morning, and now it's reversed. I'm also writing at night, too, which helps. I write better with a dog at my side, though. The difference between writing at home and at the office is the difference between a picture of a dog on your desk and the head of a dog on your lap.

It's raining now. But I think that goes without saying.

Just saw the new picture for the column. I am the whitest white geek on the planet. I look absolutely dopey. It's the expression of someone who just had half his brains pulled out his nose and replaced with the sugary fluid they use to make Gummi Bears. I think we'll be reshooting some time soon. This will not stand.

And then there's the photo on KSTP's web site. (Yes, it's up and running; I haven't wanted to point anyone there until I can change the photo. That's how ridiculously vain I am.) I have only myself to blame - I took the damn picture myself when I was throwing together the Diner web site. I was pointing at a illustration on my T-shirt, my face screwed up in a querrilous eh-wot? expression. The webmaster at KSTP simply lopped off my head and stuck it on the page, thereby DECONTEXTUALIZING the mugging expression.

The only pictures I like of myself are one where I have no expression whatsoever. Everything else looks like another person. That's who I see in the mirror: Mr. Blank. I don't smile at myself in the mirror; the few times I've smiled to see what it looks like I feel like a sociopath practicing his winning grin. Smile #43, for rich dowagers; now let's try Smile #27 for the authority figures.

It's frightening, sometimes, how much the Lileks leaves my face when I smile, and the Monson emerges. Not so much my mother, as her father. When I see pictures of my grandfather as a young man, I see the same smile I see in my cousins, and the same smile I see when I grin.

Rain this morning, of course, changing to a confused sun. Intermittant heat, interludes of humidity, then clouds. Repeat until August. What an odd month. Julember. Septuly.

Presently I am multitasking, which is to say I am typing this while web surfing for ideas, and periodically editing the printout of my first column. (I hate it.) Another leap back to the past: in DC, we had an ATEX system that hammered out your copy on a noisy dot matrix printer, a hideous old relic from the Wood-Grained Plastic Age of industrial design; it shook like an old rummy, and if it hadn't been weighted down it would have made a break for it. I was always tempted to set it free, send it 1,000 inch story and watch it leave the room, head for the window, bust the glass and throw itself into the courtyard.

Well, the kin and kith of those machines are here. I hit PR on my ATEX terminal to send the piece to the printer, but then I realized I had no idea where the printers were. Turns out they're everywhere. I finally found it chattering away in a closet. Took my copy outside to read, quinting at the ugly print just like in faraway long ago DC. The difference, however, is immense. I want to be here. When I look up the street, I don't see an indifferent landscape, a marble-and-glass labor camp; I see home. Big difference. Home is where you can put up with dot matrix printers.

There was just a PA announcement asking if anyone wanted to go back to the Taste section and help themselves to some dry ice. Yum! I'm off.

Well, Cunanan's dead, and I'm not feeling so hot myself. But mornings usually have a ration of brainfuzz and roilgut, to make up some Joycean words. I need food. And, of course, sleep. Was awakened in the middle of the night by Jasper yacking up something he ate. I can't imagine what it was. Perhaps it was a sewing needle. He ate one of those once. Even more astonishing, he barked it up without getting it stuck. It was still threaded, too.

I was on the air last night when the confirmation of the Cunanan suicide came across the wires; we all felt as though this was an anticlimax. Not that anyone wanted him to go on. In fact, catching him at the houseboat would have been fine, if there's been a blazing gun battle, or a docile surrender with the promise of trials and explanations to come. This is certainly the cheapest outcome, but it feels like a disappointment. The more I think about it, the more you realize that this guy was as close to a movie-style serial killer as we've seen in some time. Most killers, spree / serial / otherwise, and generally stupid, uninteresting, unreflective sorts with little education and less fashion sense. You have educated murderers, of course, but they confine their work to the domestic arena. Andy wasn't a dull-eyed snaggle-toothed Cletus who jist plain lahked killin' fer the smell of it. This fellow was like a character in a Bret Easton Ellis book. Reason enough for suicide, I think.

It's cloudy today. Drizzle and humidity. We're about an inch away from the rainiest July in history, or at least human history, or at least since the white men started taking records, which means it's the wettest in a hundred years. And back then they measured with big buckets: not exactly the most precise example of hydronomy. Still, it's wet. And will be wetter. The record setting year was 1987, and that July had a monster storm that dumped a dozen inches in one torrential evening. I remember sitting in my apartment in Uptown, all the power off, listening to the news on a crackly clock-radio. The battery was weak and I'd painted the thing a nice bright blue, so the speaker wasn't exactly high fidelity. It was my sole link to the rest of the world, though. One of my more dismal recollections.

Later -

According to the radio, we're due for seven inches tonight. Seven. Seven inches.

Quite a day, and it's only half over. Banged together the prototype at work. Submitted it. Ran home. Called up AOL to work on my piece for them. Nothing but system delays. Two crashes. Tried to nap. Kids outside decided to have a screaming contest. Wake up. Back to AOL. Still balky. Get an IM from some kid who's still angry at my Star Wars piece. If I'd had a button that would have electrocuted him, all the day's sturm & drang would have been vented right there, and there would have been a geek-sized hole in the wall opposite his computer.

Now off to the radio, then back to AOL. And around two I have to write the script for tomorrow night's TV commentary.

Come the weekend, James he sleep, James he hoist the beaded glass.

It's a glorious morning here in the Twin Cities, with lovely low thick clouds as swollen as unmilked udders, a dew point in the high billions, an dead cold sun swaddled in thunderheads, and a gentle mist of rain falling at the cheery rate of an inch an hour.

Rain! By God, yes, Rain! What a pleasure to see after an absence, after this long protracted miserable drought of four hours.

This is Seattle without the goatees, as Jeremy the Chef said.

Actually - to conform to my Pollyannaish character - it could be worse. KSTP meteorologist Dave Dahl, normally a reliable fellow and also a swell fellow to boot, predicted two to SEVEN inches over the course of the night, and we didn't get it. Today the sun might even burn a hole in the sod roof that passes for a sky around here. Life's looking good.

I can say that now because the hell of yesterday has passed. I turned in the prototype, and was not met this morning with a message from my bosses asking me to turn in my company badge. In fact there was a message from someone in promotions, asking for info for the in-house ads. (I have this small hope that some day I will get my own cards for the streetcorner newspaper boxes, which always seems to me to be the apex of the business.) I talked to AOL this morning; they got the column. Called the TV station, and they got the copy for tonight's show. It feels odd, but it's true: the hard work is over. Now all I have to do is be on TV and then be on the radio.

Odd: of all the things I had to do last night, the radio was the least bothersome, and in fact didn't seem like work at all. Although that probably showed, as it was one of the most addle-brained shows I've ever done. I came to work in a fire-breathing mood; Jeremy the Chef was as bad if not worse, having suffered a car breakdown that day. Once on the air, of course, we turned the bad moods to comic effect, but it was still a peculiar show; I did it like I'd driven to work: absolute autopilot. Smooth, no crashes, but when it was over I had no recollection of the journey.

There was one amusing bright spot - one of the callers had deposited a huge Seuss hat full of candy and toys. The most lurid candy I'd ever seen. Flavored grubs. (BBQ, Cheddar, Mexican.) A Bugs Bunny spinning sucker, with Bugs' hand moving onanistically. The Monster Mouth Tongue Candy - press the lever, and a hideous red tongue emerges. Kids are supposed to troll the mall sucking on an incubus' tongue. And more. Somehow we had full banks all night. God knows why.

Just got my paycheck. Alarmingly small. Apparently I took every deduction you could take. I mean, about one-third of the chec evaporated in Federal withholding. I must have claimed as a dependants the dog, my id, my superego and the individual mites in my skin. Now it's a trip to payroll for another form.

Later -

Now I'm at the TV station. Half an hour to air time. The run through went smoothly, but that's what rehearsals are for: to give you the illusion of competance. Everything's different when it's real. Interesting note: the mayoral candidate I make fun of at the end of my monologue is, in fact, present tonight, and will be sitting about ten feet away. Oh, well.

As soon as the camera turns away, I'll be whipping off the remote mike, sprinting to the dressing room for my street clothes, then it's back into the Defiant for home - pizza - cup of coffee - then back into the car to go the radio station. I'm in a stupidly good mood, perhaps from culmulative exhaustion, but more likely from the sheer fun of doing all this stuff.

The other night I was driving to the radio station, overworked and overloaded, grousing about the duties of the day, and I passed - as I do every night - the Birchwood apartments. It's an ancient pile of bricks, barely standing; once it was fine housing for the University neighborhood, but it's long gone to seed. The cornice was stripped off decades ago. The paint peels. There's a corner barber store in one of the buildings that's been empty for twenty years, and vines overgrow the faded striped pole. I lived there in 1977 in a small room I can see from the freeway. Every night I give the building a little salute: it all turned out fine.

I just realized that the window is, in fact, the kitchen.

Well, screw it, then.

Short Bleat - sorry - it's double column day, with Strib work in the day, Strib work on the porch after supper before the show, and Newhouse in the late twinkly hours after I get off the radio. A few notes about my progress in decorating my cubicle, then:

I have a new chunk of Art up on the office wall - an old wartime Coke ad with a Rosie-the-Riveter eating her lunch and drinking a Coke. In the background, the tails of airplanes; in the foreground, a vise. Around the illustration American planes fly through a Coke-red sunset sky. It's a nice piece of work. The caption: YOU WORK BETTER REFRESHED. Hard to argue. But the woman in this painting would not have been on the assembly line. She would have been in Hollywood. No one with that hairstyle, that much makeup and that variety of drop-dead gorgeousness would ever spend Day Two on the assembly line. Maybe one or two of the three, but not all three. She looks like a starlet posing for a morale-boosting photo op, the sort of thing Life used to run: Susie Howards Pitches in at the Lockheed Plant. "We all have to do our share," says the star of Paramount's upcoming "Monsieur Poisson."

I also have some hectoring posters from the 50s, apparently crafted to incite pride and greater output among the toiling masses. The series is called Produce Better - Live Better. Compared to the strident hortatory shouts of Soviet-style workplace posters, they're rather mild. Stop waste, be nice to the public, etc. The one that bothers me the most, however, is a fellow standing against a wall that appears to be covered with acoustical tiles; he has a hat, an open-collar workshirt, and a plain honest corduroy workingman's jacket slung over his shoulder. "Don't believe it, buddy," reads the copy, "and don't pass it on. Gossip is a grapevine that grows only sour grapes. Don't eat them." His head is tilted up and his eyebrows are cocked in what I'm sure they intended as a Wise Advice expression, but it makes him look slightly maniacal, and certainly not trustworthy.

Good advice nonetheless. I remember too well the paranoia of the first year in DC, fueled by the Purge and frightened talk over beery lunches with a paranoid co-worker. No gossip for me. Better to spend one second in pain as the axe strikes then to spend four years imagining the blade is tickling your neck.

Just saw the ad for the new column: pretty sweet. Considering what the Pioneer Press did for promotion over the years - nothing, not even a little blurb in the paper itself - this is nice. At the PP, they put the light under a bushel basket, then put a brick atop the basket. Then sat on it.

With luck I can move into mugs, magnets, pens and small enameled pins within the year. No, strike that: no mugs. The world has enough mugs. We never run out of coffee mugs at home. A few months ago I performed ruthless selection on the mugs, weeding out the ones whose sentimental value had expired, or had ugly graphics, or were clearly an airport gift-shop purchase made in a moment of boozy love for whatever city I was passing through. Since I made the purge I have not had to rescue a mug from the dishwasher, or drink coffee from a juice glass, or slurp tea from cupped hands.

A couple of years ago when I was involved in that abortive, doomed Lyndale Av. resurrection plan, the chairwoman of the group rewarded everyone with mugs. Four of them, all with retro designs of maps and 1940s gas stations. I can't part with them; they look too good, and they hold just the right amount of coffee. I likewise cannot shed the mug from Union Station in DC (it's black, and thus hides the coffee rings nicely) or the duo imprinted with old lettuce-crate labels. Everything else can go, though; they sit in the back of the cupboard, unused, taking up space that might be filled by unused extra highball glasses.

We really could do with one plate, one mug, and one bowl each. Life would be so much simpler. But then I would have to give up the gift the Newhouse staff gave me when I left DC: a complete set of Enterprise 1701-A barware.

Nothing doing.

But I will fight any attempts to distribute free enameled pins, which end up in the back drawer, unworn; the little disc that holds the pin to your shirt always falls off and then one day you're looking for something in the drawer, and you feel an incredibly sharp pain, and when you take your hand from the desk there's a pin with my picture on it. Nope. Pens are good, but I believe the only pens that should be given away are Floaty pens; otherwise they too end up forgotten in the back of drawers. Key fobs, then? Small useless faux-Swiss Army knives? Magnets are good for holding pictures of other people's babies to the side of the fridge? I'll go with the magnets.

I'm kidding, of course; not even the big guys here at the shop get that sort of promotion. I'm grateful for the in-house ad and the radio spots, and a little unnerved; it would be nice to just slip this in without fanfare and not call undue attention to it. But Sime & Schuster did that with my books, and look where that got me. (The bargain shelf at Barnes & Noble.)

Yes, the old comforting delusion that one's lack of overwhelming success was due to insufficient promotion.

Going to have a meeting now with the Online people, to see how to move the column to the web. I want to add Shockwave, Java and streaming video. I want a column so good it crashes anything under an MMX with 128 MB of RAM. Then it's some phone calls to the Park Board to find out some actual facts for the column - they're ripping up the entire pathway around the lake for THREE MONTHS, and this is not, I repeat, not acceptable. I suppose I could walk to the Minnehaha Falls every day, but as much as I love the creek, it's not the same as a walk around the lake with Jasper Dog.

Finished the column last night, then watched the "Best Evidence: UFOs Caught on Tape" show on Fox, looking for fakes. And yea, I was rewarded. I had been most interested in a clip of two blips of light creating a crop circle - I could have done that with Photoshop & Premier. At least Fox had the stones to say it was a hoax. A few other clips that have been debunked were also shown, as well as the classic space-battle shot from the shuttle. Supposedly it's an SDI weapon discharged at a UFO, which scurries out of harm's way. NASA says it's ice, reacting to retrorocket fire. Yeah. SURE.

There's always a few clips you can't dismiss, though. I hadn't seen the Phoenix lights, which were admittedly impressive, and shot by plenty of people from different perspectives. A series of lights arrayed in a crescent, moving extremely slowly in unvarying formation. What the hell was it? The Army's explanation: flares dropped in a training exercise. Yeah. SURE.

I remain unconvinced of it all. Dammit. If the truth that's out there is that there's nothing out there, I would love to know for certain

The devil is in the details. (Also God, according to Mies; must be a lot of room in the details, considering those two aren't on speaking terms.) Now I am looking for the people in charge of the details. Someone around here knows my new e-mail address, and I have to get it by the end of the day. I do this with some trepedation - I can't keep up with the e-mail I get from the Net and the radio show, and now I'm about to ask everyone in the state to mail me. At least here there's no assumption of a reply. But I'll have to craft something to send back to everyone - either a card or an e-card. Perhaps a virtual kitchen magnet.

Hmm: there's an idea. We could slap together some virtual magnets or Post-It note pads; people who contributed would be given the URL to go get their goodies. Cheaper than mailing out the real thing.

Cloudy today; no real point in a walk around the lake, even if I could take one. I've hit the wall, and I have brick flecks in my gums. Tottering around with a helium baloon for a head and sacks of jello for legs. (Yesterday's walk was one of those high-speed jaunts that included a patch of jogging, just to remind myself why I don't jog.) Supposed to go back out to relations' house in the burbs tonight for supper - the same place I was last nigh

Later -

I was interrupted, of course, but in a relaxed and hectic way.

. As Tony Curtis said in "The Sweet Smell of Success" - the cat's in the bag; bag's in the river.

That is, Job Done.

The column is in, and has made it through copy desk. The layout is finished, the photo has been taken, the logo is done, the web version is under construction and out of my jurisdiction. I realized today that I've been working with a large number of people on this:

One person to set up the telephone service. Another to set up the e-mail box. Two to set up the web page. One person in promotion. One person laying out the section. Another allotting the space. Another person designing the graphics. A copy editor.

Missing in all this:

A boss.

I have no direct boss. I have no one who's come over daily, tapped on my shoulder and asked about my progress. That's amazing, really. And terrifying, in a small way - I was never told that all of these things were my responsibility, and I don't know if they are; I don't know if I was doing an end-run around someone else, or if there's someone who's been expecting a progress report for the last two weeks and has JUST ABOUT HAD IT with my lack of communication. Probably not the case. The amount of trust and free rein they've given me has been heartening, and I'm gratified to see a couple lines go through that I thought would be yanked.

I really like working there.

In any case, done. Got home at five, walked around the lake - absolutely have to do that, or else (or else what, I don't know; a spare tire will suddenly grow around my midsection) and then pounded down a joyless dinner and threw myself on the bed. I was allotted but 23 minutes of sleep before I woke up, permanently. I kept hearing the planes go overhead - one a minute, over and over, another batch of 200 people roaring over the house, over and over. I couldn't sleep, thinking about them, counting them. Six hundred people over my head. Eight hundred. a thousand. Thousand two hundred. Then the dinner hour ended and the children came out to bang cans and screech, just because it's summer. A good enough reason.

Noticed today that the kids have drawn two pink squiggly lines all around the block. I don't know what it's for. It looks like the chalk outline for a murdered intestine.

Learned today that the station will not, repeat NOT be selling Diner T-shirts at the State Fair. This peeves me greatly. I can understand not getting billboards or brochures, but it's not as if I'm asking them to build me a stand and pay someone to sell a grand total of seven (7) T-shirts. The shop's already there. It makes me suspect - not to get too paranoid about this - that changes are in the works, and the Diner may actually be closed for business shortly after the fair. I'd be sad. That's the breaks, though. It would make life easier - not necessarily better, but easier. Better in some ways. Worse in others. I can only hope that they rejiggle the schedule in such a way that makes it impossible for me to do the show, giving everyone an honorable way out. I mean, they're not going to fire me for ratings - according to the last batch, I had impressive numbers in some key categories, including Time Spent Listening. People listen for an hour and a half, meaning they come in after the news and stay for the whole damn show. Not bad. A lot of that is due to Art Bell, of course - but at least it means they're not turning off the radio and reading a book to wait for midnight.

Let me sell some lousy T-shirts! Jeziz!

I think I have to take Jasper to the vet this weekend for some preventative measures. I fear he has a compacted gland in a region where you don't want a compacted gland. Elsa, the she-wolf of the Giant Swedes, had that, and it was a yowlingly miserable affair. Of course, Elsa is a bit disturbed to begin with - beaten as a puppy by the first owner, and a little growly ever since. Unfortunately, with a new baby in the house, this does not bode well for Elsa's continued tenure in the pack. Such a pity. I know the Giant Swede will do everything he can to keep from gassing his beloved dog, so Elsa will not be going to Dog Valhalla. She'll probably head to the country and find another pack. Even so, you have to wonder if dogs ever think back to long ago and remember, really remember faces and smells and the sense of belonging. If they don't, it's a blessing, and I suppose a curse as well.

Well: 27 big fat minutes left before the second shift starts, so I'd best set up the machinery for late-night web uploading, and then play a little rope with Jasper so he doesn't feel utterly neglected. The in-laws have moved to a cooler house; Sara will be up tonight when I return, so I can make noise and hoot and holler.

Tomorrow I do column number two. But the pressure's off now. Dog's in bed, bed's in the bedroom. Everyone can sleep well and dream of silent planes.