Less attitude; more bike paths, mountains and beer.

Today is Hooper’s birthday, making Hooper one year old! In truth, we brought him home at six months of age, and he was picked up as a stray in Utah sometime before that, so unfortunately we really don’t know the exact circumstances or conditions of his conception, birth and early development. The vet guessed he was six months old, based on his teeth, when we took him in or his first checkup in early August. So we counted back from there and picked Groundhog Day as his “birthday”. In truth we’ll never know, and we don’t care. Just as we’ll never really know his genetic makeup. He’s Hooper the Dog, he’s ours, he’s one today, and we love him. So we took him out for a hike.

Up past Jamestown there’s a trail that meanders through the tall trees and it seemed as good as any for a winter hike. Hooper seems to love the hiking, the snow, the altitude, the adventure, as much as all of us. Once out of the car, he starts whimpering if we don’t get on with the business of plodding through the snow in a timely fashion. He’s generally uninterested in drinking water because that would involve stopping. Instead, he snags chunks of snow and ice on the fly, and keeps on marching.

Today’s hike led to a vague trail hidden by snow, and Brenda eventually became more interested in scaling a boulder for the view at the top than continuing to the summit. Hooper & I ventured onward, but he kept looking back at Brenda and I lost all sight of anything recognizable as a trail, so we headed back to join her. We snapped a few pics, headed back to town and picked up new treats and toys for the birthday boy. He’s cached out on his bed now, amidst the debris of yet another destroyed stuffed toy. Life is good.

Hooper is a soccer wunderkind. Like all of his other traits/habits/skills, we discovered this over time.

It started with a yellow “utility ball” we found in the snow in November, a forgotten castaway from an Aurora 7 Elementary School recess. Upon discovering the lost ball languishing on top of the fresh snow at the schoolyard after one of the first snowfalls of the season here in Boulder, I kicked it toward the ballfield and Hooper immediately recognized the potential. We ran toward the ballfield gate, kicking the ball along, and once we got inside, a game of keep-away/get-the-ball-past-the-dog ensued, for far longer than it should have.

Since that time, a number of balls (soccer balls, utility balls, baseballs… balls!) have turned up in the ballfields where we take our dogs—in various states of disrepair and deflation—and recently a particular soccer ball has become the apple in Hooper’s eye.

I left work early today to make a doctor’s appointment, so Hooper & I ended up at the ballfield earlier than usual. With no other dog action going on, we resorted to a good old fashioned game of one-on-one fetch. But returning from the second throw of the day, Hooper discovered a pathetic, half-deflated, chewed-up soccer ball to his left and dropped the baseball he was bringing back to me and darted off towards the soccer ball. He jumped on it, bit it, and bounced back a foot or so and nosed at the ball, then looked at me, tail wagging.

Game on.

Soccer with Hooper is simple; make the ball go. But there are evolutionary, hard-wired layers to the game that I find interesting. Hooper’s Border Collie DNA makes this a game of Get in Front of the Ball, Herd the Ball, more than anything else. All it takes to put Hooper in motion is to simply put your body between ball and dog; he circles around and positions himself in front of the ball and you with precision. You can keep moving around the ball and he will follow suit, making sure that ball has no “out”.

The main game is to put the ball in motion though, and this clearly makes Hooper’s day. cutting left and right, Hooper eyes the ball, my feet, my hips and my eyes, as if the end result of my getting past him with the ball decides the World Cup Championship Match. And so I oblige, until I am out of breath. We cut left and right, kick-dribbling and running, Hooper’s tongue hanging out, his big brown eyes tracking my every move. The best part is when we get a certain momentum going in one direction and I open up enough distance between ourselves that I can give the ball a good whack, sending the ball arcing just over Hooper’s head in a dead run; Hooper springs up into the air, all four paws off the ground, and he throws a single snap of the teeth towards the ball, missing, and then scampers off to tackle the errant ball. He pounces, shakes it a few times like it owes him money, drops it, backs up a few steps, and looks at me and wags his tail. How does one resist this plea?

We played this game for a full hour in the ballpark tonight, with no other dogs joining us. I even gave up early and sat on the dugout bench, holding the leash. Hooper came up to me and dropped the ball at my feet, which I rewarded with another ten minutes of World Cup Doggie Soccer. Afterward, we walked home and I made him another batch of homemade dog treats; I think I love this animal.

With my new website layout came a nifty rotating masthead image capability, so I created a gallery page that shows them all, with descriptions, in case anyone cares.

Check it out: rumblestrip Masthead Image Gallery

Well, it’s official. I am fucking crazy.

At the ballfield tonight, exercising the dog, my neighbor Jeannie whipped out some treats for Hooper and her dog Joplin. She mentioned they were homemade. Instead of saying “take your homemade, organic, fair trade dog treats and your sixties-icon-named-after dog and get the hell out of here, hippie”, I said “oh really? That sounds like a good idea, all-natural and all”. Still not totally convinced this was anything I wanted to get involved in, I went home and did as she instructed, and Googled “homemade dog treats”. After perusing a few that seemed like more trouble than they were worth, I stumbled across these little babies, called Bacon Bites.

In other words, bacon cookies. Imagine my delight!

And so I convinced Brenda when she got home that BLTs were on the menu tonight, and the extra bacon could go into the treats (OK, OK, there’s never extra bacon when I make BLTs, but I thought this was a way to divert some of the fat to another stomach). And so, this guy who doesn’t bake, who doesn’t really like cookies at all, poured bacon fat and crumbled crispy bacon into a bowl with flour and egg (and garlic powder!) and actually rolled it out and cut it into little cookie nips. They are baking right now, at three twenty five, for thirty five to forty minutes. I am baking cookies for my dog. I am fucking insane. What’s sadder is that I fully plan to sample the cookies, and I’m not a little scared that I will actually like them and start fighting with Hooper over them. I mean, they’re bacon cookies, after all. Bacon… COOKIES! Am I wrong!?

Just before I started rolling out the dough, I walked over to Hooper with the dough (who was nicely draped over his bed, by the way) and let him have a sniff; two whiffs and he opened wide and tried to take the whole glob. So, I think he’s gonna like ‘em.

Life goes on around here, the main story being the cat and dog, who continue to work through their issues. The gate remains, but Ellie is definitely interested in coming down and joining us. If only that damned dog wasn’t down here:

When one of us does take Hooper out for a walk, Ellie is quick to come down, hurdle the gate, and start exploring the lower levels. Of course, she likes to do this from up high, like on top of the kitchen cabinets:

Hooper finally got his own bed, but currently he believes it to be a giant expensive chew toy. Deep down, he knows what he’s supposed to do on it, and eventually he settles down and demonstrates, like so:

This post also is the first one that employs a new plugin that I installed, which allows for a slick Javascript display that enlarges the images in my posts. Try it out; click on any image in the post and it will expand to a slightly larger size, with caption. I plan to refine this a little bit more and then I’ll incorporate this effect into all the previous posts, since I need to update them all to work with my new theme. Feedback welcome!

Sponsored link, seen in my Gmail inbox:

AmazingFartVideos.com – 10 Fart Videos That Changed The World. Watch Free Instantly!

Farts, that changed the world. Did Hitler have an embarrassing flatulence transgression as a kid that gave him such issues, leading to World War II? Did George W. Bush fart his way to such stupefying stupidity? Did a fart cause the Challenger explosion, and we just don’t know it? I mean, I thought it was an o-ring.

Loads of websites make grandiose claims, and sell lots of crap; some successfully, some not. Girls Gone Wild, I get. This, I don’t. Maybe it’s just me.

Now that my wife and I own a dog, we have the pleasure of walking him, and picking up his deuces. One day recently I was out walking Hooper on his pee track (the short circuit around the public walkways in front of my condo) and he dropped a deuce on me, unsuspectingly. I had no poop bag. lesson learned. But I can tell you this, I went back in the house, got a bag and hunted Hooper’s package down like the minefield clearers of Bosnia. Because I really have always hated people who leave their dog’s crap in ball fields and on lawns. I don’t want to be that guy. And so you can imagine my disgust last night when, as I roamed the ballfield alone, Hooper having long since given up on any and all formal training for the evening and scampering around at the other end of the park, I came across a pile. Now, this ballfield had a bunch of kids playing baseball in it just yesterday, it’s not like no one’s ever in here. I think it’s pretty damned lame to leave your dog’s crap in a public park, and I worry that one day Hooper’s gonna drop one on a neighbor’s lawn and I’m gonna get yelled at because of the assumption that I’d just leave it there. This fear is neatly summarized in a very entertaining tale at Rachel Lucas’ website, which my friend from work told me about. Thought I’d share. The gal’s got spunk.

Read: To Poop or not to Poop

Brenda & I went to see a play last night at the Denver Center. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but this is the first straight play I’ve seen since moving to Boulder; it was worth the wait.

Our friends Deirdre and Evan bought us tickets for Christmas, and it was the foundation of a great evening. The play was “Our House”, a world premiere commentary on the ever-more blurred line between network news, so-called reality television, and entertainment. Presented in the round in the Space Theatre, it was a great evening that had us laughing and thinking. I miss the thriving theatre scene back east, but then again we could never afford to go to the theatre very often anyway. But the Denver Center Theatre Company is definitely mounting some great productions and we plan to support them more.

Once again, rumblestrip.org has a new look. This time it’s based on the neoclassical theme by Chris Pearson. Very clean, and with a rotating masthead graphic (currently randomly selected from eleven images, more to come).

The bigger news is that I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. The new version supports tagging, which allows me to assign tags, or keywords, to each post. This allows a finer-grained content definition than the traditional “categories” I used to use. One nifty feature of the new layout is the new “tag cloud” feature, which displays all the tags in my blog; the more a tag appears, the larger the tag shows up in the cloud. This simply offers one more way to select posts by topic. Categories remain, and are selectable from a pulldown menu (as are monthly archives).

I’ve also changed the way images are sized, and as a result (and in order to assign tags to older material) I will be combing through my old posts to update them; in the meantime, old posts’ images will not display correctly nor will the tag cloud reflect the actual total content of this blog for a litle while, until I have a chance to go through them all.

I’ve finally joined the modern age and added a digg section. You’d think that with one of my friends and blog readers being an employee at this up and coming internet company, I’d have latched on by now. Well, now I have a “Digging” section that will list my latest Diggs, or links to things I find on the internets that I find interesting or amusing. My first one is a real doozy, and recommended reading!

Lastly, my static pages are not accessible yet, but that’s ok because they largely said “coming soon” on them. It is my sincere hope that this change, once and for all, motivates me to comb through all my old posts and fix typos, dead links, add tags and, finally, add in all my old static content from my original websites that were online as far back as 1996. Should be fun.

Oh yeah, and if you read my site regularly, you may have to force the css file to reload (ctrl+refresh or command+refresh) to get the images to display correctly. If the pics of Elle are huge, then you need to do this.

Bear with me as I bring all my content up to snuff and online. Onward!

My preferred candidates are already out of the race or are still languishing under the boot of Big Media so no one even knows who they are (Dodd’s out? Dodd who?). I find myself wanting to comment on the race, and then again I like my blood pressure where it’s at currently. So I simply offer the lyrics of this song, written by Ian MacKaye, as we march on toward November hoping for the best and expecting the worst.

“Everybody Knows”
The Evens

You arrive with empty duffel bags, hungry eyed
You looked around taking measurements to move inside
The capital it is your proving ground, your centering
You and yours can keep your scores, but Washington is our city

Everybody knows you are a liar
Everybody knows you are a liar
Everybody knows you are a liar
Everybody knows you are a liar

Too much technique with no texture below
You fabricated your way in here and everybody knows

Everybody knows you are a liar
Everybody knows you are a liar
Everybody knows you are a liar
Everybody knows you are a liar

Too many distractions just obscure what should be shown
Stop with the abracadabra ‘cause everybody knows

You return via machinery and public lies
You broke to break, you’re breaking everything, it’s no surprise
The capital it is your playground now, your center ring
You and yours can keep your scores, Washington is our city

You and yours and all your wars have run your last campaign
You’re fired from a job you never should have had
That hideous strength absolutely sinks
You better watch your back

Let the door hit you on the ass