time for Tom and Betty to come home

I don't think they can celebrate St. Patrick's Day in Texas like we can at Patrick's in St. Peter. You better come home soon. Your seat on Geezer's Row is getting usurped by some young punk with tattoos and a backwards baseball cap, Tom. You might have to fight him for it. I've been wearing a red hat around town and stirring up some trouble so when you get back, we can take care of all of it. I miss you both. The weather here is wretched. It's been like March for months...drippy, marginally cold, gray. That's what bars are for, right?

We put the word out that we were looking for a dog sitter, then we decided to take matters into our own hands. We wrote an IEP for Gus. That's an individualized educational plan. We had a team meeting and Regis contributed what he knows about dog psychology from his dog obedience classes and I contributed what I know of special education. We came up with a good plan. Here is part of it.

Knowing that we are both kind of lazy and forgetful, we wrote a check list so we would remember the practice and the reinforcement. Here is the checklist. You can see that, so far, Gus is doing quite well and so are we.

Part of what I am doing currently for my job at River Rock is gathering stories. Monday, I am meeting with one of our farmer partners and knowing how I am, I will get busy talking, forget to take notes, and come back with no clue. I wanted a recording device. I asked Regis, the king of gadgets. This is what he hauls out of the catacombs. A twenty year old tape recorder. I said I would be risking ridicule to use that in public and couldn't he come up with something a tiny bit more modern?

Of course, when I got home from work, Regis had discovered an app for my phone that would record, save, email, and play an audio recording. Amazing.

We're debating about keeping our cell phone plans at the end of May. We pay a lot of money for stupid smart phones. Smart phones what the hell. Who invented smart phones? Most of our devices do all the stuff the smart phone will do except make calls. Can't I just buy something that will make phone calls? I like to tell my kids that when I was young we had one phone and it was attached to the kitchen wall by a cord that was 24 inches long. My dad would walk through the kitchen every thirty seconds and growl, "Get off the phone!"

I shudder to think what his view would be of iPads, cell phones, text messaging, and watching movies in the car. I think he would say, "Look out the window at the cows, goddammit!"

Regis and I watched two movies yesterday: Rum Diary and The Descendants with George Clooney. The Descendants was a wonderful movie...funny and poignant and an interesting story with great characters. Rum Diary was...Hunter Thompson. Debauchery. Drunkenness. Drugs. You have to find that interesting or you won't like this movie.

We're watching Reverend Raven and the Chain Smokin' Altar Boys on youtube. They're coming for our party in June, you know. Gotta go.