Random musings

Rick was kind enough to send this pic along, in reference to Murphy, of course.

And yeah, Muphy is like that. He's proven it several times at neighborhood picnics and barbecues as he's walked right up to people, looked them in the eye, and taken burgers or hot dogs right off of their plates.

Oliver, my first Shepherd, used to do that sort of thing too, but he only targeted little kids. When I lived in New Orleans with him, I had to constantly watch him as he'd walk up to any little kid holding a hot dog and when the kid would reach out to pet him with one hand, Oliver would grab the hot dog from his other hand. Funny, but dammit, those Lucky Dog hot dogs were expensive to replace.

Lagniappe was good for it, too, only his vice was ice cream. Let him see any child with an ice cream cone and that cone was as good as snatched. At least when he did it in Harpers Ferry, the owner of the local ice cream shop, herself a big fan of Lagniappe, replaced the cones free of charge.

But Murphy...he doesn't waste his time on kids. He'll rip a burger out of an adult male's hand in a New York minute and eat it in front of the guy. No shame, that one.


The heavy rains two nights ago completely overwhelmed the flood control barriers at the Lair and gave me and Murphy an indoor pool yesterday. This hasn't happened in a while since I re-landscaped the back of the house so I'd gotten a bit lax on keeping things off the floor, to my detriment. Ah well...I just figure that a basement flood is God's way of telling you that you've got too much stuff. The garbage man is gonna need a bigger truck this week, methinks.

As to Ed Rasimus again, I'd enjoyed his books, particulary When Thunder Rolled: An F-105 Pilot over North Vietnam , for years. So when I posted a blog post about an aviation museum that I'd found in Florida and got a comment from a reader about their F-105 that I'd photographed, I was surprised and pleased to see the name of the author and pilot whose tales of flying still make me jealous today. We'd corresponded about flying and dogs and politics, both on our blogs and via e-mail, and I'm sorry to say that I never made it out to meet him the last time that he was at Wright Patterson AFB for a reunion of his Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association. Frankly, I didn't want to be a bother at his reunion. I now wish that I had. Among other things, I would have loved to thank him for convincing me that a Cessna 172 is not an aerobatic stunt plane (especially the clapped-put rental birds I was flying back then) and really, really should not be looped or do aileron rolls no matter what a few posters on the internet say. (I'd casually asked him about control inputs for such maneuvers--for academic purposes only, of course--but he saw through my request and set me straight in a discussion punctuated with multiple exclamation points.) I may be here today because I took his advice and I'll always remember it. I'll miss ya, Ed.