Stan Taylor

The April issue of National Geographic magazine arrived today. At bedtime, Katie took it with her upstairs, intending to read it in bed before going to sleep. Samuel followed her into the bedroom and saw the cover for the first time. The photo on the cover frightened him terribly: he burst into tears and was inconsolable for a good five minutes. I then tore off the cover and threw it away in hopes of appeasing him.
A little later, Katie tried to show the cover article to Samuel in an attempt to show him that it was nothing to be afraid of. She turned a page, he saw another illustration that frightened him, and we went through the whole thing again!

The office complex where I work has a small gym for the tenants’ employees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I leave the house at 6:00 a.m., beat the traffic, and then run on the treadmill before work.
I’ve never worked out with weights, but from what I understand, the best routine is to use relatively little weight with lots of repetitions. If that is correct, in all the times I’ve run at the office gym, I’ve only seen a couple of people follow this routine systematically.
This morning it was just me on the treadmill and one younger guy who came in to use the weight machines. He cracked me up: he would put on lots of weight, do three or four difficult reps, get up, stare at himself in the mirrored windows while flexing and rubbing the affected muscles, then repeat. He spent more time caressing himself and staring at his reflection than actually lifting weights. I also noticed that he only worked the muscles that he could easily see: arms, chest and shoulders.

A female cardinal eating from the feeder on our deck this past weekend:

Peach blossoms, taken in our back yard yesterday:

This is Sophia, a six-week-old Lhasa Apso that we took care of for a few days last week:

Heather Armstrong discovers the Good Dog Carl books, and says (though with more vulgarity) pretty much the same thing I did when I first read one of them:

What mother in her right mind leaves her baby in a stroller at the bottom of an escalator in a department store TO BE WATCHED OVER BY A DOG? Do the police know that this is in print? AND I‘M THE BAD MOTHER?

The person who named the food that we bought for Samuel’s hermit crabs had a sick sense of humor. Not ‘Hermit Crab Chow’ or ‘Hermit Crab Food’, but ‘Hermit Crab Cakes’! Mmmm.

This morning I went running on the Town Lake hike and bike trail. As usual, there were a lot of people out running, some of whom had their dogs. I always feel sorry for the dogs, especially the water breeds like Labs. I can just hear them saying to their people (not literally hear, as in Eddie-Murphy-as-Dr.-Doolittle hear): You mean we just came down here to run? Excuse me, I’m a water dog and that’s a lake. Lab! Lake! Dog! Water! Ducks in Lake! Must chase ducks!
There was one lucky dog at Auditorium Shores whose person was throwing sticks into the lake and letting the dog retrieve them. The others could only watch and wish.

This morning, I heard a radio advertisement for a furniture store. The ad claimed that their current sale “is the most looked forward to event of the year.”
Why not just “most anticipated”? Poor copyediting?

A newsbite from The Copenhagen Post:

For centuries, Danish churchgoers have received the body of Christ in the form of a small, bland communion wafer. Now, competition is on the way.
Ninety master bakers from the island of Funen have taken up the challenge to experiment with new recipes for the holy flesh, daily religious newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad reported on Thursday.
‘We have never tried anything like this before,’ Svendborg baker Gerner Pedersen said. ‘It’s very exciting. I think I will go for a baguette made out of a mixture of wheat and rye flour. That would give a good, strong taste of bread.’
Copenhagen deacon Finn Laugesen said he wished the bakers all the best. ‘But for as long as I have been responsible for the communion wafers, I’ve gone for the most neutral taste I could find,’ he said. ‘After all, the bread should symbolize the body of Jesus, and the wafer shouldn’t be getting all the attention. Just imagine if the pastor at the altar would say ‘This is the body of Jesus Christ. Would you like that with chocolate, vanilla or strawberry taste?’

Here’s a news flash: how about just using real bread?