puppy puppy?

don't you hate those pet owners who can't stop talking about their animals, who seem to have nothing else in their lives but their animals?

well perhaps i can be accused of appearing to be that. but the animals pictured here aren't the animals whose virtues i usually extol. this is sagan (in the chair) and max. they are dogs. i don't particularly care for dogs. they're kara's pets and i am a nice person for putting up with them.

sagan is a corgi-weimaraner mix, which is a little peculiar if you stop and think. she's something like three years old. she's pretty smart; i'll give her that. another good quality she possesses is this: if she stops moving for more than five minutes, she falls asleep. and she snores. she snores like there's something critically wrong with her pulmonary system, though there isn't.

max is an australian shepherd. he's 14 or so. he once was a very smart dog, as i understand most herding dogs are, but now his mind is pretty much gone. kara's had him from birth (his, not hers) or so; he traveled around the country with her when she went on her year-long road trip. he's never really cared for me. kara and i have been together six years and i'm still the interloper. the only reason he doesn't still bark at me whenever i come home is that he doesn't usually notice. deafness is a virtue. i recognize him as a good dog though, as dogs go.

so these are they. the dogs in my life. max sometimes seems to be hanging onto life with his overlong claws and sometimes he seems almost lucid. he could well be with us for a while. kara assures me, however, that when he does go, we will be getting another dog.

and the plan is to name him or her steve. we read somewhere that the majority of scientists, i don't remember if it was physicists or biologists or scientists in general, are named stephen or steve or stephanie. a statistical anomaly, perhaps, but we'll be taking advantage of it.