Flexi-dog

With my impending birthday next month, I noticed that I feel the hands of time beating on my body more and more. Waldo, on the other hand, is still young and flexible enough to twist his body around like a pretzel.

His new sleeping position (below) is rather impressive. His spine is in an "S" shape with his bum and his snout facing in two different directions! I don't know about you, but I am not sure if I was ever young and flexible enough to do this!!

This other pose (below) is what we tend to call "chicken legs" since he looks like one of those flayed chickens at the butcher shop.

Oh, to be young and flexible!!

On empathetic dogs

I found this interesting article about a new study that suggest that domestic dogs have the capacity for a fundamental form of empathy. How did the researchers come to this conclusion? Because they found taht dogs can "catch" a human's yawn. According to the article: "The phenomenon, called contagious yawning, has been found only in humans and other primates such as chimpanzees and is thought to relate to our ability to empathize with others."

Anyone who has spent time with a dog knows they have empathy. I, for one, don't need a contagious yawn to tell me that.

A photo rediscovered

I don't often lose things - material objects like wallets, keys, etc. - but when I do, I've been known to send a little prayer to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost or stolen articles. The best occurrence, though, is when you find something that you never knew you lost - like this photo below:

I found this photo on our new-ish digital camera totally by accident. The camera has built-in memory in addition to whatever size memory card you stick into it. I had the removable memory card stuck into my computer to download some photos from the weekend, when I turned on the camera and saw this photo. Apparently the camera reads from the memory stick by default, so I had forgotten about the photos still left in the camera itself.

I know this photo isn't much, but it's nice to see my boy again. This photo was taken in my office. Watson is on his green bed with a heating pad laid over the top of it. We started giving him a heating pad in the winter since his bones were getting more creaky and the New England winters weren't helping.

Oh, how I still miss him.....