A veritable "plethora" of items

   Matthew turned eleven years old last weekend. My wife baked him a cake. It was one of those Duncan Hines extra moist recipes. You know, the ones with "one cup of pudding" in each cake? Double decker, fudge marble swirl with chocolate fudge frosting, it was. Really, really moist, it was. I guess it was soft, too, or the frosting was thick, or something.
   Have you ever made a small mistake, and tried to fix it, only to make it worse? But still, you figure it is salvageable, so you try to patch it up again, only to mess it up even worse? And then you get determined to fix it up if it is the last thing you do? Have you ever been watching someone while they go through that process? Kinda like a train wreck, isn't it? You can see the inevitable chaos and destruction coming, but you can't do anything about it, and you can't look away. Of course, if you take a picture of it, you're just a sick bastard.
   We called it a California Earthquake, and served it anyway. Tasted great.

   If you've read my (almost) 100 things about me, which by the way was updated a couple of days ago, you'll remember that I commented on the love-hate relationship between my dog and my cat. With spring in the air, the cat has been gathering her courage and making sorties to the main floor in search of windows to look out at the birds from. Inevitably, she overextends herself, and ends up getting pinned down by the dog, and forced to fight her way back to base.
   Think I'm joking?









   Shadow just wants to play, but as you can see from the above series of pictures, she's having none of that. She's given him several solid bats on the snout, but she has no claws on her forepaws, and he doesn't even flinch anymore. Luckily, she wins the staring contests, and when he blinks, she runs for the safety of the basement.

   Oh, and speaking of Shadow...
He's not so much the puppy anymore, is he? And he's big! The average weight of an adult, male Border Collie is forty-five pounds. Shadow is over sixty-five, and he's only nine months old. We can hardly afford to feed him, he eats more than Matthew.
   And more variety. I could only dream of Matthew eating broccoli, carrots, lettuce, and cabbage. This dog lives for vegetables. His favourite treat in the whole wide world is cherry tomatoes. I'm trying to get a picture of him beside Matthew to compare with the first pictures I ever showed you. If I can get them both to stand still long enough, I'll post it up here soon.