"Ask yourself the three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything. 1) Does this need to be said? 2) Does this need to be said by me? 3) “Does this need to be said by me now?"

This is what I spend the majority of my time at work thinking. And I so rarely know the correct answer.

Shadow won't eat his prescription cat food. I put it in his bowl and he gives me the look of "Daddy just fed me the yummy treats and the gooshy food." And I tell him, "Don't play that card, kid, Daddy bought two bags of this stuff for you."

Vlad thinks the Swiffer is his mortal enemy, and chases it. Of course, he also thinks the kitchen chairs are his mortal enemies.

My friend's basset hound Chopper has learned how to turn on the Roomba just so he can chase it around and bark at it.

Thank you for the scanned burrito, -t. It was virtually delicious.

This is the first place I've ever lived that had garbage pickup. Before, it was apartment complexes with communal dumpsters, and I can't remember about the Nashville house, but I think we took our garbage to the dump ourselves. This may explain why I like watching the garbage guys throw my trash into their big truck on Tuesday mornings. It's so efficient; the truck picks up the bin and the garbageman doesn't even have to touch the trash.

When I was a kid we divided our garbage into stuff we burned, stuff that went in the manure spreader and stuff we hauled to the dump. My job was burning stuff, which was fun.

I was tommy as a kid. We lived out in the country and we burned our trash in a small pit next to the creek. We had two garbage cans for stuff that wouldn't burn, I don't remember how those got emptied.

My friend's basset hound Chopper has learned how to turn on the Roomba just so he can chase it around and bark at it.

That's wonderful.

My job was burning stuff, too! We had a big concrete bucket-like thing ("firepit", I guess) with a hole in the bottom to pull ashes out of. Anything that couldn't burn, got dumped into a sinkhole, of which we had many. I'd love to go back and excavate those sinkholes.

We've had a pretty mild Summer so far. Why am I already looking forward to Fall?

Maybe it's because Fall is my favorite season, but I never start looking forward to it this early.

shrift, did the cleaning help?

Maybe? I'll monitor the refrigerator over the next few days to see if it made a difference. I also need to experiment a bit with where to store things since it's definitely colder in the back and warmer at the front.