Sunday, starting over

On Memorial Day we had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an English teacher at a posh private high school here in Marin.  We were discussing the practice of diagramming sentences, because of a question that had come up in one of the private tutoring sessions she offers after school and on weekends to make ends meet.  As if teaching high schoolers English full-time weren't enough...  

Anyway, I realized over the course of that conversation that I never learned how to diagram sentences the way she was demonstrating it -- that just wasn't a thing we ever did at the French American Bilingual School, where I was a student through 7th grade, or at Everett Junior High or at Lowell.  I do recall quite a lot of use of my Bic 4-color pen, underlining in red, click, circling in green, click, annotating in blue.  But never like the diagram at left.  Nope.  Never.

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Dogs make better people

Mr Burns with Erica, his sweetheart of a teacherWe finished Level III Sirius puppy training last night, me and Mr Burns and our teacher Erica and the other people and dogs in our class -- Habibi, Tammu, Lola and Barry.  In the way of all school nerds, I have loved every moment of puppy class ever since we started, when we'd only had Burnsy for maybe two weeks, back in late September.  Burns has been in training for the entire 6 months he's been our boy.

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little squeak that makes my heart sing

Our boy Mr Burns is a bit of a talker.  I'm hoping I can teach him to say, "I love you," in some fashion over the course of the next 15 years, but for now am contenting myself with the sounds he makes on his own.  Which are very talk-y sometimes, like this evening.  

Here he is making the sounds he makes when he wants someone to come over and pet him, hang out with him, stop typing and be near.  It's not whining, exactly.  At least that's not how it sounds to me.  All I hear is, "hey, come see me, I need you, I love you."