How many friends can one dog lose?

Too darn many! I'm usually a jolly fellow, but these days I'm starting to wonder if the ultimate purpose of life is to produce sadness.

Another good friend and neighbor--Shannon--died yesterday. I am really down and can only imagine how distraught her sister, Libby, and their own dog, Daisy, must feel.

Before today, I just knew Shannon and Libby as the nice ladies who took turns walking Daisy, a hound that they adopted and soon nicknamed "The Mouth of the South" due to her strange and rather howl-y way of barking. But Shannon, it turns out, was also a talented and successful writer. Mostly she co-wrote books known as romance novels. She wrote so many that she and her coauthors published them using different aliases. When authors go by fake names, these are usually called pseudonyms or noms de plume, so you can tell them from the ones used by criminals. Some of Shannon's writing names were Madeline Harper, Elizabeth Habersham, Anna James, Leigh Bristol, and Taylor Brady. Here are pictures of just a few of her books:

The list goes on and on. Mike says you can tell from some of the cover pictures why romance novels are also known as bodice rippers. He didn't say which pictures, though. I'll try to figure it out when I'm in a better mood.

Later in her career Shannon turned to a different genre, one that I'll admit is more in keeping with my own taste (pardon the pun): Cookbooks!

Yummy! This book is published by Pineapple Press, which M says specializes in Florida history and culture topics. Here's a link to the book's page on the publisher's website. And this one tells a little about the authors.

Goodbye, Shannon. M and J and I will miss you.

Goodbye, Old Paint!

I've been meaning to post this update for ages, but it seems like the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

Back in December, when I blogged about our new car, I mentioned that the old one was 17. M tells me this is about a hundred in human years. He said she'd become a breakdown looking for a place to happen. One problem he had in figuring out how to get rid of her was that he couldn't bring himself to sell her to someone who actually needed transportation. And he didn't want to trade her in on the new one, because that's a recipe for getting yourself screwed to the wall by some slick-talking salesman.

Then he remembered an article he'd seen in the paper about donating cars to the Halifax Humane Society. He tracked it down and found a link to a special HHS website called rides4rescues.org, which is a charity partner of the nation's biggest vehicle donation program. One mouse-click and three form-filling steps later, he'd arranged for an auto auction company to come get Old Unreliable and haul her away. A few months later we learned that she sold at auction for $1,000, probably for scrap metal and parts. It was the final piece of a win-win deal: HHS got the much-needed money, and we got room in the garage for our new car. M says that when he can finally bear to ditch his 25-year-old pickup truck, he'll donate it to HHS, too.

We highly recommend this program to anyone who wants to dispose of a used-up vehicle without inflicting it on some innocent buyer who knows where you live. They'll take all kinds of vehicles, too, not just cars and trucks. And it will give you a good feeling to know you are helping to care for neglected animals while they wait to find loving homes. So please check it out--rides4rescues.org-- and be sure to tell them Buddy sent you.

While I'm on this subject, I want to give a special shout-out to Tyler Stover, the Halifax Humane Society's community outreach director. Tyler, who is one of my newest blog Followers, wrote the article about the vehicle donation program. His weekly column, "Tails from the Front," appears each Saturday in the Daytona Beach News-Journal. It's some very worthwhile reading for animal lovers!

Diane

The lady across the street died this afternoon. I liked her a lot, and she liked me, too. I will miss her.

M and J said we should play this song for her.

CSI DeLand

A couple of years ago, when I was a fox on the run, I spent a lot of time hanging out on the grounds of a spooky-looking abandoned house and in a wooded sinkhole nearby.

Here's how the house looked back then:

Some of the neighbors who lived next to this great little fixer-upper thought I was hurting their property values by lying around in its side yard and up on the front porch. They loved to call Animal Control to come try to trap me and to tell Mike and Jeannie and the others who were feeding me in those days to cut it out. When the Animal Control officers couldn't catch me, they threatened my caretakers with fines for interfering with their work. One of them even wrote this note on the back of a business card and left it in my empty food dish:

The only thing that accomplished, of course, was to drive my feeding "underground" into the sinkhole.

(Editor's note: For the full story of my care and upkeep in those days, please refer to my very first blog post, which talks about the circle of friendly scofflaws who helped me. For more about life at the old house and the logistics of dining at "The Sinkhole Café,"  see this one.)

Today the house is still abandoned. And as you can tell from this picture M took a few days ago, it has managed to avoid becoming any classier--even without my presence:

There have of been some "improvements," I guess: The roof sports a snazzy hurricane tarp, though the winds have already torn some of it off. But what's that they say--half a tarp is better than none? Also the dangerously sagging balcony and all of the porch railings and supports have been removed. They now lie rotting on the lawn at the far right.

Something the picture doesn't show is that this lovely home was recently once again a crime scene. And this time the crime was a lot worse than "dog on the loose." Behold this item in the local section of last Thursday's Daytona Beach News-Journal:

It seems that four little desperadoes, at least three of them suspended from DeLand Middle School for unspecified misdeeds, decided to fill their time by knocking on doors of houses and, if no one answered, breaking in and robbing the place. At one home in north DeLand, their haul amounted to $3,000 in cash and over $17,000 worth of other items, including jewelry, a computer, green cards, collectible silver coins, a gold ingot, four pistols, a safe, and a 12-pack of beer. Volusia County sheriff's deputies managed to catch three of the thieves, but apparently not the fourth. Two of the boys arrested are also linked to burglaries at a nearby apartment complex. (To see the whole story, follow this link.)

Lest you jump to the conclusion that our abandoned house is the one that was robbed in the $20,000 heist, let me say right away that it was not. Believe me, every item of value has long since been ripped off from it. No, our abandoned house is where these apprentice Dillingers came to divvy up their loot--and to stash some of it!

Everyone in our neighborhood knows that the old house has been a magnet for squatters for years. (Including yours truly, except I just used the yard and the front porch.) Several days over the past few weeks we've noticed that the front door was open. On one of these occasions--I can't remember whether it was before or after last week's burglary--M and I saw a pair of sheriff's deputies investigating the place. I hate to admit it, but a couple of times on our walks, we would go up to the house and peek into the front window, then sit down on the porch and have a treat for old times' sake. I think the last time we did that was about two weeks ago. Crikey! We're lucky we didn't run into those sticky-fingered munchkins!

And that's the way it is. This is Buddy for K9TV, reporting from the crime scene. Back to you, Bob.

(I always wanted to say that. Hee hee.)

One whole year, but who's counting?

Lots of us, as a matter of fact.

A year ago today, Grandpa George turned 89 and Grandma Grace died. Then last March, as my regular readers know, Grandpa died on what would have been Grandma's 88th birthday. Mike says that this pair of odd coincidences didn't bother him at first, since his parents had been divorced for almost 50 years. In fact he thought it was pretty neat. There was a kind of dark humor to it that helped him get past the sting of losing both his folks in a short period of time. Lately, though, he says it doesn't seem so funny. Now each of their birth remembrances will forever be dampened by an anniversary of the other one's death. It's like knowing that the parade's always gonna get rained on.

"Even Shakespeare couldn't make up stuff this bizarre!" he groused on our walk last evening, then added: "On second thought, yes, he could. Maybe he did."

"Who's Shakespeare?" I asked.

"Google him." I could tell the M-ster wasn't feeling chatty.

I think as the years go by, M will change his mind again about the funny-ness of the situation. For one thing, he's a big flip-flopper. (That's a word I heard on one of those cable-TV news channels. M says the proper terms are "learning through experience" and "evolving." Whatever.)

For another thing--and this is the main reason I believe he'll come around--M has a sense of humor that just will not leave him alone. He once told me that when he was in high school, he went over to his girlfriend's house for dinner and took a stack of rubber dog poop with him. He didn't know her parents very well at the time, and you'd think he'd be all about trying to make a good impression.

Well, you would be wrong. When nobody was looking he took that poop out of his pocket and dropped it on the living room carpet. Then when the girl and her parents discovered it and started to have a three-way conniption fit at their dog (who I'm sure must have been pretty confused), ol' M says, just as calm as anything, "Hey, it's okay--no harm done." And with that he scoops the poop up in his hand and pops it into his mouth!

I asked him if they all thought this was as funny as he did, and he said he couldn't remember. The fact that he's blocked out their reaction says a lot. (Memo: The next time he's in a decent mood, ask him how it is that he finds something like this so hilarious, yet he gets all steamed when I troll the cats' litter box for snacks.)

But back to yesterday: When we got home from our walk, I Googled "Shakespeare" and found that William Shakespeare lived over 400 years ago and that he was, in fact, a famous maker-upper of pretty far-fetched stories, which were in the form of plays. He was also a poet who wrote most of his plays using some rather iffy-sounding poetry called blank verse. (Google it.)

I couldn't find any proof that Shakespeare had a story like Grandma and Grandpa's, though he did have people dying all over the place. The most fascinating thing I learned about him is that he invented a dance called the Hokey Pokey, which goes along with one of his shorter poems. Most of the words are a bit hard to grasp, because people talked pretty weird back then (IMHO). But at the very end it turns out that what he was talking about is the meaning of life. Since today we are marking the biggest events in the lives of Mike's mom and dad, I thought it would be nice to post a reading of Shakespeare's Hokey Pokey poem in their honor. So without further ado . . .

Happy birthday, Grandpa!

Mike with Grandpa George - 1946

 And Grandma, we still miss you a bunch!

Grandma Grace with Auntie Julia - 1944

(To watch this on YouTube in its original format, click here.)