Busting Kirkham

Today has been surprisingly productive. At ISU, the stats students got to play with hypothetical power and the algebra students got to manipulate imaginary numbers. Then I came home, dug a bucket of dandelions (making sure to get all that had bloomed), and actually mowed my front lawn. This is a momentous event. My lawn has been mowed before school is out. I'm sure the neighbors are thrilled (especially whichever one occasionally sics the lawn cops on me). And since it got mowed, it is now being watered. The backyard hasn't been mowed yet, but I think I'm going to wind up digging up two-thirds of it, getting dandelions. Still, I want to turn part of it back into a garden, so that's not all bad.

Then I headed over to my dad's place to see if he'd let me take Buster out for a walk. Currently my dad cannot see anything more than eight inches away from him (this is fixable: cataracts. But he insists that his eyes will get better when he works out all this paranoid blame garbage; in a sense this is true: if he were taking meds for his schizophrenia, and not going through the paranoia, he probably would have fixed his eyes by now). He hasn't been walking Buster for quite a while. I was afraid he might resent me taking over, but he seemed enthusiastic, and even let me borrow the pickup. Buster wasn't happy about riding in the pickup, but he got excited as soon as I let him out at the Kirkham trail. Dad obviously hasn't even been trying to teach him to heel, but he started to get the idea today. Especially when the leash wound up between his back legs for a while. ;^)

The downside is that it's hard to get pictures while walking an excitable dog. The upside is that I probably got more of a workout trying not to slow him down too much, and not stopping to take pictures.