Aug 5 - 11

Puppies are the most wonderful animals, until you have to take care of one. It is like a new born child, who sleeps all day but stays awake all night. That is where we are. Phoebe is just the cutest thing but after five hours of trying to entertain her, you wonder what you were thinking.  If you leave Phoebe alone and she knows you are in the house, she just howls for attention, and yes she is very, very cute, but after a while, she just isn’t. Then, it is time for us to go to bed, and ideally, we should have worn her out so she would sleep, but instead she wore us out, and now we aren’t allowed to sleep. And of course, we had agreed to watch my daughter’s dog this weekend and so we are trying to keep her entertained as well. I now know why people will pay $150 an hour for dog training.

By the way, new puppies are not allowed to walk on unknown surfaces until they are fully vaccinated, which takes several months, so I created a puppy transport service. Here is Phoebe in my new venture, oh and by the way, yes, Cooper is very jealous.

Jul 29 - Aug 4

It seems tomorrow Cooper is getting a sister. Not a real sister but I guess an adopted sister. I am not sure of the name yet but it will be and Australian Labradoodle. I will let you know how it goes.

So, I have to tell you that I have an ad for Taylors where we feature a shake each month. So I picked a Snickerdoodle shake, but I put in the ad not to be confused with a Goldendoodle or Labradoodle. You know I am strange so I don’t need to say much more.

Jul 22 - 28

In 1972 Harry Chapin wrote a song called Sniper. It was in reference to the 1966 Texas Tower sniper. If you listen to the song, and beware it is 10 minutes long, it eerily describes someone very similar to the kid who tried to assassinate Donald Trump.

Outside of that, I have nothing. 

No more birds or nests in the house.
The kids are still extremely annoying.
Cooper does not seem to get past the puppy stage.
Jake the parakeet won’t stop barking like a dog.

Jul 15 - 21

Every year, we take a trip to Lake Tahoe. My wife feels it is so the kids will have good memories of their younger years, even though it ages us beyond belief. And of course we usually take one of the kids friends along for the trip so the kids have some company.  We always rent a different house and since we go in the middle of summer I ask my wife to rent a home with air conditioning. Well she found this wonderful house overlooking the lake with a fantastic view. When we get there we realize that we forgot about checking for AC, and the house is gorgeous but warm inside. Ok, we can manage this, and so we unpack and get ready to invite some friends over who are staying at a motel down the road. I make dinner and our friends come over and everything is going well, when my daughter yells we have a problem. We go over and her friend apparently has the stomach flu. OK, we can work through this. We try to find some cleaning supplies and get things cleaned up, and ask the friend to stay away form everyone else in case. 

About an hour later we get a text message that we have another problem. Now before this message I had told my wife maybe we should go home the next day, and she said don't be silly. So this message led us to a problem that was worse than the first.  Ok, we encourage our other friends to go back to their motel, and we clean up again.

The next morning the friend says she is fine so we decide to go on a hike. We go to Spooner Lake to do a 2 mile hike and everything goes fine. We get back in the car heading back to the house when suddenly I hear this loud gushing of fluids. Then both of our kids start screaming. My wife turns around and says kids, when we get back to the house we are packing and going home.
 
By the way I took my electric Mustang up there and on the way back from Incline Village I had as much range on my car when I got home as when I left the house up there. The car regenerates when it brakes and goes down hill. However, going up it uses twice as much so it all averaged out.