Meet Banjo

This is Banjo!

He was found as a stray in Hollister, CA, which is about 60 miles south of the bay area. He was in a high-kill shelter in a farming community and was down to his last week or so when a rescue organization from the bay area brought him here. He stayed with a foster family for a week before his profile was posted online.

The day before we got him, he went to the vet to get neutered. While he was there, they discovered that he had giardia, some tummy worms (common to shelter / stray dogs) and a piece of buckshot lodged near his hind leg. So when we brought him home on Saturday he was a bit bedraggled and mostly wanted to find a little corner of the house and curl up to sleep. He has to wear an e-collar to keep him from licking his stitches, which he absolutely hates. It makes him run into walls and he gets surprised by loud noises behind him. Plus, of course, he can't lick his stitches, which drives him crazy. We tried to take him for a walk which was a spectacular failure. He flopped around on the leash like a newly-caught fish, clearly hating to be tethered to anyone. On the positive side, he was very tolerant of us once we got inside- he didn't growl or pull away and was happy to be petted. And he has been perfectly housetrained so far. He just marches over to the door and sits patiently until we let him out. It is lovely not to have to clean up messes!


We have had him for six days now, and Banjo has really started to come out of his shell. He has stayed home alone for up to 6 hours while we're at work, and mostly seems to enjoy sleeping in his big blue bed while we're gone. But when he hears us come home, he runs to the door and turns around in circles until we sit down to pet him. Usually our efforts are rewarded with a few licks, too. He likes to roll on his back and have his belly rubbed and he is getting pretty good at "come". His favorite treat is a bit of shredded cheese, which he takes very gently from our hands. He hasn't played with too many toys yet, but we have caught him carrying around our slippers a couple times. He has a couple very endearing quirks, like the way he cocks his head when he is listening for something and how he sometimes crosses his front paws under his chin when he is laying down.

We got him to go on a walk with us yesterday, too! He still takes a fair amount of encouragement and is clearly timid of cars and other people on the sidewalk, but he likes to sniff things and is tolerating the leash pretty well. When he starts to fight it, we just tell him to come and give him some cheese and that usually helps.


So we still have a ways to go, but it has only been six days, so we're feeling good about it. I'm sure there will be many future updates on the adventures of Tom and Kate and little Banjo!

Adopting a dog

Tom and I have been wanting to adopt a dog for ages - and when we finally moved into this house in Sunnyvale we were so excited to start looking for the right one. We did wait until after the holidays so we wouldn't have to worry about leaving it alone right after we adopted it, but as soon as we returned from our Christmas trip, it was dog-hunting time!

We had a surprisingly tough time finding the right dog - we knew we wanted a smallish dog that was friendly to everyone, mellow in the house, active out of the house, didn't bark much, and ideally wouldn't shed and could learn to chase a ball. Kind of a lot to ask for, but we were under the impression that the humane societies were so full that there would probably be many dogs like this to choose from.

Not so, in the bay area at least. It was pretty sad - the majority of the dogs in the shelters are pit bulls or pit mixes, and a lot of the other dogs had fairly major health or behavior issues. One 50 lb Airedale we looked at immediately jumped up on the banquet tables that were encircling the exam room and raced in circles around the room! Imagine having that dog at home during dinner time!

The small dogs that were available were often Jack Russell Terriers, which are renowned for their extremely high energy level and can be pretty destructive at home if they aren't getting enough exercise. They are also generally hyper and don't calm down very easily.

We mostly used Petfinder, a website clearinghouse that lists all the dogs available in the various rescues and humane societies nearby. You can search for a certain breed, or gender, or size, and read a description about the dog before you go meet it, which is very helpful.

At any rate, after 3 weeks of monitoring Petfinder and five visits to various pounds / humane societies / rescues, we finally saw this profile posted on the website. I was particularly excited because the dog really looked like a border terrier, a breed I had been reading about that fit all our "wish list" requirements. I had kind of resigned myself to not getting a BT, though, because they are relatively rare (143rd most popular breed registered by the AKC) and are also in that "small dog" category that tended to get adopted lightning fast from the shelters.

But luck was on our side, and we adopted the little tyke last weekend. We've named him Banjo.

3 Cool Google Maps Mashups

As you may know, I am a huge fan of maps - especially GoogleMaps - and I recently found these mashups that make pretty cool uses of it. There are a ton out there, these are just a few I found to be particularly neat.

• GMaps Pedometer - Uses GoogleMaps to allow you to create a path with waypoints, much like GPS does, and it will give you the distance, elevation profile, and if you want, calories burned (depending on your weight). Could be useful to see or plan your common or upcoming walking routes, or to measure distances to places. In addition to the standard "Map," "Satellite," and "Hybrid" views, you can have a USGS topo overlay too, which can be pretty neat when measuring trails or other features you can't see with the other options.

• Shaded-Relief.com - Basically GoogleMaps with additional overlay options of shaded relief of the world, as well as "VE" (not sure what it stands for) that taps into the Geonames database of all sorts of location names - mountains, rivers, lakes, roads, schools, monuments, stores, etc. - this option has a higher density of features than the standard GMaps, and allows a higher zoom level. This site also lets you search the Geonames database for something, and then it plots the results on the map with a list of them at the right for you to select from. Pretty much just a tweaked GMaps, but neat.

Wedding-Mapper.com - Man, I wish I had found out about this one this summer, when I was doing the same things manually and much less snazzily! This mashup lets you enter in all the relevant locations for your wedding and categorize them as hotel, restaurant, ceremony, reception, entertainment, airport, etc. It then plots them on a GMap, and you can edit the text bubbles for each place, and add pictures, etc. There's a sample map here. If you know anyone getting married soon, forward them this link!

Newton fact 'o the day

I'm currently, albeit slowly, reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and in one of the early chapters there's a pretty amusing passage about Isaac Newton and his eccentricities that I thought I'd share:

"Newton was a decidedly odd figure - brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin-a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather-into his eye socket and rubbed it around "betwixt my ewe and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could" just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing-at least nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him."

DC Visit

This is a little bit belated, but I went to DC for a meeting at NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center last week, and got to do a little bit of sightseeing too. The evening we got in I took the Metro from Greenbelt (where Goddard is) into town and walked around for a while. My main mission was to see the World War II memorial, as that was one of the main monument/memorials I hadn't yet seen around the mall area. I know there is some controversy about it, but I was impressed with it - I think it blends pretty seamlessly into the reflecting pool area between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial without really feeling in the way. It's sunken into the ground and incorporates water, so that helps. I really liked the numerous bronze reliefs that depict WWII era life as you walk into the memorial, and the "Freedom Wall" that has 4048 gold stars, each representing about 100 Americans who died in the war. Being there at night made for some nice reflections, too. Also, I had the place completely to myself. I'm sure that made it feel more unique, too, although being 8pm on a 20 degree Tuesday night, I'm not too surprised nobody else was crazy enough to be out there. Following that I had a fantastic bowl of Crab and Corn Chowder at the Capitol City Brewing Company on 11th and H, I think. Man, that's good chowder - If you are going to DC anytime soon, I highly recommend you put both of these on your to-do list.

Lockheed Humor

This was the forward du jour at Lockheed today. Thought it was good enough to share - click on it to make it large enough to read.

Fantasy Football 2006-07 Wrap Up

Well, the fantasy football season is over. I had high expectations this year coming off of my spectacular 3 for 3 league wins last year. My strength is probably drafting strategy - football is very different from fantasy baseball because there are so many fewer positions and the elite players are much more scarce. A lot of fantasy players don't truly understand how this should affect which players you pick- elite quarterbacks get taken way too early, generally, and people don't stock up on running backs or high-risk wide receivers quite enough. My weakness is certainly player knowledge - I still pay much more attention to the Broncos than any of the other teams. Plus, here in the bay area, we only get to watch Raider and 49er games, and they have been so dismal that no one wants any fantasy players from those teams anyway.

Fast-foward 5 months to today. I finished the season in LAST place with a dismal 4-10 record. Uff. Granted, there were 6 weeks in the middle of the season (wedding time) that I paid basically no attention to my team. I missed a lot of free agent pickups and didn't even manage to change out my bye-week players a couple of times. Still, it's pretty disappointing. I'm going to have to re-evaluate for next year.

Incidentally, Tom drafted the team for one of the guys in my league who wasn't able to attend the draft this year. How did that team do, you ask? Friggin first place. That's the last time I let Tom "help out" one of my opponents....

Dartmouth Police Blotter

Reading the "police activity" column in the college newspaper was always a highlight for me - I thought I would share the most recent column with you all. It certainly presents a quaint view of "crime" in a small town...

Jan. 4, 11:29 a.m., North Main Street
Hanover Police were called when a man entered the back seat of a woman's car and asked for a ride. Several onlookers assisted in removing him from the car. Police arrested him and identified the suspect as a Dartmouth alumnus, the subject of several student complaints. The man's last known address was the Shady Lawn Motel in White River Junction.

Jan. 7, 1:17 a.m., Webster Avenue
Hanover Police responded to a call from Chi Gamma Epsilon fraternity where an arm-wrestling bout ended in a traumatic injury. An individual suffered a broken arm and was transported away by ambulance.

Jan. 7, 2:53 a.m., Webster Avenue
A Hanover Police officer on patrol spotted three subjects knocking over a trash can on Webster Avenue near North Main Street. The officer determined that all three individuals were intoxicated and arrested them for unlawful possession. A dispatcher monitoring the security cameras at the police station spotted one of the subjects throwing something into the garbage can while waiting in the booking room. Police learned that the object was a false identification card. The three individuals, one Dartmouth freshman and two visiting students, have a court date on Jan 30.

Jan. 7, 5:24 a.m., Webster Avenue
A fire alarm sounded after a shut chimney flue in Bones Gate fraternity's fireplace caused smoke to pour into the building. Police officers and firefighters arrived on the scene to find that only two residents had been evacuated. The remaining residents were then evacuated. One resident resisted and was then arrested.

Jan. 8, 8:26 a.m., North Main Street
An employee working at Sherman House called Hanover Police after arriving in the morning to find the door of the copy room forced open. It appeared as if nothing had been taken.

Sunnyvale notes

We are getting pretty close to moved into our new place, and we like it a lot! Since we've been back we have put a lot of pictures, paintings, and assorted other wall decorations up, Kate found us a washer and 2 desk chairs on Craigslist, we hung a couple mobiles, and got a nice indoor plant. No dog yet, but we did go to the Silicon Valley SPCA and looked a few but nothing was perfect enough for us to take home. Don't worry, that event will warrant a few of its own dedicated blog posts.
We did, however, take some time this past weekend to explore our local Sunnyvale community! It's quite nice, and here are some highlights of what we've found so far:

• A number of cool parks within walking/biking distance, including the basketball courts across the street that we have already used a few times. Another park (Las Palmas) in S-Vale has some fancy tennis courts (but you have to pay to play on them, it's like a public country club almost) and a great dog park.
  
• The Sunnyvale public library, which is a 5 minute bike ride away, and it's a great library. It's big, but has a bunch of separated areas and is organized well to keep the loud areas and the quiet areas separate. And it has this long conveyor belt to, well, convey returned books to the circulation area in the back! Pretty fun.
  
• We tried out our local church, thinking we were going to the Unitarian Universalist one (as a sign on the property read), but it turned out there are 2 congregations - a Unitarian one that meets at 10 and a UCC one at10:30. So were ushered into the UCC one instead. It was nice, but was probably a veto candidate for two reasons: 1) the service clocked in at 1:20 with poor hymn selection (including all 5 verses of twinkle twinkle little star) and 2) there seems to be a dedicated time to call out people that don't show up. Seriously - after the time for celebrations and concerns or what have you, they basically go around looking for who might not be there that week. This lasted for a good 5 minutes and covered at least 15 people. Yikes! Maybe we'll try the Unitarians next week.

Holiday Update, part 2

The trip to NC started off with a little excitement, as we were on the plane with two suspiciously tall, athletic, and UNC-affiliated guys that, upon later investigation turned out to be basketball players Alex Stepheson and Deon Thompson. I can report that Thompson has some massive diamond stud earings, and Stepheson wears a kids-style plasticy power-rangers or similar backpack during transcontinental voyages. Also, Thompson takes approximately 3 minutes longer in the men's bathroom after a 2.5 hour flight than do I.

This event was pretty exciting because later on Kate and I (and Jon and Wendy) got to go to the UNC-Rutgers game! The Tarheels destroyed them, but it was still a fun event. I obliged Roy Williams by wearing my only Carolina blue shirt I travelled with, and Kate was subtly defiant by showing a crimson collar. Thanks, Kimballs! Here's a few pictures from the game.

L: The house that Dean built, R: Brandan Wright throws down a monster jam

In addition to the UNC game, while in NC (at Wendy's new house in Durham, which is a pretty awesome house) we:

• Caught up with youth group friends! It was great to see everyone at Charity and Jeff's new house, which they also have looking really nice. Will have to come back some summer for a pool party. In attendance were T+K, Charity, Jeff, Julia, Mei-Yen, Emily, PeterG, Will, Nora.
• Took Lucky for lots of walks. What a perfect little feist!
• Played some good games of VisualEyes and Pictionary with the family - so fun that Auntie was able to come up too.
• Went for lots of walks in the Duke Forest.
• Attended John Edwards' '08 candidacy announcement rally at Southern Village. Interesting to be there- mostly just a stump speech, but we also got to see the Del McCoury band, and I bumped into a couple high school friends, too.

Below are a few pictures from our visit, click for a larger version.

Holiday Update, part 1

We're back from year 3 of the multi-family tri-timezone Christmas vacation, after a good (but short) visit to snowy Denver and a nice time in Durham. We still have lots of work to do to get settled into our new place, and going back to work today was somewhat of a shock, so I'll make our updates quick. Maybe we'll add more fun details later.

Denver was a whirlwind of playing in the snow, playing with kiddos, eating delicious goodies, and catching up with Kate's siblings. A couple highlights were the family foosball matchups, snowball fights, the delicous meals, late-night chats, the Broncos' last second victory (that allowed us to get to the Christmas Eve church service on time!), and of course the gingerbread house madness. The picture pretty much sums up the chaos of this event. There's probably about 6 of every possible type of candy crammed onto about 30 square inches of gingerbread there. Think Willy Wonka meets Jackson Pollock.

Unfortunately our visit was shorter than planned, due to the blizzard. We hope to make it out to all the various places Ebels (and Meshinchis) may be soon - to San Diego to see Ted/Jee/kids and Susan, to Denver to see Mark/Catherine and the soon-to-be newest nephew, and to Seattle to see Beth/Soheil and the girls/Connor. So many places, so little time! Anyways, we had a great 2 short days in Denver before heading further east to NC.