Sadie has come for a visit. We picked her up at a Ford Truck Dealership parking lot, across from the long term parking lot, outside of Chicago O'Hare's Airport from Andre who was flying with friends to Central America for a week's R&R. Sadie, a mixed breed Dog Pond dog with some interesting lineage including some attack dog strains, seems to be anything but an attack dog. She turns out to be a very relaxed and loving dog. She is obedient and goes into her cage at night or when we both leave for daytime excursions. She goes on long walks ( 2 miles and more) with enthusiasm. She has great energy and awareness of her surroundings, particularly with regard to squirrels. And she is very powerful. One has to anticipate her lunging and reign her in before an anticipated encounter. She is very bright, keeps tract of what is going on. Inside the house she sleeps on the couch when not in her cage, and she bounds down the stairs to leap onto the basement couch, turns to the TV and watches shows/college basketball with us. She will then sully up to us, putting her head upon our leg and wait for us to pet her, stroke her, and scratch her behind her ears.

She listens for us to come home. She waits in her cage for me to awaken and turn up the heat in the morning. After I have arisen and guide myself to her cage and unlock the door, she comes out, stretches, yawns and follows me to the bathroom as I perform my daily ablutions.

On our daily walk behind Bear Lake, she acts frightened as if there is a predator hiding in the woods; more so earlier in her tenure here and less so now. I wonder if she either is now familiar with the area, or that a fox or wolverine has decided to move on. Anyway, when we get to the InterUrban Pathway with its long stretches of fencing on both sides, we play pitch and catch with a ball until she is so exhausted, that she keeps the ball in her mouth and trots for the exit to head home. No more pitch and chase.

All this canine involvement comes to an end this weekend as we trundle off to Madison, Wisconsin to drop Sadie off at Andre's house as Andre greatly misses Sadie and wants her loving welcome home attitude to be restored. Mixed feelings on my part about this entanglement; as, with most social involvements, the good and bad outcomes are not clearly delineated.

Beware the Ides of March

Puxsutawney Phil, the famous resident ground hog of Puxsutawney Pa. whose first residents were the Native American Delaware Indians; Puxsutawney translates: "area of the sandflies", well anyway, as you recall, Puxsutawney Phil came out of his log on a cold and snowy day and did not see his shadow, predicted an early Spring. Six weeks later, ie, the flip side of him seeing his shadow and predicting 6 more weeks of winter, it seems that his prediction model was backwards. This morning in East Lansing, it was 24 F and expected to go up to 39 degrees F. When looking out our window, the snow on the ground and the ice on the pond, it looks like a typical March 15th beginning and forecast for the rest of the day. Average. Now I realize that the weather of just one day in the life of Ivan Ivanovich does not totally invalidate any Climate Prediction Model for catastrophic weather on March 15th 2100, however, ALL climate prediction models (here labeled as such although generally called General Circulation Models), predicted warmer winters and warmer nights with increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. So far, at least over the last 13 years, that hasn't happened; we've been on a sort of plateau as far as the weather and temperatures are concerned (since 1998). What we do see is that Mother Nature has agendas like earthquakes and Tsunamis that have far greater impacts upon our human condition than computer models, which are based upon other computer models which are based upon yet other computer models that are amalgamated into an assemblage of computer runs to give us a forecast for 90 years into the future of a 3 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Today in East Lansing, there is ice on the sidewalks from yesterday's melting snowpack that ran over the sidewalk and froze last night making for treacherous walking, still! Yes, winter is slowly fading into Spring, all pretty average for this time of year; averaged over record keeping for the last 150 years. Is there Global Warming? Possibly 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. After all, we are coming out of the Little Ice Age, the end of which was in the early 19th Century, Charles Dicken's "Christmas Carol", cold and snowy in London England and all that; just like this winter. Ground Hogs and computer simulations have similar predictive abilities.