Mitch weighed in tonight at 73.7 pounds. I guess I will drop him to 14 ounces of food per day.

An update on Mitch's weight and food: For the last several weeks I have weighed Mitch on Sundays and if his weight hasn't changed from the previous week I have added an extra ounce to his daily ration.

This morning he weighed-in at 70.8 pounds which is an extra pound since last Sunday's weigh-in. This last week he has been on 15 ounces per day. I am going to keep him at 15 ounces per day until he adds another three or four pounds.

Once he is in the 73 – 74 pound range I will take away an ounce and see how things go. I don't think I want him over 75 pounds.

I have been wondering what to get a four year old for his birthday. Finally had the perfect idea yesterday: the Dremel 400 XPR!

What does a four year old need with a Dremel tool? Pedicures! His doctor said it is a great way to trim their nails. After a little research on-line I was sold. If you nick the quick it actually cauterizes the wound because it spins so fast rather than bleeding all over the place.

When I first heard about doing it this way I thought I would just use my drill. My drill has a pretty fast top speed of 2,100 RPM. No problem. I thought the only advantage the Dremel had was it was smaller and easier to handle. I looked up the Dremel speeds and they have a range of speeds between 5,000 RPM and 35,000 RPM!

I got it home last night and it works great. I get a much better and cleaner cut than with the clippers. With the clippers his nails can splinter sometimes, and I don't cut them as short as I want for fear of hurting him. With the grinding wheel I can just keep taking a little bit off at a time until I can see the distinctive pattern on the cut portion that tells you when to quit.


This is a page that had a lot of useful information on grinding their nails.

I still want to get them shorter, but the quick needs a chance to recede after the nails are shortened. Every four days or so I will take a little more off until they are greyhound active length.

I started Mitch on Iam's dog food a month or so ago. When I started he weighed about 73 pounds. I weighed him yesterday and he was 68 pounds. I would like him between 70 and 75.

The feeding instructions say a 70 pound dog gets 2 2/3 cup of food per day, and an 80 pound dog gets 2 3/4 cup of food per day.

The difference between the two is 8/100 of a cup. That is too small for me to reliably measure each morning, but it apparently makes a difference. The food must be very nutrition-dense.

Because I am me, this morning I measured out four 2 2/3 cup servings, weighed each one and then averaged their weights. I did the same for 2 3/4 cups of food. There is about a one ounce difference.

So, for the last month or so I have been feeding him 11.3 ounces of food. Starting tomorrow I will weigh out his food for him each morning and will start feeding him 11.8 ounces per day.

Feeding him by the ounce will also give me much finer control over his food. After a month if he still needs a little more weight, or he if he has put too much on, it will be a simple matter to add or subtract a tenth of an ounce or two from his daily ration.

I also know exactly how much a bag of dog food will last him too. A 40 pound bag has 640 ounces, so at 11.8 ounces per day it will last 54 days.

I read the Sunday paper at Burger King this morning for a couple hours just to get out of the house.

After than I picked up some of the new Diet Pepsi Max that was advertised in the Target newspaper ad today. It has twice the amount of caffeine as regular Diet Pepsi, as well as ginseng.

From a few quick Internet searches I think that gives it about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. I could be wrong, but that's what my 30 seconds of research seems to suggest.

I just got in from planting six tomato plants I bought last night at Menard's for $0.49. I got Better Boys. After I planted them I fertilized them with Miracle-Gro tomato fertilizer.

I also put up some wire fence around the tomato patch to see if it will keep Mitch from stomping through them. Then I cut the stems from the dead peony blooms and watered all the plant beds in the backyard.

Now I am going to take a shower and tackle some paper work that has been waiting for far too long.

Some times I still can't get over what a beautiful beast Mitch is. I think he is truly breathtaking. I am toying with enlarging the first picture to put above the fireplace. I would crop it just slightly so that he is on the right third of the picture. The second picture really shows off his long neck.

Sheri is in Seattle for a two-week business trip. Last weekend I flew our for a four-day weekend in Seattle with her. I have a bunch of pictures and I intend to post about it, but I have just been too busy to get around to it.

This is a picture of the first cappuccino I had in Seattle at Espresso Vivace. Notice the neat little design they make on the top of every drink.


The pastry to the right had spinach and feta cheese. It was also very good. As soon as I finished this cappuccino I went back up for an iced Americano and continued to read the paper. When I left I got a hot small triple Americano to go.

I drank so much coffee while I was there. It is so good and it is every where. I intended to bring back at least three pounds of beans, but I only brought back one pound from Espresso Vivace.

I've been having problems getting motivated to get going in the morning, so I just went downstairs, ground 5 tablespoons of coffee, put it in my French press, and brought that upstairs along with my electric kettle and a coffee cup. Tomorrow morning knowing that a perfectly brewed cup of hot coffee is only seven minutes away once my feet hit the floor should be a good motivator.

We hosted our first Gourmet Club dinner at our house last night. The theme was dishes from famous Irish restaurants. We started out with a bowl of carrot soup. We were responsible for the main course which was a stuffed pork loin with homemade gravy and homemade apple sauce. We had one of the women at dinner that is on the Gourmet Club committee and said that my gravy turned out way better then the test batches they made while preparing the menu. The apple sauce was a big hit too.



Current scones and rustic potatoes were served as sides.

Dessert was kind of like a pineapple upside down cake with hazel nuts.









Everything worked out really well. The first couple came over just a few minutes after 7 PM. Everyone left around 10:45 PM.

When we started cleaning up the kitchen drain stopped up really good. I took the trap off under the sink and opened the access port in the basement and could still not get to the clog. I just kept working at it with the plunger. After a half hour of that I thought maybe I should use hot water in order to loosen things up. I also started dumping dishwasher detergent down the drain on the hypothesis the enzymes would start eating away at whatever was stuck down there.

I took a break to go in the basement and make sure the access port was not leaking from me taking it off and screwing it back on. Everything was dry. As I was walking back upstairs the hot water and enzymes finally had the desired effect it whooshed down the pipes. It almost sounded like a toilet was flushed. Yeah!

By this time I am really tired and my back was hurting from cooking, and then hosting, and then plumbing all night. I took a little break on the couch while Sheri continued to clean.

She had to be dialed into work from about 1:30 AM until 5 AM to make sure all of her servers in all of the time zones handled the new Daylight Saving Time date. I was able to stay with her until about 4 AM and then couldn't keep my eyes open. I think she said two of her servers had problems and needed extra attention.

She was able to get about an hour of sleep before she had to get up and get to the airport for her trip. She also got the entire kitchen cleaned up during the breaks she took from work overnight.

I am feeling pretty beat, but I have already showered, had leftover scones, and done a few chores. I don't know what I am going to do next. I have a list, but it is very possible I might just fall asleep on the couch. It is also possible I might get a second wind and go run some errands. Right now I don't know. I think I am running on about 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

Sheri is on the board of our neighborhood homeowners' association. The person that did the newsletter could not do it anymore, so I stepped up and volunteered. There were some camera-ready ads that needed to be scanned either because they were new last month, or the existing scans looked really bad. We decided to go ahead and buy ourselves a scanner. To my surprise almost nobody makes just a flatbed scanner anymore. Everyone is making the all-in-one machines. Fax-copy-scan-printer. One place we went had two flatbed scanners, but they were clearance and they only had the floor models left.

We walked over to the all-in-one section and started looking at those. We ended up with an HP C3180. After the rebate it will only be $65, so that wasn't so bad. I did not even install the ink cartridges that came with it because I like our current printer and I am just going to use it as a scanner.

I have had some fun scanning some old pictures around the house, and will probably continue to do that as I come across them.

In this 1942 picture my mother is the baby in lap of her grandmother. The writing on the back of the picture says (I left off all the last names):

Left to Right (Standing) Mary, Glen, Katherine mother – (Martha), Jacob, Michael (Grandma B's brother)
Sitting: Great Grandma and Grandpa Nick and Fannie, Beverly

click for larger picture


If anyone is interested in a larger picture for getting prints let me know. The original scan is very high resolution; 5,058 x 3,850 pixels.

The bean soup I made last week turned out really good and we ate every last drop. I had celery and carrots on hand because of the soup so I thought that was a good enough excuse to make a pot of chicken noodle soup this weekend.

I got a six pound chicken for only $4, and a bunch of parsley at the grocery store and came home yesterday and got that cooking. After a couple hours of that cooking on the stove I stained out all of the chicken, vegetables, parsley, bay leaves, etc. put the pot on the patio to quickly chill, and then brought it inside before we went to bed.

This morning I scraped the fat layer off of the top and put the pot back on the heat. I finely diced up a couple carrots, a stalk of celery and a medium onion and have that cooking right now. The broth tastes amazingly rich.

We are going to get cleaned up and dressed, boil the noodles, have a bowl of soup, and then run some Sunday afternoon errands.

Mitch gets hoppy before every meal. Here is a quick clip of him doing it this evening. He does the most hops at the beginning of the clip.

Friday evening Sheri picked me up at work and we took the train into the city to see a friend of hers, Carolyn Turgeon, do a book reading from her first published novel, Rain Village.



There was also a guy that played a didgeridoo before and after her reading. Very cool. I liked it a lot and now I want to learn how to play it.



After the reading a bunch of us walked down Clark Street to a place called T's for snacks and drinks.



This is a short little video I took just to give you an idea for the feel of the place.

On the way to the book reading we stopped to take a picture on the Jackson Avenue Bridge of the ice jam in the Chicago River. On the way back later that evening ALL of the ice was gone.



We got home about 1 AM and had to make a big deal over Mitch for be such a good boy and staying home all evening by himself.

I few weeks ago I bought a ham, and after I was done eating it for a few days I froze the ham bone. This afternoon I took the ham bone out and made a great batch of navy bean soup. It must have been good because even Sheri liked it. I also made some corn bread. We had both of them for dinner while watching the Oscars.

My grandfather was a civil engineering student at the University of Michigan. In 1928 he was inducted into an honorary engineering fraternity called Triangle. It is still active today.

This is what he received when it was time to be inducted. You can click on the picture to view a larger version.



I assume this picture was taken after all of the inducting happened. You can also click on the picture for a larger version.



I have even larger versions in case you wanted to print them out or send them to a photofinisher. Just let me know if you are interested.

Walking through Target today I saw this espresso machine on the clearance shelf for only $34! It has a 15 bar pump. My old espresso maker (which I haven't used in quite a while) did not have a pump, but got its pressure just from the force of the steam expanding in the heating chamber. An espresso machine with a pump heats up the water ahead of time and does not start being forced through the coffee grinds until you push a button to start the pump.

A Middle Eastern halal grocery store and kitchen opened up just down the street from us. We went there tonight to check it out and get some take-out food for dinner. It was pretty good and we are excited to finally have a Middle Eastern place nearby. We tried a falafel sandwich, a shawarma sandwich, and a large side of Jerusalem salad. While we were wandering around the store I picked up a bar of soap made with olive oil and laurel oil.

Their meats looked really good. I guess you would expect that from a halal store. They had an entire aisle of hookah pipes and tobacco. Interesting.

When we were walking down the frozen food aisle one of the guys from behind the prepared food counter approached us with a tray of little glass cups with hot sweet tea. What a nice touch!

Walking through Target today I saw this espresso machine on the clearance shelf for only $34! It has a 15 bar pump. My old espresso maker (which I haven't used in quite a while) did not have a pump, but got its pressure just from the force of the steam expanding in the heating chamber. An espresso machine with a pump heats up the water ahead of time and does not start being forced through the coffee grinds until you push a button to start the pump.

A Middle Eastern halal grocery store and kitchen opened up just down the street from us. We went there tonight to check it out and get some take-out food for dinner. It was pretty good and we are excited to finally have a Middle Eastern place nearby. We tried a falafel sandwich, a shawarma sandwich, and a large side of Jerusalem salad. While we were wandering around the store I picked up a bar of soap made with olive oil and laurel oil.

Their meats looked really good. I guess you would expect that from a halal store. They had an entire aisle of hookah pipes and tobacco. Interesting.

When we were walking down the frozen food aisle one of the guys from behind the prepared food counter approached us with a tray of little glass cups with hot sweet tea. What a nice touch!

This morning (Saturday) we left the house mid-morning to go to Cosi for breakfast. I had a bacon-egg-cheese bagel sandwich and a coffee and Sheri had grilled cheese from the children's menu and a hot green tea.

Next on our itinerary was the John B. Sanfilippo & Son, Inc. thrift store in Elk Grove Village. They are the company that makes Fisher Nuts.

I had the GPS synched with the camera today so you can click any of the pictures in this post and then click on a map link under that picture to go to a map of the exact place I snapped the picture. I didn't have great GPS reception in the grocery store so some of those locations incorrectly show up as outside the store.





The main thing I go there for is the grind-it-yourself peanut butter. They have a machine with just peanuts for regular creamy peanut butter, and another machine with chocolate chips mixed in with the peanuts! This gives you a slightly sweeter peanut butter with a nice chocolate taste. I got one regular and two chocolate.



You can also buy all of their nut products for a big discount in large bulk packages. I was in the mood for some salted blanched nuts and asked for a price. For the bulk pricing the smallest (only?) size was 40 pounds. That is too much for me. I could have handled 20 pounds. Maybe the next time Dad visits we will go there and we can split a box.

The next stop was the Mitsuwa Marketplace. It is a huge Japanese grocery store/food court/book store/video store.







We got a few bags of frozen baos, a couple of sweet treats, and Sheri bought a few skin care and bath things. When we were done shopping I took the things to the car while Sheri went to the food court and got us a little snack of sushi and egg rolls. Both were really good.







We had planned to go to Target and a shoe store but Sheri's cold started to take its toll and she didn't have any energy left, so we decided to go home and do those errands tomorrow.

We just steamed a few of the baos for dinner and are getting ready to watch a movie. I think we are going to watch The Science of Sleep.

I took my new GPS along on our vacation to Wisconsin. Whenever I took a picture I also had the GPS on. When I got back home I processed the pictures to automatically attach the latitude and longitude to them.

Click on this link to see where I took the picture, and then click the red push pin to see the picture.

Veterinarians always tell us at our dog's annual exams to brush their teeth every day. We have tried several types of brushes designed for dogs with special flavored toothpaste, but it just seems to be more trouble that it is worth.

We have discovered a great product that makes brushing their teeth every day easy. They are pre-moistened wipes, kind of like baby wipes, soaked with antiseptic, mint flavor, and baking soda. I can wipe all of Mitch's gums and teeth in about 20 seconds. We think he actually kind of likes it too. He struggles just a little bit when I am doing it, but when he sees me grabbing the container and pulling one out he still comes over and waits for me to start working. His breath is really good too. We keep them on the coffee table and I do it in the evening while we are watching TV.

These are the ones we are using now and got them at PetSmart.