Today is Ian's birthday. He's thirteen. Hard to believe. He's a good two or three inches taller than me, and still growing madly. At the moment, about an inch a month, which I wouldn't think possible if I wasn't living with him. He goes off to school in the morning and comes back taller in the evening. Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration. But you get the idea.

Roli, the newest member of the household, is settling in. He ate a library book, for some reason, yesterday morning while I was at work. I'm thinking of taking in the picture I took of him, to show the nice librarian lady. Here's my new dog. Isn't he cute. Here's what's left of the book he ate. It wasn't a very good book, anyway. One of those that looks good on the cover but turns out to be horribly written. I don't even think it was that tasty, because Roli didn't finish it either.

Yesterday:

I went to my friend Patti's for coffee after church, and backed into a mini-van parked downhill from me in her driveway. Horrible scraping sounds, I swear (I've got a truck full of kids, mine and some others) and hop out. Kids all hop out too. We find that in fact I have not at all damaged the mini-van, and the alarming white scrape is DIRT that RUBS OFF. I am not joking. There is still a bit of a scratch. I go inside to tell the owner, I'm SO sorry, I just ran into your van, and she just laughs!

I agreed, after a 4pm phone call, to go into work at midnight. I dutifully nap in the evening and go in to work -- at which point I am greeted by someone else who was called in, because nobody told the evening shift guy that I'd said I'd do the midnight! I said to him, so what do we do now? He said, happy guy, Oh, I'll stay. You go home. So I did. Slept through the night and went in to work a dayshift after a 7am call. Much nicer.

(I don't know. I'm thinking all this luck can't last...)

This is Roli. His owners are away a lot, and he's lonely. So he's come to live with us. He's almost eight months old, he's housetrained and cratetrained, and pretty well-mannered other than he's a bit humpy with Joeby, being au naturel and in need of neutering soon.

I really wasn't intending to get another dog. I don't want to replace Jazz. But at the moment it doesn't feel like that. Cos Roli's his own dog...