Sunday, December 24, 2006

Kodos at 6 Months

It's been about a month since Kodos first came down with kennel cough (I think at obedience class) but I think he's finally over it. It was initially pretty bad, but cleared up really quickly (for the most part) after a course of antibiotics.

Unfortunately, it didn't clear up completely. Kodos would hack/sneeze four or five times every morning when he first got up from his night's sleep. He wasn't in any real distress, but kennel cough is apparently very contagious, and so we had to keep him home & out of the company of other dogs. This was a big drag, as K is pretty social, and loves to be out & about.

But thankfully, this week we've had no coughing. So we took him on a long walk into downtown Poulsbo on Friday, and stopped off at Poulsbo Emergency Vet Clinic for a quick weigh-in. He was pretty wiggly on the scale, but at the end it declared him to be 80 lbs. So I guess the mutters of "big dog" I was hearing as we walked around downtown are starting to be true. We'll see how big he finally winds up.

In other news, we've tried letting Kodos sleep outside his crate for the last 2 nights. He never really loved the crate, and he's been really solid on the housetraining, so we figured we'd give him a shot. The living room & upstairs are gated off, so he plunks down on the kitchen floor and makes like a speed bump. So far so good--he's 2 for 2.

Movies

Watched A Scanner Darkly last night. Very trippy, but excellent. I am not positive that I understood the ending completely (should probably read the book) but it was definitely riveting. I guess there are 2 types of "horror" that can really succeed in horrifying me--the supernatural (as in The Exorcist, which scared the crap out of me) and tales of addiction (as in Requiem For a Dream--one of the most compelling stories I've ever seen I think).

Sunday, December 17, 2006

I love Picasa

From Kodos
Just discovered google's Picasa program/service a little bit ago, and love it. You get a program to download, and a web account where you can upload photos, like the above. The program seeks out your photo files (and also watches for new ones coming off your camera). It's got a really nice interface for adding captions, doing little touch-ups (sharpen, brighten, etc.) organizing photos into albums, and uploading albums to the website for sharing.

Very fun and easy for non-photogs like me to deal with.

Anybody interested in seeing pics of my magnificent Kodos ;-) can surf to the "Kodos" link above--it's a public album that I'll be using to store the best of the pics we take of him.