Mount Shasta, Summer 2005: A week ago on Thursday, I returned from walking down to the post office, and opened the back yard gate. On the far side of the yard a small white dog raised its head and came running. Seeing me, she leaped up on me and all around, saying “Hello! Hello! You’re wonderful! Hello! I’m so happy!”

I liked her.

I went in the back door, leaving the leaping white dog outside. Adrienne was puttering. I hung up my hat.

“I see you found my dog,” I said.

Adrienne turned around, looking timid. “Lizzie and I found her on our walk …” she said, breathless. “And I want to keep her.”

“Good idea,” I said.

It seems that Lizzie and Adrienne, on their morning walk, found the little white dog wandering on the next street. Her ribs are showing, and she’s very young, perhaps four months old. She’s a border collie, like our Tulip, but the little white dog is all white except for speckled brown ears.

The little white dog followed along with Adrienne and Lizzie on the rest of their walk, and then came home with them, I suppose so that she could greet me when I got home. I’m happy to see her.

To be fair, we took the little white dog to the Humane Society for a week, so that if she had family looking for her, they could claim her. She was wearing a worn collar, too tight, but no tags. We want this dog, but if she’s got some child pining for her, they can find her during the week.

Today it’s thursday again. We have visited the little dog every day at the Humane Society, and now she’s legally ours. The folks there called her Jewel, but I seems to me that her name is Daisy. Adrienne agrees.

Now Daisy lives with us. She’s made friends with Lizzie, our black aussie, and with Percy our cat. They have made up games to play and they have a daily routine.

I’m grateful for Adrienne.

She found my dog Daisy, when I hadn’t even known that Daisy was lost.

Interior of Mexico, this week: Maybe our myth and memory of long ago is better than we think.

Archeological discoveries in Mexico made recently report that fossils of the Pterosaur, a flying lizard from the same period as dinosaurs, actually had wingspans up to 60 feet! Thank about that. It’s lots bigger than a small airplane. It’s longer than a bus.

The pterosaur was much like a huge bat, with membrane-thin wings and hollow bones. It’s also called Quetzalcoatlus after the ‘Feathered Serpent’ of the Aztecs.

I don’t know what you think, but it sounds like a dragon to me.

Perhaps the dragon is not such a mythical beast as we’ve been told. Perhaps it is, instead, a dim and ancient memory, deep inside us, and in moments, seen clearly.

Germany, December 22, 1714: The mercury thermometer was invented by Daniel Fahrenheit, a maker of scientific instruments. So as to be able to operate his new invention, he later worked out the Fahrenheit temperature scale in 1724. So during the ten years in between, people could see that it was hotter or colder, but they couldn’t really say how much. Join us now for a scene observed one summer afternoon in 1720 at Hans Heinrich’s Biergarten just outside the village of Hamberg, out on das patio:

First guy: “Say, mein pal, how hot is it?”

Other guy: “It is, vell, kind of hot, but maybe not so hot as was yesterday.”

First guy: “Oh? How hot it was yesterday?”

Other guy: “I dunno. Pretty hot.”

First guy: “Well, look at thermo-meter! It’s right there on das wall!”

Other guy: “I am looking! I am looking!”

First guy: “Say! You are trying to get smart mit me?”

Other guy: “Who vants to know, mister weiss guy?”

First guy: “Dot does it!”

[Fight breaks out. Finally, Mr. Fahrenheit works out some numbers for the thermo-meter, and peace returns to Hans Heinrich’s Biergarten.]

Japan, Long Ago: The blind monk had spent the day visiting with a venerable master, high up in the mountains, and now the day was drawing to a close. The venerable master fetched the visitor’s staff and his cloak, and said, “Wait! I have prepared a lantern for your trip down the path.”

The blind monk laughed, saying, “Day and Night are alike to me. I do not need a lantern.”

But the master persisted, saying, “It is not for you. Your feet are sure. It is for the protection of other travelers in the dark, that they might see your lantern and not bump into you.”

“Oh,” said the blind monk. “How thoughtful. Very well.”

And holding the lantern on the end of his staff, he strode off into the night.

All went well for the first half of his journey.

But as he crossed over a narrow bridge over a great chasm, suddenly bump! He’d run into somebody! The blind monk was frightened, and then irate.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Didn’t you see my lantern!”

“Brother,” said the other traveler, “Your light has gone out.”

What if time actually speeds up and slows down, but we don’t know it because we are inside time?

For example, suppose you and I are standing in the back yard and I toss a basketball to you. It goes up in the air and comes down in your hands.

Now suppose that time slowed *way* down as I tossed it, and suppose that time then zoomed like lightning just as you caught the ball. But because you and I are both inside the same time, we just saw the ball go up and come down at the usual speed, because you and I with all our perceptions were slowing down and speeding up inside the same time span.

How can we know this is not happening?

I mean, perhaps right this minute! time might be slowing to a standstill, and you will never, ever reach the end of this paragraph! But you will never know it, because you are inside the time and so you think you’re moving forward as always.

Or what if the entire Universe is right now suddenly vanishing in the flash of an eye! But you and I think we’re living all the rest of our lives, seeing movies, driving the car, growing older, making a sandwich, laughing at a joke, making an appointment to visit the dentist, watching a sunset that seems to take forever.

And yet, really, it’s all over already.

Next week: How a refrigerator works.

December 4, 2006: After being off the air, awaiting repairs after hacker damage — apparently our server was needed to assist in sending important viagra spam to needy individuals in Brazil and Portugal — the Adventures of Bloggard has again returned to the this spot on your internet dial. A new carborator, air in the tires, a coat of wax, and this weblog’s as good as new. Maybe.

My last post was September of 2005. A year has passed. My how time flies when you’re having fun. Maybe even when you’re not.

During the year, Cowboy Charlie showed up, a beagle-border collie mix, and is now a part of our morning ritual. Charlie and Daisy Dog tussle, while Lizzie barks and barks and barks. Ah, the gentle morning.

A major upgrade in the Megatar shop is nearing completion, installing machinery of greater precision and volume, because we were falling behind on orders.

More to follow, from time to time.

Mount Shasta, March 19, 2007: Last night I dreamed that I wandered a meandering music store and I bought a bass. After taking it home, I chatted with a friend in the kitchen, and noticed a stranger coming up my back steps, across the back porch, and entering the room. Between us was a gauzy curtain, and as the stranger leaned to peer into our room, I did the same from my side, and I made a horrible loud growl.

This scared the stranger, who back-pedalled across the porch and fell backwards down the steps.

Gosh. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I love dreams like that, don’t you?

But it went on.

As it happened, my friend with whom I chatted then changed into a woman puttering in the garden shed, and I learned that she was the sister of my high-school pal Dexter Plumlee. What a surprise!

(In my actual life, during high school, Dexter worked with me at the A&P Grocery Store, and later he went to a different college and became a chemist, and then worked in the U.S. Bureau of Mines, for my Uncle Richard, who actually did the early smog research in Los Angeles. Why was a department of mines doing chemical engineering? Well, that’s another story.)

So in the dream, I asked her to call Dexter, because she said he was a bass player now, and he was playing a gig here in town. So she made a call, and then looking up the street from my back porch I saw my friend Dexter come jogging up the street. He looked exactly the same except for an additional 45 years of wear and weathering. It was great to see him again, and then I woke up because my dog Daisy stuck her nose on my neck.

Over coffee with Adrienne, I learned that she’d dreamed that Mary Beth Burrows, the always-tidily-dressed manager at our bank, was sitting in a cafeteria at the local Humane Society, and that Mary Beth had taken Kim, the shelter manager into another room, from which everyone in the cafeteria could hear Kim crying and Mary Beth shouting angrily. Adrienne and Bette Midler and everyone in the cafeteria rolled their eyes.

So Adrienne asked Eric Clapton why Mary Beth had been so calm all morning at her desk, and then was so wild in dressing-down Kim. Eric nodded.

“Mary Beth had some other things to do first,” he said.

There you have it. The latest news from the unconscious psyches at our house.

And now to the point.

Adrienne pointed to our little dog Charlie, who was snoozing after his breakfast on the couch.

“He reminds me of a five-year-old boy,” she said. “I had girls, but my friends with boys just had to drag them out of bed in the morning. Sometimes they arrived at school with pajamas still on, and their mothers trying to dress them in the car.”

“My girls were no problem,” she continued, “The key is party shoes.” (By this she means those shiny shoes that were called ‘patent-leather’ shoes by little girls when I grew up.)

“I got my girls party shoes,” she said, “and they nearly wore them to bed. They’d get up and wanted to put on those party shoes. And to do that they had to dress. Then they’d clean the party shoes with vaseline, to make them extra shiny. And then off to school.”

“My girls” she said, “where probably the only ones who got to wear party shoes to school. But I’d learned the secret to getting them to school. Party shoes.”

Mothers of young girls, you heard it here first.