Seems everyone has thoughts on the proposed $700 billion dollar bailout on Wall Street.  What captures my interest the most is the sheer immensity of the numbers.  Like a ballerina trying to hug a sumo wrestler, I can’t quite get my head around HUGE numbers like 700,000,000,000.  But I found a guy who went about  putting numbers into a smaller scale so you could “picture” what they look like.  I know, snore.  But, check this out, from Brian Bowker:

1 Hundred grains of salt is about how many come out of a salt shaker if you shake it once (if the shaker in question is not very generous). It’s a very small pile.

1 Thousand grains of salt is about how many you get if you take a really generous pinch of salt. This is still a pretty unimpressive pile as piles of salt go.

1 Million grains of salt is slightly less than what fits in a 1/2 cup measuring cup. Still not a whole lot, but quite a bit bigger than 1,000.

1 Billion grains of salt is equal to 25 gallons. If you can picture a 50 gallon drum filled half way with salt, that’s about a billion grains. That’s a lot more than the million that fit in the 1/2 cup!

1 Trillion grains of salt is equal to 25,000 gallons, or 3,342 cubic feet. That will completely fill a 21×20x8 foot room, roughly the size of a small classroom or a large living room. That is a lot bigger than that half of a drum that the billion fit into, and a whole lot bigger than the 1/2 cup that the million grains fit into. At that rate, would you even notice if a few million were added or subtracted?

1 Quadrillion grains of salt is equal to 25 million gallons, or roughly 3.3 million cubic feet. If you took a football field, including the end zones, and piled salt onto it, all the way to the edges, 60 feet deep, you would have roughly one quadrillion grains of salt! Or, if that’s a little hard to visualize, imagine 10 football fields all covered 6 feet deep with salt.

Crazy, huh?  But look at the positive side: 700 billion is only two pinches per taxpayer!

“You kids today have it easy. When I was a kid everything was HUGE. My dad was nearly four times bigger than me. You couldn’t even see the tops of counters…. Then gradually everything became smaller until it was the manageable size it is today.”– Bizarro (comic strip)

Our new dog, Coby, is giving me fits.  Sure, he’s gentle, friendly, and a well-behaved model citizen most of the time, but…

The other day we were off to Sam’s soccer game and decided to leave Coby in his kennel while we were gone.  Previous times we left him home, roaming the house freely; we came home to find that he’d busted out the screen of an open window, into the front yard! Another time he had escaped through a different window into the yard.  Still another time, we found another busted screen.  No escape that time, but an attempt that left another screen trashed and the blinds too.  No way could we leave him out while we were out. (Brilliant, right?  Only took us three times to figure it out!)

So, we put him in his kennel. (I can hear the guy from “Cool Hand Luke” saying, “Any one caught trying to escape spends the night in the box.”) He’s in there with some of his favorite things–a couple of chewy thingies, a snack, and his blanket.  Seemed okay, except for the sad doggie eyes.  Well, when we returned from the soccer game, we were all stunned and amazed to see that Coby had escaped from the kennel! Didn’t try to get out of the house this time, but he escaped from the locked cage! He busted out the side.  Latches still latched! Incredible!  Came to the door as nonchalant as you please, happy to see us.  Ta Daaaa! 

Today I’m anxious.  We got a new kennel. Different make and model.  What will he do for an encore?  If he escapes this time, one of us will be wearing a straitjacket tomorrow!

“A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.” — Ogden Nash

What’s happened to people’s manners?  Have rudeness and coarseness become the norm these days?  I held the door for a man and a woman coming into the building today.  They both had their hands full–coffees, laptops, purse; all their junk.  They seemed amazed that I did that for them.  Not that I’m some kind of hero or something. I don’t need a medal.  It’s just common courtesy, right? They thanked me. Made me feel good too.

But you see bad manners, rude behavior, obscene gestures all over the place. Discourteous drivers, surly clerks, loud cel phone talkers, and countless other people acting in ways that show disrespect for others. And what about all the political mudslinging and name calling? We shouldn’t even go there I guess. 

I don’t know why things are so uncivil, but I think we need to get back to being courteous and considerate of one another.  “Pay it forward.” You don’t really even have to go out of your way to be nice.  It only takes a second to hold the door for someone.  It takes less than a second to say please and thank you to somebody. Please, let’s try to be nice?  Thanks.

“A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.”— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I took Emilia, my soon-to-be 15 year-old, to learn how to drive on Sunday. It was her first time behind the wheel, her first all-important lesson.  She did remarkably well. We were both anxious.  I wasn’t concerned about her being behind the wheel as much as I was struck by the fact that, here I was, TEACHING HER HOW TO DRIVE!  HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? WHERE HAS ALL THE TIME GONE?!  Seems like were “Driving In The Car” with Barney the Dinosaur not so long ago.

As we were pulling into the parking lot for the lesson there was a daddy teaching his little girl how to ride her bike. Was it that long ago that WE were on THAT lesson? Emilia will always be that little girl on the bike with the streamers from the handlebars, yet she won’t ever be that girl again.

Isn’t it one of the greatest things about being a parent? The little moments are the most extraordinary. You don’t want to drive too fast past them on the road of life. That’s the lesson I learned Sunday.

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”-Dr. Seuss

Are these still the dog days of summer?  They are for us.  We went looking for a dog to adopt over the weekend.  We spent the better part of Saturday going from shelter to shelter to find our newest family member.  It wasn’t easy. You go into the shelter, walking past each cell where our furry friends await their fate, their big ol’ doggie eyes looking up at you, and you can’t help feeling like you want to adopt ALL of them. “How could someone abandon that one?” “Who would let that one run away?”  “That dog is ten years old! What happened that she ended up here?  She’s got to be someone’s little princess.”

The other hard part is deciding which kind of dog to get.  Big?  No way.  Little?  Is it yippy?  No way. All we really knew was that we wanted a mutt, or, as they’re called now, a hybrid.  We’ve had pure breeds in the past.  They don’t seem to stay with you as long. All that effort to breed perfection ironically breeds some rotten health problems in a lot of dogs.

We settled on a nice guy from the Denver Municipal Animal Shelter.  We think we’re going to call him “Coby.”  He’s a Chow mix of some kind.  Maybe part Retriever too.  He’s got a purple tongue, so we’re pretty sure on the Chow part.  I’m just guessing on the other part.  The part I’m most excited about is that he’s a part of our family now.  

Here are some pics!

Coby’s the one on the left.

Want to adopt your own furry friend?  Here are some links:

Denver Municipal Animal Shelter
Maxfund Animal Adoption Center
Dumb Friends League