I don’t think Samson likes my new job. He seems especially sad in the mornings now, and the outpouring of joy when I come home doesn’t quite make up for the guilt I feel in leaving him alone all day. It’s worst when I have to feed him, walk him, and head right back out the door for taiko.

As much as he claims to miss me, though, when I’m home, he doesn’t ever want to snuggle with me. He will ask for and accept belly scratches, but if I’m sitting on the bed, he’ll head for the couch, and vice versa. I guess he just wants me . . . around.

Every day? Every day I have to write something?

Today my dad and I drove from Amarillo to Houston. It took about ten hours, and it was pretty much the same drive it’s been all the previous times we’ve made the same trip, which is . . . many. We ate lunch at Cracker Barrel, which, if there was ever a place that was the same at all times in all places, would be it. Everything is just as I remember it from twenty years ago, and nineteen, and so on, from the checkers to the restrooms to the maple sugar candy, except that the golf tees in the little triangle puzzle are made of plastic now. But the sameness is their shtick, so, you know, mission accomplished.

Now I’m home and ready to go to bed. Samson is farting up a storm over here, in case you’re wondering what that smell is. Christ it’s awful. Oh, but speaking of dogs, John sent me this picture a few days ago: panda dog! Hope that brightens your day a little.

When Samson was a puppy he loved going to dog parks—he’d get the big dogs to chase him, then roll over and do the tiny-dog rip-out-your-belly attack, so that he’d inevitably come home caked with dirt and slobber.

In the last few years he hasn’t been nearly as social. When we visit a dog park, he mostly keeps to himself. First he makes a full round of the park, methodically sniffing and marking each landmark, and then he plops himself down next to me and waits until I’m ready to leave. Occasionally he’ll spot something interesting and trot off to check it out, but soon enough he’s back at my side.

Can dogs be autistic? Sam’s definitely abnormal. Sometimes I wonder what made him the way he is. It’s probably something from the first year of his life, before someone picked him up off the street and brought him to the shelter. We’ll never know.

Now that the weather’s cooling off, I brought him to a new dog park for the first time in several months. And for once, he seemed genuinely interested in the other dogs. Several times he threw himself into the pack with gusto and really tried hard to be social. I don’t think he understands quite how to play with other dogs, but it was adorable to watch him make the effort.

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Browsing the internet on my lunch break*, I noticed that I’ve been slacking on the blogging front lately. So here I am.

I took Sam to the vet this morning for a check-up and a squirt of something-something vaccine up the nose. I told the vet one of his eyes had been red off and on lately, but it hadn’t seemed to bother him too much. She took him into the back for a tear test and found out that my poor puppy is making almost no tears and has horribly dry eyes. And his cruel, cruel mother had let him suffer all this time. She didn’t say that second part out loud.

So now I have a tube of goop to squirt into his eyes once a day. I have to hold his eye open and squeeze a line of goo the consistency of Vaseline onto the surface of his eyeball. The vet techs managed to do it with two of them holding him still—I can’t wait to try it at home by myself. I can only hope he’ll understand how soothing the nice happy goop is and come running for it every morning. Hey, it could happen.

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I apologize in advance for the trite yearly-family-newsletter tone of this post. The videos are short, I promise.

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John, when he’s not grokking universe-defining equations, powering up a new radioactive cyclotron beam, or reminding young zoology majors of the difference between speed and velocity for the umpteenth time, has taken to brewing beer in his apartment.

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