Smacky Deuce

For those who don't know who Smacky is, it's from the cartoon "Get Fuzzy". The cat, Bucky, receives a plastic bear in his Happy Meal and calls him Smacky (the name says what it does...).

The cat looks nice, but like all cats...he's evil.




Mara gave Linus a squirrel when he was little, and when she found Smacky in the comics, the squirrel got a new name.



Over time, and several beating by Lucy, Smacky has seen better days. This picture doesn't do him justice, but he is losing his tail, and Lucy likes to pick the fuzz out. It's amazing how much much stuffing they put in those little toys!





















We decided it would be nice to buy them a new Smacky.










Our dogs thought they'd show us how fast they could gut the new Smacky (we call him Smacky Deuce, or just the Deuce). After about an hour he looked like this:

As I write this, Linus & Lucy are playing tug-o-war with the Deuce's corpse...

Can't Argue With 80°F In March!

Mara and I had an AWESOME weekend in & around Milwaukee this last weekend. Saturday was 65°F so we took the dogs to Lapham Peak State Park in Delafield and hiked about 6 miles or so. The trails were a little muddy in parts, but that was to be expected since it's a wetland and we've have quite a bit of melting snow lately.

Our dogs have been couped up in the house all winter and we felt they needed a place to let loose and run! We took them to the dog park last week, but it just wasn't enough for them. They needed to release all their pent-up energy.
Linus pretty much just ran for 4 hours or so. He has an endless tank of energy! He did, however, find some goose crap to roll in, which he tends to find quite often. I had to shampoo him several times to get it all out. Luckily the smell came out with it!

Lucy, of course, had to find a nice watering hole to get her swimming fix. When she wasn't in the water, or laying in a puddle, she was hunting squirrels, and sometimes even climbing up the trees in search of them!

Sunday surprised us with 79°F, and ABUNDANT sunshine, shattering the old record of 75°F! We didn't want to waste a minute inside so we took the dogs on a walk in an area just north of Milwaukee on the lake, called Fox Point. The houses are beautiful, but the fog was so thick you couldn't see 50 yards.














After walking about 5 miles or so we grabbed some steaks & pork chops and fired up the propane monster. It felt so good to be outside this weekend and get some of our pent-up energy out too! Hope everyone else got out and enjoyed the weather, unless it was crappy out, then just be envious...:D

I Should Play The Lottery Instead

Want to make sure you get 100% on your office betting pool? With 64 teams and my worthless knowledge of NCAA basketball (or any basketball for that matter), my odds of filling out a perfect bracket is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616:1. Yes, that’s 18.5 quintillion to one.

Even if every person on earth (currently about 6,581,763,508 people) filled out a different bracket, the odds are still remarkably small that any one bracket would be perfect. In fact EACH PERSON would have to fill out 2,802,705,392 (2.8 Billion) NCAA brackets to have the possiblity that someone would fill out a perfect one.

Just some fun nerdy math stuff for a Monday...:)

Good luck on your brackets! You're going to need it!

If Animals Could Hate...

While we were at Larry & Deb's Saturday we came across an old clip from the National Geographic video Eternal Enemies: Lions and Hyenas, that I sent them. Pretty much the background is...they hate each other. One male named Ntchwaidumela (Ent-why-da-may-la; African language of Savuti, meaning "He Who Greets With Fire") pretty much has to protect his Pride's females from roaving groups of hyenas, which hunt in large groups. When some hyenas steal his share of the wildebeest from the pride, he gets a little upset...
You'll want to watch this video over, and over, and over...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=297955061153314880