Me and Balou

I'm around Balou all the time so it's hard for me to remember that he is a huge dog. He's over 125lb right now. When I pet him I don't bend over, I lift my hand up a bit and put it on top of his head. In the mornings he'll jump up on the bed and lie next to me. When he does that his head is at my armpit and his butt is at my knees. Anyway, here are a couple of pictures.

Here is happy Balou. I'm petting him, and all is well.



Here is Serious Business Dog.

Caffeine

My preferred form of Caffeine ingestion is via tea. I've been quite fond of green teas lately. My work has a nice Hojicha Green that I've been quite happily imbibing every afternoon. When I go to Peet's on the weekend I'll get genmaicha. I very much like the flavor of the toasted brown rice.

Sometime in the not too distant future I will have to take a break from Caffeine. While in college I would always save the caffeine for midterms or finals. That way when I needed the extra alertness it was available. I view Caffeine as a powerful drug, and one that should be used carefully. It was a lot easier to keep my caffeine intake infrequent when the main way of drinking it was soda or Redbull. I don't find either of those drinks particularly appetizing. But since my switch to tea I've been drinking more.

So, I'll take a break for a bit. Probably a week when I'm already feeling crappy.

Dog Repellent

Today as we were walking Balou and Trillian after work the people 2 houses up came outside and gave us what for. Apparently Balou peeing on their bushes is Not OK. Despite the fact that their bushes are perfectly green they are displeased about him doing that. In fact they are so displeased that they have had to put out "Dog Repellent." And could we walk the dogs on the other side of the street so their bushes don't get damaged.

This is all a load of crap. Their bushes are fine. We have been walking various dops past their house for years at this point and their bushes look just the same as they always have. The real issue is that the woman who lives there is afraid of dogs. Hence the asking for us to not walk in front of their house.

So now I have done some research on the dog repellent. I'm seeing wet piles of little green granules by their bushes. I think it looks like this product. The active ingredient here is methyl nonylketone, which according to this site isn't harmful to humans. It's a commonly used anti-dog chemical. However I'm not actually seeing any info on its effects on dogs. Hopefully it's not actually harmful to dogs and cats, but given the crap that happened with cat food I have no guarantees of that.

Honestly I'd like to take Balou to leave a giant crap on their lawn every morning. Then they'd understand that really their bushes were fine before.