Beware!

Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship, Part Deux

Lady Beatrice (aka Bee) and the General MacArthur (aka Mac) make nice on the couch in the Biggest Little City. Not pictured: Sir Winston (aka Winnie)

Not a hair on my chinny-chin-chin

I missed my face.

Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

Bee has arrived in Reno. She and Nana appear to have similar interests.

The Princess, The Dairy Queen, and The Wonderful Playground of Oz

A lovely day today! Our wonderful friend Jen Littlefield is in town visiting from New York City (where everything looks beautiful when you're young and pretty) and joined us for a picnic in Hyde Park before an afternoon excursion to the south loop Target, Alcalas Western Wear (to get Baba's boots cleaned), Dairy Queen, and the fantastic Oz Park, certainly the finest playground in Chicago I've yet seen. Statues of Dorothy and Toto, Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, a garden, plenty of space for baseball and soccer, and a terrific play area with some of the best play structures I've ever come across. It makes me wish I was either five years old or an eccentric billionaire who could have a similar (though larger-scale) set up built for myself.

Dynamite Kid

So I have my third ever black eye. The other night, Daisy and I were playing 'Airplane' (the game in which one person lies flat on his back and suspends the other in the air on his knees, not the one in which players take turns doing Leslie Nielsen impersonations) and Daisy slid forward and conked me right above the eye. She giggled "Baba, I bumped my head!" I screamed in pain and held back tears. She laughed even more as I walked around clutching frozen peas to my eye and groaning. And a valuable lesson about playtime was learned.

I did make several references to the pro-wrestling move 'the diving headbutt', made famous by the great Dynamite Kid and the late ... well, I don't care to call him great, what with the filicide/uxoricide, but he was one hell of a wrestler ... Chris Benoit. And here's an example of said move:


The referee disqualified Daisy as well.

One Blonde Down . . .

The furriest member of our household, the lovely Beatrice, left Thursday night on a cross country trip to Reno. Our new apartment doesn't allow for pets, so Bee is going to live with Nana & Grumpy (and their two canine companions, Winston & MacArthur) in the mountains of Nevada. She will have a backyard to run in, two new friends, and a permanent lap to sit in - on the whole, a more luxurious accommodation than we could provide in Chicago. But even though the barking was infuriating, and I lost one half of four different pairs of shoes, and apparently something about the rug in Daisy's room just demanded to be peed upon, I am already missing our morning walks (though in the winter, that will be a different story, I'm sure.)

Bee is making the trip via a pet travel service called Get-M-Home.