I saw in Lance’s interview that he has a new Lab puppy whose name is Rex. But the poor little guy has a bad heart, so he is going to be treated by the best specialists, and maybe get a replacement heart valve from a cow or something. I know that Lance will have the best care for his new little friend, and I hope tht Rex has a long, happy life.

It is so heart-breaking (and so expensive) when one of your four-legged family has some kind of disease or health problem. My old cat, Billie-Button, was with me for something like fourteen years, and I got her when she was an adult cat. She was a black, long-haired, ornery old thing that loved only me, and tolerated nobody else. The vet thought she was about twenty years old when I took her in to have a lump on her side looked at last winter. A sample came back as undetermined, so it was decided to watch it for a while. It suddenly started enlarging rapidly, and I took her in on December 17th for surgery. I got a call a couple of hours later saying that it was a rapid-growing and deadly malignant cancer that, while looking like an only an exterior lump, had encroached into her body cavity, pirated the blood vessels in her stomach to feed it, and was enormous. There was no choice in the decision that had to be made.

Billie Button’s ashes are in a small redwood box, sitting under my bed in the exact spot where she always loved to curl up and sleep...