For more than five months, Rufus has been a pretty awesome dog. Sure, he has little eccentricities, but they’re nothing compared to mine, even if I don’t treat my stuffed animals as badly as he treats his.
Anyway, last night, we gave him a new rawhide. Over the next hour, he proceeded to devour it on his livingroom bed. I noticed that he’d gnawed it down to one knot, so I tried to get it away from him. He barked at me, for the first time.
Desperate times required the desperate measure of shaking a bag of doggie-treats in another room. He spit out the rawhide and ran out to get his treat. I used it to get him downstairs and outside for his evening pee break, while Amy hid the rest of the rawhide in the kitchen.
Once we got back upstairs, Rufus was like a junkie missing his fix. He started turning things over in the living room, trying to find his rawhide. Originally, Amy hid it under some blankets on the ottoman near his bed. He buried his nose under the blankets, shoving and snuffing. He stormed up and down the hall, pawed at his bed, and otherwise evinced a panic I’d never seen in him before.
I got him another treat, and he settled down, heartbroken.
An hour or so later, we got ready for bed, and he proceeded to do something he hadn’t tried (with me around) since he joined our home in March:
That’s right: he ran into the bedroom, strode right up on our bed, stretched out, and refused to leave, snarling at me when I grabbed his collar to get him off. What else could I do? I got my camera, let him pout a minute while I took some pix, and then said, “OFF!” while giving him a good yank of the collar. He curled up on his bed, point made.
Kids. I tellya.
, I picked up the 
of the LBJ bio secondhand last summer and read the first 40 pages (introduction and first chapter) one afternoon. I was blown away by the combination of Caro’s wonderful narrative prose and his ability to convey exactly how LBJ epitomizes American politics. On top of that, LBJ’s character and his seeming desire to cover up and rewrite his past made him a fascinating literary character (to me, but I still like Thomas Pynchon’s novels). By the time I’d wrapped up those 40 pages, I knew that Caro had made a perfect choice of subject, and was looking forward to reading the whole series.
and, while he didn’t look frail, I feared that I’d be taking a risk in diving into the biography, only to see it cut prematurely.