This year, Lauren was a cheerleader in the Future Panther League. She learned lots of cheers and looked very cute in her cheerleader outfit. She practiced very hard and kept a good attitude. We are very pound of her.

Trevor's team won their conference this year in the Future Panther League. He was also chosen to play in the All Star game. At 5 foot 3 inches and 155 pounds, he can put fear into the heart of any fifth grade quarterback.

It was a dark stormy night. Now that usually doesn't bother me. But you see, I'm the proud owner of "Super Dog". Super Dog is half fox terrier and half labrador. He can jump over a seven-foot fence with no problem even though he's just a medium size dog. He can also dig under almost any fence even when the fence goes several feet into the ground. He can also move concrete blocks and chew through wire fencing at will. This is why we call him Super Dog. The ONLY way to keep him inside a fence is to use an electric shock-collar. A small wire that runs around our fence puts out a radio signal. When Super Dog gets near the fence, the shock-collar beeps. If he doesn't move away, he get shocked.

Now about seventy years ago, a famous physiologist named Pavlov, found that you could condition a dog to do (or not do) just about anything if you gave him electric shocks.

Poor Pavlov's dog was so shook up; he would still obey the conditioning even when the electric shocks were taken away. Too bad Mr. Pavlov never met Super Dog. As soon as lightning strikes, the static electricity usually knocks out the radio signal for the shock-collar. Super Dog knows this and immediately starts digging. Usually he first chews up the radio signal wire to keep me from just resetting the thing.To date I've spent about a thousand bucks on radio signal collars, fence repair, concrete blocks and chicken-wire netting to keep him from jumping over the fence. So if I want to take Super Dog to the lake every once and awhile, please cut me some slack. I've paid for it. Plus, he's a nice pooch and doesn't bite anyone except the dog-catcher lady. You are probably not her.

We recently went to the Pea Ridge Civil War battlefield near Rogers, Arkansas. We saw lots of open fields, some cannons and quite a few deer. But we didn't see a single pea and the Ranger got kind of upset when I asked him where the peas were. Carla says there's something wrong with me. I don't know what she's talking about.

Carlsbad Caverns are in the middle of a desert. What a strange place to put caves. Anyway, the desert was really nice as long as you had an air-conditioned car to drive through it in. I was going to be in the picture too. But I couldn't get the camera to balance right on the cactus. You know; with the thorns and all.

Lauren made a new friend while we were in Roswell, New Mexico. He had a really cool looking round car. To me however, he looked a little young to be driving.

Lately, Lauren's little friend has been showing up in the middle of the night and giving us all free medical checkups. Since our insurance doesn't cover checkups, this has turned out to be a good thing for us. I just wish we could schedule them in the daytime. I also think one colonoscopy a year would be good enough for me.

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