Well, that didn’t take long:

Our application was approved Friday afternoon, and when I asked if we could pick her up next Friday, after my three-day trip, I was told that would be fine, as long as we didn’t mind maybe losing her if some other qualified party arrived in the interim. WHAT? NOOOOOO. We came down to get her the very next day, and as of the weekend, we’re now Wendy’s people. Although we’re not sure whether she’s going to stay Wendy. I like the name, but Alan is taken with this idea that a dog’s name should include fricatives, sibilants and a long E on the end. For some reason he likes “Lucy,” which has only one of those. I was thinking maybe Suzy. And then, last night, Alan walked into the house after a walk with her and said, “I think her name is Gidget.”

Maybe it is. For now, I’m trying not to use “Wendy” quite so often, just in case she ends up Desdemona or something.

And even though this is just day two, and she’s still very much a newcomer to the house, she seems to be settling admirably. No accidents, little barking, not even an overabundance of the infamous JRT energy. She’s lively, sure, but as you can see from the picture, she’s also pretty mellow. We had dinner guests last night, when she’d been here only a few hours, and she was an absolute champ. Slept all night in her crate in the bedroom without so much as a whimper. Maybe she’s just enjoying the silence, and the air conditioning, and the carpets.

I’m so happy to have a dog again. Someone to talk to when I’m here by myself.

So, bloggage:

Edward Snowden, on the run again. To Ecuador?

The Taliban wipes out a mountain-climbing party in Pakistan.

Finally, another picture, from the Friday-afternoon freeway:

It’s a bakery, based in Mexico. Which must explain a lot.

Bimbo, Gidget, and four days of 90-degree weather ahead. What’s it like in your part of the world?

So how was our vacation? It was pretty good, I think. Here’s where we went:

Not here, exactly. Farther back:

Almost there. Here:

Wow! In that log mansion? Not exactly — that’s the owner’s house, and they were only there for the first weekend. We rented their guest cottage next door:

Two bedrooms, 30 feet or so from the Au Sable River, which meant Alan was in pig heaven and so was I, because in addition to the woods and the quiet and the tolerable level of bugs and the screened porch and the nothing-to-do-ness of it all, there was also this:

Lately, a key element to full enjoyment of one’s time off. No internet — and no kid, Kate having been deposited at camp on day one — meant I was free to loaf about and do pretty much exactly what I wanted, and that was: Loaf about. And read. I plowed through five novels, none of them particularly good, but it reminded me of how much I’ve missed this, and maybe I should stop trying to read the whole internet every single day and carve out an hour or so for the printed word. Did the world stop turning in my absence? No, and I still missed only four on the Slate News Quiz, and I hardly heard any news last week. So maybe I should stop trying so hard to keep up. This three-week break from Miss Kate might be a good time to try to make some adjustments. She’s already in France, and left a Father’s Day message stating that she was fed quail and goat cheese, and tonight’s menu was to include escargot, so it sounds like she’s getting a crash course in life adjustments herself.

We did get a little bit of exercise, but downstream? Not that much:

Back to the books I read. It included one Loren Estleman title, “American Detective,” which should have been a clue — when the book has such a generic title, beware. It’s one of his Amos Walker series, a classic gumshoe who works in Detroit. I read them because, duh, Detroit, and to be sure, they have some wonderful rat-a-tat dialogue here and there, but I think this will be the last. Maybe someone has asked Laura Lippman her thoughts on the novelist’s duty to a place, once they’ve decided to set a story in an existing city. What can you change? I think you can make up streets, and you can adjust some details via poetic license, but there have to be some rules. Can you make up entire suburbs? I say no. (Estleman does it all the time.) Can you change geography in significant ways? This is the second of his books that has featured a throwaway line about the Detroit River “widening into Lake St. Clair,” which has the entire continental flow of water going in the wrong direction, and this just makes me nuts. He also spelled “gunwales” wrong, which makes me wonder about fiction editors — weren’t they English majors?

He’s not alone, either. I never picked up a second book by a particular author, after his first featured a scene set in a nighttime jungle, and he mentions the screaming of the birds. I’ve never been to a jungle, but I’m 99 percent sure birds don’t scream at night, even there. You might have a few hoots from a nocturnal avian predator here and there, but if you want the birds to scream, it has to be daytime.

Later in the same book, a character watches the sun rise over the water in a place where such a view is impossible, because the sun rises in the east. Hey, mistakes happen. Books are hard. But I don’t think you get to move the damn sun around.

Rant over. I’m feeling pretty mellow, all things considered. I’m glad so many of you enjoyed the ancient archives, and am still working my way through the comments. I’m also reading up on Edward Snowden, and am glad I don’t have to have instant opinions anymore, because the picture keeps changing. I’ll leave you with this short video, the only job we had last week. The owners of the property dammed a small creek and stocked it with rainbow trout, which they enjoy almost entirely as pets — I think they said they’ve eaten one over the years, but none recently. Every other day we were instructed to toss them half a bucket of trout chow, which made for some amusement:

May your week be filled with something similar. Trout chow, or amusement, or a guy throwing food at you.

I’m sorry for yesterday’s absence. I had one of those very long days on little sleep, and still managed to drag my flabby ass to the gym, and re-watch “Mad Men” just for the hell of it, and by the time I realized it was 10:30 and I hadn’t written a word, my head was nodding. But I did squeeze out a few! They were these

Brian Stouder, this is for you.

Also, this. Dorothy Rabinowitz, ack ack ack. I’ll be in later, because for now I’m simply too pooped.

And then, evidently, I forgot to hit Publish. Well, that’s how it goes.

But now it’s Tuesday evening, I’m better-rested, and besides the links above, a few notes:

We leave Friday to take Kate to camp, where she’ll rehearse for a week and then jet off to the Continent. We are celebrating by taking our first just-us vacation in a decade, and we’ll be far from wi-fi and the rest of the internet. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER, she said, right before her eye started to twitch.

How will the week go? Not sure. I still have a bunch of old newspaper columns (thanks, Mark P.!) I might dust off and rerun. As I recall, it took me forever to find five that I could stand to re-read the last time I did this two years ago. But I just scanned a couple, and find they don’t suck as much as I remember. We’ll see. But you’ll be on your own otherwise. If your comment gets stuck in the spam filter — Prospero, I am looking at YOU — it’ll stay there for days.

It sorta hurts — in a non-painful way — to write this. Just returned from my one-month post-op check at the eye doctor’s, and was reminded anew how much I’m not looking forward to this stage of my life. The appointment was screwed up, and they tried to hit me for a $50 co-pay I contend I didn’t owe. I won easily, which should give you an idea of medical-office economics. That colonoscopy piece in the NYT should have been horrifying to anyone still trying to defend the American health-care system in its current form.

Anyway, my eye is healing, but the cataract — which I was told was a possible complication, years down the road — is already starting to form. Fuckety-fuck.

So since we’ve already started with a jab at American health care, let’s start the bloggage with a charming BBC story about the fascinating miracle known as the Finnish baby box. Every expectant mother in Finland gets one:

The maternity package – a gift from the government – is available to all expectant mothers.

It contains bodysuits, a sleeping bag, outdoor gear, bathing products for the baby, as well as nappies, bedding and a small mattress.

With the mattress in the bottom, the box becomes a baby’s first bed. Many children, from all social backgrounds, have their first naps within the safety of the box’s four cardboard walls.

The box, with a shower’s worth of useful products to take care of the new critter, is only part of the miracle. To get it, women have to see a doctor before their fourth month of pregnancy. So it’s win-win — mothers get prenatal care, and the government sees fewer babies in NICU units, leading to Finland having a tiny infant-mortality rate. A good investment, I’d say. A great read, especially if you’re a mother.

Two stories about rich people:

A few days ago, Detroit’s Masonic Temple — a wonderful Gothic pile sadly fallen on hard times — was at the risk of foreclosure due to unpaid taxes. In the nick of time, an anonymous check for $142,000 arrived to save it from becoming yet another empty building in a city full of them. Today, the anonymous donor was revealed: Jack White. Who really wanted to remain anonymous, but the Masonic owners insisted on naming the central theater after him.

Meanwhile, in California, the damage to the Big Sur redwood forest done by Sean Parker’s (Napster/Facebook Silicon Valley shithead) wedding was tallied, and this Atlantic explication of it is such a delicious read, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But this is some shameful shit here, the sort of willful, stupid behavior for which the term “rich douchebag” was invented.

Finally, I see the Chicago Sun-Times, in its nonstop effort to strip the paper of every possible reason to buy it, has cut off Neil Steinberg to spite its face. I am a late-coming fan of his column, but I find this amazing — he’s a consistently good read, and this is an invitation to find the exit. I hope someone reconsiders, or snaps him up elsewhere.

And with that, I leave you to a good Wednesday, I hope.

It’s official: After a lifetime of sneering after retirees moving to warmer climates, I now totally get it. It occurred to me today that I could live the rest of my life at 72 degrees and three weeks before the summer solstice. I have more energy, eat better, find exercise a temptation and not a chore and feel optimistic about the day ahead.

Florida! I take it all back! Except for that part about the heat and the bugs.

Yes, it was a good weekend. Got out, got around, lazed around re-reading a Travis McGee novel. Make a homemade pizza topped with roasted red peppers, tomatoes, spinach, garlic and fresh mozz. Made hamburgers. Drank some craft beers and pinot noir. Watched, via Netflix, “The Way,” which I expect you religious types have seen by now, and “Drive,” just to see if it was still disappointing, and yes it was. Had a 20-mile bike ride and a short sail. If that ain’t summer living, I’d like to know what is.

A little bloggage? OK:

Why are colonoscopies thousands of dollars in the U.S. and only hundreds in the rest of the developed world? The New York Times explains:

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

You don’t say.

How did Michael Douglas develop oral cancer? Now it can be told:

Michael Douglas – the star of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction – has revealed that his throat cancer was apparently caused by performing oral sex.

In a surprisingly frank interview with the Guardian, the actor, now winning plaudits in the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, explained the background to a condition that was thought to be nearly fatal when diagnosed three years ago. Asked whether he now regretted his years of smoking and drinking, usually thought to be the cause of the disease, Douglas replied: “No. Because without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”

Mercy. Well, this is why I believe in HPV vaccination. Does the world need any more discouragement of this practice? I think not!

What else can split Republicans? How about Common Core?

The opposition’s momentum was evident this week in Michigan, where Republican lawmakers moved toward delaying Common Core despite entreaties from former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a respected voice within the party on education and one of the most vocal GOP champions of the new standards.

Bush, who is considering a run for president in 2016, defended Common Core during a closed-door lunch on Tuesday with state House Republicans in Lansing, then reiterated his arguments Wednesday in appearances with Snyder during a policy conference on Mackinac Island.

“Do not pull back. Please do not pull back from high, lofty standards,” Bush said in a pleading tone. He described Common Core as a “clear and straightforward” strategy that would “allow for more innovation in the classroom, less regulation.”

Good luck with that. And good luck with the week ahead.

Michelle Rhee was the big speaker at Mackinac today. Judging from my social-media feeds, it was either a huge success or, well, this:

There exists very little difference between her “reform” scheme and the broken system she seeks to fix. Both sides of this argument seek to reinforce a one-size-fits-all educational program that, to quote The Simpson’s Superintendent Chalmers, prepares the next generations for “tomorrow’s mills and processing plants.”

Thrive in a school envisioned by Michelle Rhee and you’ll likely make an ideal Secretary of State employee or insurance claims adjuster.

This is from Jeff Wattrick, who is covering the conference for Deadline Detroit. He’s not 100 percent my cup of tea, but he brings a certain zing to an event that encourages a sort of complacent, polite, inside-the-Beltway, respectful coverage that, frankly, it doesn’t always deserve.

The Center for Michigan is celebrating a big win up north, however — after about a year of work, a significant bump in early-childhood education funding is a done deal — $65 million a year more, to help another 10,000 kids attend high-quality preschool. A lot of shit is going down in Michigan at the moment that is unsettling — the DIA stuff is only the start of it — but this is good news.

Sorry for the late update, but it was one of those days where I hit the tape and collapsed into a heap. Eighty-eight degrees yesterday had something to do with it. Thursday had something to do with it. Laziness had something to do with it. And now I sit here on Friday morning, coffee at hand, and think: Cronuts? Well, OK.

What is a cronut?

A cronut, if you’re unfamiliar, is the new hybrid pastry — half croissant, half doughnut — that is sweeping New York. Or would be sweeping New York, if people could get their hands on them. As of today, the only place cronuts are sold is at the Dominique Ansel Bakery in Soho, where people now line up down the block as early as 6 a.m. — two hours before opening — for the chance to snag one of the 200 cronuts the bakery produces daily.

People will line up for pastry in other places, but they have to be Krispy Kreme.

We got to talking about doughnuts at dinner the other day. Alan revealed that a long, filled doughnut — long as opposed to round — is known as a “lunch stick” in northwest Ohio. This just goes to show you can spend nearly all of the last 25 years with a person and still not know everything about them. Why lunch stick? Who knows? Alan’s Defiance family is full of those country expressions — calling a green pepper a mango, calling lunch dinner, etc.

The other thing they’re known for is refrigerating everything. Alan once bought a dozen warm Krispy Kreme on the way to the lake one Saturday. Everyone had one upon arrival, and he went off to do some chore. When he came back for a second, they’d already been put in the refrigerator, i.e., ruined. Refrigerating doughnuts is the work of a woman who fears ants in the kitchen more than a cold, slimy KK.

Do cops still eat doughnuts? The ones I see are more likely to be eating Mexican food.

Speaking of public-safety workers, I wonder why Detroit firefighters even bother anymore. A short video on a blaze at one crappy corner liquor store that ended up critically injuring two firefighters. And then the ambulance didn’t show within 15 minutes. I ask you.

OK, time to wrap. Or rather, time to take the Slate news quiz and score miserably.

Have a good weekend, all.

You guys were talking in comments yesterday about finding caches of old porn under the rafters of one another’s houses, which is the standard hiding place, or was. (As my old neighbor the cleaning lady could tell you some folks just leave it lying around and expect the help to put it away.) It reminded me of a story I’m sure I’ve told before, but these things will happen as we all get old, right? Anyway: Some friends of mine rehabbed an old farmhouse west of Columbus, probably dating from the mid’19th century. As part of the kitchen restoration, they pulled off the mantelpiece for the fireplace. And found two items:

1) An addressed, stamped, but apparently never delivered invitation to a high-school graduation. You could almost see that it must have been part of a stack of them, and slipped off the top and down between the mantelpiece and the wall. How many hurt feelings did that lead to, you wonder?

2) A pamphlet, absolutely authentic and almost perfectly preserved, for a patent medicine that pledged to cure young men of the urge toward self-abuse. It went on for several pages about the dangers of this practice, how it could lead to a loss of vigor and general malaise, irritability, etc. I wondered how the homeowners came to pick it up at their local pharmacy — a bad-tempered teenage son, perhaps, paired with some spotted sheets? An embarrassing moment walking in on the boy at work in the bathroom? Who can say. The despairing mother confides in a druggist; he proffers some literature. I wonder if she ever bought any of the stuff. I wonder what it might have contained.

History tells us most likely it was alcohol. Which, when you think about alcohol’s relationship with human sexuality, is sort of funny. He probably switched to the livestock.

I started to write yesterday about the news that broke Friday, that the city-owned collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts could be at risk of liquidation should the city declare municipal bankruptcy (which most believe is a foregone conclusion). Opinion about the emergency manager’s statement on this is all over the map — it’s a trial balloon, it’s a negotiating technique, it’s a bargaining chip, it’s madness, it’s about time. At this point it’s safe to say that if you’re planning a trip to visit the Rivera murals, you don’t need to rush, but you never know. This will be in court for eleventy jillion years if it gets that far, but at this point, all I know to do is sigh heavily.

As you can imagine, the usual racists have stood up and thundered that those ghetto hood rats don’t deserve a great art museum, so why not sell every last watercolor. Some have said, “Oh, cheer up — it’ll just go to another bunch of museums,” which strikes me as one of the dumber things said in the last 72 hours, and that’s saying something. If the unthinkable happens, and some or all of it is sold to satisfy pensioners and bondholders, it’s pretty obvious it would go into the drawing rooms of Ron Lauder and Barry Diller, et al. I think about “Detroit Industry,” the Rivera murals, painted by a Trotskyite, commissioned by an aristocrat, celebrating the working class. It’s about the most recognizable single piece in the building, and the single best artistic distillation of what Detroit is, what it was, that probably exists today. (OK, a ridiculous statement, but I’m no critic.) I wonder what would happen to that.

Elsewhere here in the land where anything can happen, a disgraced former Supreme Court justice, a Democrat, was sentenced to 366 days in prison for bank fraud, i.e., shenanigans on a short sale. I have zero sympathy, but I don’t wish her ill. She’ll spend her year in a Martha Stewart federal prison for well-behaved lady criminals and be home in time for next year’s Memorial Day barbecue, and maybe even Christmas, with good behavior. She retains a generous state pension and the luxurious Florida home that led to all this crap.

I’ll tell ya — real estate never leads people down the paths of righteousness, does it?

I am on a dedicated campaign to get out from under my mortgage sooner rather than later — we went to a 15-year note two years ago, and I make extra principal payments — so I guess the fact the market is recovering should be good news for us, but somehow I don’t think so. Basically, real estate is the devil. I look forward to the communal apartments my old age surely has in store.

A short work week, and already we’re at Wednesday? How’d that happen? Happy Hump Day to you, too.

I signed up for another group ride Friday. It runs the full length of Woodward Avenue, from the Fist to Pontiac and back. That’s 54 miles and it rolls in about a month. I’m not worried about my legs, but I am worried about my butt and hands. Time to toughen ’em both. So I headed out for a little toughening Monday. It was a good day for it — overcast and cool, a holiday so little traffic.

I put the chain on the big ring and let ‘er rip, with the intention of riding out for an hour and then coming back at the same pace, hoping to cover around 20 miles. I reached the outer limits of my safe-solo-travel-into-Detroit circle at 40 minutes, then came back the long way around, which is to say, in one 1.5-hour period, it was blight and industry and wealth and water and — as always, because this is Detroit — lots of liquor stores.

Didn’t quite make 20 miles. Google said I rode 17.5. But a good start.

And if there’s anything more boring than someone else’s workout, I don’t know what it is. But that was the weekend: It started with kundalini yoga and ended with beef on the grill. Funny what you can do in three days, without doing all that much other than eat and recreate a bit.

Well, there was the Liberace biopic. Not all that great, but it had its moments.

I had more to this entry, a few words about the big news here over the weekend — the potential of the sale of the DIA collection — but somehow I got signed out, and lost it all.

With that as an eff-you from my own site, I’m leaving early. Let’s hope it’s not an omen for the rest of the week.

I hope it says something about this week that my options for this evening are: a) drinks; and b) yoga, and I’m considering the yoga. Seriously. It’s a special full-moon yoga pachage — an hour of kundalini, followed by an hour of gong immersion. I mean, why the hell not?

There was a woman who used to take a weights class at the same time I did a while back. She was, what’s the word? Insufferable. Whippet-thin and toned down to the last muscle, she was the sort who, when the instructor said, “If you’d like an extra challenge, raise your legs into table position,” would raise her legs into table position and add something extra on top of that. Just to be insufferable. She never sweated. During breaks, she’d say things like, “I never have to watch what I eat. Just eat whatever I want. Must be my genes.”

In fine weather, she would ride hr bike to the gym, like me. No helmet. No lock. “Yeah, I should probably get one of those,” she’d say, wrinkling her pretty nose before pedaling off, her unsweaty hair trailing behind her. She never did.

But one day we were doing a yoga strength move, and she confided something someone had told her: “Guys? It’s anti-Christian.” After that, I resolved to do downward-facing dog for the rest of my life, and I will probably think of her skinny ass every time I do.

Yeah, I’m thinking yoga tonight. And then drinks.

Much good bloggage today, so let’s get to it.

Once upon a time, the president was a young man, and he went to his prom. With pictures.

As we’re on a happy hour theme, two booze stories. First, the pricey stuff:

Even though I know it’s coming, it’s hard not to feel sticker shock when I get the bill at The Rye Bar in Georgetown’s new Capella hotel. On my tab: a $22 Manhattan and an $18 Old Fashioned. With tax and tip, the whole thing rounds out to $50. For two drinks.

Don’t get me wrong, the cocktails at The Rye Bar are very good, and the Manhattan is one of the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s made with Dad’s Hat rye, a small-batch whiskey from Bristol, Pa., Dolin sweet vermouth, and French aperitif Byrrh quinquina, all aged together for six weeks in American white oak barrels, making it so smooth that the buzz catches you by surprise.

It so happens I recently interviewed a craft distiller, and the products were wonderful. On the other hand, the day I pay $22 for a drink is the day I go back to Budweiser in bottles.

Now, the cheap stuff:

Twenty-nine bars and restaurants, nearly half of them TGI Fridays, filled premium brand liquor bottles with lower-quality booze and sold it to patrons who thought they were buying the good stuff, authorities said Wednesday.

Worse yet, investigators said at least one New Jersey bar was mixing food dye with rubbing alcohol and serving it as scotch. Officials would not say who used the rubbing alcohol. But they said no health issues were reported.

Nothing about this surprises me, I regret to say. Speaking of which, don’t get the Sno-Cones at Minute Maid Park.

But let’s try to close on an up note — Gene Weingarten observes a neighborhood eviction. As only he can.

Oh, let’s all try to have a good long weekend, shall we?

It was one of those ai-yi-yi sorts of days, punctuated with some bright spots. I am seeing, just in glimpses and just at the outermost periphery of my vision, some glimpses of clarity. But like the bright elusive butterfly of love, it refuses to be captured. When I look for it, I can’t find it. When I’m not, THERE IT IS. For just an instant.

I will take this as a good sign.

Hit the weight room at the end of it, because sometimes, that’s what you have to do — pump iron. Lately, I’m digging the Jammer in the weight room. All the college students are out and back in the gym now, clanging plates around and making all kinds of noise. I like to bring my schvitzing old ass right in the middle of them. Get used to granny, kids.

So let’s make this short and sweet and picture-ific.

I’m trying to eat more vegetables, without going to too much trouble. This is becoming a favorite lunch/breakfast — shakshuka. Or, in this case, Extremely Low-Rent Shakshuka:

You make a little tomato sauce, get it how you like it, then drop a couple of eggs on top and cover the pan. When the eggs are done, you have a wonderful lunch, with protein and a cup or so of veg. You can season it hot or mild, add whatever you want. This one was spicy. The one I made for lunch today was mostly black beans. And that is how you console yourself as an at-home worker, at charge of your own lunch.

I’m sorry, but this just cracks me up:

Gerald Ford, spending a summer on Mackinac. It’s a piece from ArtPrize, called “Our President,” and the thought of it menacing tourists for the season is simply hilarious.

The Atlantic’s photo blog collection of tornado photos from Oklahoma.

Will this week ever end? We’ll see. But we’re now over the hump.

The crush of stuff I alluded to earlier in the week has arrived, so I’m calling in sick today. However, I have a fabulous time-waster for you today: Geo Guesser, in which you are served a random Google Maps street view from somewhere in the world, and asked to figure out where you are. I played two rounds, scored 11,000 and 9,000 points respectively, and am really hoping no one does this as an iPad app, because then I’ll get nothing done.

But you geography nerds will enjoy. My tips: Street signs. License plates. Flags. Cars. Pavement quality. Your gut. This is what will carry you along.

I’ll be back Monday.