Hey did you see the eclipse last night? Faboo, wasn't it? I was sure to wake mom up in the middle of the night so we could all go out and see. There was an eerie red glow in the sky, and when the moon came back it was bright like the daytime!! Mom was very impressed, but at 4:30 a.m. she was not too happy that I had woken her up to see it. 4:30 is when she had to get up this morning to go to work!!

Here is a nice picture of some soap that she made over the weekend. The yellow and white one is called Lemon Sugar, it looks kind of like a lemon meringue pie, doesn't it? I hear they are pretty tasty but have never had one. The top reminds me of whipped cream. I LOVE whipped cream...Mom sometimes squirts some out for me and I lick it up. Oh don't worry, I never touch the tip of the can, I wouldn't want to get sick from all the human germs or anything. The blue one is called Clean Blue Tonic. It smells nice and clean. She made some other soap, I think it's called Citrus something, but I only like to post one picture now at a time. I'm just funny like that.
So, Mom locked me out of the bedroom yesterday. I think I mentioned that. I ended up snoozing and thinking on the sofa in the living room. It's not very inspirational. We were all kind of grumpy yesterday...Bailey too, because he likes to lay in his round bed in the bedroom and snooze during the day. (actually he really prefers to lay behind the woodstove but it's not on fire because a piece broke on it. I think Mom said it might be done for the season.) So I was grumpy, he was grumpy and Bandit was grumpy. ONE OF US (and I'm not saying who), knocked over a plant in the kitchen and got dirt all over the floor. But Aunt Lisa helped us out by picking up all the dirt, so nobody got in trouble! Mom wouldn't have been too happy if she had seen that! (I'm thinking it was a payback thing, but I don't want to say!!).

So last night I floated my new idea to Mom and Dad. I'm thinking of going Vegan. A Vegan, remember, is someone who doesn't use animal products. I think it's a very important statement to make. But Dad was being difficult about it. He wanted to know if I planned to get rid of my fur coat, since Vegans don't do fur. Well, I hadn't thought of that. I don't see how I can do that, really, I was kind of born that way. Do you think Vegans will be hostile to me because of the fur thing? And then Mom was being difficult, when she said, OK Casey, boiled vegetables for you I guess. And then she reminded me that there are animal products in my dog food. HUH?? Oh yeah, the label does say Chicken. But, (gulp), I'm a dog and I think I'm supposed to eat meat. I was just thinking no EXTRA meat, and no leather coats or shoes or honey or eggs or silk...I guess I have to re-think my position. Although then Mom did tell me about a vegetarian dog she once knew. I guess that a long time ago, when Mom was just out of college, she worked in VISTA, some kind of program where people don't get paid very much to help people who don't get paid very much. She said they got $45 a week in pay. She also said that $45 a week was what her father used to get paid for being an electrician working for the federal government way back in the last century before she was born. Mom said that this was to represent "poverty level" so that they could work better with the people they were supposed to be helping. BUT, they got really good health insurance, which usually poor people don't have. ANYHOO, to save costs she shared an apartment with 3 other people, who all worked for VISTA. They rented an apartment in a building and next door to them was a hippy family. Hippies were people who lived in the last century who didn't always agree with what other people did,and they tried to change things to make them better, and they dressed differently and had long hair and liked to listen to music and stuff like that. They sound like nice people, don't you think? Anyway, these people were vegetarians and they had a big German Shepard named Xanthus (you say it ZZanthus) and he was vegetarian too. The family said that they had gotten him as a puppy and he had never had meat. He did get to eat milk and eggs though, but no beef or chicken or fish. They made his dogfood special. He was a nice dog and used to come visit my Mom and her friends all the time. One of her room-mates was kind of a jerk named Howie and he used to think it was really funny to give Xanthus hot dogs, because Xanthus would always throw up right afterwards. Maybe that would happen to me if I stopped eating meat, too, I wonder? Well, I am definitely going to give this some more thought. And I just also realized that the whipped cream in the cans comes from cows...I'm not sure I can give that up. Maybe I'll just try giving it up for Lent. I don't know what or who Lent is, or if Lent gets to keep the whipped cream, but it sounds like a short-term thing and maybe I could just try it and see. So I'll get back to you on the Vegan/vegetarian thing. I really need my pillow back in the daytime, I do better thinking on that than on the sofa. I will post more thoughts later.