It probably won't come as a surprise to you if you've seen my latest poodle strip, but as is usual for springtime, I have a terrible case of poison ivy. This year's bout, no doubt thanks to the helpful paws of underbrush-romping Louis, is the kind of rash that makes me wonder how much life is actually worth living. (There must be some reason so many people are taking fentanyl, right?)

Most people seem to think that cortisone cream makes poison ivy feel better, and maybe it does... for them. For me, all cortisone cream does is take the itch away so that I can feel only pain. "Burning" and "stinging" sensations are on-the-warning-label common side effects of cortisone cream, and I feel both. I'm left with the choice is to scratch myself to death or self-immolate like a Vietnamese war protestor. Thank you, medical science.

I've always had a problem with poison ivy. As a child, I believed it must be contagious, and for many years after, I believed that the rash spread through the bloodstream. In about 2010, a very grumpy doctor finally convinced me that "contact dermatitis" can only result from surface contact with the irritant, but that only deepens the mystery of how I get rashes where I get them. Last month it was on my scalp. It was ugly; even Sitting Bull wouldn't have taken it.

My current worst rash spot is right on my belt line, which makes makes the socially-approved custom of wearing pants feel like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. My solution, obviously, is to not wear pants, which would only be acceptable if I lived in a society that still killed criminals with hemlock. I have a rare, in-person meeting scheduled for this tomorrow. Boy, are they going to be surprised.

If the march of human history is leading us to a global warming heat death, bring it on. So long as all the world's vegetation dies with us, great! I hate poison ivy.

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33/2199. Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935)
Not as good as Gold Diggers of 1933, but that's partly due to the fact that Gold Diggers of 1933 is so very, very good. The opening is fantastic, and there's a lot of enchanting Busby Berkley choreography in here. Too bad almost all of these "gold diggers" themselves are intrinsically unlikeable characters.

34/2200. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
I don't know how entertaining this silly mock-autobiography will be for people less familiar with Weird Al's discography than I am, but my mother's beau, who doesn't know Weird Al from a normal one, seemed to enjoy it fine.

35/2201. April in Paris (1952)
The song-and-dance numbers in this musical comedy should be better known, but the otherwise tired script and the mismatched pairing of naive Doris Day and sad-sack Ray Bolger make watching a bit of a chore. Keep an eye out for the rainbow of poodles late in the third act scene used as the source of the cover image of the August 9, 1952 issue of Collier's Magazine. (Google it.)

36/2202. All About Eve (1950)
Not to be confused with The Three Faces of Eve (which I have done), this is the one about a sociopath, not a split personality. They both have Academy Award winning performances, of course, but this is the one that grabbed Best Picture. It probably deserves it, especially because of Bette Davis's ability to convey rare onscreen character growth (and George Sanders' delightfully manipulative theater critic).

37/2203. The Jane Mysteries: Inheritance Lost (2023)
Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel lost Candice Cameron Bure to Great American Family, so they grabbed Bure's Full House sister, Jodie Sweetin, with diminishing results. Solvable purely by formula alone, this isn't particularly recommended.

38/2204. Garage Sale Mysteries: Searched & Seized (2022)
The last installment of Lori Laughlin's signature Hallmark mystery series feels simultaneously contrived and comfortable, much like a Murder She Wrote episode, which is certainly the point. Too bad there won't be any more of these, at least on Hallmark. (While Hallmark frowns on bribing college officials, Great American Family doesn't, so Laughlin followed her Full House stepdaughter over there after she got out of prison. Man, the behind-the-scenes on these made-for-tv Hallmark movies is getting wilder than any of their murder mysteries.)

More to come.

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I swear, you turn your back for half a minute....

I thought I saw something on the camera, so that's why I wandered out of frame for a second. You'll note that I was savvy enough to ensure the door was safely closed before I did. I'm so smart. But my poodles are smarter.

For the record, the boxes contained new couch covers to replace the ones they had destroyed earlier in the week. In hindsight, that was obviously part of their cunning escape plan. Poodles play the long con!

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We all learned valuable lessons this month. The boys learned to stay inside the car, and I learned to keep the windows all the way up.

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Happy 2nd Birthday, Henry!

Henry's great-aunt Kelley (that's her hand) brought hats, and Henry, Louis, Audrey, and Kelley's newest dog, Topper, were all treated to Waffle House leftovers.

Audrey likes her hash browns scattered and covered — and she tolerated the hat only long enough to get some.

Henry, on the other hand, was happy to wear his hat the whole time. He's always happy just to be included.

Good dogs! Here's to many more birthdays to come.

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It's 7:00 and I have to get over to CVS to pick up Dad's newest medicine before they close so that I can deliver it before he freaks out about it and the dogs have to go out before I go and its raining and I open the door for Louis... and Henry chases him outside into the downpour. And they ran and ran. And ran.

So now I have to add "wash and dry the dogs" to my list of things to do tonight.

I'm... not having a good time these days. And the boys are just making everything so much harder.

It's really starting to feel like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

UPDATE 3:30AM: And I just let the dogs out (one at a time!) before bed and in the 2 minutes it takes to use my electric toothbrush Henry dug a hole in the mud and now has to have another shower before bed.... Grrr. It was just two minutes, Henry!

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Did everyone have a Merry Christmas? I guess I did, all things considered. I mean, so long as I ignore the fact that the Miami Dolphins collapsed in the second half and lost their 4th straight game, going 0-4 in December and demonstrating that despite some earlier success they are definitively not ready to be a playoff team for the 22nd year in a row. (Annual reminder: their last playoff win was in 2000.)

Yeah, ignoring that and the fact that I badly cut my thumb on the large carving knife while doing the dishes, the rest of the day went pretty well. It was in the wee hours of this morning that I ran into trouble. Or maybe I should say that it was Louis who ran into trouble for us all.

After watching Sunday Night Football go to overtime and spending an hour trying and failing to play online games with Friend James (the trouble seemed to be with his ISP), I noticed at about 1:30 in the morning that something smelled wrong in my room: the faint smell of burning plastic. That's never good.

I began sniffing my way around the darkened house for the cause, starting with the basement. It wasn't coming from my room. It wasn't the furnace which has been running all out for days to combat the 30-year historic cold. It wasn't in my studio where I had been painting finishing veneers earlier in the day. So I moved upstairs where the smell was indeed stronger. I thought maybe it was the Christmas tree lights, but no, they seemed fine. And It wasn't any appliance in the kitchen or anything electronic in Mom's office. I even grabbed a flashlight and checked outside to no avail. What *was* the source of that smell?

When I came back inside, I noticed that the flashlight wasn't a spotlight like it was outside but an illuminated beam, a fuzzy lightsaber. As a former Boy Scout, I quickly recognized this as a Very Bad Sign. The good news is that I could follow the flashlight beam to find the areas of thickening smoke.

The source, as it turns out, was behind the curtains separating the den from the sunroom that Mom uses for crafting. As is usual in the winter, the "sun" room was the coldest in the house, and she has been running an older model portable oil space heater day and night to keep the chill out. At this point, you've probably figured out where this is headed.

Context clues indicate that sometime while I was preoccupied with football or video games, my mischievous puppy, Louis, had taken a break from chewing up my new shoelaces and pajama bottoms to sneak behind the curtain — where he knew he wasn't allowed alone — and knocked over the heater. The sideways heater did not have an automatic shutoff, and worse, on its side it started leaking oil, oil that fortunately smoked before it flamed.

I uncovered the problem in time to prevent any further damage to life, limb, or property. (Sure, the house *smells* like burnt plastic and oil, but at least there's a house to smell.) I think from now on I'm going to have to keep Louis tied to me. And I'm going to recommend that Mom mounts her new space heater (with automatic shutoff!) to the floor!

Post-Christmas crisis averted!

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Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Henry and Louis.

Henry and Louis who?

This is no joke! Just let us in, already.

Louis bolted out the door while I was letting Henry into the yard solo to take care of his business, and when the pair of poodles eventually decided they were tired of rolling in every mud puddle they could find, this is what they looked like when they finally asked to come back in.

I don't think I've ever mentioned it here on the blog, but once upon a time, while I was running an errand in downtown Newnan with July and Victoria in the Jeep, a car pulled into the parking space beside me and the woman inside said she just wanted to say hello to the girls. "I breed poodles," she explained. "I used to breed whites, but now I only breed dark-colored dogs. I'll never have a white poodle again; it's just too much trouble to keep them white."

That's proving especially true for Henry. His favorite color is Georgia Red Clay.

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Today, the UGA Bulldogs won their first SEC Championship game since 2017 in dominating fashion. Hooray!

But the real news of the day is that I have a new dog.

Like Henry before him, this good boy is a rescue puppy whose first family couldn't care for him. His original name was Ricky, though his temporary foster parents discovered he didn't seem to know it. They renamed him Coco Puff, but he never really cottoned to that name, either. Mom decided we might as well call him something that sounded good alongside "Henry."

(Side note: I might have ambushed Mom with the idea of a new dog just yesterday, so she justifiably needed some appeasing before she would allow another standard poodle in her house run by Audrey the Hungry Havanese — whose birthday is tomorrow! If that means Mom gets to name my new dog, so be it.)

Therefore, allow me to introduce Louis, pronounced like a French king, unless you're my dad, who insists on saying it "the American way."

Of course, I'm particularly sensitive to whether Henry might get his feelings hurt by having a new dog in the house, so I woke up early (for me) to take Henry to the PetSmart in Peachtree City for an interview with his prospective new playmate. As it happens, the Peachtree City PetSmart is right beside a cemetery, and when Henry and Louis (nee Coco) politely paused their inaugural rollicking to let a group of funeral-bound mourners pet them, I was pretty sure we were going to be all right.

I'm quite pleased that Louis is a brown poodle, a first for my family. White poodles can be pretty, but you really have to keep them on their pedestal, especially on rainy days when playing with new puppies in the mud.

Immediately after this picture was taken, I introduced Louis to my bathtub. It was an eventful day, indeed.

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What am I most thankful for this year? One guess:

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