Confession: every Friday morning when I wake up and go downstairs I sing Rebecca Black to the dog. "Seven AM, waking up in the morning. Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs." He stares at me. Sometimes he barks at me, which I interpret as "I loooove your singing, especially THIS PARTICULAR SONG!" so I sing louder and louder as his barks get sharper and more agitated. We're pretty much best friends.

Speaking of Rory, here he is now. Eight months old and as handsome as ever:



This weekend is my parents' birthday. Same birthday, yep. It makes it very easy to remember but financially sucky as it's always nicer when birthday gifts are spread out over the course of the year. Four out of five people in my immediate family have their birthdays within a four-week span.

I'll be heading to New Brunswick No Funswick after work to celebrate birthdays with my family, a shopping trip with my sister tomorrow, and who knows what other fun and frivolity. On Sunday Peter and I are heading to New Glasgow so I can meet my little niece Madelyn for the first time. She's five days old today. I'm a bit scared to hold her. I'm also hoping to get to see "Something Borrowed" this weekend and might attempt baking brown bread.

What are you up to this weekend?

Happy Friday!

[+] the first barbecue of the season (and every one thereafter). Food prepared outdoors JUST TASTES BETTER. We barbecued tonight - burgers with fried mushrooms and salad with mango and avocados. Best burger I've ever tasted, hands down.

[+] mystery drinks. In an effort to pretend I'm drinking alcohol (two more weeks! two more weeks!) I started scrounging the fridge looking for random ingredients we have on hand to make faux-alcoholic bevvies. Tonic water with juice tastes kind of like a liquory drink, minus the hangover. Throw in a hunk of fruit if you want to get fancy.

[+] hanging out with Rory. Our little baby is growing up - he's almost 8 months and he's in a weird, gangly, in-between stage. He's funny and makes me laugh every single day. Now that the weather is nicer it's awesome to play fetch with him and not freeze your extremities off or have to pull snowballs off his fur.

[+] baseball games on TV. A nice little reminder that summer is coming. At this time of year I start hating hockey and loving on baseball. Get the puck off the ice, as they say.

[+] old-school arcade games on Xbox 360. We downloaded Sonic 2 the other day and I could play it all day long. The graphics are crap and the game is horrible but it takes me back to my Grade 7 days like no other! Funny how you can not play a game for 15 years and remember every detail perfectly but I have no idea what I had for lunch yesterday.

(Warning: If you're eating right now, stop reading. If you have a chocolate bar or a Tootsie Roll you were planning to enjoy later, maybe you should eat it now, then come back to this post in a bit.)

So now that my seven deadly sins meme is done, I can switch gears a little bit and talk about the more important and pressing issues that are going on in my life. Currently my biggest issue is that my dog eats his own turds. "Oh sure," you say, "my dog eats his own frozen poops all the time." Oh, but wait. I didn't say 'frozen turds'. We're talking fresh, steamy, just-hit-the-ground turds.

He goes out to poop. He poops, turns around, presumably to sniff it (why do dogs do this?!) but he WOLFS IT DOWN in one bite.

This has been happening for about a week or more. Before, he'd occasionally find a frozen hunk of whatever and chew on that, but now it's escalated to the point where he eats every single bit of feces he produces. We yell at him and tell him he's bad, and we don't give him a treat after he's just devoured his own poop, but it doesn't seem to be working.

What can we do? Do we have to go out with him every time he pops a squat and yank him away from it so we can pick it up? Is it a puppy thing? What is the appeal of eating your own poop?

Please tell me if you've had a puppy who loved eating fresh turds as much as Rory does so I don't continue thinking we have this sick maladjusted poop-fetish dog. We can bond about it.

Also...it's probably a good thing that this is my worst problem right now.