I was at work when I read about Art and Shep yesterday, and I started crying like a little baby. And I’m a miserable (and very manly, I feel compelled to add) old fuck. When you get to be an old bastid you’ve had to deal with a lot of loss in life.

If you’re an animal person, then you’ve had to deal with the loss of your best friends in the world. You lose your grandparents, your parents, friends and acquaintances. People you like, people you’re indifferent to, and people you feel kinda guilty about not feeling bad that they’re gone. Some of us out there have had to deal with the loss of their kids or their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, whatever, in a pointless, illegal war.

No matter what, it always sucks. Even when you’re making a decision for a loved one that you know is the right one to make, it sucks. I’ve had to make that decision with pets, and it sucks. I had to make very much the same decision with my mother, and it sucked. As tough as those decisions are, imagine if you had people second-guessing you – demonizing you – in that most difficult of times. Imagine if it became national news, and a special session of Congress was used to enact legislation to interfere with that decision, the way it was for Michael Schiavo, and President Dummy came back from vacation to put his official stamp of idiocy upon the whole charade. How these people felt they had a right to interfere with somebody’s family matters like that is beyond me. It surely is the best definition of despicable I can think of.

Everybody I care about is hereby put on notice: you are NOT allowed to die before I do.

This has been a long, long week. I know I say that a lot, but yesterday had to have been the longest Thursday in recorded history. If today goes as slowly as yesterday did, I might have to shoot myself in the head.

On the bright side, Fritz had his first doctor’s appointment yesterday, and he’s a very healthy little (maybe not so little anymore) boy. OK, let’s get this shit over with already.

Got my replacement laptop power supply last night, so I’m back in business (assuming the little bugger – who is four months old today, by the way – stays away from it, of course). Not much else to say this morning though. Guess I’ll go watch the teevee, and see if anything interesting happened overnight.

Can’t write much this morning, because I need to conserve my battery power. A certain puppy chewed through my laptop power supply cord (the DC side), so I have to conserve until the replacement arrives. Got a bunch of meetings at work today, too, on top of having to test stuff. Oh and do all my other jobs (sometimes it’s hard to get my quota of websurfing and blogging done). Hopefully the water’s at least working today.

I was supposed to be sleeping in late today, because we’re implementing a new application framework after hours today, so I was going to go in late to stay late and test it. But then we found out the database person wasn’t going to be able to implement things until after seven o’clock (and we can’t test until after that). So, screw it. I’ll test my stuff tomorrow morning. If it’s broken, well, it’ll make for fun Wednesday.

Have a good one.

I’m too damn tired to get up and do this again today. But, I have to. So that means I’ll do it, but I won’t do it well.

Happy Easter to everybody who cares that it’s Easter. Happy “shit, I gotta go back to work tomorrow” day to everybody else. I have a lot of shit to do today (the usual, but complicated by the old familial obligations, which start way too early, if you ask me (which, of course, nobody ever does), so this will be a quick rundown of what’s on the talking head shows today.

First, Press the Meat offers us CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo and Erin Burnett to tell us about the looming recession (here’s a tip: we’re already well into a recession, on our way to the big ‘D’ word, that will be the fault of the next president, assuming it’s not McCain, in which case it’ll be the goddamn congressional Democrats fault). Beats looking at Timmy’s Potato head, I guess. Then it’s a big fifth birthday party for the war in Iraq, with the WaPost’s Eugene Robinson, Peggy “I’d like to give Ronald Reagan’s corpse a humjob” Noonan, Jon Meacham, who don’t really know much about, but adds are he’s an ass, & Chuck Todd, who is definitely an ass.

Faze the Nation has L’il Lindsey Graham, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the former Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox, Doyle McManus
of the Los Angeles Times, and Roger Simon of the ever incorrect Politico.

On Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace has Govs. Edward Rendell, D-Pa., and Bill Richardson, D-N.M., former Treasury Secretary Larry Summer, Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and the Fux “Power Player of the Week,” Eli Manning. Note to Fux: the Super Bowl was, like, two months ago, dudes.

At Goebbels, George Snufalufagus has Chuck Schumer and John Kyl, plus a roundtable of Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Carney and Claire Shipman (what are they, connected at the hip? Even the wife and I get away from each other once in a while) and of course the man with nowhere else to go, George :jerk: Will.

CNN’s Late Emission has, um, I don’t know. They didn’t have it on their website, and I don’t really care anyway.

Later, on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper tells us David Beckham and his manager might buy Beckham’s soccer team (who gives a shit, I don’t know), Scott Pelley tells us that scientists are collecting a billion and a half seeds from all the world’s crops to keep in safe storage deep inside a mountain near the North Pole (they know something they aren’t telling the rest of us about?), and Bob Simon reports on the Jesus’ brother’s box of bones things).

Your best bet is episode 3 of John Adams on HBO. The first two were great (at least I thought so, but then I’m kind of a dork).

Well, gotta go run the pooches around so they aren’t too much of a pain in the ass while we’re at the in-laws.

Happy Sunday everybody.

Oh, what the hell. You’re dying for a doggie picture. I know you are.

Odds are, I’m expected to do a lot of shit tomorrow (though nobody ever tells me anything ahead of time. I’m just expected to intuit these things, I guess), so I need to get all my other weekend shit done today, I guess. Problem is, I’m not generally happy and peppy and bursting with love on Saturdays. Oh well. Better go see about getting up and around. There are doggies counting on me, after all.

This has been one very long week. In fact, I can’t even remember last weekend, it was so long ago. And now they tell me this weekend is Easter (which, if memory serves, must mean today is Good Friday, though I don’t see where getting nailed to a cross qualifies as a ‘good’ day, but then that Catholic shit never really took with me).

Life with a puppy (even one as good as this one is) is pretty tiring. Instead of having an entourage of one big dog and two cats, I’m now followed everywhere I go by a big dog, two cats, and a puppy. I haven’t even had much time to play with my new Chumby (which is really pretty cool, I must say).

Oh well, at least I get to finish out my week in my preferred location, where I can come home for lunch, and be out at four o’clock. So let’s get this day going already.

Got to watch them launch DirecTV 11 last night. Not quite as thrilling as a NASA launch (not as many cameras, for one thing), but pretty cool nonetheless. Hopefully, I’ll have more HD channels soon.