Someone contacted me to see if they could use a photo of Ava for an upcoming art project. Pretty cool!

My friend Jon is our worship pastor for the church I work for. He’s currently taking some time off along the same lines as my recent time off. It’s been strange not having him around at work and since I was starting to miss the weirdo, I decided to give him a call to see what he was up to. He told me about a list that he’d created to get some things done around the house and that he was having a blast getting things done. Some of them were practical items, and some of them were just fun things. He invited me over to sit on his porch and smoke a cigar and we sat and talked for a couple of hours about nothing in particular. As I went into his kitchen to grab a drink…I saw the list. It was so huge I thought it needed to be shared with the masses to see just what kind of stuff they’ve been up to. Look at this thing:

My favorite part is that they are in the middle of building a sweet tree house for the 3 boys in the family. It’s design is based on the tree house depicted in The Dangerous Book For Boys, which I own and love.

Jon loves to get his hands dirty and do work-work. In some odd sense it actually provides rest for him. His family will be taking some short trips to truly rest as well, and I’m excited to have him back soon.

What are some of the things on your to-do list that you’ve been putting off for too long?

Many of you have asked about my dog Harlan since he was hit by a car a month ago. Originally, we took the news of severe nerve damage to his leg and decided to let him keep his leg for the time being to see if he would regain any use of it. That didn’t happen. Things got worse with his leg, things got gross with his leg, and we finally had to have it amputated on Thursday of last week. It’s surreal to see my hound dog moving about on only 3 legs. I’m surprised by him every time I walk in the room.

I took him in to have his nails trimmed, but I think they took a little too much off.

A friend came over to our house a couple of days ago and asked my little girl Ava about Harlan’s leg being removed. Ava told him, “Yeah, Harlan’s a circus dog now!”

Now if we can just keep our circus dog from chewing open his stitches, we’ll be good to go. He’s healing up pretty well already, and he’s moving around way better than he should be able to. I was kind of hoping we could keep him from jumping up on our bed for a little while…but, I’ll take what I can get.

Dogs are funny little buddies to have around. I wouldn’t consider myself an animal activist of any sort, but several people have told me that they don’t know if they could bring themselves to spend that much on having a dog’s leg amputated…that they’d probably opt to have the dog put down. All I can really say is that you just don’t know what you’d do in the situation until you’re in it. That, and I know that we made the right choice. He’ll be around for a good long while – and we never really knew how much we needed a circus dog in our lives.

Interesting fact: When I took him to the vet before the amputation, he was 49lbs – after the amputation a week later, he’s only 41lbs. Now that’s a serious weight-loss plan.