From The Desk of The Dog

My Last Summer Vacation

Hello everyone!  It's Runtly, the ever so entertaining Jack Russell Terrier, JRT for short!  Mom and Dad have drug me all over God's green earth this summer!  They seem to forget that I do not really like to ride in the car!  But, this last trip, I tricked them and learned something new!  Bear with me.  Mom says wrong bear, what does she know, she's afraid of bears!

Anyway, I have been in the car for over 4000 miles this summer.  I don't know why we had to go so much.  The last trip, though, I figured out a new plan.  We left really early in the morning.  I sure wasn't done sleepin' when Mom woke me up and told me we were going to go see my Mama......again!  It was dark when we left and they put me in my crate and strapped me down in the back seat.  See, they thought that if I could not see where I was going, I would ride better that way.......NOT!  We didn't get too far down the road and I let them know I needed to get out.

I did this as many times as possible and it worked each time.  Then we stopped to see some peeps we had not seen in a long time.  They live in Kentucky, whatever and wherever that is.  I don't forget anybody I get to smell.  As soon as I got a whiff of them, I was happy to see them too.  

Mom says we visited with those people for almost an hour.  I don't know what that is either.  That is probably the funniest thing about my human peeps, they are always talkin' 'bout time.  Too bad they don't know that the only time there really is, is right now.  Anywho, we had no more got back out on the road and I let them know I needed to get out again.  Mom finally figured it out.

I didn't need to go potty again.  Good grief, I had pottied 20 times already, with no drink!  Sometimes Mom and Dad are just slow learners.  Mom reached in the back seat and wallerd , Mom says that's wrong too, wish I had an eye roll emoji.  She wallerd around and got my crate undone and let me out.  BINGO!

I spent the rest of the trip to see my Mama and the entire trip back home in Mom's lap!  There was a time or two that I got really scared though.  Usually when Dad had to make smoke.  He always opens the window and lets the loud air rush in and the loud sounds from the road rush in too.  He finally just made smoke when we went through the slow spaces.  Mom says they were construction zones....whatever.  Dad just needs to quit makin' smoke.  I did kinda pay him back, it took him a whole day to get all my dog hair out of the car.  Wish I had a smiley emoji.

At least I didn't get sick this time.....but Mom did.  She laid on the bathroom floor for a really long time and I tried to help.  I licked her eyes, ears and face but she said it didn't help.  So, I just sat on the bed and watched her barf.  Mom says I'm done now.  Woof!

Summer Camp

Google, an American multinational company that specializes in internet services and products, recently held their Summer Camp.  This is not the kind of summer camp most of us can recall.  Those hot summer days filled with poison ivy, mosquitoes, campfires, s'mores and bunk houses with no air conditioning.  Singing Kum Ba Yah, swimming in a lake or learning how to pitch a tent.

No, this Summer Camp is supposed to be quite secretive.  Only the creme de la creme, the very best, the super elite are invited to attend.  It was held in Riber, Sicily, Italy at the beautiful Verdura Resort.  This place boasts two golf courses, spas and rooms that start at $903 a night.  

Google invites the very rich and powerful to attend so they can talk about how to make the world a better place.  They discuss things like human rights, education and other global issues.  This year though, they focused mainly on climate change.  Some of the attendees were the former president of the USA, Barack Obama,  Leonardo DiCaprio.....actor, Katy Perry.....singer (recently accused of sexual abuse by two people), Tom Cruise.....good actor....weird person, Prince Harry....has he ever worked?,  Mark Zuckerberg, Bradley Cooper, fashion designers and many other millionaires and billionaires, which may be the reason many journalists refer to it as "The Billionaires Club".

The 'campers' arrived in 114 private jets, guess no one thought to jet-pool to reduce the carbon footprint, and over a billion dollars worth of diesel burning luxury yachts.  When not discussing the grueling emergency of the state of the climate, they were seen scurrying around in Maseratis and gas slurping ATVs.  The campers did have to pay their own way to get to the resort, but after that, Google picked up the tab.  To the tune of somewhere around 20 million dollars.  

Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in this situation?  Were there any of the Inuit Elders invited to the camp?  The ones who talked to NASA about how the stars have changed position because the Earth has tilted, something it has done for eons.  Were there any conversations about the thousands of everyday people who have reported the sun rise is in a totally different area of the horizon?  Yes, the sun rise does move throughout the year, but the changes that are being reported around the globe are not the subtle changes that occur in the yearly trip around the sun. 

This seems like an experiment in totalitarianism, where only a few make the rules and those rules are not to be questioned.  It also seems like a blatant flaunt of wealth over the rest of the populace.  Perhaps a closer look needs to be taken at Google itself.  After all, should we trust and American company who helped a communist country develop a program to censor and spy on their own people?

From Sea to Shining Sea

Having never seen the Pacific Ocean, it was definitely one of the items on the bucket list.  I flew into Phoenix, Arizona and then traveled by automobile to the west coast.  The scenery in the southern part of the South West is mesmerizing.  The desert, in all its vastness, is an amazing thing to see.  Palm trees in the distance are a signal that humans occupy a spot in the otherwise arid landscape.  Outcroppings of jagged rocky mountains break up the monotony of the flatness of this place.  The heat is searing.  One small town has the sea level marked on their water tower.  We were well below it, leaving one to wonder if, at sometime, eons ago, this too was once an ocean floor.  

One thing about traveling from east to west is how very quickly the scenery can change.  It is almost as fast as walking from one room in a house to another.  This very thing happened as we approached the California border.  Suddenly, the flat desert turned into sand.  We were driving through the Imperial Sand Dunes.  Never had I seen so much sand in my life.  It looked exactly like something out of a movie seen and I thought surely, a camel would appear over the top of one of the dunes at any moment.  The dunes are created by the wind and the sand is said to be from an ancient lake.  All this sand stretches for nearly forty miles in a south east to north west direction, but is only about 5 miles across at its widest points.  I was left in awe to have been able to witness such a massive force of nature.

Then, the terrain began to rise.  We climbed higher and higher through mountains strewn with megalithic boulders.  Hundreds of thousands of huge stones that looked as though they had been dropped there, for some good reason and then forgotten.  The energy of this place was magnificent and could be felt even as we drove with a throng of other drivers all in a hurry to reach their destination. 

As the altitude changed, so did the temperature and the 115 degrees of the desert was replaced with mid 70's and a cool breeze.  As we drove closer to the coast, the scenery changed again, the landscape dropped off on our left, to reveal the blue water of the Pacific Ocean.  

I had been warned that the Pacific was much harsher than the Atlantic.  Its water was shockingly cold and the waves were indeed strong and fast.  They not only washed up shards of shells that had been tossed to and fro for a millennia, but rocks as well.  Not just small rocks, rocks as big as soft balls, polished smooth by the constant motion of water and sand.  One of those rocks, looking like a spotted walrus, sits silently on my desk, ever listening, but gives no advice, nor tells no tales of its hidden, but surely, exciting past.

Fast forward five weeks and I find myself standing quietly, looking at the Atlantic Ocean.  I whisper to her, "Hello, my old friend." She answers me by tossing her foam capped grey green waves my direction, gently touching the tips of my toes.  Her water is inviting and warm.  I stare out across her hidden depths, I gaze down the shoreline to a point far in the distance.  I wonder, again in awe, the stories the earth could tell.  Maybe it is telling me now.  Telling me how blessed I am to go from sea to shining sea.