The new pup, Beulah, is doing great! She needs a lot of exercise, so I spend many hours walking her around the neighborhood and enjoying *other* people's gardens (while totally neglecting mine). I stole some nice hollyhock seeds recently and today I spotted several bags of shredded leaves (score!) in the alley. Here's a picture of Beulah in a rare moment when she wasn't chomping or digging anything in the yard.

We lost our beloved husky and two cats in the same year. It was overwhelming. When we lost our dog it was in September and we just needed to get out and take a nice long drive. We ended up in the Wisconsin Dells at a wood carvers place that we frequent anytime we're up there. He made us crosses, carved their names and such and now we have this great looking cemetary out back. I have always liked the simple look of crosses in a cemetary and this was perfect. We had to put tar on the bottom 10-12 inches that went into the ground, they've been up since 2006 and as they age they just get prettier.

Hi weed. I hope you are doing well. It isn't easy, is it? Lorie, I'm sorry about PeeWee. If you search online there are some places that make beautiful pet memorial stones in granite and river rock. I had my girl cremated too- just got her cremains back last Thursday. I cannot bring myself to open the box, it has a little brass lock on it. Maybe someday I will, but not now. For now the cedar box she came back in is on the table with a picture of her beside it. I searched around online for granite memorial stones and there are some nice ones out there. Even though she was cremated, I thought it might be nice to have a memorial stone in the garden like an anchor point for her memory. I still haven't decided whether or not to do it. I miss her so much :( Q

I'm the OP, thank you for all your responses! emma, I realized afterward that I could have phrased my question better. I was trying to ask if any others took part in anything that was racism, without being aware of it, in their childhood. It sounds like some of you (I'll use rob as an example) were fortunately raised during early childhood in an ethnically diverse community, so racism by means of words or acts was thankfully no longer tolerated, as it was in many other areas of the country. I grew up in Windsor Ontario, right across the river from Detroit. There were very few people of any 'colour' at the time, as most of us had white European heritage. However, we lived only 5 minutes across the border to Detroit, where we often shopped, went to Detroit Tiger baseball games, and enjoyed all the other great culture and entertainment that Detroit had to offer. My mother worked all her life for a law firm on Woodward Ave. in Detroit. So although Windsor was a mostly Caucasian demographic, we grew up seeing and interacting with many people of colour, due to our close proximity to Detroit. At age 5 when I started school, I had really only played with my own siblings, and maybe the kids next door. So I can't claim to know how things were in my whole neighbourhood, but only that I had never heard the 'N' word in my own home or from the neighbour's children either. But soon after starting school, I discovered the children chanted the words "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a ('N' word) by the toe, if he hollers let him go..." before they started any game, to determine who went first or who was 'it.' I did not know what the 'N' word was, as it was a new word to me, so I just assumed it was some kind of little animal, in my unfortunate ignorance. No one (teachers in the yard) ever came over to chastise/stop us, so I'll never know if they ever overheard us and didn't care, or simply never caught us. I can't recall the exact moment when I learned that 'N' word was actually referencing human beings, I just remember the guilt and shame I felt when I realized I had indeed spoken that very word in my first year or two at school, in the play yard. It was quite shocking to realize that even though we lived right across from Detroit and were so much a part of their culture, that word was still being said (and much worse, when the Detroit race riots occurred, when I was eleven.) That is what I meant when I say that I have 'memories of unintentional racism' because I certainly had no clue what we were saying in the schoolyard, as 5 and 6 year olds.