Meet Madeleine

So last week this happened: I adopted a dog. She’s about four years old and weighs 12.2 pounds. She came with the name Madeleine and I like the gravitas of that, though she is very small and very lively so I don’t think anyone will blame me if I start calling her Maddie. I didn’t exactly…

A Better Way to Celebrate Owney, the Rail-Riding Dog

Yesterday, to commemorate a pup who provided good luck to the Railway Mail Service, the United States Postal Service issued 60 million Owney the Postal Dog Forever stamps. The Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum is debuting a new exhibit that chronicles his adventures and  announcing an Owney photo look-alike contest.  In conjunction with the contest, the…

Pet Shops, Shelters & Pedigree

First, the Pedigree portion of this post. I promise you, it will make you feel good because you’ll be donating food to shelter dogs with a few clicks, even if you don’t have a blog. If you do… well, I’ll get to that. Here are the details: •Each year, more than 4 million dogs end…

Paying BlogPaws Forward: Being the Change

This is going to be quick, because explaining what today’s “Be the Change” challenge is all about is better left to BlogPaws, the organization where it all started. And also because I want others to know that even if they’re busy and broke — guilty on both counts! — they can still help. First, there’s…

Celebrating 5770

I’ve been thinking about sacrilege lately, about the repercussions of bucking religious tradition. It’s a bit of a puzzlement because the religion I grew up with, Judaism, doesn’t offer a clearly defined vision of the sinners’ afterlife. The fact that I had to google the term for the Jewish hell, Gehenna, to get a definition…