Corgis Sleep on Their Backs

This is what an 8-week old puppy looks like after a 45-minute morning walk.

Matilda and the Ice Cube

We took our puppy for a walk today, but the weather was hot, and so was she. When we got home, we gave her an ice cube to help cool her off. This is what she did with it.

Meet Matilda

We have a new member of our family. Yesterday we brought home an eight-week old Welsh Pembroke Corgi puppy. Her name is Matilda. She likes to sleep, eat, and play with her squeaky-duck toy, and all the other stuff that puppies do. Like keep their owners awake at night. Click on the images for a larger view.

Wild Flowers

Three examples of what is coming up now.

The National Flower of Scotland

I went for a walk yesterday afternoon and found these. We have had lots of rain out here this spring, so I have high hopes that we will have a bumper crop of flowers later this summer. There are already hundreds of thistles.

One genus of thistle, the Cynara scolymus, is edible. We humans usually dip them in melted butter.

The Drex Files

Doug Drexler

I recently discovered a blog that I like very much. In fact, I like it so much, I even wrote a post for it.

The site is maintained by Doug Drexler, a "designer, sculptor, illustrator, and an Academy Award-winning makeup artist." He is also a digital effects artist. He has worked on such films as Starman, The Cotton Club, and Dick Tracy. He is probably best known, at least to fans of the television series (see here), for his work on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Enterprise. He has also worked on a couple of Star Trek films.

Most of the blog posts concern the Star Trek ships of the line and the model-building of same. The photography that accompanies these posts is gorgeous. In addition, Drexler often offers behind-the-scenes glimpses of the films and television shows he has been involved with, and from time to time he writes about the history of Hollywood - great fun for a movie buff.

Drexler also posts (as all bloggers do) about some of his favorite things. One of those is comics from days past, including, naturally, Dick Tracy and one drawn by Wally Wood; readers of Calvin and Hobbes will recognize the artistic inspiration.

What Drexler doesn't write about is current events, which is one of the reasons I like it. No politics, no White House, no Congress, no crime, no ugly celebrity beach bodies, "Sexperts," or gay penguins. (You can find all of these on Foxnews.com.)

The other reason I like the blog, and this is the main one, is Drexler's optimism. It permeates everything he writes. There is no whining on "The Drex Files" - at least, not by Doug. Even when he is writing about things from the past, Drexler has his eye on future. And it's clear he has high hopes for it.

After all, he's seen it; he works there.

Visit "The Drex Files" here.