Ballard Street by Jerry Van Amerongen for March 13, 2018

A prudent practice.

Hahaha! That’s all I’ve got.

No wonder Scooter’s like he is. He can only hear out of one ear. At least that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

Scooter looks….uh…um well, constipated. I’ve never considered that as a cure.

We found out the the Wineries now charge $ 20 to $45 to taste 4 wines!

So much for visiting wineries. I mean, what you don’t like what you’ve paid a lot to “taste”?

Sigh.

Scooter now needs to work on the other ear.

Scooter is brilliant… for a non-anthropomorphic dog….

in fact, he’s my favorite one.

But he just can’t quite understand the connection between clearing out one’s ears with a stream of water…..

oooh, it feels so good….. (to a dog, anyway)

and shaking his head for the next three days to get the water out.

I asked Fenton, our absolutely anthropomorphic, and brilliant, Boxer bartender, to try to explain it to him….

but Fenton speaks English all the time, and he says he’s not that fluent in American Dog anymore.

I don’t think BatPug speaks it at all.

If anyone else here can help, it would be appreciated.

Rose …I could have told you!

I remember when it was all free….

and I know I’m old, but it wasn’t that long ago.

First, it was a $5 charge to cover the glassware…uh huh….

then $10.

Now $40 for a “flight” of tastes… amounting to about one glassful.

At the Tomato Festival where I volunteered for about 12 or 15 years, at the Kendall Jackson winery,

as long as you bought a ticket….. you got samples of food from about 80 purveyors….

and “free” tasting of KJ wine.

But over the course of those years, the ticket price rose…. from $15 to $90!!

and the tasting went from almost unlimited to giving you tickets for four small tastes.

Volunteers got the same four tickets…. but no wine on shift….

and we were so hot, anyway, working in the sun, we mostly used them for soft drinks and bottled water.

Happy, and others who commented on places to visit or pass through….

If you drive down 101 past Santa Rosa you don’t go near Lake County…. it’s 50 miles east of the freeway from the exit just north of town….

Depending on how you go to Napa you don’t go near Kenwood, either….

unless you want to get off the freeway and go through Santa Rosa on Highway 12, and stop at Sonoma County wineries too…

but you’d usually do that a couple of miles before going past my neighborhood.

And almost all of the Northern CA fire damage is not along the freeway….

and we don’t really enjoy going looking for it.

Ding dong, ding dong.

It took me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.

Busted out laughing. A true laugh out loud moment.

I think that i scared Sweetheart.

Occasionally I laugh at a comic; this is one of those occasions.

Scooter has put conventional wisdom about dog intelligence on its ear…

Hey! All those cobwebs are lots of fun! No need to clean them out.

Sorry I’ve been AWOL. Compooter been sickly ( Internet Explorer) was messing up. Had Firefox loaded on and it has taken a bit to get used to it. And I was blaming Centurylink for the mess.

As always, I forgot to post a “Hi there, MUDD!