Time (because I decided it was) for some family photos, beginning with the newest member of the family …

… Max, who is either the World’s Biggest Basenji (they are supposed to be the size of beagles; he certainly is not) or what we call a PitBasenHerd. He appears to mostly be Basenji, though he is supposed to be part pit bull and, we think, part German shepherd. The combination makes him this fierce:

We got Max from his original owner across the street, in part because Max kept letting himself out of the house. It turned out Max wasn’t supposed to be in the house at all (lease conditions can be such a pain). We heard his owner was looking for a new home for him, so on Sunday we left a note on the door. We heard nothing until Saturday when I was on my way out the door for a basketball game, when she came up and asked if we were still interested in the dog (then named Peanut). I told her to talk to the people inside. I left, and we had one dog and one cat, and when I returned, we had two dogs and one cat. (Now just two dogs, but you knew that.)

Max is a challenge. We were, shall we say, misled about his age and the degree of his housebrokenness. He also chews everything in sight, including, last night, a baseball. He has helped himself to food on the kitchen counter, and he helped himself into our bed at night, where he defines the word “inert.” And yet he’s cute and he’s very affectionate, he displays most of the characteristics of the unique Basenji, and he angers the fat chihuahua, so he’s got that going for him.

As for the human children …

… this is Michael the Fire Explorer, which means he hangs around the busiest unpaid people in town, the Platteville Fire Department.

This is Shaena and Dylan, during the last college basketball game of the year. I’m sure you’re shocked that Dylan is into acting.

You may recall I spent most of the winter announcing basketball. UW-Platteville had a White Out Night against UW-Whitewater (Whitewater 65, Platteville 64), and so in that spirit I figured out how to wear all white — white jacket borrowed from someone (I used Marty Robbins’ “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” as bumper music), white shirt, white tie, white pants and black and white basketball shoes — to participate. The season included the last endless road trip to Superior, which as you know is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alma mater, so of course I had to go into one break saying “Ah’ll be bock,” later saying that Superior was going to say “hasta la vista, baby” to the rest of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference when it moves into a new conference. When Superior came to Platteville it was Alumni Night, so I thought about what I was doing when I was in college, and reused the white blazer to achieve this sort of Miami Vice/Terminator look, I guess.

(You may notice the scar on my forehead, the result of my finding out that a bridal shop’s diagonal bars, on which to hang dresses, was the perfect height for my head. The doctor who put my face back together has been very pleased with his work.)

Up next …

… this disreputable looking quartet is your non-humble writer (second from right) and his father (far left) and his two friends since approximately grade school. (In fact the two wearing Brewers stuff were born in the same hospital within days of each other.) For the second year in a row we went to a Brewers game (remarkably we got let into Milwaukee County), but unlike last year, the Brewers won, prompting some wit in the parking lot to note that we had seen one-third of their wins that day. (Now it’s down to one-fifth, I believe.)