les is not this goodlooking

This is my photo as it appears on the Marco Alvan Brazilian Jiu Jitsu website. I am not this goodlooking in real life. I also do not weigh 130 pounds.

Yesterday Marco and I taught the karate class at Amherst College. Actually, we taught Brazilian jiu jitsu (heretoafter referred to as BJJ) to the Amherst College karate club. The club is made up of a bunch of smart kids under way too much pressure to succeed. But I manage to refrain from feeling sorry for them because they are also primarily a bunch of rich kids so how bad, really, could life be?

Marco always brings Cesar (his 4-year-old son) to BJJ at Amherst College. Cesar (aka the C-Monster) is a handful under the best of circumstances. Last night he was a T-Rex around the room, crawling and growling and gnashing his teeth, weaving in and out of pairs of kids on the floor practicing their techniques. Every now and then he got in someone's way and Marco would say something rapidly in Portuguese and Cesar would bow his head and stick his lower lip out and then recover within 5 seconds and morph into a T-Rex again. Marco's 2nd son will be born in July.

As I was crossing South Pleasant street on my way out of the gym, I met up with a police officer. There were lots of Amherst cops there directing traffic around a big concert that was taking place nearby. The cop helped me across the street and asked me if I was "LH." I don't think it is ever a good thing when a police officer that you do not recognize knows your first and last names.

We stopped and chatted a bit about martial arts until I finally asked him how he knew me. Seems he met me with a local animal control officer one time. One time. Had to be a couple of years ago because I haven't seen that particular ACO in a couple of years. And he recognized me in gym clothes by my first and last names. I always assume that I'm fairly anonymous and that no one could possibly remember me after having just met me. I didn't remember his name and don't recall meeting him. I find this episode slightly creepy. Apparently I'm not as invisible as I think I am.

les keeps out of trouble

I had to grace the Lesblog with another photo of Hattie Brown. Sitting on the couch in my office, looking bleary-eyed after a long day of snoozing. God help me, I'm turning into one of those pathetic souls who share their pet photos with people who could not possibly care less. It's the price you pay for visiting the Lesblog.

I suspect this blogging business will be like the old-fashioned journaling stuff I've done off and on throughout my life. I have countless half-filled notebooks littering my bookshelves, incomplete compendia of my whines and rants, penciled drawings, assignments, or cryptic notes with phone numbers.

If I leave a half-filled blog out there in the blogosphere, I suspect that will leave me with more shelf space for better books. So I can see the upside to doing it this way.

The downside, of course, is the instinct for self-censorship I never felt when scrawling in a notebook. I was surfing the blogs of others and came across Diane who is in her first year of marriage with an apparently long-suffering Todd. Diane's blog is filled with hateful entries about her sister-in-law and poor-me tales of being married (what? she isn't taking romantic baths? who would have thought that married couples don't spend all day in the tub soaking up each other's love by candlelight?). I don't doubt that Diane feels the need to get this kind of crap off her chest. I just doubt the wisdom of putting it out there for everyone and her relatives to read. Or maybe I just admire the powerful passive-aggressive gesture.

Were I to use the Lesblog to make short work of my relationships with the people I love, I'd soon regret it. They have enough reason to find my affections suspect--my anti-social behaviors being what they are. I needn't spell it out for them.

les & hb

Hattie Brown is the one in yellow. She is a 3 year old Chihuahua mix who came to me when the local animal control officer found her living (not terribly well) off a backyard compost heap. HB is my first little dog (my last dog--the late, great Homer P. Wilson--weighed more than 100 pounds), and I'm smitten. So smitten, in fact, that I waffle between wanting 2 or 3 more little dogs and deciding that I only have room in my heart for HB. HB takes up lots of love. Of course, she has to share her Leslove with Carl and Betty Lou (the cats).

I just returned from a conference of animal shelter workers. I've been working in animal shelters since 1989 when I took my first job with the Humane Society of Seattle/King County. I was an "animal welfare technician" or something like that and I made $4.50 an hour to scrub cat cages, medicate sick dogs, and deal with a fairly callous public who would line up out the door of a Saturday and get rid of their animals by the dozens. Always more people ditching their pets than coming to us to adopt. The death toll due to overpopulation was mighty high. I began to hate people. My supervisor got calls.

Of course, now that I'm 17 years in the profession, I don't hate people. I sometimes think they do some awfully stupid things and some are so downright mean and heartless that I do find myself able to dredge up some hate for them. But I also know that hating people will only stop me from talking to them. And if I can't talk to them, I can't help them or their animals.