I went to take a quick snapshot of Parker in his give-me-a-belly-rub pose, when he caught sight of the camera strap. The outcome was, I suppose, predictable:

I got contact lenses on Monday. I honestly have no idea why I didn't get them earlier. My vision isn't much clearer than when I had glasses, but, well, I no longer have glasses. It's weird.

Also weird is sticking my finger in my eye twice a day. I don't know how long it will take to get used to that.

That is all.

Our little puppy isn't so little any more. Here's a before-and-after in which you can actually see the difference. The "before" shot is from September 8th:

The "after" shot is from about five minutes ago...

We're back, with the ParkerCam. I didn't intend to go five days without posting anything, but the office DSL modem—a crappy 2Wire model—has sporadically dropped the internal network connection. So while the DSL worked just fine, the modem stopped communicating with the rest of the office. No blogs, no email, no weather: quelle horreur.

More later.

My laziness is your gain. Here's another shot from Parker Day 2, back in September, back when everything was new and we carried him down the steps every night at 3am.

Though, if it did have a caption, what would the caption be? (Via Talking Points Memo.)

Parker is at home this afternoon. Due to a mix-up with the dog walker, he got two walks today because I was home all morning dealing with people in the house, but he got no walks yesterday. This explains why he bounced off walls for three hours last night instead of his usual two.

Today's photo has nothing to do with any of that. It's just an average shot from two weeks ago, showing the eternal cuteness of Parker and the anything-but-eternal good weather that we had over Thanksgiving:

The Washington Post has a fascinating article on Iraq and the psychology of entrapment (via Talking Points Memo):

When you invest yourself in something, it is exceedingly difficult to discard your investment. What is devilish about entrapment is not just that it can result in ever greater losses, but that those losses get you ever more entrapped, because now you have even more invested.

[Wesleyan University psychologist Scott] Plous, a social psychologist and author of "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making," said experiments show that psychological entrapment comes in at least four guises: the investment trap, in which we try to recover sunk costs by throwing good money after bad; the time delay trap, in which a short-term benefit carries the seed of long-term problems; the deterioration trap, in which things that started out well slowly get worse; and the ignorance trap, in which hidden risks surface suddenly.

Oh, my poor couch. We've given up on it even if Parker hasn't.

Frank Rich (sub.req.) today examines the depths, so to speak, of the President's (779 days, 4 hours) absention from reality:

The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

Very sad, very true.

Anne sent this photo earlier today:

Paul Krugman's column (sub.req.) today offers a bleak assessment of 2007:

Right now, statistical models based on the historical correlation between interest rates and recessions give roughly even odds that we're about to experience a formal recession. And since even a slowdown that doesn’t formally qualify as a recession can lead to a sharp rise in unemployment, the odds are very good—maybe 2 to 1—that 2007 will be a very tough year.

Luckily, we’ve got good leadership for the coming economic storm: the White House is occupied by a man who’s ideologically flexible, listens to a wide variety of views, and understands that policy has to be based on careful analysis, not gut instincts. Oh, wait.

I feel better; how about you?

As hoped, Anne sent this photo of Parker seeing his first fire. What a big day for the little guy!

This morning Parker hit a couple of huge milestones. First, as of today we've had Parker for three months. That's, what, almost two dog years? And my how he's grown:

And as befits such a momentus event, Parker's universe changed overnight, causing at first some consternation, then glee. This morning Parker saw snow for the first time.