In late December, the power in my neighborhood was out for days. In late March and April, it was out for a few hours. As I type this by candlelight, we're on hour 5 of the latest outage.

I don't understand why this keeps happening. If it's trees falling on power lines, why are we allowing any trees to remain near the lines? If it's old transformers, can't we predict failure and start replacing them?

Or maybe the problem is more insidious.

You know who loves it when the neighborhood is dark? Deer!

I'm on to you, you bastards.

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From this week's Newnan Times-Herald:

Quote:

The Coweta County Sheriff's Office has been hosting the conference since 1993, offering free training for law enforcement and first responders in areas such as long range precision rifle (above photo) K-9 handling, DUI detection, use of force, State Opioid Adapted Response and the legalities of various aspects of policing.

Personally, I had my fill of "long range precision rifle K-9 handling" the one time I watched Old Yeller.

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No sooner had I put money towards buying 2023 UGA football season tickets than it was announced that the team's new offensive coordinator will be its old offensive coordinator, Mike Bobo.

As evidenced by my keyword tag "bobo is a bozo," I was very, very hard on Mike Bobo during his first turn as UGA OC from 2007 through 2014. The Bulldogs went 75-31 during the time, and many pundits have lauded Bobo for those teams' amazing offensive production. Personally, I always attributed that success to superior on-field talent thanks to Mark Richt's great recruiting. To say that Bobo's offensive plays were "unimaginative" would be doing him a kindness.

Georgia's record with Bobo as OC earned him a head coaching job at Colorado State for 5 years (28-35) then OC jobs in South Carolina (6-16) and Auburn (6-6) before returning to UGA last year so that he could rehabilitate his tarnished "offensive genius" bone fides as an analyst for OC Todd Monken on the way to UGA's second consecutive national title with Monken at the helm.

And now Bobo's UGA's OC again. Once again, Bobo will be handed the reigns of a Georgia team with superior on-field talent thanks to Kirby Smart's great recruiting. And frankly, I'm on board for it.

If Bobo is as great as the pundits have always said, UGA is destined to win more championships. But if his play-calling is as stale as it was in 2014, well, I look forward to the opportunity for many more "bobo is a bozo" posts in the future.

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Despite their utter refusal to take responsibility for all flying insects — for shame! — I still recommend Sunday brunch at Bistro Hilary in Senoia, Georgia.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

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Not so long ago, my anonymous friend — let's call him "Randy" — asked, "Can you name one thing that is better now than it was a few years ago?" It's a pretty good question.

Certainly, there has been a parade of bad news over the past half decade or so: COVID, Trump, Ukraine, drugs, inflation, immigration.... I'm sure you can think of a few more. Certainly, a lot of things don't seem as fun as they once did: watching the television shows you want to see costs a small fortune for a dozen streaming services, most of the content in video games can only be unlocked with micro transactions, corporations bought the fun out of the Internet, comic books cost $6.... I'm sure you can think of a few more of these, too.

From an objective point-of-view, things for most of us are actually still pretty good, as evidenced by the fact that we all have so much time to bitch about what sucks. Could things be better? Yeah. Yeah, they could. But were things better than this just a few years ago? Has American society peaked? I have doubts.

Judging whether the future we got is "better" than the present we had is a matter of comparing what we hoped we would get to the reality of what we got. That's never a particularly fair comparison. Hope might spring eternal, but reality, to borrow a phrase, always bites.

But in answer to Randy's question, yes, I can name one thing: Georgia Football. Georgia Football is better than it was a few years ago. Way better. Go Dawgs!

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The big winter storm came through last night, bringing with it sub-freezing temperature and crazy wind. As is usual for these sorts of things, half of my neighborhood lost power immediately; our backyard neighbors lost theirs at 2 AM. (The yard was awfully dark.) Fortunately for us, we only lost cable and Internet.

Power company estimates a restoration by 8 PM tonight. There's no estimate yet from the cable company, but I'm not complaining about that. Better to be bored than cold.

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Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Henry and Louis.

Henry and Louis who?

This is no joke! Just let us in, already.

Louis bolted out the door while I was letting Henry into the yard solo to take care of his business, and when the pair of poodles eventually decided they were tired of rolling in every mud puddle they could find, this is what they looked like when they finally asked to come back in.

I don't think I've ever mentioned it here on the blog, but once upon a time, while I was running an errand in downtown Newnan with July and Victoria in the Jeep, a car pulled into the parking space beside me and the woman inside said she just wanted to say hello to the girls. "I breed poodles," she explained. "I used to breed whites, but now I only breed dark-colored dogs. I'll never have a white poodle again; it's just too much trouble to keep them white."

That's proving especially true for Henry. His favorite color is Georgia Red Clay.

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Again.

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Today, the UGA Bulldogs won their first SEC Championship game since 2017 in dominating fashion. Hooray!

But the real news of the day is that I have a new dog.

Like Henry before him, this good boy is a rescue puppy whose first family couldn't care for him. His original name was Ricky, though his temporary foster parents discovered he didn't seem to know it. They renamed him Coco Puff, but he never really cottoned to that name, either. Mom decided we might as well call him something that sounded good alongside "Henry."

(Side note: I might have ambushed Mom with the idea of a new dog just yesterday, so she justifiably needed some appeasing before she would allow another standard poodle in her house run by Audrey the Hungry Havanese — whose birthday is tomorrow! If that means Mom gets to name my new dog, so be it.)

Therefore, allow me to introduce Louis, pronounced like a French king, unless you're my dad, who insists on saying it "the American way."

Of course, I'm particularly sensitive to whether Henry might get his feelings hurt by having a new dog in the house, so I woke up early (for me) to take Henry to the PetSmart in Peachtree City for an interview with his prospective new playmate. As it happens, the Peachtree City PetSmart is right beside a cemetery, and when Henry and Louis (nee Coco) politely paused their inaugural rollicking to let a group of funeral-bound mourners pet them, I was pretty sure we were going to be all right.

I'm quite pleased that Louis is a brown poodle, a first for my family. White poodles can be pretty, but you really have to keep them on their pedestal, especially on rainy days when playing with new puppies in the mud.

Immediately after this picture was taken, I introduced Louis to my bathtub. It was an eventful day, indeed.

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Seasons are wasted on dogs.

The best part of this picture is that the orange setting sunlight keeps you from seeing how dirty my "white" poodle is.

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