I have a calendar that has old english bulldogs on it.  I turned the page to 'May' on saturday, and this month's picture is of brindle bulldog puppies playing with a garden hose.  They're all fat and squirmy...looking at them I can almost smell that milky smell puppies have.  We're getting a bulldog pup when we get to England.  I've always, always wanted a bulldog, and so has Dave.  We looked at breeder web sites in the UK and found a couple of what appear to be pretty reputable ones...and we chose a name already.  We know we want a boy, and we know that his house name will be Spike.  His kennel name...well, there's a story behind that.  When we're stationed overseas we get something called a 'Cost Of Living Allowance' (COLA) on top of Dave's regular pay. That extra pay is what's going to buy us a bulldog - they're not cheap, about $1200 for a papered one.  So, when Dave and I were discussing what Spike's kennel name should be, he we thought we should have 'cola' in it somewhere.  Dave went quiet for a few seconds, then blurted out "Captain Farrell's Cola-By-The-Sea".  Captain Farrel, he explained, is a character from the song 'Whiskey In The Jar' and he really likes that song...cola, well that's self-explanatory, and by-the-sea...there are a lot of small English villages and towns on the coast that have 'by-the-sea" tacked onto their names, and he thought it was something that was traditionally British, and seeing as we're getting an english bulldog..well, you get the point.  I feel like I'm pregnant, almost.  I'm so excited to get this puppy; I've waited and wanted for ages....we can't have any more kids, and we always said that we'd console ourselves with dogs instead and treat them almost like kids.

This weekend I went to the circus, and whilst I enjoyed the majority of the show I was really saddened by the elephants.  They looked so folorn and miserable.  After we got home I did a little internet research about the living conditions of circus elephants - and I'm even more sad now.  I'm not going to go into detail; I'll just say it's really quite horrifying, the things these animals go through.  So, I decided that if I ever come into money, I want to open a retirement home for circus elephants.  Somewhere they can roam and not have to live in little cages, where they can just be elephants instead of performers for human entertainment.  Somewhere they can live out the last of their days peacefully and quietly.  It'll probably never happen, but it's a nice thought.

I'm going to go swim now, and think about my puppy-to-be.