Speaking of, Lindsay and I also have an online friend who helped us through our tougher times, someone I have lots in common with by coincidence, and she recently did a very nice thing for us, which has put her squarely on our list of people we want to visit if we can ever get out for a vacation to California. Which would be a heck of a trip: we’d see my sister-in-law, my wife’s best friend, two of my best high school friends, my college roommate, another close college friend, and probably a few other people I’m forgetting. Perhaps it’s even a chance for us to drive cross-country in our 1991 Ford Explorer and push it into the Pacific, except that it has absolutely no sign of ever dying. It would just drive itself out of the sea and say, “That was fun. Can we go back to the snow in Boston now?”

They’ve named their business—Bulldog Marketing and Sales, Inc.—after their love of bulldogs. So incorporating a bulldog into the logo was a no-brainer, especially since chances are they will focus on marketing pet products. And after skimming my 1,000+ typefaces, Rockwell Sketch seemed to be the bulldoggiest font.

The funniest part of the process was having one of them sign off on the design but with the caveat, “How much does the bulldog image royalty cost?” I laughed and wrote back, “What royalty? You mean you don’t recognize your own dog?”

Their dog:

My outlining:

And the final head:

Certainly there’s room for improvement, but they seem pretty stoked, and then so am I.

I would simply like to say thank you again to all friends and family who helped during the first rather helpless weeks and the six months of chemo that followed. But especially, on this particular July 16th, I offer a special thanks to Patrick Winter, a good friend since just before seventh grade, who, despite having just moved to a new city, Chicago, this week two years ago, turned around and came to my hospital in Boston. It’s also when he mentioned that the friend he was staying with in Boston had a sister in Chicago he liked. So my thanks and congratulations to Patrick, for tonight I get to lose some short-term memory again during Patrick’s “menfolk party” ahead of his wedding in two days to that friend’s sister, the lovely Rachel. Way to go , Paddy!

With Lindsay and me trying to save for a house, vacations for the foreseeable future will always be to Easthampton, NY, where her family has a lovingly unpretentious second home. We’ve been looking forward to it for months. We’ll take Gatsby, we’ll see Lindsay’s parents, and we’ll even get to see a couple of friends on the last weekend there (starting their own well-deserved vacation as we end ours). We’ll sleep a lot. We’ll walk Gatsby a lot. We’ll barbecue. It’ll be great.

Meanwhile, mostly Gatsby-centric, the latest photos to share…

Gatsby’s was in her shedding season a couple weeks ago. This was the result, after having swept the week before:

Around the same time, my mom was in town, meeting Gatsby for the first time:

Lindsay’s friend/coworker Courtney just got a Boston Terrier/Pug mix named Cagney, who visited us today and was tough keep still:

Not that Gatsby is any better:

And mysteriously, despite loving to chase squirrels, we bought Gats a stuffed squirrel at Petsmart this afternoon, and this is how we found them soon after:

Lastly, completely unrelated but just because I’m proud of it, a Photoshop/Illustrator job I did showing MIT’s most famous building partially underwater:

Here’s the babe and his happy pappy:

Nancy’s an A+ #1 friend and she’s going to be an A+ #1 mom, especially since Thomas is wearing Mets socks and not Yankees socks.

boy you guys sure are quiet. must be all of these plants i put over here, sucking up all the carbon monoxide.

Subject: RE: Chef’s

Yeah I need a vacation from u!!!!!1 LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOOOOLLLLLOOOOOOLLLL

sit down meals are for black people.

My friend then proceeded to cite a case where someone was turned down for a job because to Google her name brought up evidence that she was “a silent but deadly farter”.

To her teenage students, that got the point across.

Hello,

You are receiving this e-mail because you have either applied recently, or at some point in the past, for a position with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

At this time, we would like to invite you to view our current job opportunities and re-apply on our NEW Career Center portal . . .

It continues:

We currently have more than 100 openings across the United States within some of our corporate departments (Finance/Accounting, Fulfillment, Global Supply Chain, Human Resources, IT, and Procurement) and our eight divisions (Greenwood-Heinemann, Holt McDougal, International, Learning Technology, Riverside Publishing, Supplemental, School, and Trade and Reference).

Houghton’s high education publishing is in bad shape—at least that’s my conclusion given they’ve forced out their best mid-level people, who then went to a competitor for a better job with better pay.