One thing that has happened recently: we've got a cat.

As you can see, she's pretty much entirely settled in.

Elsenet, some people are arguing about pronunciations, and it reminded me of a thing:

Dog.
Jog.
Do these two words rhyme for you? At the UW, they have a yearly fun run thing called a Dog Jog.

The first time I saw a poster, I was with some work friends. I paused.

"That hurts my brain," I said, "that thing that looks like it should rhyme but doesn't. It's terrible."

And then they all looked at me like I'm crazy, because in the Midwest they say it Daahg Jaahg with their soft palatte somewhere around their eyeballs, and it rhymes perfectly. For me, it's a Dawg Jahg, the short a being much farther down and "dog" being somewhere else entirely. For J, it rhymes, except both his o's are nice orderly newscaster things (I just checked). So maybe it's just me. But I'm curious where everyone else's pronunciation hits that.

(And, I'm not dead, I'm just elsewhere mentally, and I promise that compared to my meandering thoughts on the local housing market, a blank space is preferable.)