We're looking at a good bit of snow tonight and tomorrow, a foot or more, with a high water content. Sandra and I will bring our laptops home this evening in the expectation that we'll work from home tomorrow.

Today is Marley's Gotcha Day. We picked him at a vet's office eight years ago, the day before he was scheduled to be, um, well, you know. He'd been found walking on the side of the road in a town west of here. He was first taken to a shelter, but that shelter went out of business. The vet took in some of the dogs and placed an ad in the paper. We saw the ad for a couple of weeks before we made up our minds. We drove out to see him, took him for a walk to get acquainted, and brought him home. He thanked us by eating a little plastic wastebasket that I kept in the back of my car. Well, he didn't really eat it. He chewed it to pieces until it was unrecognizble. We wondered what we'd done.

My mother lived with us at the time. A lot of his care would fall to her. She'd never had a dog. Nevertheless, before long, she had trained him to wait for his dinner until she gave him the command to eat. Every afternoon she made a salad for our dinner. Marley enjoyed the broccoli stalks, tomato tops, and bits of carrot trimmed in preparation. They became good friends.

We also celebrate Marley's birthday today. He's not always at his best around other dogs, so we won't be having a party. Because he was a stray, we don't know his exact birthdate. When we brought him for his first physical, our vet estimated that Marley was a year old. So, we've set his birthday at February 29, 1996.

News on the business wire this morning is that Federated Department Stores is buying May Department Stores. It could mean the passing of another store chain, Filene's. A few years ago, Federated bought Jordan Marsh, another Boston institution. We're still grieving over the changes at Spag's.

I traveled quite a bit in my previous job. Our Cupertino office was a frequent destination, but I visited all but one of the offices (Orange County CA) in the U.S. and Canada. As with the rest of my work there, I did some good work and not so good work. I met many good people who are still my friends today. For most of the time that I was with the company, I was an American Airlines Gold member; one year I was Platinum. The elite status helped a lot when traveling with family. We could get through check-in lines much faster and have access to resources at the airline to help with changes in schedule. This was particularly handy when Sandra, my mother, and I were coming home, sick, from a vacation in the UK. Similarly when I flew with my father to his brother's funeral in St. Louis, we had to make several changes to get around a big snowstorm in the midwest. And, sure, the upgrades were nice. Today my Gold status expires. Also, most of the company offices that I visited have since closed.