Last night, around 4 a.m., I was engaged in an almost nightly ritual: standing at my back door, waiting for our two dogs to return from doing their nightly business. Our yard is fenced in, so they can't roam far, but that doesn't stop our two large mixed breed dogs from hanging outside for quite some time. And so it provided me with some quiet time for myself -- to fume and wonder why I'm not asleep.

One of our dogs, Hooper, takes an interminable long time to return, unless I'm up for going outside in the darkness and hunting and calling for him, and that was the situation last night, and I began thinking how this knucklehead came into our lives.