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Greyhuahua in motion

Rosy, who we think is a greyhuahua (chihuahua plus Italian greyhound), is taking an Agility for Fun class at the Marin Humane Society. Geoff brought the camera to last week’s class to try to get some pictures of our little athlete in motion. Lesson learned: with your average off-the-shelf camera, it’s hard to get a good picture of a quickly moving dog!


“I’m ready! Let’s go let’s go let’s go!”


Entering the curved tunnel…


…and finding her way out. “It was dark in there!”

Shooting out of the chute. (This one’s tough to appreciate in a still shot,
but she’d just pushed through the parachute attached to the end of the tube.)


Clearing the hurdle.

Here’s a quick slideshow that shows Rosy taking a few of the obstacles. Notice how, after she clears the first hurdle, she changes course to run toward the woman holding the treat plate. Hey, this agility is fun and all, but a dog’s gotta have her priorities…

Rosedale hardwoods and tiles

With the exterior (mostly) finished, I turned my attention to the Rosedale’s interior details, starting with hardwood floors.

I’d intended to use coffee stirrers like I did in the puzzle house but was concerned about them getting in the way of the front door, which fits right into the doorway without any extra clearance. Then I paid a visit to Peg’s Dollhouse, a quirky store in Sebastopol that was having a moving sale, and came home with a bunch of goodies including a package of LittleWonders Lumber. I’ve never seen this brand before but judging from the package it was pretty old.

The wood is nice and thin, so I decided to give it a try. I’ll probably still have to sand the door a little bit but it’s much better than the coffee stirrers would have been!

For the staggering price of $2, Peg sold me a package of teak lumber as well as some loose pieces that I initially thought were the same stuff and had just fallen out of the package. (More on this below.) I started with the loose pieces. They were already smooth and a nice reddish color, so I skipped sanding/staining and instead coated them with matte varnish to add a bit of a sheen.

The wood was easy to cut with scissors. I applied it using tacky glue. Goodbye, ugly floor crack!

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Puzzle Agent 2 previewed at Adventure Gamers

I’m not at E3, which is a relief to my feet and stomach and sanity, but I keep seeing all this exciting game news posted by people who are at E3 and wishing that I were there. I worked a couple of E3s doing Telltale’s PR but my fondest E3 memories are the two years I went with Adventure Gamers—a three-day whirlwind of press appointments and new game announcements and candy bar lunches followed by a day at Disneyland. Ahh, memories.

I did, however, get a chance earlier this week to play Telltale’s latest, Puzzle Agent 2 — which they’re showing to press at this very moment at E3 — and Adventure Gamers has just posted my hands-on impressions. So it’s almost sorta not really like I was at E3, if only for a brief moment. Okay, really not really. But regardless of where I played it, Puzzle Agent 2 promises to be a fun sequel, and if you like this type of thing you should go read all about it.

I still wish I were spending tomorrow at Disneyland though.

While we’re on the subject of Puzzle Agent, I’ll take advantage of YouTube’s handy embed feature to slip in two other movies that are sorta kinda related. This first one, The Smartest Dog in the World, is one of Puzzle Agent creator Graham Annable’s Grickle shorts, which tend to carry you along on a wave of tantalizing curiosity until unexpectedly delivering a stomach punch that leaves you asking, “Wait, was that funny or terrible?” Watch it, you’ll see.

And this one is a clever recreation of Graham’s The Hidden People (the short that inspired Puzzle Agent), which won the grand prize in Telltale’s Halloween contest last year. The human actors get the job done, but I’m most impressed by the dog. He just rolls with it.

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