I’m Thinking Out Loud about when does an animal actually look old this week. If you’ve ever had a geriatric cat, you know how they get kind of football shaped — narrow at the shoulders and hips, and wider at the sides. Yes, Gizmo does have that going on.

Chester never got to be old enough to actually look old. I see a few white hairs on Lola, but she doesn’t yet have that white muzzle.

In some ways, animals seem to age better than humans. In other ways, the most obvious one — their lifespan is far too short — not so much.

First: a little PSA
Mr. Judy went to get his birthday burger from Red Robin while I was gone helping my parents — I’m not a Red Robin fan. They had one of those digital flip photo things on the table. And suddenly he recognized a photo. His photo.

Of our angel Cleo, who has been gone fifteen years.

He started to dig deeper. Cleo was everywhere, as it turned out: on Pinterest, Twitter, people’s blogs . . . all without his permission.

On the one hand, he thought is was a little cool: Cleo is living on. On the other hand, he did not give permission for anyone to use Cleo’s photo.

So don’t grab a photo unless you know that it’s free to use.

And think about copyright notices on your own photos.

Now I’m wondering where Chester will pop up?

What was I thinking?
Or not thinking, as the case may be. I met Frank Shorter last year. You know, the guy who won the 1972 Olympic gold medal for the marathon?

And I didn’t even think to bring my visor with me. The one I have running celebrities sign. Epic fail.

Edited to add: I meant to fact check this before publishing (aka grab my visor). I woke up thinking this one morning, but then wasn’t sure . . . sure enough, I did have Frank sign my visor! Just another senior moment (dream?). Busted!

Again, I didn’t think of this one . . .
We were watching NCIS New Orleans Tuesday night. Last week’s episode, because that’s how we roll. The beginning takes place in Louis Armstrong Park. And the beginning of my half in March just happens to start and finish there.

I got all excited until I saw the cobblestones and said “that’s not good”. It never even occurred to me that that was blog fodder. Mr. Judy had to point it out to me.

Bad blogger, bad!

I’m maxed out
On storage space on my Ipad and my Ipod touch. I use both probably more than I use my phone. You get what you pay for, I guess; we don’t pay a lot for our cell phones.

I know that both come with some sort of cloud photostream but I could never quite figure it out. I downloaded the Amazon Prime photo app instead.

It took forever to get all those photos from my Ipod Touch uploaded to the cloud. And then I started deleting all the photos from my Ipad (far less photos on the Ipad), until I realized that some of the really old ones weren’t showing up in the app — I’m still  not quite sure why.

I was in a panic until I realized that I do have them backed up via iTunes. Don’t you love how technology both simplifies and complicates our lives?

What does 11 look like? Or 15?
I get asked all the time how old Lola is. I’m not quite sure why people are always asking, but they’re always amazed when I tell them 11. There is a tendency for people to see little dogs and think “puuuuuuppppy!”.

I get the same thing when I tell people Gizmo is 15. I used to get the same reaction with angel Puss, when I told them she was 21 — it was pretty obvious she was quite elderly, but no one ever thought she was that elderly.

Bandit update
So far there has no further snapping at anyone. Gizmo walked up to the office just a couple of days ago, when I was in there with Bandit, and hissed at him. Oddly enough, he hasn’t hissed much at Bandit at all. They still don’t have a whole lot of interaction, but they do walk by each other occasionally.

Although the poop department is still problematic, there was no diarrhea this time after boarding. There was one night when he barked to go out at 1:30 am, though. He is just determined I never get an entire week of good sleep.

I actually had the thought of trying to run with him for a mile or two of my short long run this week. Because I ran with him some when we first got him and he really seemed to like it.

Then I woke up and realized: never do something new in your taper. The last thing I need is for Bandit to trip me up and cause a fall!

Instead I’ve been running him around the backyard some days. I throw a ball, he runs to it, but often he doesn’t even pick it up. It usually ends with me just running and squeaking the ball so he’ll chase me.

Chase is actually a great game to play with your dogs. You want to make chasing you seem like a great fun — much better than having you chase the dog, which is no fun at all.

Talk to me. Tell me in the comments:

What celebrity have you met where you wished you’d gotten an autograph?

Is there an app that makes putting a copyright notice on a photo easy?

What have you noticed about your senior animal?

I’m linking up with Amanda at Running with Spoons for her: