First things first: There is nothing especially holy about Toledo unless one counts the rollers who congregated in their strip-mall temple across the street from the tidy little Days Inn we smuggled Goblin into three nights ago; we left her in the room, in her crate, as we crossed over to the Friendly's for dinner, during which we witnessed a woman in a wheelchair lecture her companions on the advisability of saying "copydog" instead of "copycat" and "oh, sister!" instead of "oh, brother!"

Goblin is not a copydog unless she imitated a creature with unspeakable manners when she vomited on Rob's mother's (Barbara's) living room floor two minutes after we arrived at her home in Milwaukee. It cleaned up easily enough, an auspicious beginning to a fabulous night during which I discovered the family I had been kidnapped from as a baby. Over an organic, largely vegetarian meal, we discussed acupuncture, Macintosh computers, and just about everything else I am interested in. Later, I helped Rob's mother's boyfriend, Paul, a physician and natural healer, enter some of Rob's symptoms into his diagnostic Powerbook to discover a homeopathic remedy for his draining eustachian tubes.

His ears did not drain as quickly as Rob's father's (Jack's) boat did this morning as we all chipped in to winterize it and put it into storage for the season. From Milwaukee, Rob, Rindy, Goblin, and I drove to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Jack's summer home on Lake Superior, where we will stay for a week. It is a beautiful place. Jack is a friendly guy, a delightful mix of Cliff Claven and Jerry Stiller. Aside from dealing with the boat, we took Goblin for a walk around the harbor, where, with the enthusiasm of our illegal president transferring the "War on Terror" from the actual culprits to Afghanistan to Iraq, my dog shifted the "War on Squirrels" from squirrels to the Canada geese who were minding their own business on the shore. She chased them into the water, ran around in a few circles, and called it a day.