An introduction...

Blogs this. Blogs that.

Part of my job working for a commercial newswire service is keeping up with all of the new trends in the world of media. Blogs are certainly an emerging medium and are written by little Johnny after school, CEOs, company employees, and just about every other type of person. I always wondered how people found the time to update their blogs since many post multiple entries each day. So I decided to find out.
My wife and I live a nice life. We have great friends, take fun trips, have unique pets... we basically have all the makings for some entertaining tales. While this might never be read by anyone out there I'll at least be able to uncover the mystery of how people find the time to do this.

So who are the cast of characters in this particular blog?

Erin - The wife
Erin grew up in Springfield, MO (they actually have a Visitors and Convention Bureau there... a fact I uncovered at a public relations conference and one I thought to be particularly funny after hearing stories about the town). She was a good student and a heck of an athlete. She went on to Kansas University as did her parents and their parents (not at the same time, though). Erin's school has a much better basketball team than my college did... a fact she loves to remind me of. After school she lived in San Diego (worked at a camp for overweight youngsters) and Breckenridge, CO (lived the life that can only be experienced in a small, mountain ski town) and most recently found her way to Arizona. I met her during one of her visits to Phoenix through a friend of hers that I was working with at the time. Over the course of the next few years we dated, got engaged, moved in together, got married, and just celebrated our 1-year anniversary. Erin is a dog person. Lucky for her I had adopted a puppy several months before we began dating.

Malcolm - The husband
I was born in Canada (a point used against me by my friends on a regular basis) to a US-born mother and a UK-born father. I moved to Connecticut with my mom when I was 4 and grew up there. Singing and tennis were my favorite past times in high school. About the same time I went to Connecticut my dad took a job at Ball State University in gorgeous Muncie, IN. This meant that I knew where I was going to school from the time I was in elementary school. Erin calls is "Ballst" (yep, 1 word)) and my buddy Jeremy wonders how I ended up there when my mom went to Penn and my dad went to Oxford. Our claim to fame as a BSU alumni (last 6 years) was beating Kansas at the Maui Invitational a few years ago... a loss that was revenged at a pre-season tournament in Las Vegas this past year. I moved to Arizona the day after I graduated from college and worked in healthcare until a few years back when I "found myself" and my career working for a newswire service. I am a cat and a dog person and had 1 of each when Erin and I began dating.

Casey - The dog
Casey is a 3-year old lab. She's kinda white but has some patches of yellow. She has us well trained... Pictures will follow. She is out of her shoe-eating days and now her worst behavior is her penchant for sleeping on our ottoman (it's comfortable, it gives her lots of places to rest her head...). She loves to fetch (but often lacks the "retriever" part of "labrador retriever"), swim, go for runs, play with her friends Jackson & Brodie, chase the cat, and eat.

Emma - The cat
Emma was around long before Erin or Casey. She had another cat to play with but he was eaten by a coyote in the back alley. Emma has a seizure problem so she needs medication nightly. That's just one odd thing about her. She doesn't like to be held, won't sit on a lap, pees under Erin's desk, and reluctantly allows herself to be pet. But she always stays close to us, loves to be brushed, and loves to eat paper. I hope she turns a corner at some point and begins acting like a cat should.

We live in a resurgent area of south Scottsdale, AZ. It is winter time right now so we're loving life. Summer? Well, that's another story.

As we write more and more in this blog we hope to share stories about what we go through day to day and what the household pets do to keep us entertained.

Enjoy!