9 February—“If February gives much snow, a fine summer it doth foreshow.” So saith a folklore rhyme, according to today’s Old Farmer’s Almanac. “We should be so lucky.” So saith the Litchfield Monitor. At least today it’s warming up a little. In Connecticut, anyway. And maybe before too long it’ll be above freezing for a whole day. In the shade.

And maybe before too long, with the temperature above freezing, little Hope and littler Glory will learn to use the run (and the great outdoors in general) as their bathroom. (They’ll never be allowed outside—except in their run and perhaps other safely confined areas—off leash, by the way. No dogs should be.) At the moment, Hope and Glory regard the run solely as their exercise and play area but they don’t like to use the doggie door to get to it.

Hope and Glory are gradually learning the advantages—i.e., praise and treats, not necessarily in that order—of using training pads rather than the floor. When the Hearst RepublicanAmerican and doubtless other rags were printed on heavier, more absorbent newsprint, we didn’t need training pads. But now, the HRA, for one, isn’t even satisfactory for holding puppy waste.

But Hope and Glory still relieve the discomfort of teething by gnawing and gchewing everything they can get their cute little shark-sharp milk teeth on. Just this morning, Hope gchewed away some of a college sweatshirt as Glory was gnawing away at a leg of a big old antique mahogany C-roll desk. And the backs of both my hands haven’t done much better.

With the weather and canine toilet training out of the way, then, yesterday I missed the Super Bowl. What can I say? Peccavi, peccavi? Damn and phooey? Forget it. As it happens, yesterday’s was the LX^th Super Bowl I’ve missed. How unAmerican can I be? Depends on whom you ask. But some 125 to 130 million Americans watched yesterday’s game, so obviously the people and entities that profit from it don’t miss me. Then there were another 100 million or so people abroad who watched it—probably American expats, because who else would watch a sport as slow and dull as American football with so many time-outs?

The Winter Olympics probably would have been less uninteresting than the football game. But we’re told that many people watch the Super Bowl games just to see the commercials. These are the same people who record TV programming and fast-forward to skip commercials . . .