In each pack of two pocket sized Moleskines, there's a Moleskine brochure and a quality assurance sticker. The first one I noticed I stuck in the first page of the book. The next couple I received I thought, "Cute. Blue," stuck the sticker in the book, made a note that it cracked me up, and that's about it. Today, as I went to pick out my next everyday book color, I noticed the sticker was green. It prompted me to look at the stickers in the other books.

They have different patterns.

When the pattern repeats, the Quality Control Number changes. I had two colour and pattern repeats.

Oh, yeah, they also come in green, apparently.

Had I bothered to look, I might have noticed they come in multiple colours.

Whee!

Of course, now that I've gone through all of my new notebooks, I probably won't figure of if there are any other patterns for a while. Still, fun to realize the patterns today!

As mentioned, a photo of Bella today.

She's still alive.

Alive and sniffing.

Okay, one of the interesting things I've refound amongst my stuff has to be the 1959 Mexican five cent coin in the pen cup this morning. I used to have a large number of old(-ish) coins when I was younger, high school era. I don't know what happened to most of them. They might be in my foreign-coins jar, which is packed away in a box in the garage at the moment. I remember having this coin, but really have no idea how it ended up in the pen cup. It's one of my favorite coins, though. I might need to start carrying it around next to the loonie that I carry with me everywhere, the one that Jonathan gave me a couple years ago.

Front side of the centavos:

Back side of the centavos:

And with scale (go, Troggie!):

Yeah, that's right, an exciting Sunday morning includes going through pens and discarding the ones that don't work any longer.

I feel at this point that I need to start posting daily pictures of Bella, mostly with the title "Still alive!" or maybe just the tag. She made it past the original month she was given by the vet after her early stage kidney failure condition was found. We believe it's mostly because she's been receiving fluids twice a week. The vet said without fluids, she has a month; with daily fluids she could have up to a year. Given that she's sixteen and a half, it's unclear if kidney failure is going to do her in or if something else will. She pretty much fears the vet now, shaking violently in the car once she realizes where we're going. It is now a balance between quality and quantity of life: no way am I going to torture the dog every day for a year just to keep her alive longer for my benefit. She struggles with walks, barely making it 20 minutes at a time; her back seems to hurt every time it's touched; she's deaf; she's blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other eye; she often misses items held next to her face; and she spends a large amount of time either sleeping or standing motionless staring at a wall. I try to make everything as much fun as I can for her, going for walks when she indicates she's ready to go, but, well, she's nearing the end of her life.

For now, however, she's still alive.

And kicking.