This Buddy of mine...

In case you're wondering, I'm not yet in Detroit. Instead, I'm back home in Longmont, Colo., for roughly three-and-a-half weeks, shooting the breeze with the fam and eating hamburger sandwiches.

On Wednesday, I was in the backyard playing fetch with Buddy, our Boston terrier. Buddy is a feisty, smoosh-nosed energy hound. He'd put a greyhound to shame in a race, but he's also rather short, meaning he stops well shy of where the stick lands in the grass because he can't see it. I had to walk to the stick, pick it up and wave it in his face to regain his attention before throwing the stick over his head again. If you're lucky, Buddy will find the stick and return it to you.

He just won't let you have it. Try to pull it from his pudgy jowls, and he'll burble like an angry Jawa. Try to extend the stick above your head, and he'll jump like he were born bouncing on a trampoline.

Buddy is as nimble as a goat and oftentimes as ornery. He can jump from floor to footstool to couch in the blink of an eye. He will turn and attack you in a moment and, in the next, snuggle beside you beneath the covers on your bed. He is an angel and a demon, the fleshly extension of the yin-yang coloring fixed, by nature, in his coarse hair.

But I digress. Buddy is a dog, and a faithful one at that. Just don't bug him after 10 p.m. He gets angry when he's awoken.