My latest attempt to make my dogs famous

What's it like to live with six dogs and three cats for a week? To find out, you can read my column, or if you only have 59 seconds to spare, watch this slideshow. An excerpt:

The first thing I learned when our canine visitors showed up is that dogs are not like human houseguests. For instance, human guests tend to think twice before they lie on your couch with their tongues hanging out and all four appendages splayed up in the air, or eat out of your kitchen garbage, or mark their territory on your living room carpet. I mean guests who aren’t relatives.

We’re lovin’ it, ‘it’ of course being a burrito filled with sausage

If you missed it during breakfast hours this morning, don't worry: You'll have one more chance tomorrow to get your free (FREE!) McSkillet Burrito at McDonald's. Unlike the people over at Starbucks, closing their doors and telling customers to eat cake (or cranberry orange muffin, as the case may be), McDonald's is showing how much they appreciate their customers by contributing to their next heart attack.

McDonald's expects to give out more than 1 million free burritos during the Leap Day promotion; for those of you doing the math at home, at 374 calories per burrito, that's 374 million calories released into the general population over the two-day period. Assuming about a pound gained for every extra 3,500 calories consumed, that's 106,857 pounds of body fat America's fast food eaters will be piling on, and all before the weekend.

Would you like fries with that?

Or for $3.99 you can get a bag of Hershey's Miniatures

No sooner had I published this column on how press releases -- about the barbecue-flavor-infusing "SmokePistol," hand-cranked flashlights and fortified dog water -- were giving me fond thoughts of the summer to come, did I receive yet another one, from "Christopher Norman Chocolates." It was flogging their "fruity, summery, special summer chocolates," for those of us who like to throw caution to the wind and feel fruity and summery at the same time.

Their big fruity summer seller? Check it out:

BLUEBERRY - Blueberry mixed with a dark chocolate ganache, hand rolled into a ball and dusted with a dark purple sugar powder. Very dark, rich and blueberry.

This raises a few questions: 1) What the heck's a ganache? 2) Whose hands? 3) Does that dark purple sugar powder come with razor blades and a mirror? Because at these prices it better.

Catching up on the columns ...

I've been lax about posting my weekly columns of late (along with anything, you know, remotely interesting). That's partially because I've been working on another blog, Blogness on the Edge of Town, and the effort has paid off, garnering tens of regular readers. But there's another reason: sheer laziness.

Anyway, here's where you can find my columns of recent weeks:

• What a drag it is getting old-ish
• My Hannah Montana 3-D diary
• You can’t teach an old dog new songs
• My life is an open book
• You may already be a winner!
• The road to Montana is paved with good intentions

Six times the columns ... six times the fun! Best if read while drunk.

At Large Valentine's Day Poll

(If you answered "Flowers," here's a rundown of how much they're getting for roses this year. Curse you, Hallmark gods!)