The Paulee Blog

My dogs, Hunter and Helmsley, have meant so much to my wife and I since we got them five years ago.  I dare say that they have been good for our marriage as well.  Both my wife and I have had crazy work schedules, and having them to either come home to, or be home while the other one of us is working helps us from getting too lonely.  Hunter Hunter was our first puppy.  He and I hit it off almost immediately.  We played in the yard and did a lot of cuddling, which still continues to this day.  It does seem like pets do choose a parent to bond with a little more, and my wife and I agree that Hunter is more of my boy.  But, he prefer to sleep with mommy over me.  Probably because of my snoring.   The first place we brought Hunter was over to my mom's place.  Turns out that Hunter was definitely a Nana's boy too.  Whenever we stopped by for a visit, he would hop right up on mom's lap and stay th...

The first time many people heard “woke” in its current context was likely during the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, Black citizens took to the streets nightly to protest the police shooting death of Michael Brown. As they did so, they urged each other to “stay woke” against police actions and other threats. But “woke” and the phrase “stay woke” had already been a part of Black communities for years, long before Black Lives Matter gained prominence. “While renewed (inter)national outcry over anti-Black police violence certainly fueled widespread and mainstream usage of the word in the present, it has a much longer history,”  deandre miles-hercules , a doctoral linguistics researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me. The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a col...