pets

Grammy nominee Mary Lambert will sing, as will Indy’s own Men’s Chorus. And there will be pets.

Canines at dinner, lifeguard credentials, and cricket mentors. Ask The Hoosierist.

Via @colefarrell: “Walking downtown, I heard an older man refer to the farmers market as ‘that weekly veggie festival.’ I’m into it.”

There’s plenty of precedent for trying to extend human lives by studying dogs. Canine research helped pioneer the use of insulin for diabetics and blazed the path for anti-hormonal prostate cancer treatments.

It was then I realized how lonely I was without a pet. For the first time in my 60-plus years, there was no dog or cat to greet me at the door and warm my lap, no adoring creature to nurture and feed, no nonjudgmental soul to whom I could pour out my heart.

Says Jim Borthwick of Noblesville, “Notice the close attention to detail, the cerebral forehead of Peyton [Manning] and Andrew [Luck]’s glorious neckbeard.”

Whenever I took walks in the park with my own dog, Puppy would run out of an alley or from between two houses to meet us. I liked to believe that when it got dark and the night turned cold, he went back to wherever he was supposed to be, and someone there let him inside.

Everything you do is an event, chronicled on Twitter. Colts games. Pep rallies. Visiting a high-school chemistry class. Even now, as you are snorting, huffing, drooling, Michael tweets to your 10,000 followers, pretending to be you.

An inside look at the early years of the beloved mascot, from the IM archives.

Your best buddy can party in Broad Ripple, too: The deck and patio at Plump’s Last Shot is a happening scene for sociable dogs, with water bowls and servers who’ve been known to bring biscuits.

As the narrative goes, Hank the Dog was born in Oklahoma, abused by his original owner, and taken in by some well-meaning soul who had too many dogs already. There is, from what little information I can coax from my reticent son, an Underground Railroad for rescued dogs, and Hank came north to Putnam County, not far from our home.

If you’ve wanted to meet Lil Bub, the famed “perma-kitten” with tens of thousands of followers across social networks, you may be in for a special treat.

When I first meet Lil Bub, as her legions of Internet fans know her, at her owner’s apartment in Bloomington, she’s staring up at me from the living room floor.

It was a downtown romp last night as dozens of dogs, cats, and even one ferret descended upon a parking lot at 707 N. Senate Ave. Indy Pride’s second-annual Pet Pride event drew more than 500 (human) attendees, up from about 320 last year in its first inception.