When I was young, we had a German Short-haired Pointer and it was my job to feed him one night. I came back in the house and made a slightly strange comment about the dog's food smelling kind of good. My brother -- prankster that he is -- dared me to eat some of it. I flat out refused. But he had the dog-food-eating bug by then so he grabbed a handful for himself. The thought of that still grosses me out. For good reason.

A recent outbreak of salmonella has been traced to the handling of dry dog food. This is the first time a link between dog food and human disease has been discovered. Approximately 70 people contracted salmonella from dry dog food produced by Mars Petcare's Pennsylvania plant. No dogs were reported to have contracted the illness. Many of the people who contracted salmonella from dog food were three years old or younger.

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Having the first baby of the new year is pretty exciting. Have the first baby of the New Year two years in a row? That's a good way to get your name in the papers. A Pennsylvania couple celebrated their second New Year's baby in a row on January 1st. Both this and last year's babies were the first born in the New Year at their local hospital.

Little Faith Lynn Armstrong was born at 5:32am this January 1, which means she now shares her birthday with her older sister, Kaden Skye Armstrong, who was born on the same day last year. It seems like this is becoming a New Year's Eve tradition for the Armstrong Family!

I have no idea what the odds are of this happening, but I'm guessing it's pretty unlikely.

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I'm not so sure that I would call it a vacation, per se, but I did recently take a ten day road trip with my husband and new baby to see both our families. We rented a car and went from Brooklyn, New York to Cleveland, Ohio, down to Louisville, Kentucky (my home town), back up to Delphi, Indiana, on to somewhere in Pennsylvania and then back to New York City.

The entire event was mind-boggling. Trying to juggle dealing with an infant, spotty directions, managing an SUV (and gas) and seeing all our friends and family really put a damper on our efforts to exercise.

That said, I did get a few runs in, all of them in Louisville. There is a one mile track all the way around my parents' neighborhood that I ran around over and over and over. It was so repetitive that at one point I forget where I was and thought I'd gone a lot farther than I had; turned out I had just decided to go the other way for a bit of variety. Sheesh.

I knew going into it that it would be difficult to find time--and places--to run on this trip. Since we were spending so much time in a car, which we're not used to doing, we got less time in walking as well. We sat and sat and sat and sat some more. We tried not to eat too poorly but there were times when we had to eat something and the only thing around was fast food joints.

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Nearly a half million pounds of beef from California and Pennsylvania have been recalled due to fears it's been contaminated with E. coli. Other states affected are: Virginia, West Virginia, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

The illnesses stemming from the Pennsylvania recall seem to all be connected to one restaurant where four or five customers got sick. Health officials say that because the number of illness is small and because exposure happened several weeks ago, that customers can feel comfortable eating at the restaurant.

Frozen beef products being recalled have the code "EST. 8264" on them and a date code of 118-6 or 4/28/06.

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