A famous visitor walked into my office the other day and he came right over and licked my hand.

I have so few famous visitors, and no previous one had ever licked me, and so this incident, despite the saliva, made a routine day mildly interesting for me.

My guest was Buster. He is the most heavily publicized English bulldog I know.

He’s also the only English bulldog I know.

This is not of course any fault of Buster’s, and I don’t believe my inability to get acquainted with multiple bulldogs ought to diminish Buster’s celebrity.

Buster, as you might recall, was the subject of several headlines around here during late May and early June of 2007.

Buster’s owner, Forrest Keller of Vashon Island, Wash., rode to Baker City during a Memorial Day weekend motorcycle tour.

Unlike most motorcyclists, Keller doesn’t mind riding with a bulldog strapped on the gas tank.

Thank you in advance, anonymous writer who eschews inane adjectives.

I mean adjectives.

Palin’s been all over TV these past two weeks and I’ve yet to see the butt of a revolver protruding from her jacket, nor the telltale bulge of a semi-automatic tucked into a shoulder holster.

Anyway it’s not as though reporters and pundits need to plunder a thesaurus to uncover descriptions of Palin that are more relevant than which weapons and which sports she prefers.

I don’t much care that she hunts, or that her kids play hockey.

Proficiency with firearms is not, after all, a prerequisite for the office she is seeking.

Not after Dick Cheney’s tenure, it’s not.

I’ve been making my own bread lately, in an effort to do more cooking from scratch. Bread, however, requires kneading — a skill many don’t need anymore thanks to the bread aisle.

The other day I was making dough, and dumped the gloopy mess on the counter to “knead until elastic, about 10 minutes.”

I set to it, molding the dough into a ball and then kneading with a motion of fold, push, fold, push, then add more flour to keep it from sticking.

My mind wanders during repetitive tasks such as this, and I remembered something from about five years ago when I took my first pottery class at Crossroads Art Center.

Summer broke the other day and I went out walking in the damp dusk, sort of a lonely wake for the beloved season.

The wind had swung around to the northwest and it blew brisk and heavy with the sharp sweet scent of mint almost ready for the harvest. A versatile crop, mint — its oil adds the tang to both the chewing gum which attacks our teeth and to the fluoride-laced paste which defends our enamel against all manner of enemies.

In the field by the junior high a dozen or so kids, elementary age by the look of them, scurried about, clad in helmets and full pads. The shoulder pads, in particular, gave them ungainly and odd proportions — the broad upper body of a mature weightlifter attached to the skinny and short legs of the pre-adolescent.

Anyway it was pleasant to walk past and hear the inimitable clap of plastic pieces colliding.

Football, it seems to me, announces the imminence of autumn at least as reliably as the calendar.