The Slice Sometimes Dogs Can Make The Very Best Of Friends

The men and women who work at the Burlington Northern Railroad’s Yardley operations center in Spokane lost a friend the other day.

Snow, a stray pooch who won the affection of an entire work force and became the morale-boosting rail yard mascot, was hit by a truck and killed.

Snow was white and looked like a small German shepherd. She was on the scene for almost 10 years, dodging engines and curling up with switching yard workers on cold nights.

BN employees fed her, built her a house, argued over who got to keep her puppies and named a newsletter after her, The Yardley White Dog.

“She was a good dog,” said one of her friends. “We’ll miss her.”

It was a cherry tree in North Seattle: “My best tree-house memory is of rolling over from where I’d had my nose buried in ‘Little Women’ and gazing up at arching white blossoms against endless blue sky,” wrote Jayce Keeling.

Every time we call a wrong number in Deer Park: The person on the other end is incredibly nice about it.

Memorable business name: “While visiting my wife’s parents in Maryland, we took a day trip to the Delaware shore,” wrote Potlatch’s Roy Knecht. “We stopped at a small doughnut shop along the way called ‘Dough and Cinn.’ It reminded me of the charge the Lord gave to the woman caught in adultery and I remarked that if the place ever went out of business they could call it ‘Dough and Cinn…No More.”’

Haunted by a face: Seeing the same people over and over in a variety of settings seems like a fact of life here. But have you ever had the experience of seeing someone once and then waiting in vain for years to run into that person again?

To avoid humming a certain Bob Seger song, skip this: Spokane’s Katie Rickard, 11, has a pet feline (a Himalayan) named Katmandu.

Advice to newlyweds: According to Fitness magazine, the list of things you shouldn’t do in front of your mate includes “Wax your bikini line” and “Bleach your mustache.”

And once you’ve mastered that level of restraint, you can work on not poisoning your partner’s interior life with passive-aggressive innuendo.

Today’s Slice question: If you could travel back in time and join Lewis and Clark as they headed west, what one modern tool or device would you take back with you?

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Drawing

MEMO: The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098. It’s illegal to shoot at musical ice cream trucks.