How do you tell them apart?

My goodness. How does a mother tell her children apart? They barely even resemble each other. Kirby has a high forehead and a cleft dome whereas Tiki's head is flatter and his eyelids are blacker.

Oh. You probably want something more obvious and simpler.

OK. The first two are Tiki. His collar and bling are red and he is often wearing a harness. He is a tri-color with blue ticking, which is a snotty purebred dog association way of saying he is the classic beagle black-tan-white combination but with spots. He has brown spots on his legs and black spots on his belly and chest. Also, Tiki has a white blaze between his eyes and another one down the back of his neck.






Kirby is a plain tri-color. His bling is blue, and he has no spots. His chest and legs are white.




They are both gorgeous, if you ask me.

Because they're rescue beagles, their parentage is unverifiable, so I don't know whether they are purebred or not.


UPDATE:

Someone, and I'm not naming names, lost Kirby's combination collar when he, I mean, this unnamed person, dropped The Boys off at the dog spa and resort. Kirby will be wearing Tiki's red combination collar until we get around to replacing the blue one. For the time being, Tiki is the one with the red bling, but the blue harness, and Kirby has the blue bling, but a red collar in addition to his regular blue collar. How's that for color coding?

National Airport

What the locals call Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Congress can go through a frenzy of renaming things after its conservative idols if it wants, but the airport in question is in one of the bluest counties in the commonwealth. National it was, National it stays in our hearts, minds, and vernacular. When someone talks about flying into/out of “Reagan,” we know we’re dealing with an “other.”

Plus Norfolk=nawfuk

Louisville=Loo-i-vull but never Loo-ee-vill

New Orleans can be at lot of things as long as it isn’t New Or-LEENZ. What are you, some kind of Yankee? Jeez. Ohio is thataway.

Fresh Fields

What Whole Foods Market used to be called around here before the merger/buyout/whatever. We’re slow to adapt to new names around here. See also National Airport.

WTF?

This is an acronym. The WT stands for "what the" and the F stands for something else.

Turtle

1. What Kirby does when he's scared and doesn't have time to find a bed to hide under, as in "he went turtle," "he's in turtle mode," "he did a full-on turtle." Consists of making oneself into as small a ball as possible and pretending to be oblivious to the outside world. Sometimes accompanied by trembling.
2. The University of Maryland Terrapins, as in "fear the turtle." A local favorite inside the Beltway, but some of us get sick of hearing about it.

Wahoo

A fish that drinks and drinks and drinks until it dies. At least that's what they told Dirtbunny during first-year orientation at the University of Virginia, home of the Wahoos, aka Hoos.

The Boys

Collectively, YB and GK.