DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband is the president of a local college alumni chapter, and I am the secretary. The chapter recently held an alumni meeting at the residence of the headmaster of a local private high school. Though the setting was a private home, the event was a formal gathering attended by the university president and various dignitaries.

Upon our arrival, five dogs began jumping on us and the other guests. We did not know that the headmaster and his wife had dogs. As I am severely allergic, I quietly asked the hostess if the dogs could be kept upstairs during the meeting.

She took great offense, loudly declaring that the dogs were her “children” and refusing to move them. I spent the evening wheezing and sneezing through my presentation to the university president.

Was I wrong to make this request? Should I have suffered in silence to avoid offending the hosts?

GENTLE READER: As unpleasant as this situation was for you, Miss Manners can’t help being relieved that it wasn’t even more dangerous.

You and your husband are not employees of the college, but its beneficiaries. Therefore any estrangement would have been a loss to the school, and not to your own status.

And evidently, the headmaster and his wife do not have human children, if they believe youngsters of any kind should be jumping on their guests — especially ones suffering physical distress. (One wonders at the standard of behavior in the headmaster’s school, if this is what prevails at home.)

Of course you should not have stayed and suffered. You could have apologized to the guests that you had to leave because of your allergy, or you could have stuck the university president with that task. He would have had a strong interest in not alienating the leaders of the alumni group.

• • •

DEAR MISS MANNERS: We’ve hosted an annual Kentucky Derby party in our home for years. We invite most of the same people every year, with a few new folks now and then.

We send out the invitations and let them know that we are providing all the food, and also tell them what drinks we will be serving. We ask that they RSVP so we will know how many to prepare for.

We have had as few as 25 people show up, and as many as 60 — the majority of whom had not responded to our invitation. I feel compelled to let the non-responders know how rude it is to ignore an invitation and how hard it makes it for us to prepare, but I fear that would be rude as well.

How do I handle non-responders? My first inclination is to ask them if they understand what “RSVP” means, or just to drop them from the list next year. Help.

GENTLE READER: The non-rude way to let them know how rude they are is to ask whether they plan to attend, and then to drop them from next year’s list.

But Miss Manners wonders why your invitations don’t plainly state “please respond” instead of using a silly French form that some people really might not understand.

A few weeks ago, as my friend Forest and I rode our bikes on the vast white sheet of the frozen Yukon River downstream of Galena, the river forced us into a 90-degree hard left. There, the channel suddenly necked down from being almost a mile wide to just a quarter mile.

A 300-foot outcrop known as Bishop Rock sits at this pinch point on the middle Yukon. Its name — bestowed by someone in remembrance of an Oregon missionary who was murdered there in 1885 — comes up at this time every year when people start talking about river breakup and the potential for ice-jam flooding.

Kyle Van Peursem of the Alaska Pacific River Forecast Center mentioned Bishop Rock during a recent presentation on the potential for spring floods in communities along the state’s rivers.

Though the Yukon, Kuskokwim, Koyukuk and other rivers in central and northern Alaska are all very solid and white as of this writing, that will soon change. River breakup happens when the power of the sun melts feet of snow from the landscape and rots the ice of the river that was hard as iron for so dang long.

Predicting when breakup will occur at any of the dozens of villages along river systems is an inexact science. The most important variable is air temperature. Warmer Aprils are good, Van Peursem said, because they allow the snow and ice to melt at a more gradual rate that won’t overwhelm river channels.

The biggest driver of the dynamic breakups that flood villages is a cold April that “compresses the time to get rid of snowmelt,” he said.

Alaska villages on rivers most often flood in springtime due to ice jams. Jams happen when meltwater shoves chunks of recently broken ice sheets together.

“I think of these as like a dam in the river,” Van Peursem said. “The breakup front (a conveyor belt of ice chunks) stops, water has no place to go and piles up behind it.”

Constrictions in rivers like Bishop Rock are common places for ice jams. In 2013, a pileup at Bishop Rock swelled the river upstream like a python and flooded Galena. The same happened in 1945, when U.S. Air Force bomber pilots dropped more than 75 bombs on the ice jam in front of Bishop Rock. They failed to dislodge the mass of ice.

Bishop Rock will soon loom large in windows of a single-engine aircraft in which Van Peursem will fly. He will monitor that portion of the Yukon River on flights from Galena as part of the Riverwatch program.

Van Peursem said the part of the Yukon he is monitoring is trending toward a dynamic breakup due to a cold April — Galena’s low temperature on April 22, 2026, was in the single digits Fahrenheit — but “hopefully we can slowly warm up as we go into May.”

A note to my readers: This, friends, is the second-to-last Alaska Science Forum I will write. After 31 years in the saddle, I am retiring from my science-writer job here at the Geophysical Institute on May 1, 2026. Though I have planned this for a while, the date sure has snuck up. I will sum up the whole adventure in my final column next week.

And — fear not — my boss and other leaders at the Geophysical Institute are committed to continuing the Alaska Science Forum after I leave.