Something is burrowing under our shed.

When I first noticed the hole developing, I placed a 4X4 in front of it to impeed progress. This is what happened:

A second hole appeared.

I have filled these holes at least twice. Now the extra dirt I used is just *gone*.

What sort of creature would do this to my lawn? And why there? The shed has a wooden floor. It is at least ten feet deep: so whatever dug this hole would disappear under the shed and come up...under the shed. Same neighborhood, same yard, just...dark. There's nothing under the shed. I saw a possum slither under there once, but that was probably 6 years ago. Riley has barked at this shed so often I'm sure the possum, if it was still there, has moved to quieter quarters by now. The neighbor's cat used to vacation under our shed (hence his nickname 'Shedward') but he has long since moved on to the neighbor's roof.

I don't think anything lives under the shed but the same breed of spiders that live inside it. I hardly ever go in the shed for that very reason, and when I do go in I go through the doorway, which allows in light. About the only thing worse than a horde of spiders surrounding me in a shed would be a horde of spiders surrounding me in the dark and the dirt UNDER the shed.

I'm sorry.

I don't see the reward.

 

We are going to work soon. Right now we are savoring the joys of returning health and the continued excuse to rest. Nancy is on the couch in the living room, where the TV is (I swear) issuing Sister Sledge singing, "We Are Family". Perhaps she's found a time warp.

*spoiler alert. If you've never seen 'Hachi' and you want to, don't read the next 2 paragraphs*

Last night on TV I watched a movie called 'Hachi', a 'heart-warming tale about a family that finds a dog that changes their lives...' I knew, when Richard Gere asked, "What kind of dog is this?" and the answer was 'Akita', I knew. I've heard the story before. It actually happened in Japan, not New England, and it happened in 1927, not 2008. A professor had a dog, an Akita, and the dog met him every evening at the train station and walked him home. And then the professor died. And the dog came to the station every night at the time his train should arrive and waited for him. For ten years. There is a statue of the dog at the station to this day.

I cannot tell you how many nerves that story stomps on for me. I don't even know why: perhaps sadness for a dog waiting for something that is never going to happen, perhaps the confused belief that someone should have 'done something', perhaps sorrow over a lost and wasted life. Do I want my dogs to pine away for me for the rest of their lives, should I die before they do? No, I do not. I sobbed through the end of it, but it was not a good sob, it was a whatever-happened-to-that-cute-puppy/tied-out-in-the-back-yard sob. I don't like nature programs where animals eat each other, either. I know they do: I just don't want to watch. Cape buffalo mauling a dying lion...no thank you.

Today Nancy is going to work for a few hours and Riley, Annie and I are meeting Lisa at Flowerfield and going to the dog park.  

Yesterday I went to PetSmart to find a citrus collar to curb barking. They didn't have one. I also wanted to find a backpack for Annie to help carry the stuff I can't have in my hands because I have her on a leash. They had $39 backpacks marked down to $7.88. Three smalls and an extra-large. I bought a small, assuming it wasn't all THAT small. It is. Interesting design, in my opinion: you could pack a chihuahua in the backpack and then he could carry himself.

So, we continue on. I do not appear to have anything terribly exciting to report.

Some days are just like that.

Wore the dog out this morning. Got her nails trimmed.

Had I known it would be that easy...

Annie's nail (like her obedience training) are a little long and neglected. I really need to get into the habit of taking her in every other week for a while so we can work the quick back. And yes, I am aware that some people trim their own dog's nails. Not I, not I. I have a groomer for that, Tara who tells me wonderful secrets, like, there are citronella collars for dogs that squirt them with unpleasant smells whenever they bark. This seems infinitely superior to a.) a shock collar, or b.) Cheryl running across the back yard 35 times a day to shout, "NO!" at some vague spot in the lawn where the dog used to be. If we could reduce the barking we could allow the dogs free access to the back yard most of the time which would clear the final obstacle--it appears--to house training.

Enough of the dogs.

We went to Nancy's check-up yesterday. We now have our very own copy of her hip x-ray. She is still on drugs, but the new drugs are less mind-boggling than the old, and she is working her way steadily back to health. She cannot drive while she's still on drugs, but she can work, and she is preparing to go to work right now. (Some things remain a little fuzzy for her, but it's okay. She'll catch up.) 

Recovery Milestone: she came back to the beloved waterbed last night. She can get in and out. Annie was thrilled, and immediately curled up in her place of honor between us. No offense, Cheryl, she nosed me gently, but this is a lot better.

So much for the veering away from dogs.

Tiny little sampling of crow for Cheryl: Lisa gave me a harness for Annie called 'Easy Walk' or 'Easy Walker'. I put it on the dog and she walked out of it and I reported that. So I then met Lisa and Annie at the dog park and she was wearing another harness for Lisa and I immediately noticed how much easier it is to walk with Annie when she's wearing the harness. So I tracked down the one Lisa gave me, tightened it up...and it's magic. Now if she gets too excited she flops like an out-of-water fish (apparently the harness trips her) but she's a smart dog and she figured out what caused that in no time. And this is the kind of dog they hitch to huge trailers loaded with bricks and talk them into pulling the trailers around, so you can imagine what a joy she is to walk beside when she wants to run to the park and you would prefer to hobble along slowly on a bad knee.

Annie is a food-driven dog. She will eat absolutely anything. You can offer a certain kind of dog treat I bought to Riley and he will just close his eyes and turns his head away: Annie eats them by the handful. So last night I was sitting in my recliner, watching election results and eating pop corn and Annie was in my lap--often in my face--demanding her fair share, and Nancy said, "What it is we're trying to avoid in Annie's diet?"

I said, "I don't remember--what?"

She said, "Corn. Do you think there's any corn in popcorn?"

So--much like cocoa, which can attract the cat from a near-coma--it looks like pop corn goes on the list of things we won't be eating very much of these days.

And now for our new mantra: Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go... 

Today is our first doctor's appointment post hip replacement. At this very moment I am sitting at my computer with my "I voted" sticker on my shirt and a deep, personal sense of accomplishment (I drove all the way to the poll, waited for 6 minutes in a line, flashed my ID, picked up my ballot, filled it out, forgot my cane, deposited my ballot in the machine, interrupted another voter to get my cane back, and hobbled back to the car.)

The dogs went with me for moral support (and to sustain life for the cat.) Now they are gnawing each other on the couch like feral two year-olds.

Nancy is playing a game on her computer. Eventually she will shower, we will go to her work where she will battle the faint haze of pain-killers which trying to continue her business and I will dutifully lift everything over three pounds, and then we will go visit the doctor to see how good a caretaker I really am.

The professional dog trainer has not called back yet.

Now Riley is gently, lovingly washing the blood off Annie's face where he accidentally removed bits of her flesh during their scuffle. Isn't that sweet? I want a big brother like Riley.

(Actually I am proud of him: he's learning how to defend himself, since his little sister not only can out-play him, she can outlast him. His life, like mine,has had the occasional dark moment since she came along.)

Okay, I promised I would make this list to remind myself of progress made:

When we First Got Annie

1. she was terrified of the car

2. she had never heard an obedience command

3. She chewed EVERYTHING

4. She thought the cat was a play toy

5. She was not house-trained

6. She had no idea who "Annie" was

7. She lived to bury her nose in my crotch

8. She made no distinction between being beaten senseless and being cuddled

As It Stands Now

1. the car is a wonderful thing. It goes. (Riley taught us this.)

2. She knows "sit", "come", "down", "Annie" and has 50% recognition of the immortal command, "God damned it, stop that!" 

3. The majority of the things she chews now are mine. She usually does a fly-by to get my attention before the real destruction begins.

4.  she knows the cat is not a toy. This is because she has not worked hard enough to help him see what a boon games between them would be. Cheryl gets testy about this.

5. We're making progress. We're not perfect yet, but then, we live with a cat who makes protest statements at will, so we sense a little wiggle room should be available.

6. She knows exactly who "Annie" is.

7. It's unfathomable, but apparently Cheryl doesn't like this so much.

8. Loves cuddles. Loves, loves, loves cuddles. Still a little wary of angry people.

9. She has discovered barking. Barking is fun. No matter where she is, no matter what she's doing, if you bark loud enough long enough, Cheryl will come out to play with you. And it scares the neighbors.

 Interesting. On the floor behind me is a medium-sized black dog. She was chewing a dog toy but she became so exhausted she collapsed. Dead Asleep, dog toy still in her mouth.

Yeah.

Well, we knew that was too good to last.

    

 

I went to writers group yesterday and Annie went to Paw Paw with Lisa. Lisa knows some very good dogs in Paw Paw. Cash and Reggie. They are calm, adult dogs who can deal with an excitable little girl. Annie clearly loves Lisa, and it's always reassuring when your dog sitter ends the event with, "thank you."

No, really. Thank YOU.

This morning we are barking. Bad neighbors, moving around, letting dogs in and out, talking to themselves in their back yards: who do they think they are? Nancy is still sleeping and Cheryl is getting testy. They have no idea of the danger we are in.

In our front yard we have a volunteer vegetation that appeared, in our beginnings here, as a single heart-shaped leafling that seemed important. My grandmother gardened, and sacred among her plants were the volunteers who were often the unexpected offspring of something that had died off, or even some sort of genetic mutation that bore watching. She taught me to see each burgeoning life form as a wonderful potential, which goes a long way to explain why stick-tights figure so prominently in our landscaping (the baby plants are beautiful and look something like small ferns.)

There was a mower failure, or perhaps an over-the-fence seepage...I don't remember exactly how it happened, but over time a small forest began to emerge of these 12 foot plants that bear long, sweeping branches of heart-shaped leaves and eventually flower. When they dry down at the end of the season, the stems remind me of old cane fishing poles.

I have no idea what they are. We call the planting group 'the bamboo'. We amuse ourselves with the belief that we have something rare and exotic, although given its determination and the minimal encouragement needed for this crop to grow, it is probably an invasive species. We tend to turn a blind eye to invasion. Hell, somewhere in our yard, every year, you will find a particularly healthy example of pokeweed. It grows. It looks lush. It required very little watering. It holds up better under dog trots than the hostas which, until the year before last, we had in great profusion.

What happened to the hostas:

I love the picture, but the hostas have not survived his nesting all that well.

Anyway: my goal for the day is to go outside, dragging the accursed ficus with me, and snip, snip, snip the bamboo forest, throw it all into the back of the truck and take it to the city compost pile.

Notice how neatly I just slipped that in there, a near-parenthetical phrase. When Nancy's father died, years before I met her, someone gave her a ficus tree. Now I was given any number of sacred plants commemorating significant events in my life, as well: to date I have two hoyas still surviving, and that is only because you cannot kill a hoya. They're desert plants. They will eventually begin to look fairly horrible if you ignore them long enough, but then the little SOBs flower.

You have to water something that flowers because it's been abused (although my grandmother told me that is precisely what makes most things flower: when they're under stress and feel pressured to bring on the next generation.)

So, the point: I am not overburdened with sentimental plantlife. I killed them all.

And Nancy has managed to accidentally kill everything but the ficus tree.

Which she takes outside every spring. And bring back in every fall. And I vacuum around all winter long. This plant gives new meaning to the word 'sheds'. It throws off all of its leaves and grows a new set. And throws them off. They are somewhat leathery in density. I can't actually vacuum the leaves because they plug up my sweeper. And once it has begun a mass shed, you're afraid to crawl under it or move it in any way because that many MORE leaves will come down...

Every year Nancy threatens to leave it outside and let it freeze.

She threatened this year.

And then, bad hip and all, she dragged it back inside.

But she's on a walker. She's on some very nice pain-killing drugs that makes the occasional conversation with her a sort of mental game of fetch.

I could haul that shedding, miserable tree out to the truck, load it up with my freshly harvested cane crop and haul it directly to the compost pile and I could be FREE of leaf litter in my home.

PS--She's really okay with that. I think it's one of those 'I can't do it myself' things.

The sun is out. The sky is blue, deep and heartfelt, with fluffy white clouds moving slowly...north. Maybe. Overall the morning seems cheerful and upbeat.

last night, feeling restless and housebound, I loaded the dogs and we went to the dog park. There were four other dogs there, a beigy-white lab, a beigy-white cattle dog mixed with...lab, and two dogs in the woods. And Riley, Annie and me. Annie probably would have been fine--all of the dogs were mature, good-sized, appeared 'balanced', as Cesar would say... I knew as soon as I let her off leash someone would come in with a herd of miniature poodles and it would be worth my life to try to catch her again. And it was cold, and damp and gray. Several groups of cranes floated across the sky above us. Annie wanted to run and I had her on a short leash, which gave me a fair view of a puppy tantrum.

The world to and from the dog park was filled with children and adults in bright colors and odd outfits pacing the streets. In Schoolcraft they were all going to the fire department, where the firemen/police had obviously set up games for them to play in the garage. Zombie Roundup.

Yesterday afternoon Annie has a severe case of the berserkers, running from one couch to the other, sniffing the cat's butt, barking at falling leaves, annoying her brother, me, the cat... I decided to take her for a walk.

Annie and I have walked into and out of the dog park, into and out of obedience class. That's it.

I put her in her dog-friendly harness that Lisa gave her--Riley said, 'you're not going out there without ME!"--leashed both dogs and off we went. We made it all the way to about 2 1/2 feet short of the street before she walked out of her harness and I was fortunate to catch her before she realized what she'd done.

We came back home.

Nancy is steadily healing. She's pretty steady on her feet. She had at least a short period of time yesterday when she had no pain at all. Her incision looks good. She's been trying to rest because she needs to go back to work soon and resting seems like the best path to accomplishing that.

And now a pointless bitch about nothing of any consequence.

I do not wake up with any great sense of purpose. I have, in the past, but those morning are wonderful and rare. I wake up every morning to the slow realization that I am once again conscious, that time is passing, that there is a list of varying lengths of things that really should be done during the coming day... I almost never wake up thinking, "It's time to get up!"

I lay there, thinking, perhaps I'll sleep in, although I'm not particularly tired, either. Depending on my overall frame of mind, I may go back to sleep, get up, or stay in bed until mid-afternoon, but I almost NEVER just hop up out of bed, ready to start my day.

I get up when I do every morning because I 'have' to make coffee for Nancy before she goes to work. I don't 'have' to: I created that, she didn't. And now that she isn't going to work, even the illusion isn't working that well.

I have two dogs and a cat. The cat I shut out of the bedroom because he only sleeps when I'm awake. This  is a point of serious contention around 4 am when he is slapping me in the fact and stomping over my head. Riley prefers not to sleep with us because we have a water bed and it slops. Not at all to his taste. And Annie sleeps with me, but apparently Annie has the same morning dilemma I do. You ready to get up? Okay, fine--catch you in an hour or so...

So why are you whining? you might well ask.

I don't know. I would just like to wake up in the morning and think, "Hey, it's a new day: I should get up!"

Ah--the creak of a walker. My patient is still alive.