We found Riley, brought him home (nearly lost him at the dogwalk half-way home,) absorbed him into our family, chased him down the street at least six times--his most legendary walkabout lasting 2 1/2 hours and resulting in one of his Moms driving around town in tears while the other one went looking for a gun*--he settled in on the living room couch and became a part of us. We found a second dog, loved her, brought her home, and she ran out into the street once. She was a delightful little dog. We mourned her loss and then, about a month later, in the midst of a maze of conflicting emotions, Cheryl went (with Scott) to the dog pound and picked out Annie.

Aware of our loss as well as our gain, our friends Trudi and Elin and Lisa and Susie came to meet Annie and they came bearing gifts. They brought an entire grocery bag full of treats and toys. Out of the bag, one Kong and a multi-squeakered snake survived the week.

The life expectancy of your average $5-$10 dog toy is roughly an hour and a half, from purchase bag to vacuum sweeper bag. Riley would take his time and his rendering of his faux prey is sufficiently gentle that frequently his toys could be re-stuffed several times before they become mere shadows of their former selves. Not so much, with Annie. They are seized, carried away, gutted, disemboweled and shredded within the hour. Nancy and I now pick up random bits of fluff and faux fur and toss it into the dog toy box, just assuming that anything unrecognizable was, at one time, a something stuffed.

A friend told me she buys old stuffed animals at yard sales. I drove by a yard sale. Stopped. Bought four stuffed toys for a quarter apiece. One died on the ride home.

However, our local dog supply store gives us a card and after we have purchased enough bags of dog food to keep Riley well-fed for a year, we get a free bag. So Nancy went this morning to secure another bag of food for him, and tada: it was the free bag!

So she bought two dog-resistant, guaranteed to last more than an hour dog toys as $22 apiece, and brought them home.

Riley claimed them both.

Unfortunately when Riley laid down the first to claim the second, Annie stole the first toy and trotted away with it.

She's been trotting ever since.

She wants to take this toy outside and bury it, but Cheryl keeps standing on the doorway, sayng ugly, anti-social things like, "Oh, no--you're not burying a $22 dog toy under my shed."

This has caused Annie to believe I have plans for her toy.

More trotting.

Sometimes having a toy is just plain hard work.

 

*He knows her truck. Came up to her truck (in the middle of a public street) said, "Hi, Nancy." She said, "Get in this truck right now." And he said, "Right, old fat woman--catch me," and he laughed and ran away. More than once. It's only charming in well-written stories about other people's dogs. 

 

The first time I ever saw Annie, she was sitting quietly inside a big metal crate. As were a lot of other dogs: she was in the dog pound. Even more dogs were sitting noisily in big metal crates, barking their heads off, and one of the things I remember from my first impression of Annie was how absolutely quiet she was.

She also had kennel cough, two kinds of worms, she was in heat and she had dug most of the skin off her throat due to food allergies, she was clearly terrified and trying to pretend she was somewhere else entirely, but...she was quiet.

It turns out this was misleading.

Annie is not a quiet in-crate sitter.

Annie is a howler, a whiner, a whimperer, a throwing-herself-against-the-bars, digging-the-drip-pan-completely-out-from-under-her, bending-the-bars inmate of such intensity that when I read in my dog book, 'you should never let your dog believe you released her from the crate because she was howling' I thought I'm never going to be able to let this dog out again. She broke her first cage: ripped a bar loose, bent it up until it looked as if she intended to throw herself on it, impaling herself in suicidal despair. That cage is out for repair. We borrowed another larger crate from a friend, and Annie has rearranged the alignment of the bars until they hold her, yes, but I am ashamed to return it to its rightful owner.

And then she goes to sleep.

We do not leave the house with Annie running freely inside because a.) at odd moment she plays Chase Me with the cat, who is old and not as agile as he once was (although this has done nothing for his disposition) and b.) she gets into my stuff. The dog eats steel wool. The dog eats gourds, acrylic paints, and pig ears that have been aged and seasoned in holes in the back yard. (Do not ask me why we have pig ears aging and seasoning in the holes in our back yard.)

In an effort to provide Annie with a kinder, gentler crate experience, I read some more, listened to advice from other dog owners, and then I went to our linen closet and secured a blue sheet with which I covered the crate. Giving her peace and tranquility, I thought.

I was so proud of myself.

I could problem solve for a dog.

I cannot describe to you what happened to that sheet. We were gone for six hours. (Some dogs spend 8 hours a day in crates: I'm just saying. They do. They're not even abused.)

She had grabbed the sheet through the bars and pulled it inside the crate, then stuffed it through another hole and pulled it tight. It looked like a knitting project...well, I suppose, a weaving project. Weaving projects are more easily done with long thin strips of material but she had six hours and nothing else to do, so she created thin strips of the sheet by sheer force.

As a sheet, the blue sheet is now worthless.

It took me fifteen minutes to unweave the sheet from the crating.

I tossed it on the Conservatory couch because...I'm like that.

This inadvertently created a place of inestimable value on the Conservatory couch.

When Riley jumps up on the couch, he sleeps on the blue sheet.

This makes the blue sheet the very best possible place for Annie to sleep.

When Riley is on the blue sheet, Annie runs outside and barks at something. Riley jumps up, runs out to help her defend the castle. Annie dashes back into the house and claims the blue sheet. And around and around they go, each vying for their rightful place on the blue sheet.

The game ends when Riley sniffs, I didn't want to sleep on the blue sheet anyway and goes to the living room couch. He is not a big brother for nothing.   

    

It is a delightful world we live in. Two college roommates got into a fight over washing dishes, and one tried to poison the other's iced tea by adding bleach. Motivation: the roommate is "mean".

Because I have that sort of mind, I am tempted to go out in the kitchen, make myself a glass of iced-tea and douse it liberally with bleach, just to see if a.) it's possible to drink it without realizing there is bleach in it, and b.) what bleach tastes like. My instincts warn me the roommate would have to be not only 'mean' but stone stupid to drink it, but I could be wrong. As a poisoning method, I give this plot a D-. In fact, it strikes me as so insanely stupid that at first I could not figure out why the police were taking it seriously. On the other hand, I've had an assortment of roommates in my lifetime. And I've had my share of fights over washing dishes. None of my opponents are any whiter or more germ-free than they ever were.

And I've never read the story of how this came to be, I have mostly studied the recovery photos, but: someone tied a puppy to the back of someone else's truck, allowing this individual to drag the puppy for more than a mile before he realized he had an unauthorized passenger. Or drag-along-behinder. The puppy survived. So: did the tier not have a truck of their own to tie their puppy to, or did they not realize the driver might just...randomly drive away? Was it brutality, or stupidity? I suspect I would just as soon not know.

Enough of that.

In my own world, which is smaller and usually more pleasant than the big one, Annie is curled up on the couch taking a nap and Riley, I believe, has ventured outside. The cat is wrapped around my feet. Nancy is at work. The writers group has been cancelled due to trauma, illness and surgery, and I need to walk to another room of the house to retrieve my allergy meds or snuffle the rest of the day. These are the horrible issues that afflict retirees.

Next week (I think) Annie has an appointment with a trainer and a playdate with Folsom, Valentine and Belu.

Here's an adventure we're having. We live in an everything-on-one-level-ignoring-the-basement ranch house built in 1954. It is a particularly well-built house. I am sure it meets or exceeds all of the standards required in 1954 except one: the plumbing is 'air-starved'. I have only a vague concept of what that means: the practical consequence is that every now and then the water in the tub next to the washer fails to drain on a timely basis, overflows and washes all of the adjoining floors. Or, Cheryl appears with a plunger and forces it down, plunge by plunge. This is a periodic event, perhaps--although I can't swear to it--even seasonal.

Outside we have a little cap on a pipe which sticks up in the lawn and which may or may not be related to this problem.

When she first came to live with us, Annie ate the cap.

It has been replaced, but now it lives under an over-turned flowerpot to protect it from the dog.

The hole in the bottom (or top) of the pot is becoming choked with a particularly determined weed which WILL SURVIVE come hell or high water.

So it is possible--although not necessarily true--that I need to go outside and weed my plumbing. 

While I'm out there, I could fill in the woodchuck holes growing under the shed. I can give you an approximate determination of the sizes of these holes: one will accommodate one entire 50 pound Golden/lab/chihuahua mix, and the other with accommodate a 40 pound black pound dog. When they first moved into their dirt homes I worried they might get 'stuck' and require yet another rescue. I was wrong. Surprisingly enough, dogs can dig dirt while laying on their sides. Now when they go outside to live in their outdoor homes, the only thing visible to the human eye is one wagging yellow and one wagging black tail.

Our back yard is beginning to look like a prairie dog farm.

 

 

 

Bored, bored, bored.

The terrier is bored.

The terrier is bored because Cheryl closed the door.

Cheryl is mean.

Riley is still outside.

Cheryl likes Riley more than she likes the terrier.

The terrier has raced inside to report 17 consecutive bad deeds performed by Riley, and the terrier was dutifully reporting bad deeds being perpetrated by the people across the street when Cheryl came along and made the terrier come inside.

Where is the fairness?

Dullard lab-mix/active, involved terrier-mix.

There is nothing to do inside this house. 

We would chew stuff, but that makes Cheryl mad.

We would play bark-and-chase with the cat, but that makes Cheryl and the cat mad.

This is really, really not fair.

And boring.

Usually when we're bored we go into the Conservatory and find something of Cheryl's and chew it. This calms our nerves, and besides, it teaches her not to ignore us. Yesterday she was playing with the keyboard and ignoring us and we got down a plant hanger-thingy and chewed that into 100 pieces (we had to split the decorative beads into two to get our count that high) and then we trotted conspicuously into other rooms carrying her crocs before she came to life and said:

(and we quote here:)

"What the hell...?"

Now we have curled up into a little ball on the couch and we are going to have to sleep because there is NOTHING TO DO IN THIS HOUSE.

We are a dog. We are supposed to bark.

Riley gets to bark.

He barks at squirrels, for Christsake.

That's fine with Cheryl.

We bark at space invaders and loud talkers and sidewalk thieves and Cheryl yells at us.

We don't even know why we bother to live her.

Wait.

Is that...peanut butter...?

Annie behaved extraordinarily badly and extraordinarily well in the same day. Her latest adventure in the dog park has convinced me Annie is not a dog park dog. (Am I being intentionally vague? I am. She did what she did. I am sorry it happened. I admire honesty as much as the next person, but I see no reason to arm my adversaries with my own words.) Later that night she woke me up to say, "I have to go outside now." Twice.

Annie has never alerted me to a need to go outside before. She does much more of her business outside than she did in the beginning, but if I have the dog door closed for any reason then it's pretty much been my problem. 

So. You win some, you lose some.

Later this morning the contractor from the hardware store is coming to measure the back door. We are putting in a second dog door because the existing dog door sends a wave of cold air directly to my feet beneath the computer in what began as the coldest room in the house. I am hoping to spend less time steam-cleaning the carpeting in the Conservatory, which grows a distinctive brown-dirt-and-leaves dog path in its  mint green fibers every week. This will a.) keep my feet warmer, and b.) make the barkfests in the back yard more of a challenge for me to reach. 

In the meantime I have developed a certain stuffiness about the head. I snuffle. I am thinking of getting dressed and perhaps curling up in my chair to read a book or perhaps watch TV. We'll see if my vitamin regimen is enough to keep this just a head cold (I was a grown adult before I ever had 'just a head cold'. I thought for decades that I was weaker and less resistant to discomfort than everyone else because I could never say, 'oh, it's just a head cold'. Possibly because it was a head cold with either tonsillitis or a bronchitis chaser edging toward pneumonia when I had it.)

The dogs are fighting on the couch. Well. They're not 'fighting'; they are playing kissey-bitey face.

This is how the game begins: Annie picks up a toy and trots past Riley's throne. See--I have this toy. This is a really good toy. I'll bet you wish YOU had this toy... 

If that doesn't work, she jumps up and tries to bite him. She has learned, during her stay here with us, not to actually BITE him (he reacts poorly, every time, without fail) so it is a mock-bite.

Come on, let's play.

Leave me alone.

But I want to play.

I'm sleeping here.

Yeah--but let's play.

If all else fails, she lays down on her back underneath him and yips. 

Cheryl fell for this. Several times. She doesn't any more. Cheryl would turn from her computer and say, "Riley--what did you do to your little sister?"

Fortunately Riley has beautiful brown eyes and...well, Cheryl has experience as a big sister.

"I know, Rile," Cheryl sighs, "they're the bane of our existence, but there's almost nothing we can do to get rid of them."

I spent all of Monday with my own little sister, by the way. We had a wonderful time.

She almost never tries to bite me in the face any more.   

 

 

This is the part of life that I do not always deal with effectively. Someone I know and care about said something that kinda/sorta hurt my feelings/pissed me off.

It was an aside to someone else, not a comment made directly to me.

It would appear, from her behavior, that she does not realize a.) that I heard her or b.) having heard her, I might take offense.

Nothing she has said or done in my presence since has suggested that our relationship has changed or should change in any way.

It is possible, from the specific context of her remark (which I will not go into here,) that she was mollifying someone she cares about by assuming responsibility for her failure to arrange things exactly as this person most likes to have them arranged.  

Feel free to insert a few random paragraphs disparaging the need, much less her compulsion to assume blame for failure to feed the need.

She was not talking to me when she made the remark. I just heard it.

And there it sits: this unacknowledged insult, festering away while the two of us smile and joke and continue to swap stories. 

Festering....festering...

So what she said was a personal, private remark made to someone not me. It's not my problem. It's not my issue. I don't even know what the core issue was: I can make it about me, I suppose, but that doesn't make my supposition true. She continues to be as cheerful when she sees me as she ever was, so...

And yet, it's still there.

Festering.

Quit picking at it, my mind directs: but then, it is my mind that is picking at it.

I really want to take her by the arm, lead her to a quiet corner and say, "What the hell did you mean when you said...?"

We do not do this, in our family.

I wasn't supposed to hear it, therefore, I didn't hear it.

You have to wonder how many of these little hot spots we have accumulated over the years.

 

Our back yard is full of vermin.

This is the report from Riley, who had interrupted his little sister's nap thirty times this morning alone to file yet another squirrel report. Riley is an avid squirrel hunter. It helps, of course, that there is a squirrel thoroughfare on three sides of the lawn, a virtual vermin highway regularly navigated by fat, tail-flipping creatures with bad manners.

They taunt him.

"Hey, dipshit," I hear them call from the fence, "think you can catch me?"

Squirrels are the paparazzi to Riley's Lindsay Lohan.

Ms. Lohan (whom I do not know, have never met and never expect to meet) apparently went nightclubbing recently, where she was approached by a psychic who offered her a free reading. Allegedly.

Ms. Lohan requested her space, and when it was not immediately forthcoming (allegedly) dismissed the volunteer as a "fucking gypsy."

Someone in the gypsy's entourage took offense, accusations were hurled, and somewhere in the process Lohan punched the gypsy in the face (allegedly.)

She was arrested.

Again.

"We're not gypsies," the gypsy's husband alleged, and presented a garbled version of how he and his wife were just innocently offering psychic insights to passing celebrities and were punched in the face (allegedly) for their efforts.

They are probably not gypsies.

It remains open for discussion whether or not they are squirrels.

I would like to go on record, however, and state unequivocally that watching a beautiful, talented young woman being unrelentingly and systematically torn apart by a pack of wolves is not my idea of entertainment. I am willing to acknowledge some of those wolves are internal, and that a few were uncorked from a bottle, but the truth is...it's none of my business.

Please, PLEASE do not dismember this young woman any farther for my amusement.

But you read the article, you might point out.

I did.

And I am ashamed.

And I will not do it again.