The Internet is an amazing thing. Three months ago I went online to price light boxes for my photography (well, not even 'my' photography; photography for friends.) Now everywhere I go on the Internet--Amazon.com, Xanga blogs, Wikipedia, facebook pages, 'research' look-ups--I find advertisements for light boxes. I understand why Amazon would memorize something I looked for, particularly since I never bought one (I made my own.) But Xanga? I looked up the definition of a word for Nancy, who was doing a crossword puzzle, and at the end of the blurb about what the word meant was an advert for a light box.

Often the same light box, which is, whimsically enough, the tracing box and not the lighting aid.

And yes, I would like one. It would go ever so nicely with my colored pencils, my paints and brushes and all of the other unused art supplies I have collected over the years. Crayons. I recently needed to through my stuff to rearrange and re-order: I have 3 collectors boxes of crayons. I love crayons. Sometimes I crack the tins just to snort crayonscent.

Another thing I have a lot of:

Isn't he cute? Next month he will be 30. I'm sorry: 31. (He's still cute.) Because he is the first grandchild of our sibling group I have easily a thousand photographs of this child. For some strange reason he now HATES having is picture taken.

or this:

This is a photograph of my cousin Diane. It was on the same roll of film as the photograph of my nephew. The whole family was gathered at the Mason's building in Ashley, where she then lived. I have no idea what we/she/someone was celebrating. I also have two (not very good) photographs of a baby I do not recognize and cannot situate on my timeline (it was not be all that unusual for me to take photographs of random babies. My labeling system, on the other hand, has fallen woefully behind.)

Or this:

Yes. It's a photograph of a baby goat. (Goats, dogs, cats and cows appear frequently in my photography. Lizards would if they were better about posing.)  My friend Carolyn Kaatz had a raft of kids (human and goat, actually,) and the kids were in 4-H and raised goats, and I went to her house and shot an entire roll of goat pictures. I wanted this goat desperately. In my mind I named him 'Caliban'. Like puppies, kittens and calves, baby goats have an annoying habit of growing up and becoming troublesome house pets. I shot this photograph before I met Nancy, and I met Nancy in 1997.

But,  because I have it and I have no idea what to do with it and I am deeply suspicious that no one else wants it, enjoy:

Here's looking at you.

The thing that fascinates me about goats (but, they hop!!) is their eyes. Coin slots. My only nanny as a child was a goat. Down the road from my Dad's house in Alabama is a field of goats, and I go visit them every time I visit him.  I am due for a goat visit.

So to fully appreciate this post: I am sitting here at my computer, writing whimsical notes about my life as a would-be goatherd. Beside me, my partner is suggesting various behaviors that might be performed on her person while she wanders the electronic maze of the VA in order to change her mother's address. She has spoken to 3 pre-recorded messages, she has called 5 phone numbers, she has waited politely...actually for three days now...it is a simple task, changing an address, unless, of course, you need to change your address with the VA. So every now and then I chuckle quietly at my own cleverness (such as it is) and Nancy mutters, "Oh, ____ me." We are under flash flood warnings in January. It is 55 degrees outside this morning: it is supposed to reach about 20 degrees this evening (these transitions are never graceful, here in Michigan) and Annie begins her intermediate obedience class this evening.

Her first command to learn may be "mush."

Oh, dear: Nancy just told me, "this is the reason people get guns and shoot school rooms of people--that poor boy was probably just trying to get some information off a government site..." 

Notes on living with the elderly: in my mind, where life is always cozy and warm, life with the elderly would be about hugs and imparted wisdom. In my experience it tends to be about bodily functions. So we installed a handicapped toilet when Nancy's Mom was about to arrive. (Well, there is nothing handicapped about the toilet: it is a toilet for the handicapped.) She arrived, and she got stuck and we had to haul her up. She makes these trips 3 times a night, and that wore on our dispositions, so Nancy and I did online research for solutions. And we solved the problem. Our bathroom is not an engineer's wet dream. Unfortunately: Pecks, as a gene pool, tend to be fairly long of torso and short of leg. We may be quite tall people, but our knees remain fairly close to the floor, and of my family, I inherited the least height. I can no longer sit quietly in privacy with my feet flat on the floor: I am poised in the air like a tripod on ass and toes. I was never one for lingering, but this removes the very last temptation. 

But as long as we can keep Nancy out of her sister's gun collection, we'll be fine.

Annie has a job now. She is diligent. Devoted. Coming up on tired because there is no rest, no break, no period of relaxation. Annie reports every move that Ilah makes. Bark! Stranger in the house! Movement--she's moving... trot trot trot grr grr grr

Nancy's mother is 95. She uses a walker to traverse the house. She is so hard of hearing I suspect in another week I will be shouting at everyone from sheer habit. ("Maybe this will make  you stop mumbling," Nancy says, and while I would never claim not to mumble, I use this as an example of how hereditary hearing issues can be.) Nancy's mother is at that stage of aging where sitting down anywhere might require a much longer stay in that position than originally planned. And while we installed a taller stool designed for the weak of knee (or thighs, perhaps) it still remains a challenge for her. This is where Annie comes in.

7:30 this morning Nancy and I are sleeping soundly when bark! bark! bark! She's moving! Unauthorized bathroom entry! Home Invasion! And Annie flew off the bed and ran to the bedroom door to bark. Riley, who sleeps in the living room, was not barking, so Nancy and I were able to determine that whoever was invading our home was a.) between the living room and our bedroom and b.) only dangerous in the eyes of one of our dogs.

It was Ilah, running her morning errands. Nancy got up, checked on her, making sure she was able to leave the bathroom as easily as she entered it. She came back to bed, but Ilah was still wobbling about. Annie was ON IT. Cheryl! Nancy! She's moving again!

We are not 100% pleased with this behavior (the barking, not the wobbling) but it does not appear to worry Ilah, and it can come in handy, because not only is Ilah hearing-impaired, she has a frail, wispy old-lady voice that my ear is not tuned to hear. I will no doubt learn eventually to pick it out, much as I now hear the clattering of dog nails on the kitchen floor, the slurping of dogwater, or the crack of plastic in the mouth of a bulldog.

Because we are on high alert,however, The Thing in The Back Yard is back. We have to trot to the window and growl at it. And then we have to go to Ilah's room and stand in the doorway and look in on her. And then we have to go tell Nancy what Ilah is doing. And then we need to nose-bump Cheryl to keep her in the loop and then we have to share reports with Riley who would be completely ignorant of everything that happens in the house because he's a lab and he sleeps too much...

This is such exhausting work for a young dog.  

We're going to need more kibble. 

Annie graduated from basic obedience class today.

On command Annie can sit, lie down, take a treat when offered (and given permission to have it,) walk on a loose leash, and come when called. Annie can walk on a loose leash all over the PetSmart Store without attacking, growling at, or piercing the ears of other dogs.  Annie is tolerant of small children who want to pet her, and because she has a very fine, light coat of hair, Annie impresses total strangers with her Red Riding Hood coat and cape. Annie is a fashionista. Annie struts up and down the store aisles. Let's get this, Cheryl. Wow, look at that, Cheryl. Can I taste this, Cheryl? Look--that dog is my class!

Total strangers stop me to admire what a beautiful dog she is. (Those strangers who do not pull up their hands and cautiously step back.) Now to be honest, I was never in any real danger of bailing an ugly dog out of the pound, but I can't say she struck me as 'beautiful' when I chose her. She has these ears that stand up, but the tips fall over, and when she's feeling comfortable and relaxed, she tends to let her ears roll off to the sides, reminding me miserable house elf Dobbie in the Harry Potter stories. Her face is impressive, but it always strikes me as being a little bit too big and blunt. There is a lot of some variation of bulldog in Annie's face.

What was not clear to me when I picked her out, and remained unclear to me for a long time, (since my appreciation for her behavior was so often focused in another direction,) is how charming she can be. When I first met her, she was shy, perhaps even slightly shell-shocked. Since she has decided that she lives here, we are her people, and we are on this journey through our lives together, she is much, much more confident, and with that confidence she has developed into this happy, prancing little princess who loves her red coat, who expects small children to want to pet her, who is perfectly happy to stop and gather a few compliments from dog lovers as we move along. You may touch me she informs her audience, and she throws her head back with her eyes half-closed, like a tiny Egyptian goddess.

"She's so calm," the other dog-owners in our class sigh, and I pick my jaw up off the floor one more time. 

Our intermediate obedience class--the one where we learn to 'come' off-leash when called even when we don't think we need to and we have better things to do--begins Tuesday. It is possible--possible--that Annie may eventually learn enough social skills to be able to return to the dog park. But hell, a whole bunch of people came to our house today to help move Nancy's mother into the guest room, and Annie was utterly charming. We confined her in her crate while the doors were open and things were being hauled back and forth, but after everyone settled (and before we left for our graduations) Annie made the rounds and greeted everyone. Hi Hi Hi, who are you? Why are you here? Do you live with us now?  No one got bitten or even barked at. There were no unauthorized piercings of ears. (Annie put her tooth through another dog's ear at the dog park: she has not been to the park since.)

So for the diary aspect of this blog, several important things happened today. The Girlchild ran a 5k race and won in her age division. This is the same Girlchild (Murphy's woman) who lived in our guest room for a  year while trying to figure out how to survive. Nancy's mother left the assisted living facility down the street from us and moved in with us. And Annie graduated from basic obedience class.

I also bought a paper shredder, but in the overall scheme of things, it's not all that.

Unless, of course, you have a lot of paper you need to shred.

And I'm not a pack rat. No sir. But I did find a box in the basement with all of my pay stubs and bank statements from 1995 to 2003.

So while we all adapt to more cohabited lifestyle, I personally am shredding.   

February 28, 2009, I wrote a blog about electronic cigarettes.

Yesterday (January 23, 2013) I received the following comment on that blog:

Next week Annie will graduate from her beginning obedience class. She--Annie--will mark our family's first successful graduation from a dog obedience class. (Riley is a well-behaved, obedient dog: he 'flunked out' because a family reunion scheduled itself over his graduation.) Annie now sits, downs, takes it, sometimes leaves it, walks on a loose leash, comes when called and does not aggress on on-coming dogs. She is the star of her class. (I should probably mention her class is a controlled collection of problem dogs. Still.) We are working on 'stay' now.

Teaching Annie to 'stay' was kind of a puzzling experience for Nancy and me. I told her to sit, she sat. I told her to stay and she sat there, gazing at me intently. In fact, we're having a harder time working on the release than we are on the stay.

In our class saturday we each took everyone else's dogs and tested them on their commands. Annie charmed everyone. (AND she did not eat the doxie in the pink coat, the dust mop (Yorkie) OR the big white dog that bounded at her. She did not threaten Blue, who ambled over into her space to greet me. She never once growled at Cain, who is 9 months old and wobbles in every direction all of the time.) All of the dogs did well with each of us. Annie is not good at 'leave it' (partially because Cheryl gets flustered and forgets the command, all the while flapping like a mad duck.)

We are already signed up for our intermediate obedience class. In intermediate class we learn to ditch the Gentle Leader and eventually, work off leash.

In our class there is a man with a 10 month old pit mixed puppy. He is struggling to get his puppy under control. Like us, it appears he has never had a dog before, so many of the things I heard and dismissed are equally non-reassuring for him. He took his puppy to the dog park to practice come. Now had he said that that clearly in my presence, I would have sat that man down and had a long talk with him (Nancy did)  because he appears to be really struggling. (His dog did not come. Duh.) People at the dog park did the same for me: it seems worthwhile to pass along. I would have shared them all:

Nobody's dog comes at the dog park. Well, they do. They don't 'come' at the dog park on their first visit to the dog park. They don't 'come' at the dog park when they barely know the command 'come'. There is no way a simple human with one-44th the sense of smell a dog has can understand the number of distractions available at a dog park. In our first obedience class with Annie she 'sat' every time I looked at her at home: at the class, surrounded by other dogs, she'd never heard the word before.

Puppy brain. People who have had more than one dog talk about 'puppy brain' all of the time. They say things like, "He'll out-grow it." This is a transition a dog-owner has to see to believe. Riley outgrew his puppy brain one week. Literally. He was a bounding, insane, could-not-concentrate puppy on monday, and friday he was a mature, well-behaved dog. Annie--the current star of her class--decided she lives with us, we are her people, there are certain behaviors we don't like and she should stop those, all about a week and a half ago. She'd lived with us for five months. Suddenly we looked down and there, gazing up at us with love, was a calm, attentive little black dog. She's still a terrier, but the insanity is gone. We can rub her head. We can play with her belly. We can grab her and she doesn't dash away to Canada. Life is not perfect, but it is much, much better than it was.

Our trainer says Annie didn't change: we did.

Nice thought. I'm not sure I fully believe it, but it is a nice thought.

I'm back.

I took a few days off, not to overtly grieve, as such, but just to adapt to Babycakes no longer being here. He was my nearly constant writing companion for almost twenty years. And while I miss him--I miss his habits, like digging his nails in and climbing my body to get to my left shoulder (never the right shoulder, always the left)--I have been preparing for this time for a long time now. If I regret anything, it is that I began to pull away from him, at least emotionally, as it became clearer and clearer to me that our time together was coming to an end. Maybe with loss I just always find something to regret.

As I write this, there are noises coming from the living room. Chewing noises. Something is being thoroughly mauled in the next room. I glance at Nancy, and she says, "Bone." She gave Annie a bone this morning. She gave Riley a bone as well, but he took his outside and stashed it somewhere. This is classic Annie/Riley behavior. Annie got a bone, Annie is devouring the bone. Riley got a bone, Riley took it outside somewhere where Annie cannot get it. He is now napping on the floor between Nancy and me.

When I picked out Annie to adopt, Nancy was at work. I asked Scott's advice, but I'm not sure I listened all that closely. My reasons for adopting her were murky and lightly battered in guilt. In retrospect, I adopted Annie because she was a particular breed mix, she was black, and she was in the dog pound. I was bent on saving something, having so spectacularly failed with Noomi. (I know, I know. Shit happens. It was nobody's fault. I'm just trying to be honest.)

As a measure of comparison, I adopted Riley because he cuddled up against me and leaned against my leg.

This morning, almost five months later, I happened to be standing the kitchen where I was making coffee when Annie came racing in, tail a wagging, and I leaned over and snuggled her and she let me. Accepting affection from humans--particularly when it involves touching, holding, and, worst of all, hugging--has been a hard lesson for Annie. She loves affection, but she clearly had never been taught to receive it. I don't know what to do here, she would worry, and then she would dance away to a safer distance...

She was work. Constant, unrelenting work. She wasn't house-broken. She came with a horrible name someone clearly made up with the best of intentions and a tone-deaf ear to sound (Sievol, which is 'love is' spelled backwards, or, to the human ear, 's evil.) She had just been spayed, she was in heat, she had three kind of parasitic worms, she wasn't supposed to run or play hard. She chewed everything she could wrap her mouth around. Sometimes she just went frantic and tore around the house like little black tornado. She tormented the cat, she hung from Riley's ears, she ran every time you extended a hand to her, she was terrified of canes, sticks, brooms and even wooden spoons. She had absolutely no sense of personal boundaries. She's still a devout crotch sniffer. I have stepped on this dog, tripped over this dog, muttered 'go...go...go...' to this dog: I have even stood in an empty room and screamed, 'Get OUT of my way!" like a madwoman.

She was terrified of the car, so a trip to the dog park involved a 20 minute discussion about   how to get from the garage doorway to the front seat (six feet.) At the park, she misbehaved so badly I had to quit taking her to avoid having Riley banned from the park as well.

As she became more comfortable living here, she took up barking. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. I've spent three months racing outside to shake a can of pennies at her. I tried using a squirt bottle but she knows the bottle, and she knows the sound of me coming through the back door. It does not appear that I will ever teach her not to bark: it appears I have taught her to come when I call her, even when she can't see me, even if I just scream her name. In fact, Riley now comes when I scream, "Annie!" Both dogs bark outside: both dogs now come inside when I yell at them. The result is skewed and accidental, but hell, it works.

We spent our first obedience class standing in the middle of the circle while all of the good dogs circled around us (vaguely reminiscent of my own grade school experiences.) They practiced 'sit' while we practiced, 'look at me.' She was terrified of the polished floor between the doorway and the class. She wanted to eat the other dogs.  "She doesn't know her name," the trainer said, looking at me like I didn't deserve to own a dog. She knew her name: she didn't know how to focus with twelve dogs and 17 people all on the same mat.

At odd moments, these past few months, I have asked myself, "Why did you have to have this dog? What the hell were you thinking?"

"We love her," Nancy would remind me. "She's going to be a good dog some day."

A trainer contacted me. "I can help you," she said, so we joined her class.

It has been a good class and we have learned good things from it. First and foremost I have learned that while Annie sits and gazed affectionately at me, waiting for me to do something, the other dogs in the class bark and lunge and whine and roll around on the floor and my dog does what I tell her to do. We have made progress.

After five months of work, she does not come and sit affectionately between my knees and lean against me: she does show up at the same time every morning for our morning cuddle.  "It's time, it's time," she sings, and then she disappears somewhere under my chair and literally rolls over while I scratch the base of her tail. "This is good, this is good, good, good--too much," and off she goes.

I am learning new commands now. First and foremost: Crate me. I started crating her just to give myself a break: now I find myself crating her right around the same time every day. "This annoys her--if I do this long enough she'll put me in my crate, give me peanut butter, and I can take my nap."

Sometimes I will be really into my writing or photograph sorting or whatever, and I will feel this little bump. A little black nose just bumped me. (Murphy trained me to recognize  nose-bumps. Riley doesn't nose-bump: he body-bumps, very lightly.)

Hi. I'm here. Just checking in.

And it has occurred to me here lately that I really like this dog. She's funny. She's sweet. I don't know that I ever disliked her: I may have found it hard to really bond with a dog that couldn't cuddle. And not all dogs do, I know that: but apparently if they want to be my dog, they have to learn. She still panics: what to do, what to do... But we are establishing rituals together. Okay, I know this one: she grabs me and hugs me and I wiggle and she lets me go.

She's calming down. She's learning work-arounds. She gets a little closer to being a very nice dog every day.

               He was not waiting for me at the bed room doorway this morning.

               He did not escort me to the bath room, walking along ahead of me at about half the speed I wanted to go.

               He is not curled up around my feet, or on the reflective-heating pad over the tool box in the window, just behind my head.

               I am not trying to make anyone cry: I knew this time was coming. I could see it in the unkempt coat, his putrid breath and the bones that were jarringly evident under my hands when I petted him. He had lost balance and coordination until defending himself from Annie’s invitations to play made him cry with frustration. There were times when I found him hunched on the couch because something hurt too much to lie down. I wanted him to make it to 20. Yesterday I watched him for a while, and my inner voice said, “What are you doing? This is slowly waning survival, this is not quality of life.”

               I took him to see his vet. He did not like the ride in the car and voiced a number of complaints. He did not like the ride into the office. He did not like the receptionist. He did not care for the room where I took him out of his carrier.

               “I’d like to go home now,” he said to me, “I was having a fine nap on the tool box before you started messing with me.”

               I held him, talked to him, stroked his fur. I assured him I would see him again soon, that he and Joshua could wait just beyond the door for me and I would be along before they knew it.

               “Screw this,” he said affectionately, “I’m going home.”

               He swore at the vet who tried to shave his leg.

               She gave him a sedative because “I don’t want to fight with him.”

               He zoned out. Some. Not entirely.

               He growled at her while she shaved his leg.

               Like the true curmudgeon that he was, he did not go gentle into that good night, but raged, raged against the dying of the light.

               I expected nothing less.  

The sun came out, briefly. Otherwise it is a cold, gray day (well, according to the  back fence, it's 50 degrees outside which in January hardly qualifies as 'cold'.) It feels cold. And damp. It rained last night and everything outside is wet. Very little snow has survived this. Which means the mud track through the Conservatory is going to get worse.

I am new to steam cleaner ownership. It has posed some logistical problems that were not apparent when I 'ordered' the machine. For instance: it takes parts of our carpet hours to dry after a cleaner--like most of a day. This means that until the carpet dries, it's still damp (duh) which means that dogs tracking in mud just make the carpet dirtier than if I had left it alone in the first place.

Clearly I am not looking for the Good Housekeeping Award, here: I just want all of my carpet to be the color it was when it was installed.

As I write this I have an unhappy crate tenant. I am discovering (slowly) that contrary to my intuition, when Annie starts getting wired up and anxious, she's barking at everything on every side of the house, she's restless, goes after the cat, steals my stuff, starts fights with Riley...the best solution is a peanut butter Kong and a closed crate. She's like a toddler who needs a nap. Most of the time she settles right down, eats her peanut butter and then snoozes.

Today is an exception, and while I can't see the eight foot purple and green slobbering monster coming through the back door, I know it's there--she certainly has warned me often enough.

On a different plane, I am reading a book by Robert Monroe about...I can't remember what he calls it. OOBE: out of body experiences. Aka Astral Projection. If I have any psychic abilities I am unaware of them: on the other hand, I have spent the greatest share of my life blocking off intuitions and hunches because I find that whole realm of the unspoken confusing and I'm not good at it. For instance, of what use it is, really, to push my trash out to the street, observe my across-the-street neighbor sitting on his front steps, and intuit that he really does not like me? I've never met him. The urge to rush across the street and introduce myself is sufficiently quashed, but then, he's lived there for...three (?)...years and that urge is apparently easily quashed anyway. If the world really is full of little bits of free-floating, sourceless knowledge, what good is it? And as for the blocking issue: how do you know whether your next door neighbor, whom you have never met, actually dislikes your existence, or you are just projecting your own assumptions about twenty-something men who drive trucks and dirt bikes onto him?

Interestingly enough, I did not buy the Monroe book and neither did Nancy. It just appeared in the guest bedroom as we were cleaning it out. (doo doo doo doo....) I assume it came from the GirlChild, who during her stay there dealt with some issues about death and dying, spectral visitations and the whole questions of where we go when we leave here. Initially it struck me as...quixotic...that I have read two books now about life beyond death and both describe more or less the same afterlife (and then it dawned on me: the GirlChild gave me the other one as well.)

I have a friend who has been journeying out of body her entire life (I always seems to have at least one friend with some attachment to the psychic, in one form or another.) Her approach is highly spiritual and she might be appalled by Monroe's determined efforts to apply the scientific method to the ethereal. (Monroe was 38 the first time he saw a color television, which would make him at least twenty years my senior. I have just passed over the 64 mile marker.) During his time the scientific method was EVERYTHING. I should journey out of body to Wikipedia and learn more about him. Perhaps I'll just drag my body along. This time.

Since I started reading this book--wherein he states he believes we all journey out of body, we just don't remember it--I have been dreaming about astral projections. Or it may not be a dream: there is (in my perception) a level of awareness between sleep and true awareness where my mind, at least, is apt to consider almost any stray and wandering thought as if it were gospel. I remember I 'woke up' once with this truly brilliant sentence running through my mind and I made up my  mind to remember it and write it down. And then I did wake up, and I did remember the sentence: it was gibberish. It sounded exactly like an English sentence, except none of the words meant anything. And then it was gone. Monroe says he frequently 'visits' friends, but they never remember the conversation; or if they do, it's fractured and non-sensical. So who knows where my brilliant sentence came from?

Nancy says she wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that people from other worlds come to me and tell me their stories so I can write them down. This would explain (for her) the people who live in my head.  

Monroe gives instructions on how to have an out of body experience. I read them quite seriously, and then all the questions reared their ugly heads again.... I joke about this, but the truth is I tend to avoid contact with the other side,convinced as I am that my mother is stalking up and down the fence line, preparing a few fine words for me, should I ever pop through. (Because, in the intervening almost 40 years, she has never found anything better to do than judge my life?) 

I am in an odd little place right now. My friend's oldest sister died this week. I've met her, but did not know her well. My cat looks like a damp rag, his coat is worse than usual and he sits around in a hump all day. His movements seem steadily more tentative. I can feel myself pulling away from him emotionally, which I don't want to do, but seem to be doing anyway. (Nancy would point out here that when I met her--17 years ago--I assured her my cats never live all that long, so he would not be with me forever. He is two months and two days short of 20 today.) Nancy's mother is moving in with us at the end of the month, which is an adjustment. I just feel things...shifting.

And I do this dance, which I have done all of my life, flirting with the spiritual and then dancing back to safety, reaching out, withdrawing my hand... part of me would love to astral project all over the known and unknown universe, and part of me mutters, "you're 64 years old: if you haven't done it by now, you're probably not going to."

Maybe the Shadow knows.

Okay.

That was weird.

I was writing a blog, happily into it, writing away, and then the whole blog just vanished. I had left the following legend: r y.

I'm going to assume I hit one of those magic keystrokes. So somewhere in some basement is lurking the nerd who created a keystroke which erases everything you've written.

Did I ask for that?

I did not.

I mean, what's wrong with the 'delete' key? It's always worked for me. 

I do remember back in the day, in the long ago, hoary time when buying a computer meant typing pages and pages of nonsense e-x-a-c-t-l-y right, not a bit of nonsense misplaced or you start all over again, to create what was mysteriously called a 'program'. I remember it well because none of my programs ever ran. Well. Once I made an address list that worked. Couldn't do it again if my life depended on it.

Years passed. Machines became bigger, faster, and more programs, pre-written, came with them. Now the new computer owner needs to know almost nothing about programming to make his computer do what he wants it to do.

But those secret keystrokes still lie buried in the keyboard.  

The only one I EVER knew was ctrl-alt-delete.

When I had XP, it never made any difference.

It wasn't until we sped into the  future with VISTA that these odd key combinations began working their ancient magic on new, virgin machines, and now I have Windows 7 which is just on fire with the damned things. They work in the text with Xanga. They work in the text with Word, which I swear to God never happened before. You can delete your entire unsaved text by hitting one key, or a combination of keys which are really not all that hard to hit by accident. You can change the format of your page. You can move margins, erase spacing settings...and you have no idea how you did that.

Which makes it nearly impossible to undo.

Anyway. You'll never get to read the blog I almost wrote because it's floating somewhere out in cyberheaven.

The contractors are almost finished with the neighbor's roof, which can't happen soon enough because I am so tired of dogs bursting through the dog door in high alarm I'm ready to throttle them both.

THEY ARE THE SAME TWO ROOFERS ON THE SAME DAMNED ROOF DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING THEY'VE BEEN DOING SINCE NEW YEAR'S DAY. How many times can we suddenly realize there are ROOFERS ON THE ROOF!! ROOFERS ON THE ROOF!!

I closed the door.

Riley is napping.

Annie is lying on the floor burping woofs.

There are roofers on the roof.

We can never let down our guard.

Today is trash day.

Trash day is not hard to recognize in this house: it is the day we have to chuff and trot and bark all day long. The trashmen are everywhere, shinnying up the sides of houses, sliding over the back fences, parking blatantly in the fronts of house where they steal our trash. This is without a doubt the worst day of the week.

And what does Cheryl do about these invasions?

She sits at her keyboard and she says, "no barking, Annie. Be quiet, Annie. Annie, for God's sake STOP BARKING."

Trashmen could steal the whole house, but until they came after Cheryl's chair she'd never notice.

And even worse than that, since we are in a telling mood: Cheryl is eating a bag of Cheetos, which is NOT on her diet, or ours, and whenever we hear the bag rustle we have to dash back into the Conservatory and nosebump her until she remembers her manners. Oh, and get this: she has a new trick up her sleeve now. She holds up something to which we are forever and entirely entitled to, and she won't let us have it until she says, "Take it". Like that: "Take it." Like we were bumping her with our nose and stuff just because it feels good. There never was a time when we wouldn't 'take it', but somehow it gives her a sense of power to give us 'permission'.

Not a popular game with us, but it's a lot better than the other one. 'Leave it'. We plan never to learn 'leave it'. We think if we just ignore her long enough, she'll give up on that one because we can see NO advantage to learning 'leave it'.

Something about eight feet tall that stinks and is covered with wet scales just tried to come in the front door. Do you think Cheryl noticed? Of course not. We had to warn her. Again.

Quiet, Annie.  

How do you stay quiet when something eight feet tall, smelly and covered with wet scales tries to come into your house?

You should see what's in the back yard.

And the roofers are still stomping around on the sky ledge. We hate that.

There's just no way to get any rest here today. Even when we curl up to sleep, we accidentally let out the occasional little 'woof'. Sleep, sleep, sleep, "Woof", like burbs.

We know what's coming next. It's that evil man who wads up papers and shoves them through the hole in the front door. He comes here almost every day and shoves papers through the door! We ask you, what sort of person does that?

Sleep, sleep, sleep,*woof*