A small miracle has occurred. Nancy brought me my morning granola and yogurt and a small tooth-lined hole appeared under my desk to demand chunks of my apple. Riley will accept apple chunks, if he happens to be in the neighborhood and if he's hungry and if you were in a mood to pass them down: Annie will eat--demand her fair share of--anything I eat.

To get Riley to eat his breakfast, I often hand-feed him exactly three pellets at a time until he's managed to pick up his momentum enough to self-feed. To feed Annie I trip over her three times on the way to the laundry room, fill her bowl and set it on the floor. She can gobble a cup of dog food in 30 seconds flat. In fact, part of the hand-feeding process for Riley is that he is never 'emotionally ready' to eat until Annie has finished her food and is scouring the room for his.

He can't eat her food because it's too rich and he's on a low-fat diet. She can't eat his food because she's allergic to grain and sheds all of the hair on her chest, belly and behind her ears, and then she starts digging. She can't dig because she sleeps with us and we can't sleep through her digging.

And, of course, she tears herself up and looks awful.  

Yesterday Annie had a playdate with Folsom (and Valentine. Valentine is a very nice dog, he just is more reserved.) You would think I would have pictures, wouldn't you? I took the big camera, the little camera, the movie camera and my cell phone. I was too busy watching the dogs play to take any photographs. We had three 'discussions' in an hour and Annie started all three of them. She got nipped in the nose for her efforts and she still started another fight. One of the things we will be working on in our next class is confidence, and I think confidence is a big issue for Annie: as I watched her, she would play with Folsom, have a lovely time, and then he would do some dog thing, invisible to my untrained eye, and she would get scared and attack and once she attacked Folsom, Folsom came back.

(Screw this, said Valentine, I'm outta here.)

Folsom is a few months older than Annie and he has limited play experience with other dogs, so he pretty much did whatever Annie did. Annie's idea of a good time is to run along beside her brother (Riley) and hang from his ears. When he's done with that he tells her, and she's learned to back off. However, it looks like she's going to have to learn how to play with other dogs dog-by-dog.

Anyway, Folsom's (human) mom, Tiffany, passed her finals with excellent grades and so we celebrated and watched our dogs play and pulled them apart when misunderstandings developed.

I didn't take Riley to the play date. I didn't take Annie to Riley's play date at the park.

My dogs have separate social lives.

Today Riley went to work with Nancy and Annie is home with me. Well, actually she's out in the back yard barking at something. There are just so many things I need to be alerted to out there, she can barely get in her morning nap. Here she comes again, tags a jangling.

I need a beer box. I remember them: nice boxes. Sturdy. I would like to convert one into a light box. Hopefully  without having to first drink a case of beer. (My existing light box is probably too small for the projects I had in mind. Necklaces, for instance. Its about 14'X14'. Maybe not that.)

I should measure it, since neither my eye nor my memory is all that accurate.

Oh, yes: and I  need to read a book by the end of the day for book group tomorrow.   

And there it is: my first unedited, as-is photo from my self-made light box.

The first, for those of you who are fascinated by all minutia, is a $1 shelf ornament I bought from Pier 1 Imports probably 10-15 years ago. It's about three inches long. It is a tribute to a lifetime habit of pointless shopping which came to a slow and reluctant end when I met Nancy. (She instituted an odious law: for each object that comes into the house, one must also leave. What would you give up to own a painted wooden fish? Much less, three.) 

CFL stands for 'compact fluorescent lamp'.

The important information, when buying bulbs, is to buy the ones that say "daylight".

Should anyone feel compelled to make their own light box you can, of course, ask for advise. Or you could just type 'make your own photo light box" in the subject line of Yahoo! and swiftly learn all that I know and easily far more.

Dogs are barking: need to go restore neighborhood peace. 

I was desperate. I had a dog I couldn't control and all I did, from the time I got up to the time I went to bed, was chase Annie, yell at Annie, scream hysterically at Annie. If I let her outside, she barked, if I brought her in she peed on the carpet, chased the cat and harassed Riley. If I put her in her crate she yipped, and echoing my mother benchmark for stress, I couldn't even go to the bathroom by myself. I called a dog trainer. I described my problem.

It seemed clear to me from her tone that either someone like me should never have been allowed to have a dog, or I should have known better than to get the dog I got. She disapproved of the whole situation. She was also busy for the next two weeks, but she would call me back. She never did.

There are certain little paths that my mind seems determined to wander down, and I wandered down the following:  Do a lot of people call you up and say, 'you know, my dog always comes when I call, she never barks, she has perfect house manners--can I bring her in so you can untrain her just a bit? Because really--this is just boring...'

Yesterday Annie and I went to interview another trainer--someone who actually likes Annie--and we are signed up for a new class. The goal of our class is to teach us--Nancy and me--to better read and understand our dog. Someone to whom we can actually say, 'truthfully, I am woefully dog-stupid and by the time I see what's coming, it's already here'. She assures me she can train my dog to behave: or better yet, teach ME how to train my dog to behave. And it will be a small class, so Annie won't have 11 other dogs to fixate on. We're looking forward to it.

Having resolved that issue, I turned immediately to my art project, the light box. I have friends who make jewelry and they need to be able to photograph their jewelry, in their own studios, on their own schedule. They are perfectly willing to pay professionals to take shots, and I am  perfectly willing to let them: I am more interested in figuring out how someone with a decent camera, some tape, a cardboard box and some tissue paper could make a piece of jewelry, shoot it, and sell it the next day.

A fifth grader could make a light box.

The lighting, however, is proving more troublesome. (Of course it is: photography is light.)

Right now the jury is still out, but it's a toss-up whether the box I spent two hours creating is going to work as well, if not better, than the $4 foldable laundry hamper I bought at Walmart. So far both are deeply indebted to my fledgling experimentations with Photoshop Elements.

I bought "fresh, energizing light"--I think I should have bought "strong, vibrant light". These are the box-side descriptions of GE 'energy smart' CFL light bulbs.

It's possible it would help if I knew what CFL stands for.

"Lamp may shatter and cause injury if broken." Really. Valuable box-side information. Nowhere does it expand on the idea of CFL. Nancy would know.

Annie went to work with Nancy today. Riley and I are going eventually to the dog park. Right now my non-barking dog is outside, barking. He is not the only  dog barking--apparently something is going on in the neighborhood. Baying hounds abound.

So I guess I will put on another pair of socks, load the dog in the car and visit the hardware store for stronger lights. And then on to the dog park, where we will run and sniff and property-mark and take a dump and generally ignore most people and most other dogs because that is why we go to the dog park: it's all about the nose. When Annie goes with us we have to constantly bail her out of social problems, but she's not coming, so we'll be free to just dog around at our leisure.

Cheryl will probably talk to other people, but that's just boring, so we ignore her.

Yup. It's a good day. 

Last week or so there was charming video on the web about a New York City policeman who saw a barefoot homeless man, went to a store, and bought the man a pair of boots.

A day or so later  news stories abounded: the homeless man was seen again later and once again he was barefoot.  What he was not was homeless. He lived on the street 'by choice'.

And there, in a nutshell, is the American tailchase about poverty and homelessness. The underlying assumption is that none of them are 'really' poor or homeless, and if they are, it's by choice.

When asked where his new shoes were, the recipient of this unrequested gifting replied that they were 'expensive' and he would be afraid to wear them in public because 'they' might kill him to take his shoes.

So he doesn't appreciate the shoes, and he's living on the street because he wants to.

Stupid cop, anyway.

Having worked on the fringe of the public welfare system, I knew the second story was coming when I saw the first one. They go together like bread and butter. Someone somewhere had to prove that a simple act of kindness cannot stand on its own.

We need to give up our beloved notion of the 'deserving poor'. 

For one, it masks our deep and suspicious belief in the 'undeserving poor', those cheats, liars, connivers, drug-addicted, alcohol-addicted malcontents who would intentionally cheat us of our God-given right to practice our kindness on those who truly elevate us to the level of saints, rather than fools.

We need to give up to notion that gifting someone else with something grants us the right to determine how, when, where and why that something will be used. If you give it, let it go. It's not yours any more. If you need to control how it used, them perhaps it is time to ask yourself why you gave it away at all.

For two, it is a horrible reflection on all of us that we truly believe that kindness is judged not by the content of our own hearts, but by the content of the hearts of those to whom we have been kind.

I have never met the barefoot homeless man in New York. I know nothing about him. Perhaps he is wiser than I am, a man of uncommon balance of spirit and heart. Perhaps he has connected with some spiritual awareness beyond my ability to comprehend. 

Perhaps he is a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps, for whatever reason, he makes really bad decisions for himself (like going barefoot in New York City in December.) Perhaps he will continue to make bad decisions for himself; perhaps there is nothing we can give him that will change the decision-making process in his brain.

It was still very nice of the cop to buy him a pair of shoes. He saw a man with no shoes. He gave him shoes.

Whether or not the man is homeless, whether or not the man ever wears the shoes, whether or he takes them around the next corner and sells them for drugs...it was still a nice thing to do.

Let us give him that.

It's awful.

There's no other word for it--just 'awful'.

Yesterday Nancy brought us new toys. Very nice toys, not like the junk she usually brings us.

We took one outside and buried it, but then Cheryl got all funny and took the other one away from us. But we just thought, patience...

This morning we had the second toy three feet from the door when both Nancy and Cheryl started yelling at us and we dropped it and ran.

But we came back...

...and we grabbed the toy...

and Cheryl actually stood up and chased us!

We dropped the toy and ran for our lives.

And she took the toy away.

We can't bury our best toy. We can't even reach our best toy. All we can do is sneak around the Conservatory so they don't see us, whimper, and try to figure out how to get our toy,which is way up high in the air with no steps up to it.

This is the worst day of our lives.

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.