Category Archives: Dogs

Dogs

Driving to Nebraska. Again.

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Beltane                                                                   Waxing Garlic Moon

Motel 6 with Sollie, Lincoln Nebraska

At 8:35 am Sollie and I took off in the truck.  We drove straight through to this little piece of heaven.

Driving between Andover and Lincoln, a frequent trip, goes through some of the less visually interesting parts of the United States.

Sollie is now in the bathroom blessedly quiet.  He’s a bit much to handle, a lot like a 3 year old.

Kate called with an extreme emergency.  The powers out and the generator did not kick in.  Time and a half to take care of it, but Kate’s there and she’s hot.  Kate hot is not something you want to see.  So Allied Generator has an evening call to rescue my sweet heart.

Ruth is with Jon and they’re on their way.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Sport

Sollie Goes Home

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Beltane                                                                         Waxing Garlic Moon

Tomorrow I leave for Lincoln, Nebraska.  Sollie will head back to Denver with Jon.  Our goal here is to calm the dog situation down by getting rid of the extra dog and getting to work integrating Gertie into our pack.  She has a Jekyll and Dog personality; sweet and friendly, cuddly 90% of the time and all gnarly teeth and dog for 10%.  Trouble is, we can’t predict the 10%.  Outside humans seem to raise her hackles, at least sometimes, but there’s something between her and the other dog’s, too.  Our hope is that Sollie’s presence, a male among females, may have tipped the balance toward aggression in the doggy world for Gertie and that with him gone, she’ll calm down.  That may be wishful thinking.

Mark finished a first course of granite blocks for our firepit. Now I have to find a steel fire ring.  It’ll be nice to have a place for a fire just in time for summer.  No.  Kidding.  It’s nice to have it done and ready for fall.  Mark’s helped out a lot.  I’ve found it much easier to do my work here if I don’t have to do the heavy work on both ends of a project.  (This will be the Agni fire pit by Mark Ellis.)

I’m awake.  In addition to getting up at 10:40 I also had a 2 hour nap.  Staying out late is possible for me, but I have to have time to recover.

Watched the NBA finals with Mark tonight.  Two Hoosier boys watching the big guys play ball.  We didn’t have the sound on.  Basketball is the one sport I know well enough to watch without commentary.  I decided, early on, that I wanted to see Miami win, so tonight’s decision pleased me.  It was a game right down to the final 4.0 seconds.

Bees, Dogs

Bees and Dogs

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Beltane                                                        Waxing Garlic Moon

Bee check this morning.  Colony 1 is about a week ahead of 2 and 3 due to my late release of the queens in those two colonies.  None of them have brood in the top box, though there is 400_honey-extraction_0225new pollen stores and honey.  They’ve only had the top box on for a week, so I’m not expecting much until the next hive inspection.  If I don’t see brood then, well, I don’t know what.

All three colonies look healthy, plenty of bees and plenty of room.  These bees, too, are so gentle.  I can inspect the hives with just a veil, a long sleeved t-shirt and gardening gloves.  So much better for the heat.

Each colony still has stored honey in the frames I put into the top boxes, the first one less than the rest, but they still have some.  I may need to get some feeder pails and some syrup, just to be sure.

I feel more confident this year, more sure of what I’m doing and what I’m looking for when I do a hive inspection, but I’m still a long way from a  knowledgeable bee keeper.

Mark has started a second round of work on the fire pit, a project stalled three years ago by lagging energy on my part.  He squared off the walls, has cut landscape cloth to put behind the granite paving stones I bought from the guy on Round Lake Boulevard and also put landscape cloth on the botton of the fire pit and covered it with sand.

Gertie went outside this morning and wandered around the front yard.  She moved slowly, feeling the trauma today probably more so than yesterday as the vet’s pain killer subsided.  She’s still on two pain meds though, tramadol and rimadyl.  I think she’s gonna be fine.  We’ve seen battle wounds before.

As I went to sleep last night, I said to Kate, “Just like an episode of Combat Hospital.”

Art and Culture, Dogs, Humanities

Ripped Apart

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Beltane                                                                    Waxing Garlic Moon

Pentheus gets ripped apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes.  The Guthrie’s production of The Bacchantes by Euripides several years ago gave the story a telling I’ve never forgotten.  It gave me a jolt.  I’ve moved on from Diana and Actaeon in Ovid to Pentheus.  His story begins about 250 verses further on in Book III of the Metamorphosis.  I’m not far into it, only about 12 verses, but already Pentheus’ fate has been foreshadowed by the great seer, Teresias.

My tutor says I’ve learned to spot and translate the verbs, a key first move, but I still have trouble picking out the subjects of the sentences. That’s what I have to work on for next week.

(Pentheus and his mom.  Pompeii. Romersk ca. 70 e. Kr. (Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen)

Speaking of getting ripped apart, I came home from a lunch with Justin Fay, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist, to find Kate gone.  She had taken Gertie, our son and his wife’s dog, to the vet.  Yet another scrap broke out and this time Gertie ended up with seven spots that needed stitches.  The end result of this was, of course, a hefty vet bill and a hurried consultation between Denver and Andover over Gertie’s fate.

We resolved it this way.  Gertie has become a liability at Jon and Jen’s, growling at Gabe, 3 years old, nipping four neighbors and going after the postman, not to mention climbing the fence to get out.  So.  What to do?  I really like Gertie; she has a big personality, a bouncy vital way, but she is a mischief maker, a trickster.  Gertie will stay here with us and we’ll figure out how to manage our pack without any one getting hurt.  We’ve had to do it before when one of our Irish Wolfhound’s, Tully, decided that our Whippets were prey.

First step is to get Sollie back to Denver so we can reduce the number of dogs.  After that we’ll probably try letting Gertie and the big girls out again, hoping that the changed dynamics will have resolved.  If we have another spat, we’ll have to go to some management strategy, maybe a dog run outside, or having Gertie and one big dog at a time out.

We have Mark here now and Gertie will stay.  We’ve become a hostel.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Weather +Climate

Second Life

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Beltane                                                                      New Garlic Moon

Rigel has spent the morning with a very worried look.  She doesn’t like thunder and barks at it to tell it to go away.  That doesn’t work well.

She’s not nearly as reactive as Tira, one of our Irish Wolfhounds, who somehow had it in her head that she was safest inside a vehicle.  That meant if a window in either the truck or the Celica had been left open, she’d jump inside.  My Celica still has her clawmarks in the upholstery.

In the wee hours of one morning I found her hanging worn out over the top of a chain link gate we used to keep the big dogs out of the garage.  She’d jumped it, but gotten stuck.  In her frenzy she ripped the truck license plate, which was within reach, to shreds and scratched up the truck hood.  The license plate cut her lip and there was blood everywhere.  I thought she was dead.

Running over to her, I lifted her off the gate–not easy, since even the smallest Wolfhound bitch weighs in at 150 pounds–with sheer adrenalin.  She struggled to her feet and looked very happy to see me.

Stayed up a bit late last night working on my avatar in Second Life.  Inspired by the presentation yesterday I decided to check out a virtual world.  There’s a learning curve to it.  So far my avatar, Quam, a Latin word for why, has ash blond hair and is wearing a get up cobbled together from an array of clothing options, none of which really suit me.  In this regard a typical male, however, Quam does not want to spend all his time figuring out how to be a clothes horse so his current outfit is good enough for now.

Quam learned how to walk, fly, push things, see up close, how to chat, how to change his clothes, but his meat package real world avatar got sleepy and had to go to bed.  Not sure I’ll stick with Quam, but if I figure out how to do it, I’ll get a snapshot of him and post it here.

Here’s the weird part.  I had dreams of flying and of going to the tops of buildings to scout the terrain.  I did both of these things in Second Life.  Hmmm….

Art and Culture, Dogs, Politics

DB BFA

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Beltane                                                                Full Last Frost Moon

I now have a full degree in dog barrier visualization, construction and maintenance.  A guest dog, Gertie from Denver, has discovered the joys of orchard exploration.  In her case she  cropped2011-04-20_0896crawls over the fence, runs over to the blue berry patches, jumps in and digs.  Furiously.  So.  In this instance a temporary barrier since said Denver dog returns home soon.

We have some metal roofing left over from project or another so two sheets of roofing now stand secured to the fence Gertie most loved to jump.  We test our barriers using the empirical method.  That is, we let Gertie out and see if she ends up in the orchard again.  If not, great.  If yes, back to the design.

After the barrier erection, I went into the MIA.  A panel explained an interactive art event that will take place at the MIA during the Northern Spark festival on June 4th.  I got a great idea from the lecture that I plan to turn into an effective Ai Weiwei protest.  More on that later.

Tonight I’m going to UTS (my seminary) for the final event of the year long mentoring I’ve done for Leslie.  With that event marking the end of that work and the session coming to an end next week, life will become less hectic.  I can relax into the garden and Latin since the summer pace of the Museum is slower, too.

Dogs, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Busy Friday

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Beltane                                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

Finally.  One chunk of the Metamorphosis finished in a literal (sort 0f) version.  That’s Book III:138-250.  My learning curve has been steep, sometimes so much so that I thought I might tip over backwards, but I seem to have reached a point where moving forward goes faster now and the hill no longer looks quite so daunting.  The next step is to take it apart and put it back together in idiomatic English, then compare it to other translations, see what insights that adds.  As a guy who thought the world of language had invalidated his passport years ago, I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased with myself.  It means a lot to do something at 64 that I’ve spent a lifetime imagining I couldn’t.

After that I drove into Little Sezchuan and had lunch with Justin and Margaret, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist and Executive Director.   We discussed evaluating our legislative work this year, wrapping things up and getting ourselves squared away for the 2011-2012 session.  This has been a difficult year and it’s not over.

Came home, ready for my nap.  But.  Vega lay in the kitchen, scrunched up in pain and bloodied from some kind of a fight.  No clue what happened, but we first examined her, then took her over to the vet who sewed her up, gave her antibiotics and pain pills and we brought her home.  She’s resting now, but the vet says she be very sore tomorrow.  She’s such a sweety, she just let them work on her.

Now, I’m sleepy, but can’t get my nap because it would interfere with going to sleep.

Dogs, Family, Friends

Good News, Good Art

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Beltane                                               New Last Frost Moon

Good news from the vet.  Vega’s kidneys are ok, so a round of doxycycline should set her right.  She’s so lovable, a goofy, intelligent, sweet animal, a joy to be around.

Then another death related incident.  A friend called for thoughts about a service he was conducting for a deceased friend.  This guy suffered from bi-polar disorder and was found two weeks ago in his house, a suicide.  He had killed himself in 2008.  Friends and relatives thought he was in Mexico.cropped3

Mark says he was a dog person in Bangkok and I can see that here.  He finds our dogs a real help, sort of a therapy pack.  That’s one reason we keep dogs, because their presence cheers up the house and adds loving beings to our day.  What’s not good about that?  Well, ok, there is that death thing, but that’s the price of love.

I wanted to show one more of Mark Odegard’s designs, all of them wonderful.  This one has its fans among my docent colleagues, too.

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Knocking on the Door

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Beltane                                                                             New Last Frost Moon

There are times and this is one of them, when death seems behind every door.  My friend Bill has learned that his wife’s cancer is stage 4.  A grave diagnosis with a grave prognosis.   American’s exult in the streets over the death of Osama Bin Laden.  A friend sent out a quote from Martin Luther King* that expressed my feelings.  Today Vega, one of our younger dogs, tested positive for Lyme’s disease.  Not a big deal, treatable, unless the kidney is involved.  Hers may be.  If it is?  Difficult to impossible to treat.

Since I started today already in somewhat of a funk, all this darkness hovering around has reinforced it, made the day two or three shades grayer.

Death does not surprise us.  It lurks beside us all our born days until the last one.  Its reality, its starkness, its finality, especially that last one, passing from the quick to the dead, still strike heavy hammer blows to the heart.

Death’s most severe wounds come from the source of our greatest joy, love.  Without love death counts only as an incident, something happening to someone else, an event of little consequence.  We know this each day we read the obituary pages.  Even the death of someone we have known, but not loved, does not shake us at our foundations.  When, however, death comes to call for one close and important in our lives, the very bound of love lacerates the heart, accelerates our fear, amplifies our sense of loss. Continue reading Knocking on the Door →

Bees, Dogs, Family, Garden

Baby Leeks Leave Home For The Raised Beds

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Spring                                                                 Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Beets and leeks.  Carrots and spinach.  Lettuce and kale.  Sugar snap peas and sugar peas.  Garlic from last year.  Strawberries and raspberries.  A few missed onions.  Rhubarb.  leeksAsparagus?  We’ve got green things above ground, not far above ground, with the exception of the mighty rhubarb, but we have germination and lift out.

The bee yard has bees coming and going, busy doing what bees need to do at this time of year. They flit in and around with purpose and energy.  We were all working outside today.

It felt good to have Mark here helping, a sort of family experience.  A bit unusual in my life, but good.

When I transplanted the leeks the other day, I was proud of them.  A month ago they were just seeds in the packets from Seed Savers Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa and here they were, well underway in life, ready to go outside and grow in the wide world.  There are tomato plants still growing inside along with some kale and chard.  They won’t go until the last frost date is past, May 15 or May 20 depending on whose map you read.  Other things will get planted then, too.  Beans, in particular.  Cucumbers.

Today when I dug a trench to re-seat the irrigation head near our back deck, unearthed by Vega and Rigel two seasons ago, I got the trench finished and Gertie plopped herself right in it.  It was cool, she said, thanks.  I shooed her out of the trench and she got up willingly, only to lie down on the mound of earth removed.  Which, of course, I wanted to put back in the trench.  She looked up at me with a smile, sand bedecking the hair hanging below her mouth.