Category Archives: Dogs

Dogs

The Neverending Story

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Samhain                                    Waning Dark Moon

The Neverending Story:  Rigel and the Fences.  Now after all the digging spots she has used have been blocked, after all the beds in which she dug and chewed up irrigation line have been fenced, after the chain link fence she climbed has an electrical fence to defend it, after the truck gate has been chained, blocked with granite and secured with a metal fencing post, I have put up the last of a run of plastic coated wire over the top of the split rail covered with green mesh.  The intent is to keep Rigel from climbing back into the orchard which she has done with impunity since we fenced her out of it.  Her move.

A slow day today, the rhythm of Sunday afternoon, a late lunch, reading a new book, watching a bit of a game about which I cared little, all followed by a nap.  This evening was more of the same, a sweet languor.  I watched a bit of the Cowboys and Eagles game, but wasn’t really into it.  The Place of Execution, an English mystery on public television, ended tonight.  Like I said, a slow day.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Health

Garden Crusader

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Samhain                               Waning Dark Moon

Welcome to another sunny, warm November day.  These are days I’ve come to expect from October, but, as Paul Douglas often says, nature tries to balance, so here we are close to Armistice Day with a 60 degree and bright day about to unfold.  That means time to finish what I hope will be the last Rigel barrier of the season, extending a wire across the top of our wooden orchard fencing to make it really, really hard for her to get a purchase.

Kate’s lying low for the next few days, taking care of that not yet healed back.  A wise decision on her part.  She’s most at risk just as she begins to feel better, chasing down dogs, picking up the mail down our sloped driveway, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making Danish pancakes.  These are all part of the routine of a normal  life, not important, perhaps even a bit annoying on a daily basis, until you cannot do them at all, then they loom large as important, even critical parts of identity.

A shout out here to Vicki Nowicki.  I met Vicki at the annual Seed Saver’s Exchange conference in July.  I ate dinner with Vicki and her husband.  We talked about permaculture, Celtic holidays, the odditys of American landscape preferences and the importance of becoming native to a place.   Vicki told me she’d won a Garden Crusader award from Gardener’s Supply Company.  The notice came today in a e-mail from them.  I’ve excerpted a bit from the interview with her.

When we spoke, and as I read this, I found myself speaking when she talked.  We were in synch.  She also has a Liberty Garden project that I admire.

2009 Garden Crusader Vicki Nowicki

Vicki’s life work has been to help people slow down, learn about the land they live on and take better care of it. “What I’ve been trying to do for 30 years is to glorify the place where you live,” she said. “I want to use food gardens to nail people down to their place. A garden helps to reveal the nature of your site and bonds you to the land,” she said. “When you have a garden instead of a lawn, you are now producing something, not just consuming at the maw.”7150-nowicki-bench

Liberty Gardens

Her newest project pulls together everything she knows and believes about gardening. It is a website called libertygardens.com. The site will include tutorials and garden journals and will be a resource for anyone interested in gardening.

Here is how she describes it:

“It’s for the 21st century and it’s about growing food at home in order to make it a home. Our lives will change and our world will change when we start to plant food gardens at home. It’s a simple act that each person can choose to do at any time without a new law being passed, or a feasibility study being run or a stimulus package being doled out. But talk about a shovel-ready project! If our land is worth caring about and if our families are worth caring about, we can each choose to create the food supply that we have been asking for. We have the liberty to choose what to grow and how to grow it. People have always done it.”

And with Vicki Nowicki’s help, more and more people will be joining in, and doing it too.

Aging, Dogs, Garden, Health, Sport

A Good Day

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Samhain                                     Full Dark Moon

Rigel and Vega spent much of the day defending us from visiting neighborhood dogs.  Of course, thanks to our record setting fence-lines no battle could be joined, but jaw-boning was much in evidence.  This evening they came in, flopped down on the couch and went to sleep.  That is except for the show on birth and babies in the animal kingdom.  Rigel turned her head toward the TV and watched a mule-deer born, penguins enfolding their single chicks and musk-ox turn to face down the white wolves of the Arctic.  Would loved to have been inside her head.

Kate worked outside today, weeding the blue-berry patches and other parts of the orchard.  The good news is the clover has become established and has choked out the weeds.  The bad news is that the clover threatens to choke out the blue-berries.  Sigh.  She is only two weeks out from her procedure tomorrow.  Amazing.

Our defended (defenced?) vegetable garden can now be worked without fear that a Rigel or a Vega will come along later and try to emulate any digging I might have done.  Their work is not up to my exacting standards.  The last greens came out today with the exception of some Swiss Chard that still has vitality.  All that’s left in the garden now are strawberry plants, asparagus, garlic, parsnip and carrots.  The first two are perennials, the latter three crops from this year that can stay in the ground for a while, carrots, or need to over winter, the parsnip and garlic.

I couldn’t bring myself to patch the damage from the dogs.  It is quite extensive and I find myself reactive when I work on it.  It will keep until next spring.

Then of course there was the Vikings-Packer game.  Our defense had a bit of a let down late in the third quarter and the first part of the fourth, but they played brilliantly otherwise.  So did Favre.  At one point a Packer named Jennings fell on the Viking sideline very near Favre.  Favre’s concern and his action, bending down to see how Jenning’s was, moved me.  He seems to genuinely care for his team mates both current and former.  He also plays like a little boy, jumping and waving his arms, picking up players who’ve just scored a touchdown.

After the game he had an interview in which he spoke warmly of the Packers and the fans there.  It was a mature and sensitive moment.

It’s fun to see him play as a Viking.  Didn’t think I’d feel that way, but I do.

Aging, Dogs, Health, World History

Mammals Here Nap

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Fall                                                   Waxing Dark Moon

It has been a strange fall for  leaf change and leaf shedding.  Our trees were green until just a week or so ago, then the trees with golden fall colors like the birch and the poplars changed.  A few of the red changed, but the large numbers of oak and ash trees still have their leaves.  They are brown, not green.

The wet, cool day put all the mammals here in a stupor.  Rigel and Vega slept in their crates instead of playing outside; the whippets dozed on chairs and the couch.  My eyes began to wink shut while I read about the masterpiece and Kate decided for an early nap.  So did I.  Something in us furry creatures find wet, fall days a nice time to head into the den and rest up.

Sarah, Lois our housekeeper’s daughter, took care of the 17 year old at Hennepin General.  She’s a nurse in the pediatric ICU.  That was a good story about backs against the wall medicine.

If I had a school age child, I told Kate, I’d be worried.  The random nature of the H1N1 serious complications makes it difficult to know just what to do.  Kate then reminded me of a reality I knew vaguely, but which surprised me.

Parents as late as the 1950’s and early 60’s lived in an age when it was still common for children to die.  Measles, mumps, diptheria, flu complications, polio all claimed the lives of children while adults who had them and lived were unharmed.  This is such a different reality from our own, an era when the death of a child is seen as an anomaly, an act against nature, when in fact, for the bulk of human history, living into adulthood has been the anomaly.

Even so, if you were a pioneer and you knew the odds of your children living into adulthood were low, the death of a child would still be the death of your child.  Hard.  In that regard those must of have been times of uncountable sorrow.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work

Litter Mates

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Fall                                       Waxing Dark Moon

A word about litter mates.  Kate and I buy litter mates when we get puppies.  Once in a while we’ve gotten adult dogs given to us by a breeder and we did buy one solitary wolfhound, but otherwise litter mates.  Of our current pack all of the dogs were litter mates.  Hilo and Kona were born 8 years ago from a champion whippet bitch.  Emma and Bridgit (now deceased) we bought 14 years ago from a woman who was line breeding for really fast whippets.  They were both crazy, but they loved each other.

Rigel and Vega don’t look like litter mates.  Rigel looks like a miniature Irish Wolfhound (miniature at 100 pounds, of vegarigel400course) and Vega looks like, well, Vega.  She’s a giant coon hound with a huge head and a lot of muscle.  Appearances in this case deceive.  These girls have been together since last December when they were born.

Litter mates have mutual space.  They lie on each other, eat each other’s food, play together.  They retain the bond you might expect from animals who shared a womb, then a mother’s breasts.  The intimacy and trust they display toward each other is so sweet, so innocent and enduring.  We buy them just for this reason, so they will have a partner through life, one they can count on, one their own size in the case of Rigel and Vega.

These relationships have been part of the magic for Kate and me over the years, an addition to the joy of knowing animals as friends and companions, we also know them as sisters.

Aging, Dogs, GeekWorld, Great Work, Politics

Fencing

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Fall                                          Waxing Dark Moon

Dan the fence guy came and measured the fenceline for our garden.  He hopes to finish by tomorrow and I hope he does.  Rigel will then be relegated to digging holes in the woods and the backyard rather than the garden and the orchard.  This home’s most expensive dog greeted Dan with a lot of energy.

Kate’s doing a bit more each day, though she still tires easily.  She walks without her walker for short distances and stood up for a good bit last night to cook the Danish pancakes.  Her recovery is a testimony to Viking pillaging genes, I think.  No Viking would let a bad back stop them from raiding a monastery or sacking a castle.

Dan has had back troubles, too.  In fact, he goes in to see the top spine surgeon at the U on Monday.  He had surgery on L-5/S-1 twelve years ago and now has trouble there again and in his neck.  He keeps telling Jake, his cousin, that he can have the fence business, but that he needs to protect his back.

After burning through the majority of the new toys I bought yesterday, Rigel and Vega seem enchanted with the frozen peanut butter Kongs.  A good sign.

Here’s a link to a fascinating Scientific American article on economics titled Does Economic Violate the Laws of Physics? It raises issues I would put in the conceptual arena of the commons.  It makes a ton of sense to me.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Sport

Kate on the mend

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Fall                         Waxing Dark Moon

The Vikings took the pressure off themselves today by losing to Pittsburgh.  A lot of things could be said about the game, but in the end they lost.  It was a great game, one I enjoyed watching anyhow.  OK, I will say one thing.  That tripping penalty that called the touchdown back in the 4th quarter stank.  It was a game changer in a bad way for us.

Kate’s recovery, slow, but regular, gains strength each day. She went downstairs and up again tonight.  The incentive was big, seeing Ruth and Gabe on Skype, but the trip had a confidence building aspect, too.

Rigel and Vega have calmed down with the cooler weather.  Calmed down in a relative sense.  They still clang and bang, heavy with tooth and claw, but escaping seems to have become less a priority since the electric fence.

Aging, Dogs, Family

More Fence.

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Fall                      Waning Blood Moon

Dan the fence guy came out again.  This time we’re fencing in the vegetable garden, a five foot high fence and a taut wire to run along the top of the orchard fence.  Rigel is an expensive dog.  Really expensive.  A sweetheart, yes, but a major league nuisance, too.  The electric fence, I’m proud to say, has done its job.  No more escapes since it went up.

Kate and I reupholstered the couch this afternoon, the seat cushion.  In the process I thought back over growing up and could not remember a single thing Dad ever fixed.  I’m sure he must have fixed something, but I don’t recall what it was.  Anyhow, fixing stuff ratchets up my annoyed level to unpleasant proportions because I always struggle.  The outcome does not match the effort for me.  Kate, when able, has a different ratio of effort to outcome and has a much better time.

A good run with no trips into the city.  That makes getting things done here much easier.

Kate’s in the calm before the storm, but it isn’t very calm, at least from a pain stand point.  This kind of pain, constant and intense, exacts a psychological toll as well as a physical one.  The pain requires, demands attention.  That is, after all, the point of pain.  Hey.  You.  Pay.  Attention. Now.  That attention adds a level of stress to all daily activities.  Also, at 65 any infirmity at all raises questions of mortality, of fitness for life as we’ve known it.

This is the right decision at the right time after two + years of exhausting less drastic and nominally invasive procedures.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Sport

Dogfood, O.D. and Football

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Fall                                                    Waning Blood Moon

He loaded 10 bags of 40 pound dogfood and the straw boss said, well bless my soul.  This is what Tennessee Ernie Ford would have sung if he’d been with me on my trip to Costco this morning.  I like to make fewer trips when I run errands so this time I stocked up on dogfood.

The nice lady that counts the objects against your receipt took a look at my cart and my gray hair, “Do you need some help?”   Nope, I could handle it just fine.  A few years back I used to resent this kind of heavy lifting, in particular rock salt for the water softener and dogfood.  Now I look on it as an opportunity to tone up the muscles.  It’s part of my resistance work out for the day.

I shifted today from the garden to the desk, spending a couple of hours puzzling over how to organize a conversation for a congregation that wants to consider its future.  This is very different work from harvesting potatoes or planting garlic.  Not finished yet.  It has to set a bit.  Percolate, as Kate likes to say.

In addition I have to put together an Asian tour for next Friday.  At the same time I’ll design a Southeast and South Asian tour since I’ll be able to use some similar objects.  That’ll be tomorrow morning.

The Vikes play the Rams  tomorrow.  The Rams now have the longest losing streak of any NFL team.  Detroit won last week and lifted that burden from their franchise.  No team in the NFL is a push over because the NFL has only elite athletes, some a bit more elite than others, some a bit younger, others more experienced.  The combination means that on any given sunday (yes, there was a movie.) any one team can beat another.  I hope the Vikes win convincingly and shore up their pass defense while getting Adrian a 100+ yard day.

After the Rams, the Vikings play the Ravens at home, then go on the road for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers.  That will be a tough stretch.  If they do well in those three games, they will move up in the power rankings.

Dogs, Garden, permaculture, Writing

Gnashing of Teeth

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Fall                                    Waning Blood Moon

Back to the gnashing of teeth.  When I went out to plant the garlic this morning, I discovered Vega and Rigel had decided to become gardeners, too.  They dug up beds, they dug up around beds.  They moved a lot of soil, none of it in a constructive manner.

This almost made me cry.  After some unpleasant words and gestures, a bit of stomping around, I called Dan the fence guy and said, “Dan, I need another fence.”  When he finishes, this yard will have more fence than many cattle ranches.  It will take days just to walk the fence line.  And this all inside an acre and a half.

Anyhow, I planted the garlic, covered them with six inches of straw and protected them with left over chain link fence.  Later in the day I mulched the parsnips, which will over winter along with the garlic, and the carrots.  I’m going to try storing them in the ground with a heavy mulch to protect them.  In theory, then, I can go out in the middle of winter and harvest fresh carrots.

The potato harvest is now in, too.  I dug up the Viking Purples (no kidding) and the rest of the white potatoes, washed them off and left them in a large plastic boxes to cure.  They stay at room temperature for two weeks, then downstairs to the coolest storage we have.  That’s outside the house at the bottom of the basement stairs, but still inside the garage.

Got some nice feedback today on my organization skills for the Sierra Club and on my writing from a fellow Docent.  Also, a good nap.  That all helped.

Big dogs bring big problems and big rewards.  Can’t get one without the other.