Category Archives: Dogs

Dogs

On the Lam

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Lughnasa                         Waning Harvest Moon

Vega and Rigel are gone.  In a 45 minute period while I lined up framing for a painting to hang over our fireplace they escaped and were returned and escaped again.

When I got back from the framer, a message blinked on our answering machine.  Pam, the neighbor across the street, had called.  The people who live behind us to the south had caught Rigel and had her on a leash.  Vega slipped her collar.  They were kind enough to bring Rigel home and open the gate and let her in the back (fenced) yard.  Vega snuck back in via their escape route, a route I cannot identify.

I wandered the neighborhood calling their names, met several of the neighbor’s dogs, but neither heard nor saw anything of Rigel and Vega.  I feel helpless, especially since we do not, stupidly, have either a chip in them or tags on them.  If and when we get them back, a chip and tags are going on for sure.

My plan is to wait a while and see if they come on their own.  They like it here and we have lunch for them, so if they’re free, they will return home.  Later, I’ll call animal control, but I’d prefer not to right now since I don’t want to explain the lack of tags.  We keep our dogs fenced and I exert a good deal of energy to keep them contained, so we’ve operated on the (false) assumption that we don’t need to be too prompt with tags or chips.  Wrong.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Our Land and Home

Life Busting Out All Over. Much Better Than the Alternative.

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Lughnasa                           Waxing Harvest Moon

My thoughts on Enlightenment were cut off mid think by this world, Rigel on an adventure outside the gate.  Now I’ve secured the gate (I think.) until it can be repaired and I’m about to return to research for the Liberalism series.

We have many tiny strands of life breaking out:  Kate’s spine, Rigel’s venturesome spirit, Vega’s big gallumphing crashing presence, a gnarly conceptual piece that needs to be written by September 6th, the oncoming harvest, driveway seal coating on September 8th and the next round of Ecological Gardens work starting on September 9th.

I also have a tour today at 1:30.  Thank God, it’s only Sin and Salvation.  Ha, ha.

Dogs, Humanities

Ideas.

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Harvest Moon

Breaking news from the 16th century.  Revolution gets legs from philosophical ideas.  When I grew up in the study of philosophy, the history of ideas was the primary teaching method.  Ideas, this approach claims, grow up in contest with each other, one claiming this and another positing that.  Idealism, like Platonic forms, would find itself ground down by realists or materialists.  Empiricists would find rationalists bugging them at every turn.  The metaphysicians became prey for the logical positivists and linguistic analysts.  From time to time someone would start out on a brand new tangent like Descartes cogito ergo sum, or  Immanuel Kant’s masterly synthesis of empiricist and rationalist approaches.

It was the first way I learned how to think in an academic sense and a history of ideas approach still comes most naturally to me when I examine big problems, like the roots of liberalism, for example.  Thus, it shocked me a bit to learn, in reading Israel’s Contested Enlightenment tonight that the last few decades have seen the history of ideas bashed in academic circles, especially by those claiming material and social reasons for such historical events the Enlightenment and the Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The argument apparently has been made that ideas cannot matter in real history since so few people take an intellectual stake in big ideas at any point.  If they do not appreciate them intellectually, the argument goes, they cannot be affected by them.  This underestimates the

This thought broken off by another escaped dog.  Rigel broke the truck gate open and escaped.  Frustrating.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Friends

Barriers and Transitions

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Lughnasa                               Waxing Harvest Moon

The day so far.  Bought 55 granite blocks to use in constructing barriers to the dogs.  Bought 10 straw bales to reinforce a barrier to the dogs.  Do you see a pattern?

A nap, then a workout and some Sierra Club work.  The day has sped past with work and play, now winding down toward the evening when I sit with the dogs, read or watch television.  Eat supper.

Kate’s in a definite transition mode this year, perhaps even in the next few months.  The pain causes her increasing difficulty, sometimes she spends her non-work hours recovering from work.  Literally.  Not a situation that can go on forever.

The neighbor whom I have mentioned in the past, though, has bigger issues.  His mental decompensation seems to track with his physical.  He grabbed his daughter’s arm and bit her.  His wife had to call the police to come take him to a psych ward.  He returns home tomorrow with nothing different.  A sad situation.

Dogs

Puppy Chess

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Lughnasa                     Waxing Harvest Moon

Reframing.  Work on  containment of the puppies requires reframing.  If I don’t begin to see these as interesting challenges rather than more damned work, I’m gonna be one frustrated guy.  This morning Rigel appears, wandering around in the orchard.  This is after a professional fence was installed.  GRRR.

My next move may be granite paving blocks.  Tough to dig through and a neighbor has a bunch of them for sale.  This is chess, doggy escapism and single-mindedness against the more flexible human intellect.   I win a move, then they win one.  This will, eventually, wind down as the puppies mature, become more sedate, less struck by wanderlust.   It is, of course, this very energy that makes puppies so compelling, so lovable.

Dogs, Our Land and Home

Fences

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Lughnasa                              Waxing Harvest Moon

Good fences make good neighbors.  The folks that live diagonally across the road from us, their house fronts on Round Lake Blvd., have two dogs.  These dogs like to visit our dogs.  Note that this means their dogs do not have an enclosure to keep them at home.  When the neighbor dogs come calling, our dogs bark and bark and bark and bark.  Really annoying.  To amplify the annoyance Vega and Rigel (remember them?) have discovered a variety of ways to penetrate the fence and go play with the visitors.

All understandable, especially when you have two strong, determined puppies (8 months old now and 86.6 pounds and 74.6 respectively, Vega and Rigel), but not acceptable because there is a busy highway nearby. It is also always possible that the lure of things far away could grip these two star-named dogs and they could wander.  Not good.

What to do?  A fence.  We now have a chain-link fence that surrounds all our 2.5 acres except for the area immediately around the house.  We also have a fence around the orchard since Vega ate the netaphim.  We used to have a fence around the vegetable garden, but I dismantled it three years ago.  So, we have a lot of fence.

Even so, I have begun installation of one more.  This one I will create from old snow fence and a plastic snow fence, using fence posts made from bamboo and old wooden stakes.  The purpose of this fence will be to create a 50 foot or so setback from the chain-link fence line.  This will separate our dogs from the neighbors by a good distance and should lower the volume and decrease the escape attempts.  I hope.

That’s what I spent the morning building.  It’s not quite done, since I have to create a gate that can open and close to admit the truck and lawn mower, but I think I have that figured out.  I’m not sure whether this will be permanent or not.  If it is, then I’ll have to use better looking material, for now, though, I only want to see if it solves or substantially ameliorates the problem.

Dogs, Sport

Post-Op Pups

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Lughnasa                            Waxing Harvest Moon

The need to constantly monitor our two post-op pups and Kate’s difficulty with her neck and back has made me feel trapped in the house.  If I leave one of the pups in the kitchen too long, they chew up and ruin something I’d rather have.  If I let them outside, they run the risk of opening their incisions and getting an infection.  Kate’s pain has made her less able than normal to help with them.  So, I stay close, listen for chewing sounds and rotate the pups, one inside and one outside.

While Kate was here this morning, I made a quick run to the temple of the cost conscious consumer, Costco.  Got dogfood, dog treats, kitchen trash bags and two large jugs of Tide.  I discovered a while back that if you go right at 10 a.m. when they open, the chances of getting in and out in a reasonable time rise dramatically.

OK.  That’s enough whining.

How about that Favre?  He was in for two sets of downs, did a bit of this and a bit of that, nothing spectacular.  The paper claimed season ticket and jersey sales have almost made up for the money they spent on his contract.  Geez.  Here’s a bit of irony.  Tavaris Jackson followed Favre and played well into the fourth quarter.  He looked great.  His passes were crisp; he didn’t hesitate.  Seemed to know what he was about.  Then John David Booty stepped in and looked good, too.

It made wonder if the coaching staff has picked Favre for an additional reason to the apparent one, that is taking an already good team deeper into the playoff season.  Maybe, just maybe they hope his play and presence will elevate the work of Tavaris Jackson and/or John David Booty.  Maybe, just maybe Favre plays a couple of years, these guys apprentice from one of the best to play the game and become our quarterbacks of the future?  If I can think of it, someone else can, too.

Dogs

The Girls After Their Operations

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Lughnasa                         Waning Green Corn Moon

We move into the new moon tomorrow, the moon that will see us well into September, the harvest moon.

Rigel and Vega do not feel good.  They have lain around ever since returning from the vet and their surgery.  When I came downstairs, they lay together, Vega’s head on Rigel’s chest.  Littermates hang together throughout life; Hilo and Kona still  sleep together and cuddle, 8 years after leaving mom behind.

I guessed Vega’s weight to be  90 lbs and she weighed out at 86.5.  I guessed Rigel at 73 and she came back 74.5.

Political agony has not ended with the demise of the Bush administration.  Now we begin to see why the left has not trusted the Democratic party for years.  Even with solid majorities in both houses division between fiscally liberal and fiscally conservative Democrats make passage of health care reform of any meaningful kind unlikely.

Dogs, Politics

Free kittens. Spaded.

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Lughnasa                    Waning Green Corn Moon

Rigel and Vega have returned home, a bit foggy and uncertain.  Spayed now, they have to be on home rest for the next 10 days.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll make that.

Kate and I saw a cute poster on the bulletin board posted in the airlock going out of the Festival Grocery.  Done in crayon it said, “Free kittens.  Spaded.”

These lectures on the cycles of American political thought I’m listening to right now have prompted a considerable amount of noodling, most of  it focused right now on the central paradox of our democracy.  A solution borne of the Enlightenment, our government and in particular our Constitution and Bill of Rights makes a lot effort to protect the individual and that crucial virtue which ensures individualism, liberty.

The paradox at the core of our nation is this:  government exists to co-ordinate and organize a community, yet its chief underlying value is individualism.  Thus, the purpose of government, focused on community, stands over against the individual it exists to preserve.  This paradox, unresolvable, lies at the fulcrum of so many of our political disagreements.  I’m not any further along with this right now, but its on my mind.