Category Archives: Dogs

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health

Eureka!

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                 Waning Green Corn Moon

Got some sleep.  Feel better this morning.  A busy day ahead.  Groceries, recycling, straw, more weeding.

Kate comes back from Denver today.  I  had a bit of a snit yesterday when she wanted to stay an extra day.  My Woolly meeting is on Monday and she’s a big part of the get ready for it plan.  Also, her birthday is Tuesday–65!–and I have an evening ready for us.  I wanted her back her with me, but felt conflicted because she wanted to stay with Jon.  He had a bad ride home from the hospital.  A moot point as it turns out, since it would have cost around $500 to change the ticket with $150 airline fee, $30 Orbitz and $320 in additional ticket costs.  Not proud of myself over this, but I’m glad she’ll be home today.

Vega or Rigel, remember them?, ate my pocket moleskine diary and a current novel I’m reading, Consider Philebas.  By eat I mean shred and coat with drool.  The diary’s pages are recoverable and Consider Philebas, though badly mauled and wet, contains the pages I’ve not yet read, which is good enough for me.  Just one more of the V&R stories.

Over the last few days I have dutifully filled the large rubber water container we have outside.  And refilled it.  Those big dogs, I thought, drink a lot of water.  Then, shortly after I filled it yesterday morning, I put the hose away, turned around to see Vega curled up in the water container.  She was happy.  Archimedes could have had his eureka moment watching her.  90 pounds of puppy displaces a lot of water.

The Denver Olsons have had a rough summer.  Hirschel their 6 year old German Shorthair developed cancer and died.  hirschJon’s surgery has created the kind of upset recovery from any surgery always does.  Next up is Gabe’s surgery to install a port for his prophylactic factor.  That comes on the 27th.  Not to mention that they started back teaching two weeks ago.   A lot for a young family to absorb.  Why I was conflicted.  (pic:  Hirschel)

Aging, Dogs, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Watch the Video

Leave a comment

Summer                 Waxing Green Corn Moon’

Former Door County dairy farmer and Woolly Mammoth Bill Schmidt passes the Dairyland baton to northern Indiana’s Fair Oaks Farm.  Why?  They produce enough milk to provide for the dairy needs of an 8 million person city.  They have 25,000 acres and 32,000 cows, milked 3 times a day on a moving carousel.  Hard to believe?  Watch the video.

Kate and I spent the morning at the Minnesota Spine Center.  We met a confident and capable surgeon who gave Kate some possibilities she had not had before.  Whether any of them will relieve what has now been a 20 year 0rdeal that has caused a lot of pain and cost here 3 1/2 inches in height we do not know, but we will.

Vega the wonder dog continues.  Now she has found the netaphim running through the raised beds.  She has gnawed on some of it though she cut through none of them.  She’s an intelligent, active, inquisitive dog.

The Blackberry Storm I got at the Verizon store got terrible reviews when it first came out.  I have used it for a few days now and can say that the problems I’ve encountered so far fall the into the severely annoying class, frustrating but not crippling.  Example.  Like the I-Phone, the device it attempts to copy, it has an acclerometer that switches the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape when you turn the phone.  Unlike the I-Phone the Storm does not always respond to the turn, at least not right away.  Likewise the internet link acts up sometimes, offering less than the full website for viewing.

On the other hand it has a full qwerty keyboard in landscape mode and two thumbed typing can  be accurate and fast.  It also has a smaller footprint than the I-Phone, something I appreciate.  It will work for my needs just fine.

I’m back to working out with the full routine:  flexibility, resistance, balance and aerobics.   Body and mind work better when exercised.

Dogs, Myth and Story

Quieter Dogs

Leave a comment

Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

Kate’s plane is in the air, but 30 minutes or so late.  I’ll leave in a bit to pick her up.  It’s a long hike to the airport from here.

The dogs have not been noisy today.  Daddy was home.

Yesterday, via Netflix, I finished the first season of TrueBlood.  My fascination with horror, monsters and science fiction has been lifelong and I imagine it will be with me when I head out on my 49 day journey to the next adventure.  As an HBO program, TrueBlood takes full advantage of a sub-genre of horror, the vampire romance.   There is sex, betrayal, monsters and demons of the night and a lot of Cajun country atomspherics.  The one  true Cajun speaker in the first year turned out to be a fake, however, and a murderer.  There was an audio tape, Cajun dialect for Actors, in his affects.