Tag Archives: Gertie

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health

Bandaged

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Mid-Summer                                                                                 Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Picked Kate up at a very quiet Fairview-University.  She got into the truck cab under her own steam, stands on her new hip and walks short distances with the aid of the walker.  Her progress from last Friday amazes me.  She tires quickly, of course, but she’s already on the mend.

Now the fireworks.  Rigel, who hates thunder, doesn’t distinguish between thunder and fireworks.  She becomes agitated, barks.  No fun for her.  Or us.

I discovered a new sensation with Kona’s injury yesterday.  I put the bandage on, wrapped the coban around her thorax to hold the bandage in place, and the dog who had been snapping and biting, shrieking and limping, bounded up the stairs as if nothing was the matter at all.  Today, after Kate got home, I checked it for heat or tenderness, both signs of infection and it felt cool, plus she didn’t flinch.  Being able to help her move from a limping, snarling state to a normal carefree state in just a couple of minutes gave me a lot of satisfaction.  Made me realize what Kate feels in the urgent care.  It’s a rush and a pleasant one.

Gertie, who almost certainly bit Kona, is asleep at my feet, looking innocent.  In this instance my guess is that Kona snapped at Gertie and Gertie bit back.  Kona has become a bit crankier as she ages.  I don’t think this will be a long term problem.

It’s going to be a busy July.

Dogs

Sigh

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Beltane                                                            Waxing Garlic Moon

So, this guy has this dog.  He puts up an electric fence to stop the dog.  The dog jumps up on the fence, standing as a mountain goat, all four feet together, on the electric fence and the wooden top rail.  She’s laughing at me.  It’s another episode in the long running series, Are You Smarter Than A Three-Year Old Dog?  Up to this point, apparently not.

Gertie is a special case, a special needs dog, only I don’t know what her needs are.  Why does she need to be in the orchard?  No clue.  Why does she snarl at strangers?  Territoriality I imagine, but what would make her back off?  Don’t know.  She seems to have a hair trigger with the other dogs.  Why?  I’m hoping it was partly (mostly) induced by Sollie, her male companion for the last two years.

I’ve put up a run of bamboo fence and two pieces of corrugated metal roofing material.  Working so far.

Tomorrow I’m going to the hardware store and buy material for another shot at this.  This time I’m going to get the plasticized wire I have on top of the fence and run it a couple of inches above the electric fence.  She pulls herself over the fence, but when she does I’m guessing she’s not completing the circuit, so the electric fence is just soft rope. (It has wire woven through it.

Dogs

One Shocking Day

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Beltane                                                          Waxing Garlic Moon

One more shocking day.  Headed out this morning with Mark to Fleet Farm.  If you’ve not ever encountered Fleet Farm, your life is not complete.  A megastore before there were megastores Fleet Farm carries all that stuff you can’t find anywhere else.  Electric fence supplies in this case.  Yes, my dog barrier creation abilities have been tested once again, this time by new arrival, Gertie.

Gertie is a little dog by our standards, but she’s athletic, so the pull up and belly over the orchard fence proved little challenge for her.  You might think we wouldn’t care if the dogs were in the orchard, but our trees and blueberries have soft earth around them.  There must be an invisible Dig Here sign over each one, for no sooner does a canine enter the orchard (is this sounding a bit garden of edenish?) than soil begins to fly.  At some point, too, the dog encounters netaphim (nope, not seraphim), but a drip irrigation method designed to deliver water just where you want it.  Netaphim is chewy.  OH, Boy! OH, Boy!  Neither one of these activities make the orchard keepers happy.

So, once again, I put up insulators, strung the rope laced with wire, jerry-rigged a gate and joined the whole to the already existing 1,600 feet of electric fence bordering our back yard and now the orchard.  Plugged it back in.

Now we wait for the yelp that will indicate Gertie has learned about Mr. Wire.

Welcome home, Gertie.

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, 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.

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.

Bees, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

We Inch, Slowly, Toward Spring

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Spring                                                                 Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

Kate comes home tonight.  Yeah!  I miss her when she’s gone. I’ll follow our usual procedure and pick her up at the Loon Cafe, conveniently located at the end of the light rail service 650-herb-spiralfrom the airport.  Makes the drive much shorter and I get a good meal in the bargain.

After the biting and the barking and the adrenaline I figured out a somewhat complicated solution to the Rigel/Sollie problem.  It involves making sure that one set of dogs is in their crate before admitting the others to the house.  This way nobody trespasses on anybody else’s territory.

It demands a careful watching of when Rigel and Vega are away hunting so I can let Sollie, Gertie and Kona inside.  Or, alternatively, when Rigel and Vega are on the deck and the others are out hunting.  A bit baroque I know but I have no more indentations in the leg.

(pics from April of last year)

As the Bee Hiving moon goes from New to Full, our yard will lose its snow and we will have several species of flowers in bloom, a few vegetables in the ground and as it begins to wane we should have our new bees hived and happy in their new homes.  There are things that need to happen before this last, not the least moving the hives to the orchard, cleaning all the frames of propolis and burning the old hive boxes and frames I got from Mark, the bee mentor.650-apple-blossoms

Seeing the bulbs planted in the fall begin to emerge always heartens me because it reminds me of hours of labor spent in the cool air of late October or early November.  We won’t be here for that time next year, so probably no new bulbs this year.

In fact, I’m declaring finished to our orchard, garden, vegetable, bee expansions.  We’ll stick with no more than three hives, the raised beds and other beds we have in the vegetable garden, the trees and bushes we have in the orchard and the flower beds we have in place now.

We’ll always have to replace dead plants and put in new ones in their place.  We have to care for the fruit trees and bushes, plant vegetables and maintain the bee colonies so we’ll have to plenty to keep us occupied.  I just want to get good at the stuff we have and begin to slowly limit the work we do over the course of the year.

Dogs, Travel

Travel Agent? C’est moi.

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Spring                                                      Waning Bloodroot Moon

As travel agent for our house, I make reservations, check on them, plan itineraries and handle changes to travel plans.  Like several of my domestic responsibilities I have these duties because of misspent time over the last couple of decades + learning how to use computers, then the web.  Mostly I find it makes life easier, quicker, broader and deeper.  Once in a while, like this morning, it takes more time than a comparable activity would have a few years back.  When I made Kate’s travel plans for her upcoming birthday junket to Denver (Ruthie’s 5th!), I inadvertently clicked on an incorrect e-mail address, charlebellis@gmail.com.  I made this mistake years ago, but somewhere in this infernal machine, it helpfully brings back all my past sins against perfect computing.  So, I had to call the airlines to get them to resend the info.  Talking to a real person.  How 20th century.

We fed five dogs this morning:  Rigel, Vega, Kona, Sollie and Gertie.  We’re used to this, but each collection of dogs has a different personality and require different food arrangements.  We’ve not got this one perfected quite yet.  But we will.

Gotta go now.  A China tour to prepare and a legcom agenda to flesh out.