• Tag Archives Rigel

  • Mammals Here Nap

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Health World History 📎and tagged

  • Litter Mates

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Faith and Spirituality Family Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Fencing

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs GeekWorld Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Kate on the mend

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Family Sport 📎and tagged

  • More Fence.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Family 📎and tagged

  • Gnashing of Teeth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Garden permaculture Writing 📎and tagged

  • Rigel Redux

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                            Waxing Blood Moon

    After reviewing the stats for ancientrails, I learned something old.  During the time when Rigel and her sidekick Vega staged their break-outs readership went up.  My assumption is that conflict drove the rise.  Can man outsmart dog?

    Chapter 14 or so.  Vega and Rigel have not escaped the yard since the electric fence went up with the one exception I orchardfence709mentioned where Rigel opened the truck gate.  There is, though, a follow-on.  While gnashing my teeth  about the escapes and to allow Vega and Rigel some outside time, I reversed field and put them inside the fence we put up to keep them out of the orchard.  Did you follow that?

    This  only lasted for a few days while Kate and I gathered our strength and solved the larger problem, then we let them back out into the larger backyard.  Now, however, Rigel yearns for those days in the orchard.  So what does she do?  Yes.  She climbs into the orchard.  Do you hear those teeth again?  Right now I don’t know how she does it.

    On another front.  The bees.  Mark Nordeen graciously set me in bee-keeping this spring with the loan of a bee suit as well as hive boxes and supers (for the honey).  He came over frequently at first, then gradually let me handle the bees on my own.  We are, however, in the fall and I need to make the bees comfortable for winter.

    Since bees are warm climate critters, not even native to our shores, winters alone can kill an entire hive.  As  you can imagine, our winter puts a good deal of stress on a hive.  That stress plus some disease and pesticides contributes to Colony Collapse Disorder.

    Elise, Kate’s colleague and Mark’s wife, got a new horse, an heirloom breed and a black mare.  While putting the horse in a trainer (Elise rides dressage.), the horse kicked Elise on the chin, threw her fifteen feet and knocked her out.  The kick separated skin from bone around and below her jawline.  She’s better, but still suffering head-aches and neck pain.  As you might imagine.

    Anyhow that means the bees and I are on our own on this getting ready for winter deal.  A learning experience for me.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Yelp!

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Fall                                        Waxing Blood Moon

    Yelp!  Ah, what sweet music to my ears.  Here I am, shame on me, celebrating a cry of pain from an animal I love.  It is, however, a liberating sound in this strange regard; if we are not able to contain Rigel–she is the leader of jail breaks–, she’ll have to go back to the breeder;  so to keep her confined is to maintain her in the home she loves and where she is loved.  She doesn’t really runaway.  She follows her nose over the fence and through the woods to whichever neighbor catches her first.  She would come back if left to her own devices, but the realities of suburban living don’t allow her own devices.  Therefore, Yelp!, is a good thing.

    This is probably the largest project of a domestic nature I’ve ever attempted.  It took a while because I had to learn something new at every turn of the page, but with the voltage flowing and the dogs contained for now, I can mark it down as successful.  A big deal for me.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • No Title

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

    Yesterday and today were full of new information, new faces.  Both days challenged my capacity to sit in one place for a long time.  The 40+ Aeron chairs in the Minnesota Foundation’s board room made finding a good chair easy and did make the day more bearable than the plastic backed metal chairs in the Northstar Ballroom.  Both days were long and challenging mentally.  A good thing.  But tiring.

    Tomorrow Kate and I go see our financial planners, I call it visiting our money.  We want to discuss how they will generate cash for our payouts and have them run them run our projections using a 4% drawdown rather than the 4.6/4.7% they used.  This will give us a new and hopefully longer time horizon before our money runs out, but it will also shrink the amount of money available each year.  This is a trade-off than another consultant, Ruth Hayden, says is necessary since we’re all living longer.

    Unless you are very wealthy, living large and living longer are incompatible.  That’s not to say we will, in any wise, be hurting in retirement; it does mean the cruises, trips to Hawaii and expensive purchases will have to be truncated.  Bearable.  Our life does not revolve around luxury.

    The solution to our fence jumpers, according to Junior Lehman, the breeder and caretaker for a large pack of hounds, is an electrified fence.  I thought this was most likely the cheapest and easiest solution, but until I heard from somebody with some experience I didn’t want to spend money on it.  Now it will be off to Fleet Farm and hopefully we can begin letting Rigel and Vega outside again to romp and play, develop as dogs.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Family

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                              Waning Harvest Moon

    Alert:  more dog stuff below.

    These dogs.  They have a sense of playfulness,  athleticism and a joy in each others company.  And we’re ruining that right now.  We have them on leads because they jump the fence.  They get tangled up in them and have no fun outside,  inside they’re uncertain what all this means and they act unhappy.  Inside, too, their energy, unreleased from vigorous play (and, it must be pointed out, fence jumping) gets expressed.  This is two 75 pound + animals baring their teeth and jumping on each other.

    We love it that our dogs have the run of the woods.  They have a shed to hunt under and one to sleep under.  They have woodpiles filled with critters that interest them.  There is a plastic swimming pool they can jump in when its hot and water to drink when they’re thirsty.  They organize themselves into a pack and enjoy each others company.  Being on leads cramps all that.

    Right now we’re sad because we can’t figure out how to give these big puppies the freedom they need while keeping them safe and us out of trouble with the law.  A conundrum.  This situation exceeds our doggy knowledge by a lot.  We need help and we’re seeking it from the dog’s breeder, our vet and others who have coon hound experience.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Family 📎and tagged