• Tag Archives Rigel

  • De-fence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                   Waning Harvest Moon

    OH, boy.   We let Vega and Rigel out this morning and Brad, the neighbor who returned Rigel yesterday, gave us a call about 15 minutes later, “I think they’re out again.”

    Sure enough.  I drove over to Brad’s, got both of them in the red car and drove home.  They are not, it turns out, digging under the fence.  They jump over it!  This creates a really big problem.  We have an acre plus of fenced yard, most of it filled with trees.  We can’t watch our dogs on this sized property which is why we have de fence.

    This could be a deal breaker for keeping Rigel and Vega.  We’re investigating several options, but the bottom line for us is that they have to have access to the whole backyard.  If not, they can’t be dogs in the way both they and we like, that is, free roaming, able to do what dogs do within the borders of our fence.  It’s a pretty generous space.

    They are, however, coon hounds as well as irish wolfhounds.  Both have a strong prey instinct, but the coon hounds also have the instinct to follow and tree the prey.  Jumping tall buildings, or fences in this case, in pursuit of prey apparently comes with the breed.  We didn’t know this until now.  It just didn’t occur to us.  We focused on Wolfhoundness and neglected to consider the coon hound.  Our bad.

    This saga is not over, but it is at a very frustrating impasse right now.

    They are sweet, kind, lovable dogs just doing what comes naturally.  Not their fault.  If we keep them, we have to find a solution that lets them roam our yard and not the neighborhood.  Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh!


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Still No Rigel

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

    The second night with no Rigel.  I took fliers to filling stations, veterinary offices, grocery stores and the local humane society.  Tomorrow I plan to distribute a few more at baseball fields, the town rec center, those sorts of places.  After that, we call back to various places and wait.

    The driveway has a nice fresh black coat on it; we have a woodland edge to balance our orchard and few trees planted out in the prairie grass.  My neighbor (not the suicidal one) came over and noted we’d planted a couple of hawthorns on his property.  He said he didn’t care and I said I didn’t either.  They’ll have the same affect there and at that point the properties run into each other on an open field.

    Kate’s home.  She looks better, but still ragged.  We see the surgeon on Thursday morning.  Could be some big changes here after that.

    The second in my series:  Liberalism in Our Time has gotten hold of me, it’s now the filter through which I read articles, think about politics and  our common life.  I just learned about a guy named Herbert Crowley today.  He was the architect (and an architect) of what some call the welfare state.  His thought has some interesting resonance for me, since I’m struggling in this series with my radical critique of liberal thought.  When I get to the Future of Liberalism, I’m going to have come down somewhere on that question, which I’ve  sort of neatly side-stepped so far.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Faith and Spirituality Our Land and Home permaculture Politics 📎and tagged

  • One of Those Days

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon (visible in the western daytime sky)

    Kate has begun the dreary process of checking with animal control, vets and the humane society.  At the same time she’s begun canning tomatoes, a task she finds soothing.  It’s a good thing since she has a cold and numerous pains throughout her body.  She prefers to keep going, get things done.  In the past I’ve tried to get her to relax, take it easy a bit, but just this year I realized this is part of her spirit, her who she is-ness.  Now I congratulate her.

    Today is one of those days.  Rigel’s still missing.  The borderline asphalt company will show up sometime today to seal the driveway.  Paula and the Ecological gardens folks have begun installation of a woodland edge garden.  To put a nice bow on the day I have my semi-annual teeth cleaning at 11:00.  I moved the vehicles to the street, got the gate ready for Paula, then took off and bought 10 more bales of hay from Al Pearson.

    Al’s a 70+ farmer who sells his bales right off highway 10.  He bales the hay and sells it retail.  We all win.  He’s a ramrod straight 6′ 1″ sturdy Scandinavian.  He told me, “We like our repeat customers.”


    📂This entry was posted in Cooking Dogs permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Drama

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                  Waning Harvest Moon

    Rigel has not come home.  We don’t know where she is or how she is.  Her absence is palpable.  At night she sits on the couch with me, her head in my lap as I watch a few TV shows, wind down from the day.  She was not there tonight.

    Our neighbor left in an ambulance again.  Another suicide attempt, this time with tylenol pm.  We cannot know the pain in another persons life, not even those close to us.  The barrier of flesh and mind holds us out, even when we try to overcome it.  This is the truth in solipsism.

    There were two police cars, an ambulance and people going in and out of the house.  I watched for a while, behind a gauze curtain and felt like an Italian grandmother leaning out a window in a Boston neighborhood.  Drama, the kind that touches lives daily on every block in every city and town in the world, grabs us, makes us want to know how things come out.

    Kate gave his wife a call and offered to be there for her.  She has a big heart and a generous spirit.

    The longer Rigel is gone, the more a feeling of sadness creeps over me.  I don’t want to feel it.  It seems as if I do that I’ve given up on her and I haven’t, but now she’s gone at night.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Friends 📎and tagged

  • Waiting for Rigel to Come Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon

    Vega returned home.  Kona let all the dogs inside (her major outdoor trick) and Vega walked into our bedroom where I had laid down for a bit.  When I got up to see if Rigel had come home with her, she apparently got up on the bed because I found many burrs and stickers deposited on my side of the bed.

    Rigel is still out there, somewhere.

    Until she comes home or we decide to try and find her an alternate way, I won’t take Vega out to discover their escape hatch.  I want Rigel to use it to come home.  There’s probably a subtle psychological truth in that, but I’ll leave it to you to discern.

    On another note, this is a holiday, a holiday of ending.  Labor Day, aside from its apparent purpose, has acquired a status, at least here in the northern US, as the end of summer.  This comes not only from the meteorological changes, September 1st is the end of meteorological summer, but also the return of kids to school.  Here in Minnesota people go up to their lake cabins to shut them up for the winter and the whole atmosphere becomes one of back to work, time to get serious again.

    As a holiday, it has a certain numinosity, a feeling of difference, of quiet, of peaceful.  Today I have a sense of lassitude, a languor.  That’s partly from the intense work of the last week in researching and writing Roots of Liberalism and partly my body’s response to holidayness, perhaps you could call it its holiness, a time set apart, different from all other days.

    Waiting for Rigel.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Great Wheel Holidays 📎and tagged

  • On the Lam

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Ideas.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Puppy Chess

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Fences

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Post-Op Pups

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Sport 📎and tagged