• Tag Archives Vega

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • The Girls After Their Operations

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Free kittens. Spaded.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Politics 📎and tagged