Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Busy Days?


                           Busy Days?



I guess I could take a break from my busy day and sneak a few words into the blog. 

Did I say busy?  Hmmm…  Well, of course it all depends on your definition of “busy”.

“I’ve been so busy…” Well, you’ve heard that and you know how everyone says that – they’re busy doing this and busy doing that.  Too busy to do this and too busy to do that. 

But I’d be really surprised if that was actually the case.  Busy is such a subjective word.  What you consider busy I might think was an easy day and visa-versa.  It depends a lot on priorities, too.  What you consider important or what you actually want to do.

I’m pretty sure I was busy today, but of course it was a retired dude’s kind of busy. 

For example:

My mornings are busy with the routines I’ve developed (fallen into) since I retired.  Get up when I darn well feel like it.  (Yay!)  Clean up, dress and let the dog out of her crate.  Feed her and let her outside to “decorate” the side yard as she sees fit.  Pick up the decorations in a small bag and donate them to the trashcan.  And of course she has to bark a bit, usually.  Seems like it doesn’t take much to fire her up most days.    Another trait I have to work on dissuading her from.  Then it’s a fresh cuppa coffee and the morning paper, which I read more thoroughly nowadays than I used to.  Then?  Well, then I generally have some plan of attack for most days, a focus.  But, then again, not all days.  Some mornings I just log onto the computer and see if anything strikes me as something I might like or want to do. 

Usually something comes to mind.  Whether it’s applying more paint to something that direly needs it, cleaning this or fixing that, going here or going there.  Or it may just be a day where I write a nice letter to a friend or take the dog out for a long stroll. 

However the day turns out, whatever I do, essential or seemingly frivolous, at the end of it I always want to believe that the day mattered and that it made a difference. 

There is a lovely story that I want to share with you concerning this very thing.  It goes like this:

 “Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.

One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?"

The young man paused, looked up, and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."

"I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die."

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!"

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he turned to me and said,

"It made a difference for that one.”
― Loren Eiseley

It mattered to that starfish. 

And I like to think that most days mattered to me too, more or less.

And so let’s now divert from the philosophic portion of this particular blog and continue with some doggie stories. 

You probably knew that was coming, didn’t ya?

For those of you not interested in more Trixi tales, I bid you an affectionate adios.  I’ll see you back here sometime soon.

OK gang, you still with me?  Then off we go…

For those of you who are keeping track of the “incidents” concerning our new dog Trixi, you might want to click off a couple more.  As you might remember, she scared us a while back by slipping off her collar and making an unexpected sojourn to our neighbor’s front yard.  She was just checking out their concrete goose, apparently.  It’s one of those concrete goose statues you see all over, but this one happens to be wearing a red coat and that is, I’m guessing, what attracted her.  She did came back when I called, so that’s a point in her favor.  After that particular jailbreak I decided to replace her collar with a harness we’d bought her specifically for walking, an Easy Walk type.  It has its leash link in the front of it rather than behind the dog’s head, so if the dog tries to pull away from you, its design twists the animal to the right and back toward you.  It works pretty well, too.  Anyhow, I decided to leave it on in place of the collar that she slipped out of.  After a couple of weeks wearing it, I wondered if it might be a little uncomfortable for her as it was fairly snug, so I got a “regular” dog harness that I thought might be OK and feel a bit more comfy for her. 

She figured out how to slip that harness in two days flat!  Back on went the Easy Walk.  Unfortunately she had apparently been pondering the angles and straps of the EZ Walk too and ended up slipping that one also.  Again we were lucky and she returned from the neighbors when called.

What the heck do I do with this Houdini now?

After a hurried phone consultation with our vet, I got a recommendation to try asking a local dog trainer about collars. I called him the next day and he said to come on up and we’d do a “meet and greet”, the mutt and me. 

Or is it the mutt and I?

We drove (actually I drove and Trix rode) up to the trainer’s place on that rainy, dreary day, parked my car and saw the trainer stick his head out the door and wave me and Trix to come in.

The dog and I scooted from the car to the building, trying our best to stay between the raindrops and not succeeding very well.  Jim, the trainer, was a very friendly chap and we talked quite a while about collars and his training methods.  I agreed to join one of his training groups starting up in a week and also wrote down some of his ideas of collars I might try.  He first showed me a Martingale collar that is used on a lot of greyhounds.  Those dogs have smaller heads and strong necks, so a regular collar will slip right off.  That description sounded a lot like our buddy Trix.  The Martingale looks like a regular collar except it has a chain loop in the front, so when the dog pulls, the loop contracts and pulls the collar tighter.  It’s similar in effect to a choke chain except it shrinks the whole collar at once instead at one point like the choke chain and will not jam.  He also showed me a Sprenger prong collar, a nasty-looking chain device that has, like its name implies, prongs that point into the dog’s neck.  They are NOT sharp and are only there to attract the dog’s attention when it pulls.  I slipped one on Trix and we walked around the trainer’s big room.  Trixi was remarkably amenable to walking and NOT pulling when wearing that one!  So when I returned home I ordered one of each off the Internet.  Now we’ll see how things go when they’re delivered!  We’ll also see how the training goes as Trix and I start next week.

So wish Trix good luck and wish me patience, fortitude, resilience, courage and… more patience.



Sunday, March 1, 2015

The Great Spackle Caper



       The Great Spackle Caper






Another doggone snowy Sunday, but at least it’s not a zillion degrees below zero like most of February has been this year.  This particular snowy day, to differentiate it from the myriad other snowy and cold days inflicted upon us this winter, started around midnight last night with a light dusting of snow and was followed by heavier stuff in the wee hours.  My son works third shift and reported this morning that it was pretty steady over the dark hours of the night and that driving home was more than a bit dicey.  So the calendar now says it’s the first of March and we haven’t been anywhere near normal this winter, in temperature or in snowfall.  One’s been way higher and the other way lower.  I’d like to say it’s been a typical winter for hereabouts, but it really hasn’t.  It’s been pretty grim.  Granted we’ve had worse in past years, but not a whole lot worse.  Anyhow, the calendar is wending its slow, methodical way toward spring and in a few weeks I’ll probably look back at these words and wonder at their impatience.

Now for the latest.

As some of you may remember, we rescued a dog back in November last year, about a week before Thanksgiving, and she’s been a real humdinger for us.  She’s a smidge over 40 pounds and a mix between Shepherd, Boxer and Terrier.  That’s according to the papers we got with her from the rescue place.  I’m not sure how they derived that lineage, but its probably close.  I’d probably peg her more likely as a cross between a pit bull, a whitetail deer and a goat.  I’ll get into the goat reference in a minute. 

Just remember that goats eat ANYTHING!

Our rescue people, One of a Kind out of Akron, received her from the Mahoning Pound.  That’s all the history that’s been written down about her, so her life is a mystery to us for its first three-four years.  She’s had puppies we do know, ten pups in the last litter we’ve been told, and more than one litter, too, according to our vet.  She’s spayed now so that’s definitely in her past.  Her color is what’s called brindle, sort of a medium brown with faint, almost tiger-like, striping.  Brown and white face, white chest and white paws.  Long, deer-like ears, one of which is bent inward like she’s giving you a military salute when you see her.

Our family has always had dogs as far back as I can remember and so has my wife’s family.  This new dog is fifth in a line of canines my wife and I have owned in our married life and she may be the largest.  She was 40 pounds when we got her and we’ve added a few since then, as she started out pretty skinny. 

She’s been a good dog, I suppose.  She’s friendly toward us in the family, but that’s normal and expected, as dogs consider their owners as part of their pack.  She likes other people when properly introduced to her, but can be a little intimidating to people knocking at the door.  I’m not too upset at that.  Larger more intimidating dogs can make a house very much less ripe for break-ins or other problems from outside. 

The rescue place where we got her had named her “Trick” as they received her near Halloween.  We preserved most of their name selection by renaming her Trixi. 

She seems comfortable with it.

Readers of my blog might remember her actions not long after we got her involving her ingestion of a LOT of Baker’s Chocolate and my procedure on how to make her “offload” the dangerous treat. 

I thought that I might get lucky and that would be the worst we would see from our new buddy. 

I should have known better…

Here’s the latest chapter in Trix’s ongoing story:

I retired a week before Thanksgiving last year.  I fiddled around for a while after that momentous day, doing this and that and helping my wife with Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations.  She makes lots of cookies that we give away and mail to various relatives and my assistance was appreciated.  At least I think so.    After the holidays were over I decided to tackle some maintenance issues with the house that had been put off for way too long.  Interior painting was the first on agenda.

I started of course by moving furniture to make various walls available for preparation and painting.  During which preparation I used spackle to patch various holes and other dings and scrapes in the walls.  This is an old house, so the imperfections in the walls were numerous and all over.  I’d just spackled a number of holes one day and not long after that noticed Trix eyeballing the pink stuff lower down on the walls.  (The spackle I used went on pink and dried white.)  As dogs have been known to do, she took a lick of the stuff.  And another.  Apparently it had an odor that was pleasing to her. 

I shooed her away.  Spackle was not a food item and the label said it was poison with a capital “P”.  So I made an effort to keep her away from where I was working. 

But good intentions and real life are sometimes not always synonymous.

On Wednesday this past week I was plugging away at another project upstairs in our house – repairing a wall.  A long time ago a hole was made in that wall of our bedroom.  It’s been so long ago I’m not really sure how the hole was made, but there are some vague recollections about someone (could it have been me?) taking a punch at the wall in a fit of pique and going through.  (Shame on whoever it was!)  I was younger and dumber back then, so I just “patched” the hole with some metallic tape, then painted over the tape when I painted the room.  The damage was behind our bed’s headboard so wasn’t really an eyesore.  But now, since I was doing projects, I decided to fix that hole correctly.  I started with the “screen and spackle” technique where you attach a screen or grill patch over the hole then spackle over it.  Then sand and respackle until it is smooth and able to be painted.  I’d put the first layer of spackle on the grid and used quite a bit of it to cover the metal, then went downstairs for a sandwich while it started to dry.  After eating it and fiddling around down there for a little while, I went back upstairs to see how it was drying.  When I took a look at the repair I was confused.  The metallic grid was clean and shiny.  No spackle on it at all, pink or white!  I rubbed my eyes and looked again.  Yes, clean.  No spackle.  Wait a minute.  I KNEW I had done the work – I wasn’t THAT senile yet.  I looked on the floor – could the stuff have fallen off?  No, nothing was lying on the floor.  I shook my head, trying to rearrange the cobwebs in there and looked again.  Could the stuff have oozed into the cracks of the grid and gone inside the wall as unlikely as that scenario was?  Nope, none evident.  Then an icy chill ran down my back. 

Could it have been that stupid dog? 

When I found her she was flopped on the couch looking sleepy and real innocent.  That is until I noticed the smudge of spackle on her lower lip.  Holy cow!  She’d eaten ALL of the stuff!

I called the vet immediately and was told to use the “table salt or peroxide” trick to make her vomit it up.  I only could get a smidge of salt into her pie-hole this time before she clamped down and stubbornly refused to open her mouth.  It would have taken a scissors jack to open those jaws then, so I bundled her up and ran for the vet so she could do… whatever it was she needed to do.

They muzzled her and poured some hydrogen peroxide down her gullet, then handed her leash to me to take outside so she could vomit.  So I stood in the cold and snow watching the dog watching me.  She eliminated the OTHER way profusely, but nothing out of her mouth.  She seemed oddly normal for a poisoned animal – no convulsions, no drooling, and no wheezing.  Just a patient look as if to say, “Are we done out here, doofus?”

I returned inside the vet’s office and reported the non-upchucking.  The vet said to just take her home and watch her.  Feed her a bit more than normal to “keep things moving” internally and if she demonstrated any signs of illness to bring her in no later than Friday morning so the vet could “get it out”.

So I took the obscenely normal-acting dog home and fed her.  And watched her.  And watched some more. 

She could NOT have been more normal.

The vet called the next morning and I reported Trix’s condition.  And she called the following morning.  I repeated the report.

I read the label on the spackle during that waiting period.  Not good reading.  “Call the Poison Control Center” and “Do not induce vomiting” were mentioned.

Trix just continued doing her doggie stuff as time went by, blithely oblivious to our anxiety.

I’m sure the vet thinks I dreamed up this whole escapade, but NO, I didn’t!  Honestly!

And that’s where we stand today.  It’s been said that cats have nine lives, so let’s add another ancestor to my mutt.  There’s gotta be some cat in there somewhere! 

Along with the goat…