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Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

imaginary social dilemma

Filed under: dogs,humility — alison @ 23:01

 

Yes, he is wearing a sweater.

Yes, he is wearing a sweater.

The other day I took the dogs for a walk in the Parc Regional de la Nature at Papineau and Gouin. Pepe’s stamina is not so good these days, so I tucked a baby carrier in a bag just in case. And I did end up using it, posing great, if imaginary, social difficulties. Sometimes I could completely hide him inside the carrier and I could imagine that other people assumed it was a baby. But mostly his head stuck out. Besides, pretending your dog is a baby is even creepier than just treating it like one. 

I knew that rushing up to people and explaining that YES I Let Him Walk, But He’s Thirteen With Kidney Disease And He Gets Tired, OK? was not the right thing to do. And staring people down with an I Dare You To Say Something expression was not fun for anyone either. So mostly I avoided people’s gaze, which is interesting because when I am not carrying a chihuahua in a baby carrier I’m not aware that I look people in the eye that much.

One possibility would be that I just stop taking him on these walks, and just let him walk up and down the street in front of the house. That would be the sensible thing, right?

Another would be to get a BAT CARRIER to perplex, amaze and amuse.

found on stuffonmymutt.com

Found on stuffonmymutt.com. Thanks, Leanne!

Sunday, August 29th, 2004

a weekend up north

Filed under: amusements,dogs,Mary — alison @ 22:05

We paid an old-fashioned weekend visit to Mark’s friend Mary who was having her end-of-year cottage-closing party on a little lake in the Laurentians. Food was brought by everyone, children were brought by most and dogs were brought by very few (we dropped ours off at the Dog Lady’s on the way up). The drunks were sociable but not lascivious, the children were active and excited but not rude, agressive or whiny, the food was identifiable and nutritious. As this party lasted two days and as many but not all guests made multiple appearances it’s a little hard to count numbers; but I suppose that Saturday night there were about twenty adults. It ended with a bang this afternoon as the last five of us hard-core partiers played a rousing game of Cranium™.

Anyway, it was very nice.

We left this evening in time to pick up the dogs before the 7 pm curfew, giving a lift to a friend. The dogs were happy to see us but bore no apparent resentment towards the Dog Lady. Exactly perfect. We locked Pepe into his usual cage in the back of the station wagon and drew the cover over to muffle the sound of his barking somewhat. I sat in the back seat with Poupoune on my lap and our long-legged friend sat in the front. I quickly realised that Poupoune reeked something awful. After quick and urgent discussion windows (which had been raised against the rain) were lowered and I stuffed Poupoune into a plastic bag to contain the nauseating odor. This arrangement worked quite well, Poupoune being pretty compliant when she knows what is wanted. Upon our return home both dogs were ushered promptly into the bath and thoroughly scrubbed… and de-flead while I was at it.

I think the other dogs at the Dog Lady’s did the territorial thing and peed on them. And then I think the Dog Lady sprayed them with Febreeze.

[originally transmitted by e-mail August 29 2004]

Sunday, May 2nd, 2004

Not sick, just bad.

Filed under: dogs,illness,psychology — alison @ 20:19

Poupoune is my favourite dog. She is alert, attentive, attached and one of the most fully alive of earth’s creatures I have ever known. She is also irritable, ill-tempered and quarrelsome.

This winter she’s been grumpier than usual. Cranky. Snappish even. Things she’s never enjoyed — like having her paws caught during wrestling matches — get snarls and air-bites now. She’s become totally fed up with Pepe, not tolerating his presence anywhere near her. And she’s bitten us three times, drawing blood once. The first two times we could kind of understand what provoked her. But when she and Mark were napping together as usual this week and she bit his leg when he shifted in bed was just too much. I immediately made an appointment with the vet.

As I explained to the vet yesterday, my hypothesis was that she’s in pain and snapping at whoever happens to be nearby. The vet put forth another hypothesis, that she’s becoming blind and panics when approached by someone or something she can’t see.

Well, both hypotheses were eliminated. Her vision is excellent (no cataracts, pupils respond well to light, and she blinks when you tap your hand towards her eye), her joints are smooth, flexible and non-tender, her innards sound and feel perfectly normal, and when she runs excitedly around the room sniffing and leaping she doesn’t hesitate or favour any side or leg. For good measure, her temperature and bloodwork were also checked and show absolutely no abnormalities.

This is when hypothesis 3 was brought out: not sick, just bad. (Or in vet-speak, “exhibiting inappropriate dominant behaviour.”) The first question the vet asked me when exploring this hypothesis was “Does she exhibit this behaviour in one particular place or situation?” The answer being “Yes, in the bed,” the take-home advice was “Don’t let her in the bed any more.” (Recalls the old joke: “Doctor, my arm hurts when I go like this!” “Well, don’t go like that.”) We were also offered psychoactive medication (for her) to help in the behavioural-modification program.

We’re pretty much going ignore the advice. We certainly don’t need drugs to manage her. We were worried she was ill, and $212 later we know she isn’t. We have our answer. She’s 11 lbs / 5 kg (about the size of a cat but without the sharp claws) and bites us maybe once every one or two months. We don’t have kids. It isn’t a safety concern and we enjoy napping with her. We’ll just be a little stricter: she won’t be allowed in the bed without us. And more severe with consequences when she goes too far, because we won’t be worried about her.

[originally transmitted by e-mail May 2, 2004]

Tuesday, April 15th, 2003

FW: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true story

Filed under: Anne,dogs,internet dating — alison @ 22:49

Glossary:
Outremont: well-to-do professionals live there. Rich people too.
Nerve.com: the personals site where I met Adam, and Mark, and Anne (in that order).
100 pounds: about 45 kilos.

>on 4/15/03 3:51 PM, Cummins, Alison at wrote:
>Um, may I forward this? It’s funny and lovely. (Just like you.)

—–Original Message—–
From: Anne McKnight [mailto:______@sympatico.ca]
Subject: Re: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true story

Hi,
A funny story about Internet dating, with the moral being, you never know what will happen.
Remember last fall when I met that cool musician guy with the heady imagination, had a nice coffee with him, after which he asked to meet up again, and then he up-and-said his trials (“”) with Internet dating were over, when we actually hadn’t even been on a ‘date’?  

Well, the scene at that time was kind of bleak.  I was dog-sitting. In outremont.  In a house with no good food to raid, except for dog food, very expensive dog food.  The dog had allergies and had to be given pills often.  The dog’s allergies made its anus itch.  The dog would sit & spin on its poor itchy anus for hours on end.  I didn’t know this was an allergic symptom.  I thought she had to go out.  I took her out alllll the time.  She has no discipline and weighs over 100 pounds, and would drag me down the street, towards other dogs, towards piles of dogshit, towards sodden donuts in gutters, all of which I would pry out of her mouth.  If she put anything in her mouth, it would activate more allergies, more sitting & spinning.  Is it any wonder I turned to alternate-virtual–worlds?  Also, I was writing grants, which in academia means inventing parallel lives you will probably never get to live.  Which I have already not gotten to live about 7 times since I moved here, all those parallel lives recycled back to the drawing board…

So, anyway, I answered the cursory, wildly funny ad on nerve, and started a conversation with this guy, the musician.  Even though I was stuck with the itchy-anus dog, in outremont, with no food but dog food, it made me happy.  I met him, and that made me happy too, since more than ‘dating trials’ I thought, oh at last, someone I can talk to about the freaky things I like, music & etc.  well, that didn’t work out, obviously.  I was dissed-electronically, ick.  

The synchronicity of the conversation was good though, as it got my imagination deceived, productively, into thinking it had an interlocutor.  I wrote a grant proposal to pay for all those things I invented in the parallel worlds that crossed between that conversation & the parallel universe sponsored by the government of quebec.  

So synchronicity point 1, is that K**** says, Sunday, he is working with the guy who is the ***** man at *****, who is this guy.  Oh really, say hi for me.  So, yesterday, Monday, synchronicity 2–I find out that I got the grant.  45K + 10K for equipment, sound & image editing stuff.  I guess I owe that guy a beer some time.  Even though he has a girlfriend, and protocol dictates we will probably never be in a together-drinking situation anytime soon, due to the blowback such an encounter in his single days would oh-so-predictably provoke. Moral of the story:  you never really know, do you?

Chalk up another felicity for parallel, virtual lives, and the unpredictable directions they go…

a

[originally transmitted by e-mail April 15, 2003]

Monday, March 31st, 2003

Return from Nunavut.

Filed under: dogs,Notes from Nunavut — alison @ 08:17

My father arrived back from Nunavut on Friday bearing the following images.

***
Skidoo-driving mothers trailing kamatiks – [dog]sleds – ferry their children back and forth from school. Open vehicles like skidoos are much more popular than warrm, wind-sheltering ones like trucks.

Skidoos are used to hunt caribou. Dogs are used to hunt seals because they can sniff out breathing holes in the ice. By law, dogs must also be used when guides take southern white hunters to bag a polar bear.

***
Northerners don’t think much of southern white hunters. They skin their bear then have the pelt stretched so that a six-foot bear becomes a nine-foot trophy.

***
One of the ministry of education administrators, a southern white woman my father was consulting for, was recently widowed. Her husband was a prominent inuit hunter who died while stranded in a storm so severe that helicopters couldn’t go out to search for him for four days.

His brother explained that if he hadn’t become separated from his kamatik and his dogs, he would have been able to survive two weeks. As it was he was only able to hang on three days.

Only two of his five dogs survived the storm.

***
A northern dog will stand on top of its doghouse in minus forty weather and high winds simply for the sake of being top dog. (“What is a northern doghouse?” “I haven’t been inside one so I can’t really say, but from the outside it would appear to be a packing crate.”)

***
When leaving Arviat for Yellowknife he realised that Yellowknife was a southern city after all: it has trees.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 31, 2003]

Sunday, March 23rd, 2003

First dedicated dog-walk of the season

Filed under: dogs — alison @ 17:37

The weather’s been warmish and drizzly lately so I experimented with taking the dogs on their first walk to the park this year. I’ve taken Poupoune on short excursions to the fabric store from time to time, but not anywhere she was just allowed to run; and Pepe has been entirely confined since October.

Pepe’s experience was mixed. While he was happy to be able to play his favourite game (pee-on-it*) with more scope than the usual kitchen chairs, the excitement and stimulation of all those sights, smells and breezes gave him diarrhea. And he was less than thrilled with the falling-through-wet-snow and plodding-through-slush aspects of the walk; even less so with the occasional swimming-through-snow-melt aspects, and had to be carried most of the way.

Poupoune being generally hardier, with longer legs that allow her to traverse difficult terrain without dragging her belly through it and a larger brain case that allows her to walk around puddles instead of through them, was happily unambivalent. She took full advantage of the opportunity to freely express her landmark-sniffing, stick-carrying, territory-inspecting canine nature.

We walked through one park over a crust of wet and icy snow. The next park had a large lake in the middle. Earlier in the year the snow was deep enough to cover the benches by the path; now the runoff is deep enough to cover them up to the seats. We took the sidewalk around one side but were able to pick a way back through the other side.

The dogs are now peacefully flaked out, and I am full of that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from having made someone happy.

*Pee-on-it is played thusly: approach an object. Lift your leg and pee. It’s not a very complicated game, but Pepe is not a very complicated dog.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 23, 2003]

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