Snippets

The other day Josie and I walked to our neighbors across the street to drop off some mis-delivered UPS packages, and as often, the pup was a great conversation ice-breaker. They immediately began to dish out: their daughter, soon to be getting married, owns seven dogs, including a German Shepherd who's a national champion. What's more, the dog will be walking her down the aisle at her wedding next month...!

Josie continues to oscillate between being saint and sinner. She's learning to lie contentedly under my desk as I work in my home-office. Conversely, most of her badness these days has the unlikely target of Elizabeth. Yes Elizabeth -- who handles her so ably, who has this natural feel for animals, who is aware of the dynamic of dominance in the pack, who of course is also the smallest of all of us. Josie's been nipping at her regularly, and Lizzie does all the text-book corrections, but to no avail. She is gradually getting pretty dispirited. We're hoping it's a phase, but are seeking advice.

Last snippet before shut-down tonight: in prep. for training Josie to our newly-installed invisible fence we're adding to our existing visible fence, including putting up a fence and gate near our front door. This, we hope, will work well with the invisible containment, and certainly ought to signal her that something new is happening. It'll be great to let her off the leash entirely when in our yard. But that's taking more fence work, and several weeks' training...

Pumping ironies

Peter drove Josie and the kids to Hartford yesterday to visit his sister and her daughter, aka Tania and Kristina. They'll have to tell you more about that on their return. It sounds as though the visit was a great success, with Josie behaving like a lady and enjoying the picnic along with everyone else. While they were away, I thought I'd look I'd mention a new element in my life, the fitness buddy.

Alice is my fitness buddy, and has been ever since I saw those Cape Cod photos of us on the beach (too cold to immerse in the waves, so every bulge showed above the waterline). I have midriff issues; she wants stronger arms. She lives in Little Rock, I near NYC, so we exchange phone calls and spreadsheets. She boosted my vague food goals to "5 servings of fruit or veg a day" and "no more fizzy diet drinks" (they make you hungry and deposit aspartame in your mid-brain). The 5 servings a day have left me energized. Cutting the soda should have done the opposite: I loved that carbonated caffeine kick in the morning. But a week afterwards, my appetite had plummeted and my weight started inching downward. After a consolatory DDP left me hungry for a week, I'm back to iced tea.

We haven't exactly gotten derailed, but real life has gotten in the way.

Alice applied for a new job in Atlanta and is preparing her house for selling, so all the touch-up work is counting as arm exercises. A persistent staph infection discouraged her eating her 5, but helped her drop many pounds, so her waist is getting trimmer by the minute.

I've been eating my 5 (and Granny's pies and summer ice cream), but spend so much time with the physiotherapist doing shoulder and arm exercises that my midriff is no slimmer, but my arms are toning nicely. Should fitness buddies be living each other's goals like this?

Oh, and to top it off: Peter, who hasn't joined us in our healthy new goals, has dropped nearly fifteen pounds...

Elizabeth writes

When Dad (Peter) was in Oxford, Josie was giving everybody loads of trouble! I knew that Josie needed her alpha, so we had to do some serious training with her. We trained her with some Cheerios because she loves them. What we did with them: we used them like a treat to get her used to our commanded words, and when she did it right, we gave at least one to her. Once Dad (Peter) came back from Oxford, she was so excited to see him that she jumped all over him. Then when he started training her, she got much better.

Once when I walked with Josie and my friend back from the public library, I gave Josie to my friend, Josie saw a bird across the street, charged towards it, out of my friend's hand, across the street, and it was very scary because she could have gotten killed. She crossed the street again at our garage and I caught her. Sometimes when I look at Josie sitting down beside me I can't believe that she did all that.

Elizabeth's request

Elizabeth has asked me to enumerate the Airedales in my life. The first was Gabby, who was part of the family before I was. After her came Shea, then Helle. But there was also my grandmother's dog, Tacky. We've also just made the acquaintance of Charlie, an elderly (16-year-old) Airedale who strolls the neighborhood with his owner.

Cat training

So much for that. Elizabeth and Michael for the last few weeks have spent a half hour at a time trying to cat-train Josie, that is, to make her understand that the cats are none of her business. Alice, who is moving soon from Little Rock to Atlanta, sent us some extra cat doors, which the kids immediately installed in their room doors with a little help from Dad and a jigsaw. When it came time to show Jack and Cinder how to use them, Jack decided that we looked dangerous and shot downstairs for the first time in ages--right into the maw of....Josie! We heard a great scramble from her scrabbling feet as she chased him under the guestroom bed and low-grade grumbling and hissing from Jack. We backed off, forcing Josie from the room once, twice, about fifteen times. It might be better to let Cinder teach Jack about the door.

Dog days

Every month, my goal has been to write more often in the blog than I did the month before. Oh well! At least August will make September easier, right? It has been a busy month, nonetheless.

While Peter was in Oxford, Granny came for ten days and, as usual with her Mississippi farm-girl work ethic, made neglected parts of the house sparkle. She also made 7, yes, SEVEN, custard and pumpkin pies, all of which were consumed before she boarded the plane home again. We had three Airedales when I was growing up, all of which we considered my father's, so I'd forgotten how much she likes dogs. Though she was never able to get Josie entirely under control, she eagerly volunteered to walk her in the mornings, in the afternoons, in the evenings. I'm not sure how far they got, but they seem to have come back friends.

Josie graduated from Puppy Kindergarten. Not summa cum laude, but not at the bottom of the class, either! And that last class was brilliant. With the instruction we received then, we now have Josie heeling and paying a good deal more attention to us when we are out walking. Frederic joined us for this last class and all but the graduate celebrated with cones from a neighboorhood creamery.

The school year is drawing near. We had our annual visit to the pediatrician. He usually says of Michael, who talks a mile a minute when nervous, "He's very precocious"; this year, on observing the length of his feet and the width of his shoulders, he said, "He's going to be a giant." Better get my hugs in while I can, then! He pronounced Elizabeth "perfectly healthy," which bolstered her confidence; she seems to need that, since her best friend, with whom she has been inseparable since kindergarten, is moving to a new school. Elizabeth is growing in other ways, too. She's just given me notice that, after nine and a half years, I'm to retire from doing her hair.

I'm working from home today. Michael just came in to report that Josie has been carrying around one of my 5-pound weights. The physiotherapist assigned me to doing biceps curls and "skull crushers"; it seems Josie has decided to do "neck lifts." Just heard some whimpering--hope she didn't drop it on a paw!

It's budget time at work. We are supposed to keep our budgets "flat," that is, not to spend any more money next year than this. I spent a good deal of time working with one of my team members on our various budgets. Some people write in full corporate-speak and it takes a great deal of effort to trim out the jargon and excess verbiage so that the financial controllers can understand the requests. For there are ways around that "keep it flat" directive. As in academia, you try to squeeze as much blood from the stone as possible, and if you want cash, you have to apply for it. I'm asking for cash to expand the archives operations: to launch a conservation effort and to digitize our foundational document, which is almost 200 hundred years old, with copperplate beginning to fade and pages crumbling.

We're going into the city tonight to hear a mass percussion performance at Lincoln Center. Cold and drizzly weather, apparently driven up from the south by Hurricane Dean's romp through Mexico.

Adolescence

Much has been going on.

I was in Oxford (UK) for the first week in August, and was alarmed at some of what I was hearing from Pat via e-mail: Josie being "difficult," "overwhelming," "hard to control." Not the best time to have left her with Pat's mom, who had enough on her mind during the days with the kids. "Well," I thought, "she must be missing her alpha. As soon as I get back we'll put things right." Well I got back, and was greeted with much joyous licking and jumping. But the control issues were still very much there.

Of several factors, one has been illness: she stopped eating for several days, and then started throwing up lots for a couple of days. Evening emergency visit to the vet, accompanied by Lizzie. (Just for effect, she coughed up some bile on the vet's floor. He was impressed.) She got IV electrolytes, and I cooked up some rice and beef for her new "bland" diet for the next few days. She's better now, but on days of mild relapse, she behaves awfully -- because she feels bad.

Another major factor: she's really growing up. She is less and less content to stay in the crate. She wants to spend more time with the pack. But she's not ready for un-supervised activity in the house. She's a real teenager, and she's a whole lot more work now than she was. There are times when she does settle down near us, chin on floor or on paws, just like a text-book dawg, but those are pretty rare. We're walking her more and more too, finding ways for her to see more of the neighborhood, work off energy. I make sure to walk about a mile with her every morning. (On several recent mornings I've walked with her by the train station along the Bronx River. A pleasure.) And we try to find a way to run her around later in the day too. After such sessions she's often pretty content, sometimes even tuckered out. But sometimes she's just rarin' to go for more.

It's been exhausting. But it's been good, at least, to have had some time during these end-of-summer days, to be here and devote some attention to all this. Better yet, it's been amazing to have these days with my kids. They aren't adolescents -- not yet, anyway! And they are a total pleasure.

Cut to the Quick

I've been revisiting the New Skete books with great pleasure. In the first one (Dog's Best Friend) they talk about grooming -- cleaning ears, clipping nails, brushing, etc. -- and emphasize that we should make this a pleasurable ritual that dog and owner alike will look forward to. Accompany with lots of massage, verbal reassurance, etc., as you get into the ears with cleaning fluid, get to the nails with clippers, and such.

This has not exactly worked with Josie, at least not lately. She's learned to recognize the bottle that holds the ear liquid -- a fluid that smells like rubbing alcohol. So after Elizabeth steadies her comfortably, I approach with the bottle, and watch the dog get super-uneasy, ears flop back smoothly against her head. I get in there somehow with a squirt of the fluid and the cotton balls. And just when we all think it's over, she does a great head shake that sends the liquid all over us.

Today it was nail-clipping day. I still look forward to these things, but Josie, again, panics. If our floor hadn't been well polyurethaned, there'd be claw marks all over it today from Lizzie dragging Jose over to where I could get to clip her. Thing is, in the end, she does calm down, and we're still all the happier for it, just to have had a good cuddle. You see that's another thing: we're supposed to hold back on petting and handling her in order to reserve that for when she has earned praise. But that's really hard to do. As I keep saying: she's a puppy after all.