project 365 #182: django and mojo are buds 2

project 365 #182: django and mojo are buds 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My friend S brought Mojo the puppy over to play with Django yesterday. Those two are so bonded. They played for hours. Theo is highly disinterested in puppies and also he's going through his yearly I Hate Summer thing where he itches all the time and just wants to lie in a hole. So every time Mojo comes near him he warns him off with a short growl and snap combo that makes Mojo leap backwards. Do not disturb Uncle Theo, kid. But Django adores him and that makes up for surly old Uncle Theo. Besides, watching Mojo go straight up in the air and then back at Theo's snap is highly entertaining itself. Almost as entertaining as when either Django gets Mojo's collar and drags him around the yard or when Mojo gets Django's collar and tries (very cutely) to drag Django around. Puppies. Ah.

project 365 #165: django and the plunger 2

project 365 #165: django and the plunger 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I've been having all kinds of deep thoughts on and off all day, which is quite something to deal with when you're also run off your feet busy. But I have and they've all been prose worthy wonderful bits of bloggy goodness, too. Unfortunately I no longer remember any of them. Them's the breaks. I do remember something about a line that went on about the evening light and an air of unbearable poignance which it adds to the most prosaic things so clearly it's probably all for the best that I've forgotten most of it.

I started watching a deep and meaningful movie, too, to wit, The Fountain. I think it's a good movie but personally I'm either too ADD or too something, possibly dumb, because I lost track completely very quickly and then I lost all interest and started drawing. Which half finished drawing is here for your inspection. I'm putting it up half done because I have a bad history of needing to do things all in one evening or they either never get done or become heinous and I like this so far, so, if it gets all awful, at least I'll be able to look back at the beginning and sigh nostalgically. And think about the poignant light.

Of course, it wasn't what I set out to draw. I set out to draw a camel. I've been watching Planet Earth on Wednesday nights and it's affecting me powerfully. I just want to draw camels in the desert and Tibetan foxes and polar bears and stuff. Grasses swaying in the wind. This is unlikely to happen. I know it's unlikely but one can hope and anyway it's something to mutter about to myself as I alarm the neighbors by pacing back and forth to my seizure inducing kitchen light (it hasn't recovered from the mysterious 1/3 power outage yet and barely gives any light except in sudden blinding flashes) and wandering around in the flickering rain outside in my gnome pajamas looking to see if the damn dog took my phone.

He didn't. All he ate today was my knitting, and that's a blessing in disguise. Now I don't have to finish that horrible hat.

bridge at malvern hills park

bridge at malvern hills park
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, Django's back. That didn't last long. Unfortunately, A's life seems to be too complicated right now for her to take care of what is, after all, her dog and thus there was a whole terrible late night argh argh argh thing with hysterical phone calls and shouting and all that sort of delightful thing. So naturally he's back at my house. He seems a bit chastened and quieter though - he's been back for almost 24 hours and he's only gnawed a bit on one of my Danskos, and since it's one that he already chewed up months ago, the extra damage is not too bad. And the fence reinforcement also seems to have worked. On the other hand, M was home all day with him today and that always helps; tomorrow will be an acid test. God. But I guess we all knew that of course I don't have the guts or toughness or whatever it is that is required to be like my mother or any of the sterner women of a previous generation who had no trouble banishing destructive dogs. Pity, that.

In other news I finally used the Barnes & Noble gift card my brother got me for mother's day and I am deliriously happily planning to never leave the house again except for work. Katherine Kerr! Charles Stross! Charles de Lint! and Iain M. Banks! Also, I got myself more Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica because Tiny Cities Made of Ashes is one of my favorite songs in the whole world. I most heartily recommend, by the way, the Pandora Modest Mouse station. So far of everything I've plugged into Pandora, that one comes out with the most diverse and coollest mix and I listen to it all day at work and it makes me happy. Plus it pretty much always plays not only Ike Reilly but also the Apples in Stereo and this is good.

project 365 #154: django and new toy after an hour

project 365 #154: django and new toy after an hour
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday I indulged in some serious retail therapy, or, well, it would have been retail therapy except that what I was doing was replacing several of the pairs of shoes that Django has chewed to shreds over the last year. Still fun but not quite as fun as, say, buying totally new and different shoes. And I bought a bunch of frames at K Mart and right now, in between bouts of struggling with Adobe Illustrator, which I am attempting to teach myself (I am "working" at home today, woot) by making some big signs for the museum, I am framing art. Except that naturally I bought all the wrong size frames even though I had a list with me and now I have to go to Michaels and get more frames. And find that one drawing that has vanished into the moving vortex - the only drawing that I want to find and, naturally, the one I can't find. Argh.

Last night was another party party night with S & Z & H & D & J & me all whooping it up on the incredible wobbling deck. It was lovely but of course I had had nothing to eat all day and so I gave up and went to bed while the party was still going on. This is rude but alas, sometimes necessary and miraculously I feel okay this morning, if a bit annoyed since M is out of school as of today which means that he and his friend C are taking up altogether too much space in the house clumping around, eating extravagantly spiced up ramen and leaving the bowls, along with almost empty glasses of coke and gatorade, everywhere. The steps are all fixed up and my nice landlord D performed miracles and even built a really goofy little railing where the old steps were on the deck to keep us from drunkenly falling off it. And my friend D is here right now; the fence is done, although Django can still get out of it, goddamn goddamn, and he's putting in a new dog safe - i.e., cheap and destructible - screen door. Things are looking up.

project 365 #149: jodi catch and throw mojo

project 365 #149: jodi catch and throw mojo
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So it turns out that my pal S' new puppy, Mojo, who, as you will recall, came from my friend D's dog Cookiebob and her mesalliance with a miniature dachshund who belongs to the crazy lady next door to D up in Bat Cave, is a beer drinkin' dog par excellence. By which I mean, the dog is a lush and thus will fit right in at all our parties. S hosted a little get together on her back porch last night and Mojo kept knocking over beer bottles and lapping up the result. It took us a while to realize that he was doing it on purpose. When he started trotting off with cigarette packs in his little mouth we realized that the dog had a problem and that PETA would probably be after us forthwith. He's not a quiet, mellow drunk either: he got all rambunctious and started running in circles and trying to chew our shoes off our feet until K had to hold him out at arms length for a while.

Neither of my dogs have any interest whatsoever in drinking beer. Pity - it might mellow them out a bit. The dog fence is almost completely done and Django immediately scouted out the places where it isn't done and took off. Of course he's so dumb that he just runs wildly around to the front of the house and wiggles his ass all around like he does to be let in the front door, so it's not too bad. Tomorrow morning Django is going to the clinic. All you male blog readers had better sit down and cross your legs now - yup, he's going to have his balls cut off. (Say this at a party and watch all the guys cross their legs nervously. It never fails.) Hopefully this will calm some of his wandering and destructive tendencies - the little fuck had my reading glasses in his mouth last night and I'm tired of living in a house full of dog confetti.

Addendum: I went home for lunch and to let the dogs out. In the three hours since I had last seen Django, he had eaten (and shredded, and tossed all over the den:)
2 pairs of shoes - my flip flops and my sneakers
1 pillow - a nice one that I've had a long time
1 entire spindle of blank DVDs
1 small wooden box of rocks and crystals and, inexplicably, magnetic poetry
1 gourd bowl, perhaps my favorite gourd bowl that I ever made, that was up on a shelf.

He had started on a trash bag of wrapping paper but fortunately hadn't gotten that far into it. Now he's tied up again outside while I ponder, yet again, either giving a false name at the spay/neuter clinic tomorrow and just never picking him up or putting him on Craigslist as free to good home or dog torturing laboratory, whichever calls first. The neutering had better work some miracles or that dog is history.

project 365 #126: schwag the puppy best

project 365 #126: schwag the puppy best
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

So did I mention that my daughter A took one of my friend D's puppies the other night? Yes, yes she did, and this is Schwag, who came over to visit today. I take back everything I ever said about little dogs and yes, I know that what I said was usually in condescending tones - the kind of tones used by those of us who are fond of large dogs who feel that eeeny dogs cannot be considered true dogs at all. But Schwag acts just exactly like a real puppy - only quarter sized! He is scary adorable! He is total cuteness! This is puppy love! I took 52 pictures in like an hour! The best of those can be seen here if you want more sweet, sweet puppy action.

Moods

I'm in a pissy, miserable, cranky and awful mood this morning and it makes me want to smoke, or throw myself off a bridge or something. This mood was brought to you by a) stupid knee, still injured and making my life difficult; b) puppy, who has apparently decided that if I'm not walking him, well, he's not housetrained anymore, so that for the second morning in a row I began the day by stepping into a large puddle of piss on the kitchen floor and c) my son, who missed the bus and then presented me with the worst report card I have ever personally seen. If I had given a report card like that to my father in 9th grade I probably wouldn't be here typing this for you now, because it would be difficult to type missing my arms, if, that is, I was alive, which would be doubtful. I said this to my son who said that he was sorry I'd had such a rotten childhood and I said that that wasn't what was bothering me at all, that instead I was upset since I didn't have a man handy to beat the crap out of him. At moments like this I become unexpectedly Republican and feel that all my problems could be solved by the application of a little old fashioned military discipline, god damn it, whereby I would throw away everything, leaving only perhaps a shield and a gun or two and some bare boards to sleep on, and everyone would be beaten regularly and fed corned beef hash. Unfortunately I am soft and weak and not a member of the superior anything and so I always cave in and there's no discipline of any kind, really, around our house, except inasmuch as the dogs have us trained to feed them.

The other option that occurred to me this morning is more feasible, though: leaving. Packing up the dog, a few clothes, some CDs, my camera and my tent and moving on, preferably to some kind of slow country western lament about drunks and jukeboxes and the rain. Divorcing my kids and the puppy and starting a new life somewhere else, somewhere bleak, somewhere with a lonely aluminum diner and one flickering streetlamp. Somewhere I could wear red lipstick without looking like a crazy bag lady. Somewhere where I wouldn't know what the hell a report card is and they don't have puppies. I can just imagine my kids, left behind, almost like the Rapture came - they'd be delighted. They'd let the puppy shred the couch into tiny bits all over the floor and they'd all lie in them and have a generally great time until the canned food ran out and the water got turned off (they like long showers.) It's not good when I am the only civilizing influence in a household because we might as well face it: I am not particularly civilized at all.

Alas, though, I 'm not quite able to tear myself away, even if some of it is just an unholy fascination at this point, like, how bad can it possibly get? Pretty damn bad, I'm afraid, pretty damn bad. The house just gets nastier and my knee keeps on hurting and the report cards. . . jesus, the report card. I try to reassure myself on that point since even if he is doing terribly academically, at least he has a lot of friends (mumbling friends with long hair, who smoke cigarettes and have bottle rockets behind their backs) and is socially quite adept (do they honestly think I don't know a high school FREAK when I see one? What the hell do they think I did in high school? ) and, well, hell, he's just like the president. Except, of course, for the money and the family connections and the frat boy attitude and, thank god, the apparent callousness, although M does seem to think he's both immortal and always right. He is 15, it is true. Possibly M will make it to the White House yet - we can only hope that it's not with high level explosives strapped to his body.

Walking Django

project 365 #2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Every morning Django & Theo drag me around the neighborhood. It would be cute if it wasn't so goddamn annoying. Theo is pretty good, unless he sees another dog on a leash, but Django is impossible and, worse, he's gotten strong, so he really drags me along. Then I lose my temper and bite my lip and snarl savagely at him and swing him to me by the neck, which is unattractive at best and probably a felony at worst (although it doesn't faze Django one iota) and he apologizes abjectly without quite ever knowing what he's done wrong and we start the whole thing over again. Jesus, puppies. They're worse than babies.

A baby wouldn't have trashed my entire backyard like Django has. I need to go take pictures of that; it's awe inspiring; it looks like Red Cross photos of a natural disaster out there. You think I'm exaggerating and I wish to god I was: in actual fact it's much worse than I can describe. It's too awful to even take pictures and I really don't know how I'm ever going to clean it up. Like an acre of pure, unfettered destruction, proving once and for all that dogs actually prefer to live in squalor. Little shithead. He was hanging out on my bed chewing up some foam thing today, too. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

In other bloggish news, my virus, in its latest incarnation, has morphed into a classic head cold. I seem to have caught a mutant X men morphing virus; I've basically been sick for the whole goddamn month, but I never get the same symptom twice. It's because of the being good thing - when you smoke & drink a lot, viruses are afraid to enter your body. They know the toxicity level is too high for them to survive. Then you get healthy and lo, the viruses are all like, "Awesome! We can raise a family in this lovely, healthy, pure environment." Yet another reason why it just doesn't pay to be good.

Mondays

There were hairy electricians in my office today; hairy, sleepy eyed electricians with large overalls and power tools. I had to go downstairs and use my other office, a.k.a. the front desk, and they disconnected the printer and made lots of noise: Mondays. I went to work early, as I will have to go to work early for the next couple of weeks while my daughter (who is currently undergoing a bad breakup and a new job and is thus less than delightful company) gets her schedule together. When I got home I had to go to the laundromat and the children made rude jokes about yesterdays lasagna. So, okay, strictly speaking it was not lasagna. The lasagna noodles were full of bugs, and anyway there were less than I thought, so it became a sort of spaghetti casserole a la lasagna, which apparently wigged the kids right the hell out. I had no idea they were such purists, such devotees of classic Italian cuisine. I half expected them to call the lasagna police on me. And when I got home from the laundromat the puppy had naturally thrown up in technicolor around the dining room: he's been eating ornaments off the Christmas tree. Now we have to worry about him as well although I cynically think that he can digest a little thing like a glass ball (or two) with no trouble at all.

One week, one day, 20 hours, 59 minutes and 35 seconds. 88 cigarettes not smoked, saving $17.75. Life saved: 7 hours, 20 minutes. So far, so good, or so awful - I still haven't smoked and I even went to the Westville and had one slow miserable beer at the bar this evening. Supposedly it will all get better in another week; just one more, one more week to hold out and I'll be able to go for more than a few minutes without thinking about cigarettes. It's like having a urinary tract infection - when you have one, all you can think about is peeing and your urinary tract, but when you don't have one you simply never think about your urinary tract. You go days, in fact, without thinking about it even once. When I was smoking I didn't spend hours thinking about it all the time: I just did it. Now, I have to relearn how to live without smoking and all I'm hoping is that soon I can do it without my whole head being taken up fighting the urge to smoke.

Psycho Puppy, qu'est ce que c'est?

Even as I type this, my son is becoming increasingly late for school - the shoe bandit has struck again. The shoe bandit takes socks and shoes and bits of trash and shirts and stuffed animals and hair clips and (damn him) contact lens cases out to the yard where he distributes them in a seemingly random pattern that is apparently pleasing to the canine eye. He rarely chews them up - just moves them out. That's funny and cute and adorable; it's so funny and cute and adorable that you just want to send him out to play in traffic. On days like today, when it's inexplicably, global warmingly 65 degrees and pouring rain, it's even worse. But that's cool, since global warming is just another part of my Extreme Dog Walking experiences.

Django has gotten to the age where he's kind of like a human five year old - full of enthusiasm and energy and charm, but no sense at all. He bounces around on the end of the leash like one of those rubber balls attached to a wooden paddle: a toy wielded by a completely spastic toddler. This morning, in the warm rain, he discovered the joy that is puddles. "Rivers!" he thought (occasionally, I can hear the dogs think. Shut UP. I can TOO.) "There are rivers all over the road today! Yay, rivers!" and he bounded in. To. Every. Single. Puddle. There were a lot of puddles. He became a very, very wet puppy. He likes to jump up on me. I became a very, very wet extreme dog walker, while Theo, who has his own agenda, mostly focused on his arch-enemy, the chained up chow behind the stockade fence, just got bigger and bigger and bigger: rain affects Theo's collie pelt like a blow dryer affects a certain kind of Southern lady.

Yesterday, we were just in time to see a couple of school buses unload. Theo has never liked school buses: they're too big, too noisy, too, well, YELLOW. (What he really hates and fears, though, are UPS trucks. Go figure.) However, Theo is extremely fond of children, although he has a tendency to try to herd them. Django knows very little about children, has hardly ever met any, and knows nothing about school buses. The bus doors opened, the kids filed noisily out and Django watched in horror as the huge yellow things began to spit out midgets. He did a complete back flip at the end of the leash, ran between my legs and tried to get the hell away as fast as he possibly could. It was hilarious. Sad, but hilarious. Meanwhile, Theo, desperate for love, stood there wagging his tail so hard his whole fat self shook.

The Watering Hole

This is an African watering hole that will happily run all day on your computer on windows media player. It is pretty nifty, really, even though so far all we have seen are bugs. Phosphorescent bugs, granted, but bugs nevertheless. Not dissimilar to the bugs we have right here in North Carolina. Still, as my son said hopefully, "But they're special Africa bugs!" And they are indeed. The soundtrack is really cool, though. The African night is much, much scarier than ours, even those nights of ours that are punctuated by random gunfire, like Thursday (I guess I wasn't the only person who got stressed out by Thanksgiving.)

My son, despite his advanced age, is fascinated by the watering hole. He thinks it would be better if there was a speaker, though, and we could talk to the (so far hypothetical) animals through it. "Wouldn't it be awesome," he said, "If like there was this lion just having a drink, and then you yelled OOOOOOOGA OOOOOOOOGA OOOOOOOGA through the speaker and he just like jumped straight up in the air?"
"Yeah," I said, "Although I'm not sure that's what Dr. Doolittle meant by talking to the animals. I mean, you know, learning their language so you can play mean practical jokes on them."

Mean practical jokes on animals can be amusing, though. Django is terrified of the rooster noise that M can make come out of his celphone, but the scary monkey-hyena-leopard-invisible-smoke-monster roaring noises from the watering hole aren't fazing him one iota. I remembered freaking Theo out one time with the sound of a fox on the computer (he wigged right the hell out) but the watering hole noises aren't bothering him either. So we tried playing some other sounds: lions and foxes and wolves. Theo did get off the couch to bark at the front door when the wolves howled, but Django just stayed on the kitchen floor chewing up a dishtowel. This proves that instinct has been completely subsumed by modern life: you know your dog is a suburban 21st century wuss if he's more afraid of roosters than of lions.

Dog Walking Fashionista

The good people at Project Runway have been bugging me to reveal my dog walking fashion secrets. It's not surprising, really - I look so amazing at 7:00 am when I set out into the cold with the dogs. So here, for the first time ever, I will dissect my dogwalking wardrobe for the good of humanity.

The key ingredient is a pair of. . overalls. And not just any overalls. In the summer, I wear denim overalls that are not only a little too short but with (this is vital) a couple of missing buttons on the side, so that I achieve that really, seriously Appalachian local look. Usually, these overalls are combined with a giant plaid flannel shirt. Or two.

In the winter, I wear an outfit that some might say is a little too young for me. To them I say, phooey! If it's good enough for all the best dressed 6 month olds then it's good enough for me. In short, black fleece overalls. Baggy black fleece overalls. Baggy black fleece overalls that lack only a TV screen over the tummy to make the wearer look exactly like a goth teletubby. Or possibly Mindy. The first time I ever wore them (the only time I ever wore them to do anything besides walk dogs) my brother fell into hysterics. "Mindy!" he cried, "Mindy, where's Mork?" The overalls get even baggier around the middle if you wear them, as I did this morning, over gnome pajamas. The combination of the pajamas, the overalls and the many plastic bags in my pockets all work to give me that special diaper butt toddler look that is so hard to achieve for most adults. But who can tell? Because over all this must go a giant black sweater and, given weather like this morning, a 30 year old Army coat that has never been washed, a fur hat and mismatched mittens. And, oh yes, mismatched socks and white sneakers with shiny stripes.

I look special. Proud. As special and proud as anyone can be who is holding a bag of shit and being dragged down the street by two dogs. That's pretty damn special. And yes, I know, this post is useless without pictures. But there are no pictures, and if the gods are kind, there will never be pictures. Never, ever, ever.

Communes

I went to a big party on Saturday night at a big house that is also a more or less communal living situation. It was fun; I drank too much and danced to a Dead cover band and gave out a lot of my newly printed non business cards. They had an awesome bonfire and all in all it was nice and it reminded me of my misspent youth, specifically the portion of it I spent living in vaguely communal living situations. Since I haven't got a damn other thing I can think of that's going on right now and is remotely interesting to blog about, I'm going to tell you a story about when I lived on the Tick Ranch.

The Tick Ranch was a big semi farmhouse out in northern Baltimore County and I lived there with my then five year old daughter, six or seven other artists and a vast, varying number of dogs and washing machines. The dogs had a tendency to produce other dogs, you see, and so, surprisingly enough, did the washing machines. They broke down a lot and shortly after one died, someone would get fed up and find another half broken washing machine cheap and haul it home. We put the old ones in the yard and occasionally considered making an art project, or something, out of them. We called it the Tick Ranch because, as in all of rural Maryland, the surrounding woods and fields were teeming with ticks, and all the dogs brought them home to us on a regular basis.

At the party the other night I noticed that the inhabitants of that commune had a nicely organized job board up on the kitchen wall. We never got that organized, which is one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart. Also, as I mentioned to one of the residents on Saturday night, we threw our parties in the middle of the summer, when it was warm and so we always lost all our sheets, since guests would wander off in pairs to the woods with a sheet or two and reappear an hour or so later, happy but sheetless. This is less likely to happen when it's 36 degrees outside. At any rate, the job board looked to me like a good idea since I have never forgotten the morning I came downstairs to find a really horrible doggie mess on the floor in the hallway.

There was no telling which end of a dog it came from, and certainly not which dog. It was large and odoriferous and truly terrible, and I was not the first person to encounter it. I could tell that, because the first person to encounter it had gone to the trouble to make small warning flags out of red paper and toothpicks and stick them in it and also to rope it off with a square of yellow police tape. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with communal living, and particularly the problem of communal living with artists. It was hilarious (if it had happened nowadays, we'd have put it up on Flickr) but, of course, it was still there. It remained there for some time. And that is today's instructive commune tale for you.

Alpha Dog

Puppy is the alpha dog now. We pretend his name is Django, but he doesn't know it and we don't call him that. We call him Puppy, because this is a household of four fairly bright, fairly creative, extremely verbal types. . . who call their puppy Puppy. I realized that he had become the alpha dog today, when Theo stood back gloomily and let Puppy have his pick of the doggy dinners. For a while there, Theo was in charge of which dog ate out of which bowl; this was a time in which Theo grew fat. Now, though, Theo hangs his head and lets Puppy have the first go at both bowls.

My first emotion was to feel sad for Theo, but then I realized: Theo doesn't want to be the alpha dog. I empathize strongly with that, because I'm not alpha either. I know I'm not alpha because I went to one of those PR meet n' greet thingies this afternoon with some of the WNC tourism movers and shakers. I used to dread these thingies and not take them seriously but nowadays I have decided that my ass depends on networking like a motherfucker. So I am networking, which isn't really too hard, because at this point I've actually known most of these people for years (and by know I mean seen at a bunch of cardboard chicken luncheons and smiled and exchanged business cards with) and they're all really pretty nice and so what the hell? I'm going to get a new boss sometime soon and if s/he isn't to my liking, I'll be back out there with the resumes. This is how I know I'm not an alpha: I am not applying to be my own boss, and several people I saw this afternoon who hadn't seen me since my year's hiatus from the tourism scene said, on hearing about my place of employment, "Oh, did you take the director's job?"

No. No, I didn't, and I don't want it, and frankly I don't want to be in charge of anything at all, really. If I was in charge at a real job I couldn't fiddle around with photoshop or do elaborate Excel to Word mail merge letters, which, take it from me, is the absolute best thing to do when you're hopelessly hungover at the office, which might have happened to you the day after Halloween. I know that this state often happens to people the day after Halloween, because some people are incapable of staying quietly home on Halloween and instead must go off to the bars to see the costumed masses and in the process drink entirely too much beer and stay up until quarter to two in the morning, which is a really bad idea on a Tuesday night.

That is why some people are not out at Drinking Liberally but instead are quietly at home on this Thursday night, like the actual dedicated and good employees and homebodies and mothers and carer for alpha Springer Spaniel puppies that they, in fact, are, despite their occasional resemblance to wild drunken revelers. But you see, if you are an alpha dog, you can't ever shed those responsible moments and act like a wild drunken reveler but instead must be sober and responsible at all times: among other, more pressing reasons, you'll be the first one called when the alarm goes off for no apparent reason at 2 in the morning, and if you'd been revelling, that could get ugly. So fuck being alpha. I can take being second at the food bowl if it also means that I get to be second or third when the shit hits the fan.

Collies, Springers and Shepherds

the wily stalk
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I've just been out watching Django & Theo play in the sock strewn backyard. I found my sneaker out there yesterday morning, which prompted me to give a lecture on logic to the dogs. "You want me to take you for a walk," I said furiously, "so much that you get excited whenever I put my sneakers on, but then you steal one of my sneakers and take it out to the yard to chew on. Is that logical? Does that make any sense? See, now we can't go for a walk and it's all your fault." They looked suitably chastened but I'm not sure the message got through, somehow.

Theo, as you know, is a mostly Collie dog from Madison County. He was raised by a mostly German Shepherd from Baltimore. I have a theory that in parts of the country which were settled mostly by German/Eastern European immigrants, like Baltimore, most of the mutts are Germanic as well, whereas in areas like Appalachia the dogs are mostly Scots Irish collie types like Theo. It's a good theory. Someday someone will get a masters thesis out of it. Not me. Theo, however, never picked up any Shepherd traits like guarding the house and children. Theo thinks the house and children can take care of themselves, although it makes him very happy to herd children into small groups in the center of a field. He also does this weird, purely Collie thing where he lies down if he sees another dog or something to herd approaching. Toby never did that in his life and he was as puzzled by it as I was at first, until I met another Collie owner who told me that it was a total Collie thing. Therefore I postulate the Collie genes are tougher than Shepherd traits.

Now Django, as we also know, is an aristocratic full bred Springer Spaniel. I had Springers before, as a child, and knew them to be just as dumb as posts. They like swimming and eating and, well, I never noticed much in the way of instinctive Springer behavior, which apparently consists of flushing game anyway. That's probably why intellect is not high on the list of Springer traits: hell, even I can flush game - all you have to do is run through the bushes with a complete disregard for the fact that there are men with guns getting ready to shoot past you. Yes, idiocy would seem to be helpful. Django, so far, appears to be rather brighter than the average Springer, which may explain why he is turning himself into a Collie.

He's started doing all kinds of Collie things, from nipping at everyones heels to get them in order to lying down whenever he sees or hears the cat approaching. Since he's still a baby, and he looks nothing like a Collie anyway, the effect is both strange and hilarious. It's very cool though, and gives one hope for the future. If he can stop being a Springer and become a Collie, perhaps even my son can graduate from high school before he's 30 and maybe someday I will earn a living wage despite my unconscious vow of poverty. Miracles can happen after all.

Sure, He's Cute

django run
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Yeah, he's adorable, but arrrrggggggghhhhhh! Yesterday he peed on my bed and then, in case that wasn't enough, he got into my closet and took out all my shoes, which he redistributed around the house and yard before settling in to eat one of my favorite, favorite clogs. Grrrrrrr. That is why he and Theo are now locked in the kitchen when there's noone home, which isn't fair to Theo, but oh well, them's the breaks. I've never been one of the crate people, because Toby was claustrophobic and hated them totally, and Phineas, the awful Shih Tzu (Shih Tz'livingroom) just shat all over his and spread it everywhere and after that experience, I decided I never wanted another shih tzu or another crate. So no crate for young Django, but oh. my. god. I had forgotten the true scale of the destruction a puppy can create in a very short amount of time.

OVERHEARD RECENTLY:
While walking down the street, said by a very drunk guy outside the College St. Pub: "If you're being chased by a bear, what you want to do, see, is run downhill."
"Naaaaaah. No way."
"Yeah, I swear. Run downhill."
At work, one geologist referring to another geologist:
"Well, he's a sedimentary guy."

Dude, New Phone!

Occasionally that which starts out rotten can end happily. This morning, I walked both the dogs: Theo, the old responsible one and Django, the tiny bouncing one. This was not as easy as it sounds, because by walk I mean get wrapped up in leashes and fall over not once but several times and by dogs I mean furry agents of Satan and by responsible I mean used to be good on the leash but now is pulling my arm off again and by bouncing I mean, in fact, bouncing like a motherfucker. If a motherfucker usually bounces, with which fact I am not acquainted, but I can totally assure you that a 9 week old Springer Spaniel indeed bounces, vertically, several feet in the air at a time. Which is why I needed a new phone.

You see, I took the dogs out on a walk through scenic foggy West Asheville (see photo) around 7:25 this morning, leaving M with instructions to get his ass out of the shower and onto the school bus in a timely manner. Which, you would think, a 14 year old could manage. Then around 7:40, when I was not particularly far along in the walk (see above, particularly referencing bouncing and getting wrapped in leashes, A called to complain bitterly that her brother had called her to demand a ride to school and it was unfair. I fielded that call okay and was thus not surprised when my phone rang again 5 minutes later, since I knew it was M calling to complain bitterly about how unfair his sister was to refuse to give him a ride to school. I had just gotten past the "You still have time to catch the school bus for chrissakes" part of this conversation when 1) puppy bounced and 2) Theo lunged and 3) phone went about 5 feet up in the air and 4 feet laterally before plunging to the pavement with an unhealthy crunch. Then I shouted JESUS FUCK! and so on, and made my unhappy broken phone way through the rest of the walk (including past that spooky playground - I did have my real camera and I hung it around my neck and hung on like grim death, so it didn't get puppy-ed) and got home where I found that M had indeed amazingly taken the school bus.

I spent the rest of the day metaphorically girding my loins to do battle with Sprint, convinced that I would walk into the Sprint store and if they didn't actually rush me with spears, well, they would certainly do so metaphorically. I told everyone how tough I was going to be and I walked in there with a fierce look on my face, ready to stand up for myself! To listen to them say tough shit and actually get mad back instead of caving meekly, apologizing for my temerity and slinking out. Which is how those encounters usually end. For once, though, I was happily surprised. "Oh yeah," said the guy, "You're way overdue for an upgrade. Here, you can have $150 credit towards any phone we have." Which is why I now am sporting a seriously slick shiny black phone WITH A CAMERA, DUDE, WITH A CAMERA and I am so, so cool now and both my children are overcome with jealousy, which is always just a sweet, sweet feeling.

Puppy Love

A week ago, things changed around my house. A week ago, my daughter found a puppy. And now, it's all over: we are all madly, but madly, in puppy love. Puppy has chewed everything he can get his teeth into, widdled neat little puddles in most corners of the house and done other dreadful things: isn't he pwecious! Mama's own baby angel OW STOP THAT sweetest wuzzle AAGH PEE OUTSIDE fuzzy wuzzer beans! Mama didn't need those ugly old shoes anyway. Izzum sweetie pie.

A found this puppy near a park by the Nature Center, early early on Tuesday morning when she was dropping her boyfriend off at work. The puppy was soaked and bedraggled and completely happily wandering along the side of a very busy street, so A stopped her car (my car, actually, but that's another long sad tale) and the puppy nonchalantly hopped right in. So A, having a kind heart, brought the collarless, tagless, microchip-less (we took him to a vet & checked) puppy home.

This is a purebred puppy, about 8 weeks old, fuzzy & sweet & with a badly docked tail that's already healed. A did the responsible thing: she called the Humane Society (aka the animal shelter; there's only one for Buncombe County) - about 8 times over the next 3 days. No one ever reported the puppy missing. A papered East Asheville with Found Puppy flyers. No one called her cel phone. A checked all the newspapers and the websites and everywhere someone might post a missing puppy flyer: nothing. Noone, apparently, is looking for this beautiful baby dog. And of course, by now, the worst has happened: the entire family is madly in love with Django, as he has been finally named after considerable wrangling, since I favored the name Chauncey and A was holding out for Ringo and M, disgusted by the whole thing, thought Killer or Spike were suitable.

Note that I am not posting any pictures of said adorable (OH. MY. GOD. HE. IS. ADORABLE.) puppy even though I promise you I have taken many, because the only way someone is claiming this dog is if they can describe him with no hints. At this point I kind of think they may not get him back anyway, partly because I feel that anyone who doesn't call the Humane Society about 20 minutes after they've misplaced a puppy that young doesn't deserve to own one and partly because, as I may have mentioned, we have all fallen in love with him.

It all goes to show you that you must be careful what you whisper into the ear of the universe. About two weeks ago I was saying that Theo was lonely and perhaps I should get another dog. I was thinking about a young dog, you know, not a puppy. A young shephard mix, to be specific, or possibly a lab, and not this kind of puppy at all, and certainly not an 8 week old baby with his milk teeth barely in. But there you have it: the universe, while it hears news of a vacancy appearing, is not good at specifics.

Meanwhile, Theo just remarked bitterly that noone asked HIM if he wanted a puppy, and Jesus H. Christ on a proverbial crutch, anyway. Theo is now desperate for his missing loneliness and somehow not at all as enthusiastic about the puppy as the rest of us, not to mention prone to heaving long accusing sighs in our direction as the puppy merrily chews on his cheeks. Still, he is patient, and the puppy does everything he does, which is just so cute! Stuff like taking all our socks outside, which is an old trick of Theo's, had long since ceased to be considered cute around here, but now, it's adorable again! The puppy does it so much more cutely! Mr. Bill is also not enthralled; in fact, Mr. Bill has reacted as if we had taken in a giant squid with a particular fondness for gray cats as hors d'oeuvres, not a fuzzy puppy. Every time he comes in the kitchen and spots the puppy, he reacts exactly the way I would if I came into my kitchen to find a giant squid wrapped around the refrigerator, reaching out for me with one huge and suckered tentacle, which is to say he screams and vanishes. I don't think he's really eaten in a week.

Poor Theo. Poor Mr. Bill. Poor us. But happy, lucky puppy, who is getting lavished with gigantic truckloads of love, gourmet puppy food courtesy of my mother, who is also gaga over him, a fancy collar and special new leash. Not to mention the chew toys, the gentle puppy centric flea medication and, of course, the hugging. Ah, puppy love.

Bold Fashion Statement or Terrible Error in Judgment?

Before
and After.





The haircut, in pictures.




I swear, I thought this was a good idea. I thought it was going to be great. I got tired of wading through knee deep drifts of dog hair and I thought, oooh, won't Theo be happier with all that hot heavy fur gone? So I took him on down to the Soapy Dog and told my friend R to go for it, shave it all off, you know, R, just go for it, and then I merrily went off for an hour or so . . and then, I was presented with the new Theo: Freak-O, reptile fox rodent creature of Mars. Galactic scourge. Interplanetary large tailed loon. After A and I got done gasping and laughing and falling on the floor, A said, "I don't think collies are supposed to be shaved." and damn if she isn't right. Good thing Freako isn't particularly vain and hardly ever looks in a mirror, because oh. my. god. He looks horrible. He looks naked and strange. I think I have to make him some clothes. I don't think I can even take him out for a walk: people will scream and run. Damn. Haircuts: not always a good idea.