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Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum* . . . and so does the staff at my veterinarian’s office, which doubles as a local animal shelter. And so Jasper, a stray Schnoodle (schnauzer/poodle mix), has come to live with us. He’s about Violet’s size, less than 2 years old, playful as all get-out, and cute as…well, if you genetically engineered a dog for ultimate cuteness, you’d get Jasper. He’s also impeccably house-trained and crate-trained, understands the word “no,”** and is going back to the vet Friday to have a few extra ounces of manhood removed. He loves long walks and squeaky toys and tennis balls and old, knotted socks. And being petted, during which he absolutely melts into your lap. Make no mistake, though, Jasper is a terrier to the bone — feisty! Violet, who is much less stressed lately, tolerates him and they have shared the loveseat with me on two occasions.
And here he is:
Treat? Ball? Pettings? Walk? Treat? Ball? Pettings? Walk?
Ready for my close-up
Put that camera down and play with me!
Speaking of Violet, here’s a pic of her out at my friend’s farm. Violet LOVES the farm, where she’s allowed to run off leash and herd ducks and, if she’s sneaky and no one notices, chase a cat or two. Whenever we go out there, I have to carry her to the car when we leave or she would stay. She wants me to stay too, mind you, but she’d stay without me. It’s the farm!
Happy farm dog
And speaking of the farm, my friends adopted a goose this summer. Not just any goose, mind you, a rescued goose (the other goslings at the farm store were pecking it to death and the original rescuer, who passed the goose on to my friends, didn’t expect it to live). Her name is MJ and she has some fancy French breed name which I’m pretty sure translates as “Phyllis Diller’s wig”:
Yup, naturally curly feathers....
Trimming the clover....
Oh, and tho the farm has a flock of ducks, MJ hangs out with the dogs, even accompanying them on walks….
"Honk....I mean, ARF!"
The happy dog in the picture is Buckshot, so named because he strayed into the farmyard one long ago day full of, yes, buckshot. My friends and I are an animal-rescuing bunch.
*most dogs and cat aren’t too fond of ‘em either.
**unless the cats are involved. But at least he doesn’t want to kill them, as Ricky really did.
At his favorite Storm Lake park
In the spring of ‘06 I adopted a stray, a beagle-husky mix that I named Ricky. Ricky was in many ways a fabulous dog — quiet in the house, good with people including children, not food or toy aggressive, not an escape artist, and a good traveler. But over the years, he became increasingly aggressive to other dogs…to the point that many days it was like I was walking Cujo.
I thought about giving him back to the shelter about 1 1/2 years ago, but decided to try and work it out.
I tried training with a local pro, which didn’t do much. I started using an Easy Walk harness and that worked for about a year, but he got increasingly worked up and hard to control when we passed a dog on our walks…or something he even thought might be a dog up ahead — people walking a toddler or even pulling wheeled backpacks. Last month I switched to a Gentle Leader head harness and I was very careful to follow the training tape but he started lunging against it when he saw a dog, smelled a dog, or we approached a house where one of his “arch nemeses” lived — sometimes I felt like I was just sawing on his poor nose. I could only take him on a couple of different walks any more, where I knew no dogs lived.
A few weeks ago he got away from me at the park and launched himself into a big black lab that was completely minding its own business some ways away. The lab very expertly flipped Ricky over onto his back — the whole dog pack thing — but the minute he let Ricky up, Ricky went for him again.
Then I realized that my excuses to skip our twice daily walks or take short walks (it’s getting dark, I’m tired, etc.) were really about not wanting to deal with the drama. At home, he was a Good Dog, but I had to admit I wasn’t capable of dealing with his worsening aggression. So I emailed the shelter and told them I was done and needed to return Ricky.
And they told me they (or any shelter) couldn’t take a d0g-aggressive dog because, of course, they had to put the safety of the other dogs and the workers first. They also noted that intensive anti-aggression training can be very tough on the dog, especially an older one, like Ricky. That’s when the possibility of having Ricky euthanized was first mentioned.
I called my vet, and they agreed. So after a few days of spoiling Ricky rotten, which he loved, I took him to the vet and had him put down. The office was not busy and the vet and two techs came into the room after Ricky had passed and we petted him and cried and told stories about our dogs — a little wake, really.
I told one story that involved Ricky’s big old hound-dog smile, and on the drive home, I realized something: I hadn’t seen that smile in at least 2 years. Ricky had become increasingly aggressive, but also overly-focused and tense and, well, unhappy. He was healthy, but something hadn’t been right for a long time. That moment, I knew I’d made the right decision.
So goodbye, Ricky. Author Terry Pratchett writes that a creature that is half-man, half wolf isn’t a werewolf — it’s a dog. Dogs are the animals on the planet that have most entered our lives and our hearts and while I have absolutely no idea what the afterlife is like, I’m pretty sure they are there.
Hound-dog smile
When I moved in to my house 4 years ago, elderly neighbors who share one of my property lines were right there to say hello, invite me over for coffee and cake, share my problems and joys. They were like the neighborhood grandparents.
Both in their 80s. She’s pretty healthy, but Bill, he’s been ill as long as I’ve known them. A few days ago, he passed away from complications due to pneumonia. It wasn’t unexpected, but it is so sad — they were devoted.
When I went over yesterday with a cake (having adopted the Midwest habit of feeding any trauma), both sons (both adopted–this couple had SO much love to give) were there. One I know slightly, the other I’ve never met. I shared this story about Bill with them and they loved it:
Back in ‘06 when I’d moved in, we were chatting over coffee. Some more terrorism had occurred somewhere, a suicide bombing, and Bill said, “I just don’t understand how these young men can believe that killing innocent people will get them 50 virgins in heaven.” We were having a serious conversation, mind you. I said, “I agree, Bill. But I think it’s 72 virgins.”
Bill took a pull on his oxygen and said, “Well, I could only take care of 50.”
Still cracks me up! Goodbye Bill, and have a rollicking time in the next life.
From ages 7 to 37 I lived in northern Nevada, where it can get damn cold, but it’s almost always sunny and the temp seldom remains really low for more than a few days at a time. Most folks who live there who are not fashionistas have one winter coat and if that coat isn’t quite warm enough for the short cold spells, well you just suck it up and wait it out.
And then I moved to the southern edge of the Great White North. I now own four coats, which I refer to by levels: level one is a pig-suede shirt-jacket, just leather and lining; level 2 is a Land’s End squall jacket, mid-thigh, hooded, lightly insulated and especially good for rainy or windy days to about 30*. Level 3 is an upper-thigh length nylon & down jacket, hooded, good down to the teens. Level 4, which I broke out today to walk Ricky (9* windchill) is nearly knee-length, made of heavy canvas, down stuffed, deep hood with faux fur trim, rated to -25*. It it’s too cold to wear level 4 (and it can be), Ricky gets no walk and sulks.
All midwesterners own levels of coatness, but never use those words because to them, it’s jsut normal — but I’ve started to change that. My friend Kathy travelled 2 hours to her folks’ house for T’gving wearing her pretty red wool pea coat, as it has been unseasonably warm (until today). Her mother commented on her new coat and Kathy said, “Oh, it’s usually colder than this — you’ve just never seen my level 2 coat.”
She received blank stares and now knows how people usually look at me.
(Pratchett fans will get the title)
My knee and I and the animals are all fine and plugging along. I’m grading like a madwoman most days and just too tired and uninspired to blog. But here’s today’s bit of wisdom: If you forget to put the evaporated milk into the pumpkin pie filling (not that I would ever do such a thing, uh uh, not me), it’s still edible. Not pretty and certainly not anything you’d serve to guests, but tasty. Even the parrot thinks so.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
…..sort of.
So I’ve been going through physical therapy for my right knee, which has turned into therapy for my right knee plus custom orthotics for both feet plus some work on my tibia and femur, which have both twisted in an effort to shorten my right leg to match my left leg. It’s going well, mostly because I have an excellent therapist and an enthusiastic and engaged physical therapy student working with me and because I’m diligently doing my assigned daily stretches/exercises.*
Yesterday, I got fitted for the orthotics. The therapist who does that had not seen me before and thus had not seen my long, skinny, bunioned, twisted-and-practically-prehensile-toed feet. They are old lady feet, except they’ve been like that since I can remember. No pretty open toed shoes for poor Inez, ever. *sigh*
Anyway, the guy comes in and lifts my right foot without really looking at it yet, asking me what I suspect is his standard first question: “Have you ever been fitted for orthotics before?”
“No.”
Then he looks at my foot and says in the most shocked voice one can use and still remain professional, “Really?”
“Nope.”
“No one has ever suggested it?” He picks up my left foot.
“Uh uh.”
“Wow,” he says in the same tone of voice you’d use if you’d just seen, say, the Loch Ness Monster gallumphing down Main Street.****
“You should see my spine,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” piped up the very thorough, earnest, yet impossibly young and sweet physical therapy student. “She’s been great as my first patient work-up. You should see my notes!”
Yes, even out of the classroom, I’m doing my twisted, bony little part to educate today’s youth.
*The therapists were hugely pleased with my compliance and said lots of people don’t do their home exercises. I can’t understand that — why go to all the trouble of physical therapy if you’re not going to do everything necessary to get better? But then, I don’t understand why my students don’t read their assigned texts, either.**
**I don’t even expect them to read ALL of the assigned texts — I’ve been a student and I’m pretty lazy in general. But unless I assign reading responses which means reading = points toward the final grade, many students would do none of the reading at all. None! Since when does school mean no reading?***
***Some profs feel that rewarding reading with points is letting the academic standards team down, but I’ve tried teaching classes in which most students were unprepared and thus unengaged. That way lies bitterness, liquor, and way, way too many cats.
****Or the Abominable Snowman (anyone who mentions Bigfoot in the comments will be the focus of some very bad thoughts, KURT).
Not feeling my usual, chirpy self, but back enough to blog about it.
My good friend Jennifer sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, noting it was mid-semester again and as usual, I’d disappeared. And boy was she right — this one hit me hard, for some reason. I was a bit underprepared for classes but felt WAY unprepared, and the first week of school had meetings and other non-teaching work galore, and it just didn’t let up all month. And then a couple weeks ago, when I started to feel like I was on top of things again, my right knee started experiencing bouts of burning pain that were just no fun at all.
After finally visiting my doctor (because the pain didn’t go away when I ignored it and did nothing) and having x-rays that showed that age and a lifetime of clumsiness had scarred up the tissue under my patellas fairly severely, I had a physical therapy appointment yesterday with a long-time therapist and a PT intern, both BVU grads, which was fun. They were amazingly thorough and gentle and helpful. So thorough that they found that while, yes, they can help me with the immediate problem of the knee pain, the larger problem that has caused me hip and back pain on and off my whole adult life is that my left leg is significantly shorter than my right and that my right tibia has actually twisted outward in an effort to shorten itself and create balance.
How did 46 years’ worth of doctors and my own experience fail to notice a significant difference in my leg lengths? I do indeed have a “high hip” on the right side, but it’s always been assumed that was a product of my 3-curve scoliosis.*
So, in addition to therapy to treat my current knee pain and help prevent future knee pain, I’m going to be fitted with a lift for my left heel — a type of orthotic. I may have some pain in re-training my body to a new stance, but it should mean much better comfort and health for the rest of my life, and I’m pretty excited about that.
Now research on the internet tells me that a 1/2″ lift (12mm) is right below the border of having to have specially-made shoes, so let’s hope I don’t need anything higher. Given the fact that I already have a lot of trouble getting good-fitting shoes, I might have to stick with lace-up styles the rest of my life. But I can live with that because 1) having long, bony feet has meant that I’ve never been able to be a big fancy-shoe consumer and 2) I’ve got that whole Quaker simplicity and lack of vanity thing going on, or at least I’m trying to.**
More overwhelmingness to follow in terms of school — I’m teaching 2 weeks of a women’s studies class on top of my current load after Thanksgiving and I’m going to teach during our January interim and I haven’t prepared for either beyond a general idea of what I want to do. But I’m pretty sure I can deal with that and not disappear again. On the knit/crochet front, I’m in a shawl/wrap phase at the moment — oh, and I’m planning to get together with a new faculty member who knits and start a weekly or bi-weekly charity projects yarn night for students and staff. But that’s not until February, thank heavens.
*Yeah, I’m thinking my skeleton is not real pretty.
**Okay, I still have my hair low-lighted to hide most of the grey. I’ve had little enough to be vain about my whole life, so I’m enjoying the whole Iowa-humidity-curly curly pretty hair thing, dammit!
I’ve put this blog on haitus several times in the past and always returned to regular posting, so don’t worry. But I’m feeling overwhelmed right now with things that I have to do/plan, and while I haven’t been blogging, I’ve felt like I should be, which adds to the overall stress level. So I’m thinking check back, say, mid-October and I’ll have all my ducks, if not in a row, at least all waddling in the same direction.
And what am I doing that is making me feel so overwhelmed? Well, I’m still working on course calendars for classes that started last Monday, I have to plan a two-week section I’m teaching for Intro to Women’s Studies, I have a guest speaker coming to town next week and I need to spend Tuesday and Wednesday of this week getting ready for her visit, designing a poster, sending it out/posting it, etc., plus I’ve agreed to meet 6 freshmen (none of my own students) individually for coffee as part of our welcome-retention program, start on the fall issue of the peace and social justice newsletter I took over this summer, finish a prayer shawl for a fFriend* who is quite seriously ill, publicize and plan the course I’m offering during our January term, attend faculty senate meetings and run my own monthly committee meetings, and, concurrent with all this, I’d like to write some fiction, sleep 7 hours a night, walk the dogs, and sometimes eat something that did not come from My Grocer’s Freezer.
So yeah, haitus.
See you!
*the fF (or Ff) indicates she’s both a friend (pal) and a Friend (Quaker).
I haven’t posted in awhile. Fifteen days, to be exact.
My sister Carol thinks it’s because we’ve been playing two and three games of online Scrabble at a time, to which I reply, “Carol, if I were spending *that* much time on each of my moves, I’d be winning more, or at least losing by smaller margins.”
No, with the fall semester staring me down, I’ve been spending as much time as possible reading novels, napping, walking the dogs, crafting, and in general pretending that 8/31 simply will not happen. Where’s that famous Mayan calendar stand on the end of the world? Any chance it’s 8/30/09, around midnight?
Anyway, sitting at my computer posting a blog entry has seemed too much like work to my denial-laden brain. But I can no longer put off prepping for school — I actually cleaned my office and filed last semester’s paperwork over the weekend — and so I can also bring myself to sit still and type full sentences. I mean, I’m going to take a nap directly afterward, and then walk the dogs and, after dinner, craft my way through some mediocre television, but hey, baby steps.
So, I have a lot to share. First, the yearly meeting of Iowa Quakers (conservative).* Everyone was friendly and welcoming and Scattergood Friends School, where the meeting was held, was amazing. I got to tour the attached farm and found out the students also help with the extensive vegetable gardens, the hens, and the cows, sheep, and pigs. The animals provide most of the lawn and field mowing for the school’s land, as well as much of the meat and eggs for the cafeteria, and it’s all very environmental and nifty.
We stayed at a motel about 10 minutes from the school. We drove to Scattergood by 7 every morning and left around 10 at night, and stayed busy with meetings for most of that time, with breaks for delicious meals prepared by the school’s cook and his student helpers. Meeting attenders took turns doing kitchen chores and I put in my two shifts washing dishes. But 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. always busy and always interacting with folks — that is exhausting! During one brief break on day 4 or 5, my motel roommate found me reclining limply on a bench beneath a tree and asked if I was okay. I replied, “The Quakers broke me.”
Now, meeting for business — officially called meeting for worship for business — among unprogrammed Quakers is a funny thing when you first encounter it. Because we have no paid ministry or church officials, all business of the meeting — the budget, paying bills, making charitable donations, hearing reports, accepting new members (both individuals and monthly meetings (every “congregation” is called a monthly meeting)), reading and responding to correspondence, etc., is done by the entire membership, led by a clerk. We don’t vote, as it’s not a matter of majority rule, but rather it is the clerk’s job to determine the “sense of the meeting” and offer decisions and then write the official minute and read it back for the meeting’s approval. In between all this, moments of silent worship may be called for so we can be sure this is all being done in the Spirit.
If you’ve read this far, you can no doubt see two things: first, the clerk’s job is complicated and it takes someone with the literal patience of Job, a strong sense of organization, and, occasionally, a “velvet hammer” manner to do it (we can safely assume I will NEVER be clerk of the yearly meeting. The monthly meeting, maybe — that’s easier). Second, a two-hour session of this seems to last about four years, especially when it’s your first time and you’re sitting on benches designed by the Spanish Inquisition (we’ll get to the benches in a minute). I mean, I respect and love the unprogrammed Quaker way of doing business and after a couple of sessions I got the rhythm and I’m planning on attending next year, so you know I mean that. But in the shock of the first 2-hour session I wanted to storm the head table and say, “Oh for heaven’s sake, let me do that! We can get through this in 20 freaking minutes!” **
Fortunately, I brought yarn and sticks, and I’ll be posting the pattern for my “Scattergood wrap” as soon as I finish making one.
As for the benches, I’m pretty sure that if my monthly meeting had such achingly uncomfortable seats, I’d probably be a Mennonite or Brethren by now. Luckily, our benches have solid backs that rise straight from the seat for about 10″ and then angle slightly back to the top. Not too bad as benches go. The benches at Scattergood have a 6 or 8″ slat across the top and then nothing to the seat — your lower back is just flapping in the wind.*** I have a triple scoliosis, meaning my spine resembles San Francisco’s Lombardi street without the flowers, and by the end of day two, I could hardly walk. So I spent most of the week sitting in a padded folding chair and allowing most of the others to believe I’m just that wimpy, rather than insisting it was my bad back. I did get a couple of gentle comments — turns out there’s a sort of bench pride amongst some lifelong Quakers, akin, I think, to Catholic school graduates claiming *their* nuns were the meanest.
And so that was yearly meeting — spiritually satisfying and exhausting and relaxing in an 0utside-the-normal-flow-of-time kind of way. I give it 10 out 0f 10 boxes of oats.
*conservative in this context represents our worship and meeting for business styles, and a definitely Christian rhetoric, not our socio-political stance. If you’re wondering about our socio-political stance, I can tell you that Labor Day weekend, I’m attending a lesbian Quaker wedding.
**Which is pretty much how I feel at faculty meetings, except faculty learn early to never, ever volunteer to be in charge.
***although if your lower back actually flaps, you’ve got more serious troubles than what kind of bench your meeting uses.
From Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) — Quaker, that is. I’ll write more about the experience itself once I’ve had time to process and relax. But I had a good time, met many, many wonderful, welcoming people, saw Scattergood School, a Quaker boarding high school (where, if I had a teenager, I’d bankrupt myself to send said hypothetical teen—soooooo cool), designed a shawl pattern and got lots of it made, and lost 5 lbs because the while the food was good and plentiful, there was no snacking and lots of water drinking.
Now I’m off to buy groceries (including no snacks in an attempt to keep up the healthy eating) and pick up Zeke bird at the boarder. Without my parrot-y alarm clock and with my sleep debt, I slept in ’til 10:15!
