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Nap time

b (from my iPhone)

Fun in the Snow (@ my mom's house)

via facebook.com

My dachshund takes in the view. :3

Georgie: A Rescue Story

The other day I got an update on a foster dog -- a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Georgie who lived with us two years ago, from just prior to Halloween to just before Christmas.

Georgie had some kind of skin condition and arrived hairless, itchy, raw, reddened and miserable. He was about as sad as sad can look. 

Another volunteer, Huntly, picked Georgie up in Vermont and a mutual friend delivered him as far as a highway exit in New Hampshire. The first time I saw him, he was in a dog crate in the back of a van at a rest area, growling and snarling, his skinny body pressed as far back as he could get against the crate's back wall, and looking for all the world more like a gremlin than a Cavalier. (More "Lilo and Stitch" than "Lady and the Tramp.") Prior to the pickup, he had been living by himself in an unheated trailer, with a litter box and a bag of cheap kibble. Details were fuzzy, but there was something about a divorce, and an owner who had moved to a place that didn't allow dogs, and a hope that he might have been adopted to someone the owner knew. But who wanted a hairless, irritable dog with some kind of undiagnosed, ugly skin condition?

Georgie was with us for a few months. Turns out he was allergic to pretty much everything; had raging ear infections; and needed regular dermatology visits, medicated baths every other day, and deep ear cleanings. I kept him sequestered from our other dogs until he was stable, which meant he and I spent a lot of one-on-one time... unlike any other foster dog I ever had. Boy was he high-maintenance! But so sweet and such a little impish personality. I fell for him hard. 

The nature of the foster relationship is temporary, of course. I couldn't keep Georgie, and anyway, even if I wanted to, we weren't the right kind of family. We already had three Cavaliers, and Georgie needed a home where he could be the only dog; he wasn't particularly good at sharing. 

So eventually, the day came when, stronger and fuzzier, he went home to his new life. If I tried to describe how much I missed him, you'd think I was describing how I had lost a lung. How much can you miss a creature who squirms at the endless ear cleaning? Who struggles in the bath? Who growls at your son? Who nips at your other dogs? Who hops over gates? Who hoards his food? How much can you miss a tense, skittish creature whose naked tail quickens like the reverberations of a violin string when he sees you? How much can you miss something that presses his lean body so tightly against your leg that you can feel his heart keeping time with your own?

It's surprising how much, really.

In her note, Georgie's new Mom calls him fabulous. Playful. And as furry as a Collie. "I cannot thank you enough!" she writes. She includes a picture of Georgie as he is today, poised expectantly above a tennis ball. There's something about his eyes that's familiar. Otherwise, I barely recognize him. Which thrills me.

Georgie is one of those rescue miracle stories; the kind of from-the-brink of disaster stories you hear sometimes at a party or whatever, about animals or people or about other kinds of reformations. And you think, "Really? Could that really be true?" 

But it is true. It really happens that way sometimes. Which not only fills my heart but also gives me a kind of faith in humanity, and reminds me of the capacity of love. As goofy as that might sound.  

Stop murdering the enviroment with your gas guzzling dog

via good.is

I thought the above image was an interesting exercise in perspective. You hear environmentalists ranting about gas guzzling SUVs and lobbying for higher emission and gas mileage standards, but you don't see them going around murdering dogs left and right. Well, at least not yet.

However, I'm not sure I completely agree with the methodology used here. 10,000 kilometers is a little over 6,200 miles. That's not exactly average use, at least not here in the United States. But even if you double the annual driving distance, the carbon footprint is still less than that of a medium-sized dog.

I think the one thing we can be sure of is this: We are on the eve of an epic battle between PETA and Greenpeace. It will be bloody. There will be many casualties. And when the dust settles after the storm, there will be a lot less smelly people getting up in your face trying to get you to sign something when you walk out of Whole Foods.

This study also proves the superiority of cats. This has been known by most digital natives for some time though. Lolcats over Faildogs any day of the week. Twice on Caturday.

matching*couples

Yes I'm left footed (and yes she is demanding - but aren't all woman?)

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device, so please excuse any typo's made with my man-size fingers on the teeny weeny keyboard

Poem Five

Friends

Soft cuddly talkative friends

Loyal smelly wilful friends

Emotionally intelligent Psychic complete

Friends and I share our world

Of fellow richness and just each other.

My colleagues I call them

My family My friends They have been around

Many a hill and many a bend

They are sweet and sensitive Compassionate and kind

My friends I spruik of are friends one dreams of

Fortunate am I for their company thus

Dogs some call them Me, they are familyPlus.

My pains and my loves!

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device, so please excuse any typo's made with my man-size fingers on the teeny weeny keyboard

Comfy

b (from my iPhone)

The return of the prodigal daughter

The biblical reference is entirely unfair. Katherine is in no way lost (at least in any way relevant to our nuclear family) or wasteful. Really, its the opposite. Her visit is celebrated as one would expect, not in spite of expectation.
She woke me up today with the volume of excitement and scorn to force me into a dog walk with her. It was short on account of her injuries. These injuries are also what afforded her the trip home (and saved her from initiating newer rugby players this weekend at Stony Brook).  With disappointed dogs home, we ate as a family: Dad, Kat and I. Stake for them, and mashed potatoes for the three of us. Kat's favorite meal.
Citing absent navigation skills and memory, Katherine dragged me into taking Joker and Chance to Sarah. An hour driving to play with the dogs inside a closed tennis court for thirty minutes. After killing the hour and a half, we found mom and dad on the couches watching TV. Neither of them have been anywhere besides the bedroom and the kitchen in as long as I have. Months. Natural, Katherine was soon in front of the TV wearing in her spot on the couch as well.
I descended to the basement and completed the last real nagging part of the website. I left the spot of nagging feature vacant long enough to view it as a whole. Disgust followed. It needs to be rewritten. With this in mind, I drew out what I'd expect the database to look like so I could imagine the server calls would be so I could tailor the javascript. I am totally clueless on how to store and fill enumerated qualifications. I am also shaking on how to store multiple choice question data. Hopefully andrew will be able to give me some database structure insight.
Tonight, I also finally made an effort to play the song I was aspiring to before leaving for Georgia. C E7 Am F. How hard can that be!?