It was Finley’s birthday yesterday!
We had a friend of Finn’s come over to stay the night, and took the girls out for dinner. Sunday morning Jen made pancakes for breakfast while I took Hazel out to the Lowe’s for supplies. Once we finished eating the girls did their thing until noon, and then we drove into Ellicott City for Finn’s surprise: we made truffles at Sweet Cascades.
The owner, a lovely lady named Sue, had us blow up balloons to made chocolate bowls. Then, we scooped ganache from a bowl and rolled truffles, using a variety of other candies and ingredients to flavor them.
Then we dipped everything in more chocolate and decorated them, which was great fun.
We wrapped up our creations and put them in our bowls, then headed back home, completely stuffed. Mama and I enjoyed the huge smile on Finley’s face the whole time.
My FitBit used to do a great job of guessing how many stairs I’d climbed during the day, and I think the best I did was something like 45 floors on a Sunday when I was going up and down from the bathroom to the basement to use the table saw or retrieve a tool or some scrap wood. I haven’t figured out how to get the Apple Watch to give me the same estimates—it’s buried within one of the associated apps and I can’t be assed enough to bother right now—but I’d guess I beat 45 flights getting the windows in place on Sunday. After fixing the power switch on the table saw in the basement, I used that to rip a bunch of boards down to get sash stops the right size. I then measured and cut a stool the proper size and shape for the inside to clean up the casing. The miter saw is up in the bathroom so I had to run up there to trim things to size and come back down to fit them in place. By 9:30 that evening I was exhausted and went to bed early. Monday morning my knees were sore and my legs didn’t want to climb the stairs at the train station.
The other big event was delivery of our cabinets on Friday. The original time been scheduled for Wednesday but when they said ‘delivery’ they failed to mention it’s just curbside, so you have to get the stuff in your house yourself. On Wednesday a driver stopped at the house, spent an hour moving the boxes out of, and then back into the truck, and left. I got a couple of calls from the company, and we rescheduled for Friday. The five smaller boxes were reasonably easy to carry inside but the big linen cabinet is huge, and the guy on the truck took pity on me and helped me get it up the front stairs and into the front hallway, after which I handed him a $20 and thanked him profusely. I’m clearly going to have to open the box and break it down to its base parts—it came completely assembled so I have to pull the shelves and drawers out of it—and enlist a couple of friends to help me get it up the stairs and into the bathroom. I hope we can get it to stand up correctly…
I’m sad to read this morning that Ric Ocasek, frontman of the Cars, died in New York at age 75. As the author of one of the best rock songs of all time, this is a loss for humanity.
I’m also strangely excited about the news that Gary Larson may be resurrecting The Far Side after a long, dark hiatus. I don’t know if this means he’s going to be reprinting old strips or just producing new ones, but I hope it’s the latter. The world needs more weird humor. (On my desk here at work sits the Midvale School for the Gifted mug my parents bought me for my college dorm in 1989; I’ve had it with me ever since).
It doesn’t look like much, but this is Sunday’s product. The windows are secured in place, an all moulding is caulked and sealed on the inside. I need more cap moulding for the top and I need a thin strip for under the sill, as well as more insulation for the now-empty sash pockets. Once that’s been bought, I can seal this up completely and be ready for paint on a day when it’s snowing.
The results are back on Hazel’s lineage. Some of what we suspected is true, and some of what we learned is a surprise.
A word of warning: I’m about to make sweeping judgements about dog breeds based on my previous experiences. I realize full well that asshole dogs are the result of asshole humans. But I have a distrust of several breeds based on interactions I’ve had where the humans have been attentive parents and the dogs have been shitheads. You can argue with me all you like, but you won’t change my mind.
So: on to the results. It came as a surprise that she is, in fact, 37% Shorthair Pointer; we figured she had some kind of sporting background based on her shape and face, but we couldn’t narrow down what it might be, and I just figured the rescue was making an uneducated guess. The other, bigger surprise is that she’s 25% American Staffordshire Terrier. In reality, this should be expected because pit bulls have been popular for years and there are plenty of idiots who let theirs run off the leash without being fixed, so I’d wager every rescue mutt has some pit in the woodpile. Then there’s a 37% mixture of “other”, which includes Terrier, Asian, and Sporting breeds. What this means is that more than a third of Hazel wants to dig up the lawn to bite you before fetching the paper.
So, back to the main breeds. The Shorthair Pointer is the part I’m happiest about; I love that breed and sporting dogs of this type are the size and temperament Jen and I are used to. If we were dealing with more Pointer and less Terrier I think we might be further along normalizing the dog/cat balance in our house, she’d be the medium-sized dog we wanted, and I’d feel better about leaving the girls alone at the house.
Then there’s the Pit Bull. I really don’t care what anyone says; I don’t trust pit bulls. I’ve met many friendly, gentle pit bulls. I’ve rolled around on the floor with them. I’ve had one sleep on my lap. I also lived in Baltimore City as the Rottweiler Era gave way to the Pit Bull Era, when every white trash methhead from Highlandtown was walked three pits on a chain through my neighborhood on their way to the methadone clinic. Every other week somebody’s pit jumped a fence and mauled a kid or the mailman or somebody minding their own business in their own fucking yard. While I understand that a raging smack addiction probably doesn’t make for conscientious dog parenting, I think there’s something going on there. And I have a hard time trusting that inbred instinct with my daughter and niece and nephew.
And, to be perfectly honest, it’s a class thing. I hear pit bull, I see a toothless tattooed basehead sagging his basketball shorts wandering up Eastern Avenue yelling for his baby mama. I left the city to escape that shit; and as much as I make judgements about people and their dogs, I know that other people do the same.
The random mixture of breed groups is most likely what accounts for her size, as she’s not as tall as a pointer or a pit, and there are a lot of unknowns in this group. The Asian group includes awesome dogs like Huskies but assholes like Chow-Chows. I’ve had several experiences with bity Chows and I don’t trust them at all. The mixture of terriers accounts for the digging and the prey drive; terriers were bred to chase varmints so it’s perfectly within Hazel’s nature to see a running cat and want to eat it. And the Sporting group could be anything—we just don’t know enough about what the mixture is to have any idea of its influence on her.
So, we’re still in a holding pattern. She has good days and bad days, just like me. I was completely out of patience with her last night for some reason, while this morning we were good together during our morning walk. We’ve got some recommendations for personal trainers (someone to come in and train the family, not the dog) so we’re going to research this approach and see if there’s hope for a resolution.
Johnathan Franzen published a sobering column in the New Yorker which basically says he doesn’t believe humans can stop climate change.
Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.
Scientific American published a rebuttal in a blog which basically tells him to STFU.
But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the Universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens.
Reading it for the first time, I wanted it to be written more as a point-by-point rebuttal. When I re-read it, I realized the author chose to focus on words of hope rather than scientific diarrhea—a welcome shift from the stuff I read every day. Climate scientists know better than any of us what’s probably coming in our future, and it’s not pretty. I’m taking comfort in the fact that she can still be optimistic.
We got four new windows delivered yesterday, and I took about 20 minutes to fit both of these into place after dinner. They went in like butter: a perfect fit for both. I’d spent more than one night worrying about having measured them wrong and being stuck with something that wouldn’t work, but this went smoothly. And they look great too.
We also heard from the cabinet folks that those will be delivered on Wednesday…
After all of the activity last weekend, this one is quiet in relief. We dicked around the house for most of yesterday, working with the dog at her second behavioral class, and she did pretty well. She was attentive and well behaved, and the trainer was kind enough to stay and talk with Jen for 45 minutes after class while I walked her out back.
To be perfectly honest, it’s been a struggle to make a decision about what we’re going to do with her. We made a pro/con list last weekend that came out pretty evenly on both sides, and she had a really good couple of days with us. Then there were a couple of days that went to absolute shit and we all sat up on Friday night talking about it and mostly agreeing that we were going to send her back. Saturday morning we had a change of heart and we’re back to square one.
I don’t want this to sound like we’re a family of dilletantes. Jen and I are dog people. We grew up with dogs, we know dogs, we’re not afraid of the responsibility of dogs. We know what it means to have a dog.
I’ve settled into the routine of walking her in the morning and evening, and as much as I’ve never been a morning person, I like being out when the rest of the world is still sleeping, smelling the dew on the grass, feeling the first chill of fall in the air, and following Hazel as she wanders the neighborhood following her nose. Jen and I get some time to talk with each other, and the exercise doesn’t hurt. When she’s chill, she’s a wonderful dog to be with. What we’re struggling with is her social anxiety, and prey drive. She’s a nervous little girl who is paralyzed by loud noises and flashing lights she doesn’t recognize, and kind of a dick around other dogs after a while.
She’s a smaller dog (although she’s gained five pounds and an inch and a half in a month’s time) so she has a need to meet every dog she sees, but when she shifts into play mode she doesn’t know how to stop. She’ll run and jump and nip and bark, but when the other dog backs off she keeps going, and when they tell her to stop (usually by giving her a solid chomp or, as happened this past week, by knocking her over and putting her in a choke hold with their teeth) she doesn’t take the hint—she keeps going. She’ll continue jumping on them, nipping and barking, and we’ve got to step in and separate them.
We don’t have the DNA tests back yet, so we don’t know what flavor of breed soup we’re dealing with. She’s definitely got some hound in her, because she follows her nose whenever we’re out with her. There’s a fair bit of terrier mixed in, because she loves to dig (god help us). There’s some working dog in her, because her legs are long and she’s built like someone put a full-sized Vizsla in a shrink-ray set to Half Size. The prey drive of the terrier is what worries us. There’s a split-personality thing going on where the super-bright part of her brain knows that our cats are off limits. When we bring her inside and she sees them, she’s now at the point where she’ll sit down on her own and wait for them to cautiously saunter over and look at her. She gets fidgety, and we can see one half of her brain thinking YOU ARE MY SIZE! LET’S PLAY while the other side is saying IF I CHOMP THEM, THE HUMANS WILL DESTROY ME. She’ll get close to them, and the cats will smack her in the face a bunch of times, and she’ll back off. Then she’ll wiggle up to them again, they’ll whack her on the nose a few more times, and she’ll back off again. This continues until the cats nope themselves out.
The problem is that when the cats tear ass at high speed, the prey instinct in her brain destroys all rational thought and all that’s left is I MUST CHEW THAT RUNNING ANIMAL IMMEDIATELY. It’s this dichotomy that has us worried, because we don’t know if it’s ever going to work itself out in a favorable way. The cats are understandably upset; Trixie has gained several pounds in the last month and Nox looks noticeably frazzled. They’re not getting the attention they need and we feel horrible. We’ve read horror stories about Jack Russell terriers getting along amicably with cats for several years and then one day it’s the hallway scene from The Shining. This, and the reaction to other dogs, is what has us up at night.
So we’re in a holding pattern, and she’s snoring peacefully on Jen’s lap in an anxiety sweater.
When I was in college I applied for and got a credit card, because, why not? At first I was very careful with it, but as those things often do, it crept up on me. A couple of years out of school I was running a balance of $4,000 and struggling to pay down the interest. This continued for a couple of years until I upgraded my job situation and then I made a mission out of paying it off. Once that was done I put the card in a drawer and rewired my brain to only buy with the cash in my checking account, and used my debit card exclusively. That was about 20 years ago, and I haven’t had a credit card since then.
You know where this is going, right?
Apple just came out with the Apple Card and I signed up for it. A couple of days later a very small package appeared in the mail and I opened it to find a surprisingly meaty titanium credit card in a small envelope with my name on it. I activated it and put it into my Apple Wallet alongside my debit card, where I can use Apple Pay with my phone or my watch. The plan is to only use it for gas and high-dollar purchases, as I’d like the extra layer of protection against card skimmers and fraud. Plus, the cash back is kind of nice.
Update: be sure to opt out of the arbitration clause.