Hazel is now averaging around 27 lbs. and stands 18″ tall at the shoulder. Contrast this with a 15 lb. puppy at 12″ when we first brought her home. I used to be able to scoop her up in one hand when she was loitering on the front lawn at 11PM, impatient for her to come back inside, and now I’ve got to grab her with both hands and lift with my knees. She eats twice a day but her favorite thing is to see if we’ve forgotten to move the cat food to the counter, because that apparently tastes better than the $70 puppy food she gets. Meanwhile, Nox is in the office horsing down whatever might be left in her bowl.
We’ve settled into a regular daily routine. I get up in the mornings and walk her first thing. Sometimes the ladies come with me and sometimes we sneak out before they wake up. We have a standard route: first we walk over to the church so she can find a good place to poop on their lawn. Then we walk behind the church into the stand of trees where she can chase squirrels and listen to the acorns drop. Then we loop back around on Beechwood Ave. and head to the backyard, where I put her on the long lead to hang out while I get coffee and breakfast together. In the evenings we go for one last walk before closing up the house. She’s accepted that the crate is her nighttime bed; I take the leash and her harness off inside the front door and she trots right inside and lays down for sleep. Jen bought her a couple of fleece jackets to wear when the weather gets cold, and I had her in one for the majority of the day yesterday. She looks fashionable!
The issues with the cats haven’t worked themselves out much. Some days she’s super-chill with the two of them, and other days it’s one big furball of scrabbling claws on the floor as they all try to simultaneously occupy and avoid the same space. We’ve done four pet training classes that have taught us some coping techniques, but everything flies out the window when she sees a squirrel or another dog on our walks.
We’ve found new and interesting ways to try and exhaust her before bedtime; our friends down the street have a puppy roughly her size and practically beg Jen to bring Hazel down to let them run around the backyard and wear each other out. On the days we’ve been able to schedule this, she crashes out as soon as she gets home. On other days, I’ve found a method of wearing her out: I take her over to the playground at the school where there’s an enclosed area about the size of a tennis court with one entrance. I bring a couple of sticks in there, take the leash off, and we play an abbreviated game of Fetch (more like Chase) where she goes after one while I pick up the other. Come to think of it, I suppose I’m playing Fetch. She should be giving me $9 salmon-flavored treats every time I pick up the fucking stick. I guess it’s OK because she is absolutely beautiful when she’s running at full speed. After a half an hour of this, she’s worked her ya-ya’s out and we head for home.
Much of the grass in our backyard is gone, because we had the landscaping guys come and dig a drainage trench Wednesday afternoon. We tied the downspouts from the back of the house into one pipe going out to the middle of the lawn so that the runoff doesn’t keep flowing past (and into) the garage. This should move even more of the water away from the house and hopefully prevent further flooding. They also pulled all of Jen’s plants from the circle garden and leveled it out across the middle of the yard and trimmed back all of our planters in preparation for fall. They are coming back today to level out all of the divots and low spots and humps in the lawn and hopefully make the whole thing flatter (or, at least, sloped all in the same direction).
Along with that work, I approved a contract to have the driveway dug up and replaced with real asphalt. The idea is to widen the whole thing out to two car widths so that we’re not constantly dealing with parallel parking. We’re also putting in a drainage trench toward the back that will move all the water flowing down the driveway from the side of the house out to the other side of the garage.
Up in the bathroom, we’ve got the linen cabinet sitting roughly in place, which is a huge relief. Brian helped me hump it up the stairs last Saturday and we were able to just squeak it into place in the corner. Now I’ve got to figure out how to get the toe kick pedestal underneath it—but that will come a little later. The next big step is to finish off the trim on the front windows. I’ve been holding off because I wanted to see how much free space we’d have with the cabinets in place—there was a chance the countertop would be in the way of the woodwork. I’m going to get that in place and sealed up so that the whole room will be airtight and keep as much heat in as possible. Then I’ll start modifying the piping behind the sink.
Finally, I bought two more windows for the living room on Monday. I’ve got a couple of weeks before they come in to get other stuff done, and then I’ll call my brother in law Glenn to come over and help me get them installed. He’s keen to learn, and now that I’ve done four I feel like I’m clear on the process; having another set of hands will hopefully make the job go faster.
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.
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.
I pulled a bunch of little caterpillars off the tomato plants last night, probably about 20 of them, and crushed them beneath my shoe. They destroyed the top foliage on half of the plants and in doing so killed off the third wave of fruit. Disgusted, I cut back most of the brown foliage, watered everything, and picked the remaining ripe tomatoes. There’s still some green fruit left but it’s pretty sparse, so this is pretty much the end of our tomato season for 2019. It looks like they are Yellowstriped Armyworms, which are pretty common up the eastern seaboard and love to eat crops.
After measuring and re-measuring the windows in the dining room, I called and got pricing for four new replacements, two for the outside wall and two for the porch wall. The outside wall should be a cut-and-dry operation, basically pulling the outer moulding, removing the windows themselves, and pulling the sash weight mechanicals. I think the biggest issue is going to be filling the sash pockets with some kind of insulation—whether it’s spray foam or compressed cellulose, I’ve got to find a good solution for getting in there and making sure they’re packed.
The front windows are going to be more of a challenge, because when the Doctor had them covered over, the workers chopped about 2″ off of each of the verticals in the windowframe so they don’t extend all the way to the edge that meets the wall. I’m faced with either ripping the entire dual windowframe out and replacing it, or taking each vertical board out one at a time and replacing it without moving the horizontal header and plate. The latter solution is the best, but requires nonstandard wood dimensions—the boards are 1 1/4″ thick, which hasn’t been standard since before the Second World War. So I’ll either have to have something milled or work with what Home Depot has.
Meanwhile the bathroom cabinets are on order (have I mentioned that already?) and should be ready in another 2-3 weeks, which gives me enough time to sort out the last of the geometry problems over the back door of the bathroom. Basically the windowframe and the doorframe both come together at an odd angle, close enough that the cap moulding overlaps in space. The way it’s set up now I’ve got to pull the side casing I tacked in off the door and replace it with new boards about 1/4″ higher so that the top of the window and door are at the same height.
Once that’s done I can move inside the closet and finish off the moulding inside and work my way around the perimeter of the floor up to the shower.
* * *
Hazel is getting more and more used to our daily routines (such as they are) and mostly settling in to a schedule of her own. Inside accidents have reduced dramatically, and she’s very good at letting us know when she needs to go out. Her prey drive has ramped up though, and the cats are scarce whenever she’s out on her own. Her anxiety has also ramped up to double what it was when we first got her, so there’s been more whining and crying at night in the crate. We have a quote from the Invisible Fence guy to surround the house with wire, and I’m going to call him today to schedule it.
We are working into a routine with our new daughter, who is as dependent on us as a newborn. Early morning walks are obviously the rule. She’s overnighting very well and able to hold her bladder until we get her outside, and then there’s usually a hunt for someplace to poop. I haven’t been home during the day much this past week but the girls tell me she’s getting better at letting them know when she needs to go out. At night I’m staying up until about 10:45 and then taking her for a final walk. Then we settle down and she usually falls asleep at my feet or in my lap, and I quietly transfer her into the crate. Then I head upstairs to get into bed about an hour beyond my normal time.
What this means is that we’re all sleep-deprived—well, Jen and I are. Finley has been good at taking on some of the responsibility but as a kid who needs her sleep the overnights are our watch. So I’m dragging ass and struggling to think coherently.
We have a doggy DNA test in hand and are going to wait on the results to know if she’s a good match for the cats—if there’s a large percentage of Jack Russell Terrier, we’ve got to rethink our situation completely.
I had plans for Jen’s birthday. We were set to have dinner at a new restaurant downtown, and after some last-minute scrambling we found a sitter we know but have never used before (we’ve gone to church with their family for years). Finn and I took the dog out to run errands, and she started complaining about not feeling good at the Home Depot, where Hazel was the hit of the store. We stopped in PetSmart to pick up a yard lead, some chew sticks, a new collar, and a better harness, and Finn looked worse. Out in the parking lot I was holding Hazel while waiting for Finn to get in and she threw up next to the truck.
I packed both of them up and got them home, where we hosed off Finn’s feet and shoes and she went inside. Then I canceled the sitter and our reservation, and we downgraded our plans for something quieter. I’m sorry, baby.
Hazel is settling in well so far, and we’re adjusting to the reality of a new creature in our household who needs constant attention. As puppies go, she’s an absolute dream. She’s able to hold her bowels overnight and make it out to the front lawn at 7AM—but not much past that. She doesn’t bark or carry on when she’s alone at night, and she’s cool with the crate overall. Now that she’s comfortable in the house she’s happier to play and gnaw on things, but she responds to “No” and “Leave it” very quickly. And she wants to walk further and further each day, even though she’s got some anxiety issues with noises and dogs and cars and people.
Finn and I were walking the dog on Sunday afternoon, enjoying the sunshine and cool air, and a truck pulled up alongside us on Frederick Road. A big late-model Ford quad-cab, easily a $60+K truck. The driver half-yelled, half-slurred something like “C’mere” and waved at us; I stopped where I was on the sidewalk and Finn stood beside me, slightly behind me. This kind of thing happens frequently where we live; people get lost and stop to ask for directions quite often in this age of Siri and Google Maps. But whatever.
The man then started talking to us in a rambling, slurring, mumbling voice, and as he began he picked a magazine up off the passenger-side seat next to him. I caught a glimpse of it and something registered and I thought, is that what I think it is? The words I could make out were something about Morseberger’s (the bar down the street in the middle of Catonsville), his daughter in Florida who doesn’t talk to him, driving around—at this point he stopped and said, “is that your daughter?” at which I point the alarm bells were beginning to ring and I didn’t bother to hide the annoyance on my face and said, “Yes?”—and then he mentioned Morseberger’s again and kept looking at me, and then the magazine, and then me again and mumble-talking. It was at this point I could actually make out what the magazine was: a girlie mag of the quality you’d find in a porno shop. And he was looking at Finn.
I snapped. I started yelling at him: “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. YOU ASSHOLE! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
He actually looked shocked, and had the nerve to look wounded, like I’d just kicked his dog. Then he dropped the magazine back down on the seat, struggled to put his truck in gear and peeled out as I yelled after him, “GET OUT OF HERE, ASSHOLE!”
His truck receding in the distance, Finn looked at me and said, “Wow, Daddy, you were swearing at him. Why did you swear at him?”
Pumped up on adrenaline, I had to calm myself down a little and explain to her what I’d seen and why I reacted the way I did. When we got home we set out some food and water for Hazel and the three of us had another discussion about perverts and why they do dumb shit like that and what to do when that happens (we’ve been talking to her about this kind of stuff for years).
When she sets up the lemonade stand, we realize that anything can happen, just like it can when she walks to school. The world is full of normal people and our neighborhood is like most others in the country. But it’s the one screwball that can really mess with one’s trust in society; I can almost see how 1/2 of the population would rather sit inside and listen to Fox News tell us how dangerous the world is every day instead of going out and making it better.
I’m glad I was there with her, and I’m glad the deep-rooted politeness I’ve been taught through the years was overtaken by full-on Dad mode as quickly as it did and with the conviction I felt. Part of me still can’t believe it actually happened.
Sunday afternoon I found a $20 router stand on Craigslist and spent an hour in the car picking it up. I’ve been using my router freehand since I got it, and have found a way to get the results I need without any mounting surface. But for the two threshold pieces I’m building for the bathroom, I need a stable base to work with and the new 60˚ bit I found is too big to use freehand. This stand is only worth about $20—it’s the basest of bases Black & Decker produced about 40 years ago. But within an hour I’d mounted the router to the stand and devised a way to get it to work with the wood I’ve got—I’m going to have to build a jig for it, which I’d have to do with a $300 router stand—but when it’s done I should be able to add a gentle beveled edge to the threshold that won’t stub a toe.
After much discussion and many castoff candidates, we decided on the name Hazel over hot dogs at the IKEA. We also considered Pearl (Jen and I loved it, Finn did not) which would have been equally excellent, but Hazel was the first one we all responded to immediately.
In the meantime, she’s overnighting really well, enjoying time on the lead in the backyard (digging holes) and laying about in the sunshine. In the evenings she’s exhausted and loves nothing more than to curl up in an available lap and fall asleep.