canine tales

Shame Trundles

The funniest thing this past week has been Odd Trundles and the Fancy Harness. I decided taking forty-five minutes to walk him a half-block was not optimal, and went on a mad quest for a harness that would fit his barrel chest and tiny hips. Fortunately, I found something perfect–microfiber, padded points, adjustable for said barrel chest–at the pet store, brought it home…and he haaaaaates it.

He can no longer rage-sit to halt the whole walking process and demand coaxing, and it makes our walks–never fast, more of an amble, with a few rest breaks because he does have very short legs–just so much easier for everyone. An unexpected bonus is that he can’t wrap the leash around my legs anymore. I’m sure this is a component of his fury.

Anyway, here’s Odd Trundles, giving me the side-eye of shame. The green cloud is his Fancy Memory Foam Bed in my office, the one he is refusing to climb into because he is So Mad At Mum. You can just hear him grumbling “shame, shame on you, Mother,” in his stuffed-nose little voice.

Poor fellow. Life’s hard for a Trundles.

Dogs, Dogwood

Yesterday, while walking the dogs, I passed a dogwood in exuberant flower. I love their notched blossoms and of course the canines are always happy to stop and sniff–or snuffle, in Odd Trundles’s case. Poor Trundles had a damp rear because he had to be half-washed that morning, and walking in the sunshine to air his nethers was apparently quite pleasing. At least, he’d forgiven me for soaping and rinsing him by the time we arrived back home.

Spring has definitely sprung.

Said Often

So Odd Trundles had a nightmare last night, and peed his bed. This doesn’t happen as frequently as you’d think, but it does mean I’m up early, his bedding is in the wash, and I have soaped a dog’s ass and undercarriage before 8am. It’s a good thing all my commitments for the day were suddenly changed to afternoon during the span of a half-hour yesterday.

If I can just get through this week without combusting from sheer tension, I’ll call it a win.

So. My office is full of the reek of just-washed Trundles, but at least the window is open. A plumber is coming by this afternoon to fix the shutoff valve and maybe, if he got authorization from the home warranty folks, to install the new dishwasher and take the old one away. I have each scenario planned for–just the valve fixed, the valve fixed but the dishwasher electrical somehow borked, the valve fixed and the new dishwasher installed but the old one not carted off, and the best of all possible worlds, the valve fixed, new dishwasher installed AND old one carted away. Anything will represent a step forward, so I’m pretty Zen about the whole deal. It’s arrived at the point of absurd hilarity, so I can relax now.

The other commitment this afternoon is offering moral support during a friend’s doctor visit. I can’t plan for any of the scenarios on that one. For one thing, nothing is inside my control there except showing up on time and being supportive. For another, there’s just too much we don’t know yet. Today should at least give us more information. Aggressive treatment options are already scheduled for the next few weeks, so we’ll see how it turns out.

I say that a lot. Just this past weekend, I was in the car with the Little Prince. I have this habit of prepping the kids when we’re in the car. When they were younger, everything went easier if they knew what to expect, and the car was the last-minute place for answering questions and taking them through processes. I guess I haven’t gotten out of the habit, because I started telling the Prince what we were looking for and as a bonus, answering his questions about the then-latest bits of the dishwasher saga.

“…we’ll see what happens,” I finished.

He laughed. “You say that every time we’re in the car.”

I said it again at dinner, and since then, I’ve noticed whenever it leaves my mouth. The kids are sixteen and twenty now; I suppose decades of parenting have left me with a few habits they might find a little annoying. Both of them tell me the prep sessions are comforting no matter how old they get. Plus, they’ve absorbed “plan for what we can and relax about the rest” as a Life Maxim, which is hardly the worst way to look at situations.

It’s busy, but so far I’m coping. Especially since work is going relatively smoothly, though I had to take some time off yesterday to think about ceremonial leather armor, mercury poisoning, and different diseases I can give this particular Emperor that will have the effects I want on him and the story. I need his decline to be fairly rapid since we’re in the last third of the book, and the coronation is the next-to-last thing that happens before number one of the trilogy reaches a natural resting place.

But…yeah. We’ll see what happens.

*winks, vanishes in a cloud of smoke*

The Hang of Tuesdays

I took double the time I thought I needed off after finishing a zero, but I’m still stretched-thin and cranky. It always takes longer than I plan for, even if I plan for a ridiculous number of days. I should just give up planning and wallow.

Yeah, I can hear you laughing. It’s not gonna happen. Contact with the enemy throws all plans out the window but planning is indispensable, and all that. Maybe I’ll just revise the Nutless Kangaroo Shifter Story. It’s only 25k, and it’s fun. That might help ease me over the hill.

Otherwise, it’s all opera (yesterday I livetweeted the Met’s 2009 Lucia di Lammermoor, just for fun) and knocking off a bit of reading. I finished Leckie’s Strong Men Armed and have moved on to another Bolaño. The former is not perfect, I’ll admit–the casual racism is very much a product of its time–and Leckie struggles against the dehumanization of the “enemy” as much as anyone who had slogged through brutal combat can. It’s just what it says on the tin–the story told pretty much from the viewpoint of the Marines on the ground, of whom Leckie was one.

The Bolaño is…well, it’s pure Bolaño. Udo the narrator is a selfish piece of shit1, and Bolaño would have done better from a technical standpoint to do the book in the same close first person without trying for the epistolary feel of a diary. I keep thinking every time I read him that I’ll finish scratching that frustrating itch and be done with it, but like Jandek, sometimes I get in a mood and it’s the only thing that will do. Fortunately I have the rest of the TBR to get through when this is finished.

It would be nice if the dogs would stop trying to den in my TBR. In their defense, it’s in my office, where we all spend the majority of our days. And whenever they start, they get a reaction from me, which is probably the point of half their attempts. (Or more.)

I had a list of Serious Subjects for the post today, but any attempt to organize them makes me stare into the distance in self-defense. The part of recovery where you feel better but still have to be careful so you don’t tear something fragile and injure yourself even worse quite frankly sucks.

So it’s tea, some revisions, reading, and playing with tetchy bored canines today. The Princess has something pastry-based she wants to experiment with on her day off, and the oven is already going.

Not bad for a Tuesday.

Of Course, At Least

Of course Miss B had to wriggle and push until I was out of bed, despite a very interesting dream I kept longing to go back to involving a spy, a giant old refinished Victorian house, and microfiche. Of course Odd Trundles, bumbling around under the dining table, scared himself with a high-pitched noise from his own nether end and knocked over two chairs, wrenching the table almost sideways and almost, almost knocking a hapless African violet off said table. (It lost a leaf and keeps whispering about earthquakes.)

Of course the Mad Tortie had to try leaping into my lap while I was drinking coffee. She’s fine and the cup didn’t break, but I had to make another four shots because the first four hit the floor. And, and, of course, of course the damn squirrels have found the bird feeders and are gorging themselves.

Of course.

I’ve a middling-long run this morning, which means B will not be accompanying me. She will be quite put out by this, but she’s no longer the sprightly pup she used to be. Rest will do her good, and she can go with me tomorrow. Of course she won’t understand, and will supervise me extra hard upon my return.

At least I got some seeds into a mini-greenhouse, protected from squirrel depredations. I’ll be able to plant the starts when they come up and have a chance of them surviving, if the slugs aren’t too bad this year. I also got another hellebore into the ground, a beautiful deep-flowered one. The milky daffodils are coming up and I see evidence of hyacinths, the hop vine survived the winter and is by all appearances ready to make this the year it grows up the stair-rails with a vengeance.

And at least, if I don’t take B today, all the asshats who let their dogs offleash will only be moderately annoying. Small mercies.

I have hung a cheap bird feeder outside the kitchen window. On tiptoe, getting the hook into the holder, I heard the Princess laughing on the deck behind me. “What?” I tried not to sound aggrieved.

“I’m just thinking,” she said, “that maybe we’ll have more raining squirrels.”

I’m under strict orders to keep her posted.

Over and out.

Alarm, Buffet

I put my alarm clock across the room on my dresser, so I have to get out of bed to turn it off. Both the kids have used this strategy with much success, but it wasn’t necessary for my silly self until this past winter. Even the sunrise function, where the attached lamp starts glowing a half-hour before the alarm and ramps up to simulate dawn, wasn’t helping. I would roll over, turn the damn thing off when it began to glow, and roll back, all without waking. Miss B loved it, because I would also somnolently scratch behind her ears for a little bit before passing out again.

She also hated it, because I wouldn’t get up, even when she put her nose in my face. There’s nothing like feeling whiskers tickle your lip and opening your eyes to see a carnivore’s big sad eyes–and sharp pointy teeth.

Odd, of course, didn’t mind, since it meant his early-morning nap blurred into his mid-morning nap. The only thing he did mind was brekkie being a bit late, but since brekkie happens after he gets up, gets his morning song, and unloads, world without end, amen, that wasn’t a huge problem.

Odd remembers the one and only time he missed breakfast at our house. That was back when he went to the vet as a pup, got an umbilical hernia fixed–and got neutered, too, all in one go. You don’t want to do surgery on bulldogs if you can avoid it, since their airways are already so compromised sedation becomes a hazard. Odd didn’t mind the crate-ride there, and didn’t mind coming home minus a few bits–he was already too roly-poly and corkscrewed to be able to reach his stitches, so he didn’t need a Cone of Shame. What he did mind, and complained LOUDLY about, was the lack of breakfast that one notable morning.

Dogs are mostly Zen creatures of the Now, but he remembers the one day brekkie was not delivered. Miss B, of course, shrugs and yips at him when he starts grousing about it. “BEFORE I CAME HERE, BREAKFAST WAS NEVER CERTAIN,” she informs him, and Odd, aghast, begins running in circles and barking loudly, as if this is a prospect.

“You’re just making it worse,” I tell B, and she looks at me with a certain gleam in her eye.

“HE’S GETTING EXERCISE,” she says, and I rub behind her ears.

Yesterday, since we went on a run, she was reasonably mellow. Which made that afternoon’s Squirrel Antics somewhat easier to handle–the little bastards have awakened after the cold snap, and are digging in the garden to see if I’ve put any more peas down there. (I haven’t. Yet.) Of course, the Mad Tortie sees them, and while they are not birds, she still yearns to nab a specimen. (Despite, I might add, a squirrel being roughly her size if you take off her tail and poufy fur.) It’s one of her great unfulfilled desires, like constant catnip and a door she can lie across the threshold of, neither inside nor out. The damn squirrels, including the new queen of the backyard heap (and Lord, she is a story unto herself) think the garden boxes are a buffet; the Mad Tortie thinks the squirrels are a buffet, Miss B longs to herd them all up, and Odd Trundles knows very well Mum gets mad if you go digging in the boxes but the prospect of New Friends drives what little sense he lays claim to straight out of his capacious, rock-hard noggin.

But that’s another blog post, since I’m nursing three separate burns in three separate places only left hand from the red sauce yesterday. That didn’t happen during the squirrel hijinks, mind you. It was just an added fillip to a very strange day that ended with yet another hilarious scene in the nutless kangaroo shifter story. (Its working title is Scrotum Search, because I can’t help myself, but it will probably be Jozzie & Sugar Belle if I decide to do it as a serial.)

Since I’m up and have taken down a tankard of tea, I might as well go for a run. Maybe today I’ll tire Miss B out enough that she won’t want to herd everything in the newly-unsnowed yard.

I’m not holding my breath.

Enforced Rest

I could finally run again this morning! It was chilly, nasty, and damp; Miss B kept trying to kill me, but I persevered. Taking a week off while my body fought a book I shouldn’t have been writing and a furious cold caught at a train station might have been good for healing, but I was tied in several knots by this morning.

I’m still tense, but not entirely murderous.

Over the weekend I used the enforced rest to finish revisions on Sparked–the first book of the YAs my agent wanted me to write just for her. I believe she has plans that involve shopping them to publishers, but that’s outside my field of vision right now. I’m still not sure I want to get involved with YA publishing again. But may gent knows best, and in any case, I wanted to write something just for her. My version of a gift, since I find present-giving (and receiving) utterly charged circumstances unless my children are recipients. Anyone else, anxiety kicks in. So I write books for people I love, and it doesn’t seem to turn out half bad.

Anyway, Miss B is finally calm, with all her week’s worth of fidgets worked out. I am not nearly as calm, but I can tell I’ll sleep tonight. What I’ll do when may body decides it can no longer run, who can tell? I might expire of insomnia and sheer irritation at that point. Today, though, the plan is red sauce (the beginnings of said sauce are beginning to smell divine) and laundry–and moonlighting with the nutless kangaroo story. Said story choked up 2K yesterday, while I was supposed to be resting in a post-revision blur.

They never do what you want, stories. They twist and turn and sometimes bite. I swear I will NOT turn this story into a book, it’s a novella at most. (The characters trying to crowd in to get their POVs heard are laughing at me.)

Odd Trundles is exhausted from his weekend too. It involved a thorough washing, never one of his favorite things. It also involved irrigating his sore paw with hydrogen peroxide. If it takes bathing his toes in that shit daily, that’s what I’ll do. It’s a good thing I love his cranky, creaky, snoring little self.

So. I have a tankard of hot Earl Grey, my favorite sweater, and the smell of oregano-heavy tomatoes is wafting through the house.

Over and out.