June 2007

“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” – Joan Didion, in “On Keeping a Notebook”.

We spoke for about 30 minutes, all-told, and I explained all about The Beagle. What she’s like, what she’s afraid of, how she reacts to certain things. The trainer – highly recommended and very capable – informed me she couldn’t work with us because it’s her belief that dogs who are aggressive cannot be cured.

They can, however, be managed with special routines and specific reactions to behaviours and not permitting her to do a lot of the things she likes to do. This is all stuff that we don’t need a trainer for – just a good deal of effort on our part.

Coffee and I talked about this a lot yesterday and last night. Obviously.

We have about 4-6 months before we’ll have kids placed in our home (our best guess, at least) and that leaves us with 4-6 months in which to get this dog into some sort of routine that prevents outbursts and aggression toward us. Or, alternately, we need to rehome her.

I don’t know if we’re being ridiculous to even attempt to “rehab” this dog into something kid-friendly. But at the same time, I just cannot fathom giving her to someone else – she’s a weird little dog with strange quirks and I’m not sure she’d be all that endearing to someone else.

At the same time, I don’t want her to bite the kid or scare the kid.

At the same time, she hasn’t bitten anyone (yet?).

At the same time, kids are really unpredictable and loud and bouncy.

At the same time, so is the beagle.

Ugh and fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck…

The plan for the moment is to keep our eyes and ears open for her Perfect Home. Who knows? It could happen, right? We might be walking her down the street and someone will shout, “Hey! I’ve always wanted to adopt a f’d up beagle with an attitude problem and treat her like a royal princess!” and then we’d all be happy.

But, while we’re smoking that crack, we’re going to work REALLY hard with her to get all the behaviours in line with what her life is going to look like in a few months. Specific bedtimes, for example, to prevent meltdowns. More time spent with Coffee. More dedicated training time.

I swear to you, though, that she knows something is “up”. Yesterday she sat beside me and stared – just stared – while I hammered away on the keyboard. I’d look down and she’d be staring up at me – cute as a button – and it was like being punched in the stomach all over again.

Right now she’s slowly licking my ankle and giving me the “doe eyes”. Yeeesh.

So, that’s the temporary resolution. We’re going to work super-duper hard with her and keep our eyes open in the meantime and.. see what happens.

I don’t feel much better, quite frankly. I am not feeling hopeful. But.. we’ll see.

The beagle, for several years, was the absolute bane of my existence. She shat in my shoes, she peed on my stuff, she shredded things I once cherished. She snarled at me when I pet her on arriving home from work and, regularly, she’d have a beagle meltdown as soon as the sun went down.

But in the past while – a year, maybe? – she’s mellowed and decided that she likes me. She really likes me! LIke a little shadow, she follows me around the house. She lies on my feet when I’m cooking and she forces me to rub her belly at random intervals. We spend a long time snuggling each day, usually while Daisy is napping in the solarium.

And now, now that she likes me, she has decided that she does not like Coffee very much. Her aggressiveness toward him is growing. And when we are all together – Coffee and me and Daisy and Zooey – the beagle meltdowns have increased. There are very few snuggles or bellyrubs in the evenings and there are many more hysterical snarlings and carryings-on.

In short: we need to find a new home for Zooey.

When we brought her home from a friend’s place, she was a young puppy and it was with the understanding that we would not be having children and that we’d be adopting a good deal of time into the future. We thought she’d mellow out after spending time with Daisy and getting a lot of attention from a stay-at-home Coffee. At the very least, we didn’t think there would be a problem with future kids given that we were not adopting tiny infants.

But we were wrong.

To prevent tragedy – physical and emotional – we need to find her a new home. Bringing a traumatized kid into our home and introducing them to an unpredictable beagle isn’t safe for the kid or the dog. If she bites the kid, Zooey is just plain screwed. If we have to give the dog away once the child has arrived, how can we convince the kid that we’re not the sort of people who give away “our problems”.

I feel rather ill just writing this.

One of my biggest pet peeves is people who give up on animals.

It’s hard because she’s a very good dog – she can sit and wait and ‘speak’ and lie down and she’s pretty decent on a leash. She loves the leash-free park and playing ball and she’s healthy and funny and goofy. She also has very velvety dog ears that are good to chew on. Her only problem is what our vet diagnosed as dermatitis between the toes on one foot – causing her to limp sometimes – that comes and goes.

And her wonky eyes.

Ideally, I’d like to find her a home with a single person (with or without other dogs) or, at the very least, a home without kids. She needs someone who’ll take her for walks and let her sniff all the blades of grass – someone who doesn’t want to jog and doesn’t mind meandering. She needs someone who finds her howling funny and who will scratch her neck (the “sweet spot”) for long periods of time.

I’ve never given an animal away before – never tried to find a new home for a creature (other than degus to my friend’s son). I feel shitty about this and I’m trying not to take it as a personal failure. It’s a change in circumstances and, if we can do this the right way, it’ll be a really good thing for Zooey to have a home where she’s the center of someone’s world.

We’re spreading the word slowly – to immediate friends who know about beagles or have ‘beagle connections’. If that fails, we’ll talk to our vet (to see if she has any recommendations) and then we’ll start spreading the net a bit wider.

This just feels horrible.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): How well are you capitalizing on this year’s unique opportunities, Cancerian? Now that we’re almost halfway through 2007, let’s take an inventory. I’m hoping that six months from now, you’ll look back and make the following declaration: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this year I realized in many colorful ways that limitations are my friends. The obstructions I faced eventually forced me to become far more resourceful than I’d ever been before. The wastefulness I uncovered showed me how important it is to shed my trivial wishes and focus intensely on my top priority desires. The confusions I encountered taught me valuable secrets about how to master my emotions and dissolve my superstitious fears.”

(Freewill Astrology.)

There is still no sign of my beloved Baxter squirrel. *sigh* We’re now onto Squirrel Watch Day 3.

—

Last night we stayed up past bedtime to watch a few more episodes of “Freaks & Geeks“. I cannot believe they cancelled that show.

What were they thinking? One season? That’s it?

Clearly I need to be in charge of television programming because these people couldn’t find their.. asses..erm.. these people couldn’t do the.. umm. THESE PEOPLE SUCK. THAT’S ALL. THEY SUCK.

Watching a few episodes is totally worth the hangover-like feeling when the alarm goes off in the morning. Mostly. I’m gonna’ be mighty peevish when it’s all over.

—

A stunning crochet revelation: bigger hooks = less time crocheting. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner – what with the little case of hooks in sizes tiny to huge sitting here and the comparisons that can be made to knitting. But now that I have discovered this amazing factoid, I’m totally taking advantage of it for the granny square project. My second square looks WAY better than my first, too.

—

Tonight is the legal training for the Foster/Adopt program. We’ll be learning all about the things we can and can’t do with foster kids, how the foster/adopt program works, what’s expected of us and of the kids, and, in general, they’re just going to give me more information to mull over between now and when they place the kid(s) with us next year or the year after.

Okay. Maybe not next year. Maybe sooner.

But for god’s sake, people, I’m being as patient as I can and we’re not even at the homestudy stage yet and I am LOSING MY MIND because I cannot tell our worker just how impatient I am to get ‘our kids’ (see, I am capable of being ‘appropriate’ when required and this is probably a good time to practice that, y’know?) and thus I am left rambling here, to you, or constantly whinging to Coffee about how looooooooooooong this is taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaking.

Wah.

It’s probably for the best that the adoption worker does not have access to the inside of my head.

Anyway, tonight is the last class we’ll ever have to go to – at least, before we get some kid(s) living here – and I’m quite interested in finding out the details of the additional foster-parent training that’s available.

I’m also hoping to avoid a panic attack in the middle of the class because, um, lawyers make me really really anxious. Go figure.

—

The neighbours across the street have a tiny dog named “Chippy”. Chippy is white and fuzzy and completely crippled by arthritis in his legs. As such, he doesn’t ‘walk’ so much as ‘hobble and then fall over’ and his owner spends a lot of time carrying Chippy around and placing him down to pee. I am not sure that Chippy’s joints are capable of flexing at all, anymore.

He’s at least 15 years old and has weepy, rheumy eyes and wheezes like he’s been smoking a pack-and-a-half for the past decade. He has one of those filthy little-dog faces with the soggy whiskers and, when I cuddled him in the winter, I discovered that he weighs approximately 3 pounds.

Most of the neighbours believe it is cruel to keep Chippy alive.

When his owner is doing some weeding or planting in the flowerbed, Chippy is often left sitting in the middle of the lawn like a garden statue that’s been coated in fun-fur and left in the sun. He gnaws on blades of grass and lets out his wheezy snorts.

He’s like the dream dog for an elderly couple (which his owners are) in that he stays exactly where they put him, there’s no need to chase him down the street and … wait, I’m totally describing a houseplant here. Except I’m pretty sure Chippy enjoys being cuddled and fawned over and fed little bits of leftover chicken from dinner.

While the neighbours complain that Chippy is just plain ancient and likely to be suffering, I can’t help but wonder if that’s really true. I mean, his owners obviously love him very much and they bring him outside into the sunshine and let him snuffle at the lawn. Perhaps the elderly neighbours are just aware that aches and pains are par for the course at this point – and perhaps have their own achey joints to boot.

Hell, if Chippy lived in Hollywood, his feet would never have touched the ground and he’d have lived his whole life in someone’s purse. So, really, acting like a lawn ornament isn’t such a bad thing.

There is no point to this.

My first granny square for the project is complete! Huzzah! Go me! Wheeehaaaaw!

Now, on to the second one…

Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. -Anonymous

Last night I made my way through about 3/4s of a granny square. I’m hoping that with a bit of planning, I can make at least 20 squares to send before the end of August as a contribution to the afghan project in my previous post. I’m getting better – and faster! – at crocheting and that’s a pretty cool thing.

Maybe 20 is aiming too low? Hmm. We’ll call it “realistic planning” for now. I need to remind myself that it’s not my job to single-handedly crochet all the squares required for the project. I do not need to delve into that “all-or-nothing” thing here, ok? Ok!

—

For the past few nights, we’ve been allowing Daisy to sleep outside of her crate and this, my friends, is a HUGE DEAL. Both dogs have been crate trained since we got ‘em and they’ve grown accustomed to sleeping in their crates whenever we’re gone for a few hours or when we’re asleep at night.

In the past two years, we’ve allowed the dogs to remain uncrated while we’ve gone out to run errands – groceries, say, or to Ye’s and the library – and they’ve gotten much better about not shredding the entire contents of the recycle bin onto the living room floor. But they’ve always slept in their crates.

Daisy is fully housebroken and tends to spend as much time as possible sleeping on the futon in the solarium – why not let her sleep there at night, too, if she wants? We’ve done it for a few consecutive nights and she’s been fine – no pee spots or damaged furniture or half-eaten books – so we’ll keep letting her sleep out.

The beag, sadly, cannot be trusted to sleep anywhere other than her crate. She still makes random pee spots in the house (in the basement on tiles, thankfully) so we’re still making her sleep in her crate. She seems fine with it, though, and perhaps she’s glad to have her own ‘space’ to sleep without hearing Daisy snore.

(Both dogs snore. A lot.)

So, it appears my little dog is growing up. Remind me to hide the car keys.

—

This morning I took the dogs for a walk while Coffee was mowing the lawn (he finished just as it started to rain! huzzah!) and as we made our way down the alley I was saddened to see a fluffy grey squirrel lying, dead, at the edge of a neighbour’s property. The squirrel looked exactly like my friend Baxter – the squirrel that I hand-feed peanuts to on occasion. There was no sign of trauma.

Coffee came to peek, too, but we couldn’t identify for certain that this little corpse was Baxter – she was near her nest, however, and that doesn’t bode well. I put out a whack of peanuts on the porch (as I always do) and I’m hoping I’ll see my little squirrel-friend pop by to pick some up.

Please keep your fingers crossed. I really quite like my little grey squirrel.

—

On that note, I’ve got some stuff to do.. Have a good day. More later..