Category Archives: Molly

Help, I’m in trouble with my dog

It’s official. Molly is sure I have a spare mistress hidden in my office and is upset about it.

This afternoon, I’m attempting to listen to the podcast of “Herding Vegetable Sheep” by Ekaterina Sedia as read by Kate Baker from the Clarkesworld site. Molly keeps running into the office barking and looking about. Ms Baker has one of those husky voices that sounds sexy even when emanating boredom while reading the phonebook and that triggered Molly’s jealous streak. Every time I turned up the audio, Molly came sprinting into my office, barking and searching.

When Molly couldn’t find the lady so obviously speaking, she turned to me and gave me the look. You know, the one that says “this voice isn’t L and yet it sounds like a young lady, so where is she? Huh? HUH? What are you hiding from me? Come on, I know you’ve hidden her somewhere.” How do you respond to a look like this?

I have to admit it was an effective look. I immediately felt guilty for listening to the reading. But then it hit me that I had nothing to feel guilty about, so why was I letting the dog make me feel that way. (It might be those big brown eyes. I don’t know.) In the end, I outfoxed Molly by reading the printed version of the story. (So there!) After all, what Molly can’t hear won’t hurt her.

It’s now an hour or more later and Molly is still sitting here in my office looking at me very intently as if to say, “I know you hid that lady somewhere and I’m not leaving until she comes out.” Wonder if she’ll give it up when I go to make supper? It’s a real shame when your dog thinks you’re holding out on her.

Anyway, for those of you that enjoy Sci-Fi and non-fiction about the field of science fiction, I highly recommend the Clarkesworld site. The ezine they publish has some very good short stories and audio readings. Given the collapsing market in short stories as the more traditional mags fold up shop, this is becoming one of the premiere places to see new authors cut their teeth. The addition to the mix of an occasional story by masters like Mike Resnick and Robert Reed adds just the right spice.

Since I seem to be a bit book and author tracked at the moment, I’d also like to recommend the Robert Burton Robinson site. He has four of his Greg Tenorly series novels available for download and they are a very pleasant read; a combination of mystery, detective, and romance. He also has a couple of his other novels and a chapter serialization of his newest novel available on-line.

Back to work. I still have to figure out how to convince Molly that there is no new mistress so we can return to normal.

Friday High Five

Angela once more has the Friday High Five up and running, so …

My list of five for today:

Five Things I Know But My Dog Doesn’t Know I Know

  • I know that you are sitting with your head in my lap, grinning as I type, just hoping I will pet you. Begging like that only sometimes works.

  • I know that there is a bit of wind making the bushes move outside. You don’t have to keep trying to tell me. It’s really unladylike to be barking at the breeze, no matter how important it seems to you.

  • I know that it snowed last night. After all, we were out together to shovel it this morning. And no it wasn’t very helpful that you kept throwing nose loads of snow up in the air and back onto the places I just shoveled.

  • I know how L’s valentine bear, sitting calmly on the kitchen counter when we went to bed, appeared on the library floor this morning. You might have been able to plead innocent if you hadn’t suddenly stopped and refused to enter the library until after I picked up said bear. It also would have helped if you hadn’t then run with your tail between your legs to the back door while looking back at me with a guilty grin.

  • I know that the toilet lids are down throughout the house. Although you recently turned 21 in dog years, that does not give you the right to imbibe eau de toilette in this household. Gone are the days of mysterious lapping sounds coming down the hallway to my ears. Gone too are the surprisingly wet muzzled and guilty grins as you tried to nonchalantly appear innocent when you heard me coming down the hall. The water in your water bowl comes from the same place. You don’t need the extra addictive kick of eau de toilette in your life. Get over it.
Doesn’t look very innocent to me. How about you?
A more normal look. “Come on, Come on …”

Blue Monday

L headed back to the mountains today, so it was up to me to console the mournful Molly. We tried a sneaky trick this time – we had Molly out in the back yard playing while we loaded L’s truck. It meant Molly didn’t catch on to the impending departure of her mistress quite as soon. In order to cheer both Molly and myself up, we went for a nice long walk this afternoon after L left. If Molly is tired enough, she doesn’t get a chance to mope because she is busy sawing logs as she snores away, usually at my feet in my office.

While we were walking, it was once again borne home to me just how much the climate change has got the flora and fauna confused this year. The robins are still here in mass. There will  not be a first robin of spring here since they never left. This is the first time in my memory that the robins have not left for the winter to return in the spring. It is really strange to see hundreds of robins in the trees and on the grasses in January and February in this area. I even saw a few pairs mating today. Makes me wonder what is going to happen to the population if they all get fooled into early mating and subsequent egg laying while it is still freezing at night and we may get weeks of extended cold.

Yet another sign that the climate is driving the birds loony is that Canadian geese are circling in the late afternoons. The characteristic Vs of geese honking and circling the corn fields and river ponds is not usually heard at this time of the year. They have apparently not completed their southward migration and are instead hanging around in the fields edging town and on the river bottom. Normally they come flying south in November and December and aren’t seen again until spring. Not this year.

I could continue with a long and boring compendium of odd fauna behaviors related to the climate upset, but you get the picture. Things are a bit strange out here in the hinterlands. The weather is changing, air streams and the resultant rain patterns are changing, and the plants and animals are duly confused.

I’ll close with a couple of pictures of Molly.

First we have Molly laying forlornly by the fireplace in the library:

But then I asked her if that was a squirrel making noise outside:

That got her attention. Note all of her chew toys on the floor. (You didn’t really think I’d leave a hamburger sitting on the floor did you? And you surely didn’t think that Molly would not snarf it if I did leave it did you?)

Sunday Meanderings for the Terminally Insane

It must be Sunday – it seems that every Sunday the blogger interface drops the top menu bar and reverts to a font calculated to make me blinder than I already am. But I am fooling the gremlins of software! I can type blind just as badly as the next person.

Today was one of those days that the thermometer says one thing, but the body says another. The thermometer said 40, but the wind chill said 10. Needless to say, walking into the breeze during the stroll Molly, L, and I took in the park early in the afternoon was a biting experience. According to the friendly (but seldom correct) weather people, the next week is supposed to be cool to cold out here on the plains. In a rarity, it is supposed to be cooler out here that in the foothills and Denver. Sometimes we get all the luck. Still no snow or other moisture out here either.

After our walk, I played car repairman on L’s vehicle. Her windshield washer had stopped spraying. Given that she is up in the mountains with all the snow up there, it is important that the washer work. Colorado uses magnesium chloride in place of salt as a deicer on the roads, which is ecologically friendly, but leaves a slush that is about like light crude oil in color and viscosity. Thus, whenever a truck runs by, you need to have working washers or be prepared to drive blind. Back to the topic at hand, taking the molding plastic off and un-kinking the hose fixed it all. Evidently it got kinked when they removed and replaced it to put in the new windshield this summer and it had finally closed off under the heat-cold cycle of winter. Routed it through the groves in the molding as designed and all should now work fine. I will undoubtedly hear about it if it doesn’t.

Other than that, I have been battling a sinus headache all day. That alone makes me think that the aforementioned weather people might have it right. Big changes in air pressure and I can almost guarantee my sinuses are going to hurt. There must be somewhere where the air pressure is constant year round.

(I must have gotten to them with all my typos – the blogger interface just popped back to normal and the font is big enough for me to actually see. Just goes to show that even software programs can only take so much!)

I got a chance to test some of my home-brew software in the thrown together PVR today. You remember it was my current obsession as discussed here . So I used it to record the play-off games today with my automatic ad removal engine in running in real time. It only crashed and burned a couple of times, so it is getting closer to being usable. Still needs a lot of code cleaning and optimizing since it can pull a machine with dual 3GHz processors right down to it’s knees, utilizing both CPU cores to 100% for periods. (Are you bored enough with this techno babble yet?) Here’s a picture of the system in operation as I compose this post with the game playback marked in red.

L got headed off back to the mountains earlier in the evening, so Molly is lying in her bed moping. Molly will mope for about 16 hours, then return to her normal bouncy self. The only hope of early recovery is the sighting of a squirrel in the yard. It’s amazing how dogs are observant enough to sense when one they love is getting ready to leave. Within an hour or so of L’s planned departure, Molly starts laying on the floor at L’s feet and watching L with sadness in her eyes. Then she gravitates to the garage door and watches as the people go back and forth. Then, when L leaves, she immediately heads to her bed and lays there, looking like the world has come to an end. So I leave you with this picture of Molly moping in her laundry room bed.

Cleaning, fur, and dogs

I finally finished cleaning the house today. All that is left is to wash a couple of floors and I’m done for the nonce. You know it’s getting bad when cleaning the house is the exciting news of the day. My wife and son are up in the mountains, so it’s just Molly and I here at the house. Molly doesn’t say one whole heck of a lot so I am left to talk to myself. I figure as long as I don’t answer myself I must still be sane. At least Molly puts her head on my leg and looks at me with big brown eyes as if to say “why are you lonely and sad, you haven’t rubbed my head and belly eight billion times yet today?”

Molly is a Border Collie mix with long silky hair. Unfortunately, that means that she sheds year round in varying amounts. Nothing like dog fur in tufts and piles all over the house to make it clear it is time to clean. Dust devils on steroids is what I call them.  At least Molly has slowed down in her shedding as compared to summer now. During the summer, vacuuming the house would yield at least 2 cannisters of Molly fur. Now that it has cooled a bit outside, vacuuming only yields 3/4 of a cannister of Molly fur.  Long silky hair that sheds all the time is a characteristic of the breed. If she wasn’t a stray adopted from the humane society, we would probably have looked for a short haired dog like all our previous pets. It is amazing to me that anyone could abandon a puppy down by the river to become coyote food. It is just fortunate that my colleagues of the local humane society found Molly before the coyotes.

That makes me think of the dogs we have been fortunate enough to have in our life through the years. In our married life, my wife and I have had three dogs. What is amazing is that all three have been very different in breed and behavior, yet they were all affection hounds. We haven’t had a dog that wasn’t up for getting rubbed and petted.

Our first dog was the very first pet that my wife had ever owned. Her mother and brother both suffered from asthma as she was growing up, so it was a pet free household. We journeyed to the Los Angeles dog pound and picked out the dog that looked like it needed us the most. The result was a Staffordshire Terrier mix we named Sam (short for Samantha since she was female). It was good that we really wanted Sam because Sam was a tough dog to get through puppy hood. We should have taken the hint when we brought her home that first night and put her in the tile floored kitchen with a plywood barrier to keep her there so she wouldn’t poop on the carpet. Of course once we went to bed, she jumped over the barrier and pooped on the carpet, then hopped back into the kitchen to sleep. She devoured an entire wooded doghouse while teething and we spent weeks waiting for her to die from internal splinters. She just grinned and continued on, eating all of our rose bushes for desert. Sam was with us for a number of years until she suffered from arthritis and calcification  in the spine that left her paralyzed from the waist down. It was very hard for me to drive to the vet’s to have Sam put to sleep. You know it is for the best, but it still feels like betrayal of a friend.

Our second dog was actually given to our son when he was a youngster. Some employees called grandma to bring our son down to work, introduced him to the dog, and then suggested that he ask us if he could keep him. Two guesses as to any possibility of us saying no. Thus we became the proud owners of King Beauregard III (Beau for short), a pedigreed Basset Hound. Beau was the first scent hound we ever had. If Beau couldn’t smell it, he wasn’t interested. No looking out the windows and getting excited, unless the window was open and Beau could smell something. Beau was also the first dog we had that was not very intelligent. Bassets are not noted for being trainable and Beau fit the mold perfectly. Beau was sneaky rather than devious or conniving. You could always spot when Beau had been sitting in the rocker, because he would hop out when you came into the room, but didn’t connect the moving chair with us knowing he was doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Beau was with us until he died of old age.

Our third and current dog is Molly. Beau had been gone for a while and we weren’t sure we were ready to get another dog yet. Beau’s passing was unexpectedly hard on our son. It hadn’t been obvious how bonded they had been until Beau was gone. As a founding member of the local humane society and a member of the board, my colleagues knew that we were still thinking about a new dog when Molly was found as an abandoned puppy down by the river. The people of the humane society thought Molly would be perfect for us. It didn’t take much to convince us. So we became the proud owners of a Border Collie mix. What a change! Molly is extremely intelligent, much more so than any other dog we have had. She has a large vocabulary of words and commands she understands. She is also a visual hound. If she can see it, it is important to her. Thus she looks out the windows all the time. She is of a breed that has a need to herd. Thus she will attempt to herd about anything: crickets, toads, birds, squirrels, you name it. There is nothing funnier that watching her keep five or six crickets within a small circle on the back patio. Unless it is watching her trying to leap into the air high enough to herd the squirrels running on the telephone wires. Of course the squirrels are not immune to teasing Molly either. They will sit on the wire and watch her run back and forth, trying to herd them. About the time she finally calms down and gives up, they’ll let her lay down looking up at them and then throw a pine cone at her. That starts the game all over again.

Of course my mind in its peculiar way wanders off into the land of the odd at every chance. So when I see all the dog fur, it makes me wonder if our ancestors, when they first domesticated dogs, did anything with all the fur. Probably not, but it does leave me a bit curious. Can’t you picture a woven dog fur coat? Time to give it up before my mind goes completely off the deep end.