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The sack got so heavy by the time I last saw it that it threatened to break through the veneer bottom of the lowermost secret drawer of the dresser where she stored (read: hid) the quarters. They came from my sometimes-father’s pockets every day when he came home–when he came home–and slipped silently into the hard-times security vault of the paper bag in the bottom drawer under some sweaters. And it grew and grew, until the day came when no more new quarters were ever again added to the stash.

The years came and went, and the quarters stayed–not hoarded exactly, just kept with an assumption that some day that $75 worth of coins might mean paying the rent. But then, after moving the considerable weight and volume of them from apartment to apartment one too many times, Mom decided to see if they might be worth a bit more than their face value, since many were silver and they ranged back more than a half century.

Fortunately, she has a friend who knows is coins. She decided to ask him if he’d evaluate her quarters collection, with the thought of just giving the whole lot to him for all his kindness and the handy-man help he has offered her over the years. He came, he examined, he muttered to himself, his eyes sparkled.

“Do you know what you have here? Do  you know how much this collection is worth?

She perked up, thinking maybe she had as much as doubled her money for the decades-long trouble of holding onto her stash in the bottom drawer of the dresser, so long after my brother and I needed quarters for lunch money. And the story has a happy ending.

“What you have here is almost five thousand dollars worth of coins!”

She was dumbfounded. And both she and her friend came out much the richer when she cashed in the product of her perseverance, thrift and frugality.

The stash of hoarded quarters has long been a family secret or sorts, a testimony to the self-reliant character of a depression-era girl who grew up not knowing at times where tomorrow’s pennies would come from. And one coin at a time, she laid up a nice nest egg, and it is certainly time it hatched and did her some good. She’s earned it.

I am relieved to be able to say that we are now thinking we can keep Gandy after all. She has shown considerably better behavior in the past few days–not entirely free of snarky or otherwise obnoxious behavior, but stopping herself before things get out of hand. She has turned a corner (is turning at least) that is partly nurture and partly nature.

For our part, we have realized this dog (by breed and by her own personality) can’t be “broken” of the aggressive behavior in the same way a dog like a lab might be. We’ve done better NOT engaging her when she misbehaves, but ignoring her, the re-engaging with extra affection, and she is responding.

For her part, a lot that is changing for the better is likely the result of normal maturation of her nervous system. Early impulses are protective, quick, unchecked. In the wild, that is the way it must be: mistrust, self-protection, caution. Then, as the young animal ages, the “reaction” circuits are over-ridden increasingly (learned, with positive reinforcement) by the inhibitory circuits that raise, rather than lower the threshold of protective response. Gandy is learning to put the brakes on her innate tendency to strike out against possible threats. The stakes are higher now that she might lose attention and treats with inappropriate behavior.  We were not sure she would ever care.

We are doing better at the NOTHING in LIfe is Free approach, though Ann’s tendency is to just give the dog things to “buy her off” rather than take a little more time and make the dog do something RIGHT to get food, treats, belly rubs, special toys and outside exercise.

We are supposed to start obedience training (hopefully tomorrow) that will not solve the snappiness but can go a long way especially to make Ann comfortable with the dog and to bring us all to sing (or bark) off the same page.

Yesterday, Gandy and I went back and forth between the pasture and the wood pile in the truck. She felt like quite the farm dog, you could tell. We had our first game of FETCH with a stick. She tires of such silliness pretty quickly and wants a REAL job. She is far more energetic than any lab we’ve ever had, and so we’re glad warmer weather is coming and she can help with gardening. I’m thinking we won’t need a tiller, hoe, or maddock if we have a GANDY in the garden!

An isolated but severe snow storm loomed ahead on the SD prairie. Image by Holli

It’s another one of those mornings when I have a long batting list and not enough time in the game to even have a single at-bat–except to post an image that belongs to my daughter.

It was on the strength–literally–of this experience that she went out and got a “real” camera. This shot was taken with her iPhone, and I did some minor work on it in Photoshop.

I think the photography bug has bitten, and there is now one more landscape photog in South Dakota. And I think this is great.

A goatless goat shed, aging gracefully in Floyd County, VA

My daughter called from BestBuy in her hometown. She was camera shopping. As in her first serious look at cameras beyond her iPhone.

Me, I would research and compare and agonize and second-guess and anguish over such a decision. Not her. She walked in, looked around, called when she had narrowed it down to two, and went with the one that felt better in her hands: a newly-released Nikon P500. She especially liked the 35x zoom, which will come in handy in her area where landscapes stretch for tens of miles towards the distant horizon.

Tomorrow (with her permission) I’ll post a going-to-work shot she sent from last week. It served the same purpose for her that wildflowers in Gatlinburg did for me in 1970: you need a real camera to take images that the photographer and not the camera has full control of.

Above, a wonderfully dilapidated old structure on a friend’s property, a building that was once a goat shed, its weathered board and rusting roof so rooted in place it has become a part of the local landscape and natural setting. Obviously, it has had a bit of painterly rendering in Photoshop, specifically with the benefit of a plug-in called Pixel Bender: free, for Adobe PS 5 users.

It takes no particular talent, beyond having an eye for the final rendering and some knowledge of the right tools, to create a “painted” landscape. It seems a bit like cheating. But this way of visioning the natural and manmade world expands my in-sight of the beauty in the ordinary. I can see the finished painting in the every-day scenes and objects;  my imagination holds the brush, and memory becomes the palette. I delight in projecting the painter’s potentials even when I lack the skills to use them in the traditional ways.

Image by fred1st via Flickr

What’s Good for Gandy is the operative question this morning.

We are approaching the painful conclusion that she is not the dog for us. It’s the painful part that is of concern: she has not been able to restrain her bite.

I’m not talking about incidental damage of normal puppy chewing or rough-housing like she would with her litter-mates. I’m talking about curled-lip attacks when it clearly does not serve her intentions to play or be close or get attention. And often, these episodes of aggression come immediately on the heels of her more rare periods of being loving and peaceful. Suddenly, my hands are bleeding again. Sometimes, she lunges for my face or other tender parts. We just can’t have that kind of acting out.

We’ve tried it all: distraction, substitution, treats (with the clicker), withdrawing our attention, removing her from the room to the back porch for a few minutes by herself, kindness, firmness. We don’t know what else to do.

And she continues, at 14 weeks, to grow, and we continue to invest in her uncertain future here. At this stage in our physical and financial lives, such wasted effort and time seems not to be a wise investment. We certainly can’t look forward to our grandchildren getting to know her and trust them together.

She is wonderful outdoors. She is a beautiful, lean and muscular dog, agile, curious, attentive, and fast. She is very intelligent and can sit, stay, come, lie down, get in her crate, and get on her blanket on command, most of the time. She loves riding in the car in her crate, sleeps through the night, is house broken. But she is threatening to become a mean dog, and we don’t know why. We’ve relented from making the hard decision because she will eventually come to herself and be placid and typical goofy puppy, but are we only fooling ourselves that she has finally morphed out of her bipolar episodes?

Are we just naive, spoiled by only having dealt over the past thirty years with Labrador Retriever temperaments? Is this something we can expect the dog to miraculously one day grow out of? Are there things we can do differently short of a shock collar for her and TASER for the both of us?

We’re frankly near (if not occasionally just past) wit’s end. Ann said I should say anything about this publicly. But you (might) know me: this blog-reading community has ridden the rough road with me for must about ten years, and thankfully with your wide experience, often helped us get beyond the tragedy du jour. This seems to be approaching another one of those bumps.

Should we fail to succeed in establishing the bond of trust that is now missing, what then? (She is being totally charming just now, wouldn’t you know it, playing nicely with the tennis ball in this odd game of fetch she has created.)

This is our first time to offer a home to a “pound puppy” and the first to lose a dog by giving it back up for a second adoption. Would we be better off to have her put down than turned into a pit fighter? What a sorry situation that we would never have imagined only six weeks after meeting Gandy for the first time with such high expectations.

UPDATE 4 pm: After a not-so-good early morning, the dog has been very very much improved. Of course, we’ve spent a good bit of time out today, pruning grapes and puttering in the wood pile. But even inside, she’s shown marked improvements in her restraint from biting, and when she offers to throw her head back and grab my hand, she’s easily dissuaded by reminding her about the acceptable toy we were playing with. Also, I’ve had some encouraging offers to help in the event that we don’t reach a comfort point with “forever” with Gandy. The saga continues.

☐  Unheard of: A january morning and we don’t need a fire in the stove. Last I heard, we will pay in February for our month-long January thaw. And we will pay wide and deep for warmer winters, hot summer nights, and turbulent and chaotic climate in the decades to come. We have made our bed.

☐  Buck, the movie about the “real” horse whisperer, is coming to Floyd February 11.  Read more at SustainFloyd.org

☐  I got an “alert” from my mapophilic blogging buddy Gary, pointing out the revised imagery of our area in Google Earth. Dang. You can see the logging from last spring, the garden shed, lots of stuff not shown in overflights from a couple of years ago. These images are from Nov 2011, and zoom down to a much finer level of detail, even in our very rural part of the world.

☐  Speaking of views, I have two for you. One is of size, the other, of landscape. Both are highly worth your time. Or at least they were worth mine.

▶ Scale of Universe – Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool

▶ Remind Yourself How Beautiful Nature Is By Watching This Stunning Yosemite Timelapse 

☐  Why do blog visits fall off so precipitously on Fridays? Last week I had the lowest visitor count I’ve had maybe since the first year of the blog. And so I feel a bit foolish even bothering to post anything on Fridays. Most folks read from work. Is Friday the day they finally hunker down and get stuff done they deem even MORE important that blog reading?

☐  The “task manager and general informational-organization” realm is one that for me is in constant flux. I don’t seem to be able to find any one online or desktop application that does it all. It MUST be out there. And so I have come back (probably temporarily) to SpringPad, which admittedly has come a very long way since I was a beta user several years ago. It is, like most, the kind of app that is hard to “get” until you invest enough time to pour enough stuff into it that make useful. I’ve also installed the Mac version of Producteev, and flirt with Asana, WorkFlowy, Checkvist, and Things. And I still long for the long-abandoned EccoPro that did it all. Imagine, the Mac version. Sigh.

☐  Gandy is being incredibly good today, in SHARP contrast to the past few days–as if she finally GETS it. Frankly, I wondered if we were going to be able to come to terms. For the first time today, I caught her doing something she knew was wrong, and rather than be defiant she was repentant. Rather than biting, today she’s licking. Oh let it last!

☐  I love it when the depth of language leaps out at you unexpectedly. Of all places, I learned a very OLD meaning to a familiar word from an episode of the TV series (LOST on NetFlix.) Some of the characters were building a medieval-looking seige-engine giant slingshot of a thing which one them called a trebuchet. Say what? I thought that was a font type. It is, and here’s the story of how it got that name in 1996.

Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare for the Microsoft Corporation in 1996. It is named after the trebuchet, a medieval catapult. The name was inspired by a puzzle question that Connare heard at Microsoft headquarters: “Can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically, is it possible and how?” Connare “thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the Internet”.

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I told you a few weeks back that the coyotes got our hens. There were feathers all over the pen, and Ann found two carcasses of the black hens, Beta and Myrtle, out in the pasture.

What I didn’t tell you is that the next morning, Gandy (during her first week with us) and Ann discovered the red hen, Pearl, alive, down in the creek bed, nearly frozen. The thermometer had dipped almost into the single digits that night, and it seems a miracle that she survived.

For the next week, she would barely come out of her house even for food or water. In the past week or so, however, and particularly when the weather is less harsh, we open the pen gate around noon. She comes across the creek and has taken up regular residence just off the back porch. She was fearful and aloof and avoided us before, but now we are her only flock, and she seeks out our company.

A couple of days ago, just about the time I was thinking I should herd her back over to her pen, I heard her squawking out front. I jumped up and ran to the door to find a massive, mostly-black coon chasing her down the road. He didn’t even bother to look up when I hollered from the porch. I ran down in my socks, found a large rock, and hurled it soccer-fashion into the creek near the coon. He scampered up the nearest walnut tree, while I ran inside for the gun.

By the time I got back out, he was lumbering his way across the creek. The chicken was nowhere to be found. I assumed she would hide until dark, at which time the raccoon, the coyotes, wild dogs or some other predator would scatter her red feathers for us to discover on a future walk. But just before dark, I heard her calling far behind the house and coaxed her back home.

Yesterday, a fox explored the pasture in broad daylight, hunting for rodents. It’s uncommon to get more than a glimpse of a fox during the daylight hours; we’ve seen them pass through, during mating season, but I got to watch this one hunt. Her technique was not much different from Tsuga’s–nose-driven, but also attending to faint sounds of digging and scurrying under the matted pasture grass.

At one point, she paused, lifted one paw, cocked her head, then leaped far higher than the 80# Tsuga, tucked her legs under her, and spiked her head, nose first in the grass. She came up with the fattest rodent I’ve ever seen–too big to be a mole or a mouse as I watched through binoculars. And then she coursed back and forth on down the pasture, paying no attention to the chicken pen–whose gate was thankfully still closed at the time.

If the bold fox comes back during the day again, chances are she’ll be far quicker at grabbing the chicken than the coon was. And chances are, I won’t be able to do a darned thing about it.

Jesse loves a good WET better than any dog I ever saw

Hydrogen peroxide.

I’d never heard of this “remedy” until my wife came home from a church meeting last week telling me the terrible tale (outcome then unknown) about Tsuga’s best and only playmate, 120# golden retriever, Jesse.

It seems his owner, our neighbor and friend, was on the phone when he heard a commotion in the other room. By the time he went to investigate, Jesse had eaten a lot of thyroid pills (and the bottle too, it turns out.)

The emergency clinic in Christiansburg (Town and Country, the same one where we rushed Tsuga to no avail, almost two months ago) instructed Jesse’s human to induce vomiting–by giving the dog a 3% dilution of hydrogen peroxide, just as the recent article at the link above describes. (You might want to bookmark this, pet owners, and local folks, and the ER vet phone is 540.382.5042.)

We heard nothing more about this potentially tragic “stupid dog trick” for more than a day. (Jesse is highly intelligent, but to butcher and old country song, “the Mouth Has a Mind of Its Own.”)

The H202 worked and the dog is fine. His owner, however, may need sedation and counseling. And a stainless steel medicine locker out in his shop.

My only puzzlement is this: how the heck do you “make” a dog drink hydrogen peroxide? Should one keep a turkey baster handy for just such a use? You can hide a pill in some peanut butter, but a liquid that MUST go down NOW?

Our dog was in a litter being handed out for free from the back of a truck at WalMart in Galax. A kind young girl suspected that, given away indiscriminately like this, some of the young “Shepherd-Lab mix” pups might end up back in Humane Society custody after being neglected or abused, in households unprepared for the considerable effort and time it takes to contain a puppy while it grows to resemble an intelligent being.

So mom and pups were taken off the hands of the Walmart Give-away person, and effort made through the Human Society to find intentional homes for the 8-week old pups. The mother dog, the girl told us, was definitely “mostly German Shepherd” and one of the three pups she brought for us to see was shaped and had the longer, denser hair of a Shepherd. But not Gandy.

And though they were advertised as being probably fathered by a Lab, we’ve decided that misses the mark. We know labs, by temperament and form, and this dog sleeping under my desk just now knows nothing of the wanting-to-please, quiet disposition of a lab. There is something else under the hood here.

There are practical reasons to want to know. We need to order a crate that will fit this dog as an adult. How big will she get? (I’ve seen the rule of thumb to double the weight at 14 weeks. She’ll be about 25# by then, so 50#. But how tall?) And we’re puzzled by her temperament, energy level, curiosity, intelligence and persistence. Who is this dog going to be?

We’ve thought maybe boxer, given the build and the coat, but the face is not right. We’ve wondered about pit bull, but she is so long of neck and leg.

Last night I happened to pick up the latest National Geographic, whose cover story is “What Dogs Teach Us.” The centerfold is a display of breeds. I did a double-take.

“THAT is our dog” I said out loud to no one. Almost all features fit, even though Gandy is definitely not pure to the breed. The long neck, the dark muzzle, long legs, copper coat and wrinkled brow. She even, when alarmed, shows the distinctive “ridge” that was so startling when Ann and I first noted it. “It’s like a mohawk!” we both said. And it is characteristic of the Rhodesian Ridgeback, or African Lion Dog. The image above is of pure-bred ridgeback puppies. Look familiar?

Even the description of the dog’s personality is a dead ringer:

“They are strong-willed, exceptionally clever, and many seem to have a penchant for mischief. Owners report them teaching themselves (and each other) how to escape crates and kennels, open even ‘child-locked’ cabinets and doors, and especially behind-your-back stealing of food.

…Despite his athletic, sometimes imposing exterior, the Ridgeback has a sensitive side. Excessively harsh training methods that might be tolerated by a sporting or working dog will likely backfire on a Ridgeback. Intelligent to a fault, the Ridgeback accepts correction as long as it is fair and justified, and as long as it comes from someone he knows and trusts.”

Man, does this hit the mark. Gandy returns blow for blow. She is not penitent when she does wrong, and will only escalate her resistance if confronted with force or punishment. But then, she can be a dear. We have yet to learn exactly where the switch is, or how to remove batteries.

Take a look at the Google Image gallery and compare to Gandy’s pix at Picasa. What do you think? Anybody been around this breed and have advice, suggestions or condolences?

I was thinking back this morning over past late-Januarys since starting this blog in the summer of 2002. I felt certain that, if I went back through the archives, I would find myself at the zero point, where life seems to be at a standstill, and molecular motion ceases.

Then I got curious, found myself in the January 2004 archive, and made myself laugh. That felt good.

So instead of trying to reach conclusions by way of a smarmy nostalgic slog across a tundra of Januarys, here’s what I wrote about humor eight years ago, prompted by the fact that I had just finished watching three seasons of MASH on VCR tapes. I always felt like Hawkeye Pierce and I had a bond–a brotherhood. Who shares your sense of humor?

Cover of M*A*S*H (Widescreen Edition)

Next to sex, the bond of shared laughter must be one of the most intimate of human experiences.

If I had life to do over again, there would be more music and there would be more laughter in my life. The music I could make alone. The laughter–that is a more elusive fish.

One can laugh alone, but the most satisfying humor is shared, and just as one finds only one or a few with whom he or she could spend a lifetime, it seems that finding another who shares the same way of coping with humor–of crisis management with laughter, of word play and wit– is just as rare.

Two people who laugh at the same thing are more likely, perhaps, to stay married than two who balance their checking account the same way. Humor involves the intellect (wit), the emotions (mirth) and the physiology (laughter) and so when two people laugh at the same thing, there is a deep connection that is beyond words and a bonding occurs, or the bond that was always there is uncovered.

I am decidedly not funny as in joke-telling. If pressed, I couldn’t come up with a half dozen jokes (half of them knock-knock) and I’d flub them sure as the world. But I do see (and too often voice) the ridiculous with some clarity in the news and my own bumbling life, and absurdity abounds on every hand. I see myself as a mirthful person; my family may not agree because I’ve learned to keep many of my witty quips to myself over the years.

Language is packed with humor, and puns are not off limits, no sir. While I am definitely not into cruel humor at another’s expense (which seems so popular on TV comedy these days) sarcasm and irony are fair and oft-used tactics, but I have to be very careful where I use them and have been misunderstood by my more concrete and somber colleagues in the past. There’s nothing more lonely than to be the only one to get the joke.

The most laughter-filled time in my life was, paradoxically, while working in a multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Program as a physical therapist.

I would come home on Mondays, after our medical rounds, with permanent laugh lines etched in the corners of my mouth. While I’ll confess, some of our pitiful patients were easy targets, the more usual victims were the clinical psychologist, the nurse, my good friend the sociologist-director (who gave presentations on humor in medicine), the exercise physiologist, the PT or the DO medical director. We were all such exaggerated characters in our own right, working in a stressful situation where terrible things had happened to the people in our charge–not unlike Hawkeye and Hotlips and Radar in the heat of battle and bloody operating rooms. Lordy, it felt good to laugh.

If you and I spent time together, would we share a sense of humor?

For some whom I’ve come to know via Fragments, I think “most definitely over a pitcher of some bubbly beverage, he and I or she and I would quickly find common ground and resonate in each other’s humor-frequency… they are the BJ’s and Trappers of this little blogging world”. And there are others for whom I think “we’d get along intellectually, but he or she is too (serious, concrete, up-tight, academic…) for me to be wide-open with my authentic quirky way of seeing and expressing things… these are the Frank Burns and Hotlips of the blogosphere; we’d smile, but we wouldn’t laugh often.”

Sorry. I’ve gone and gotten ruminative about humor. I’m a mess. But then I’ve been alone with the dog for two days since Ann’s snowed in at work. I’m starting to get a little cabin crazy and everything seems absurdly tragic or funny to me. Better laugh than cry. Eh?