Had a great time at the Thanksgiving party yesterday afternoon and evening. Got home not very late, around 9 or 10 p.m. Fed the dogs, let them out, went to bed.
Along about 4:30 a.m., Ruby started twitching in her sleep. Pretty clearly she was having a dogmare. Eventually she settles down and I think now it’s back to sleep.
And so it seemed, for about five minutes. Then she begins to utter little hmh! noises.
This dog’s vocalizations are eerily human. They often have exactly the intonation that human speech would have, with question marks and exclamation points and periods and dot-dot-dots… This noise sounds just like the hmh! you and I would make when contemplating something that mildly surprises and interests, or some set of facts that contradicts an assumption.
Sometimes if I ignore her when she wakes in the middle of the night, she’ll go back to sleep. But no. This keeps on. Then she goes down to the end of the bed, where they get lifted on and off.
It was late when they got fed, so I figure she probably needs to go out. But once she’s on the floor, it becomes evident that “let me out” is not what “hmh!” means. The instant her feet hit the ground, she goes BATSHIT!
She roars down the hall, barking furiously. Cassie follows her. I hobble after them.
Nothing in the house. She’s at the back door. None of the motion-sensitive lights are on, so I figure it’s probably OK to open the door and let her out.
She flies out the door IN FULL HOWLING BAY!
Yes. Corgis can make a sound a lot like baying. It’s the final level before they start to scream, and this particular specimen of corgidom does scream when something gets her mad enough.
She chases into the yard in an utter frenzy, and now Cassie kicks in and she charges out there emitting her fullest-throated make-my-day! bark. They are both ready for bear, and Ruby apparently thinks the bear is in the yard.
I run barefooted into the yard behind them, thinking damn, I should’ve at least grabbed a steak knife out of the kitchen drawer. I’m unarmed and not what you’d call dressed. The only thing between me and whateveritis would be two twenty-pound shepherd dogs.
But once we rounded the corner, it became obvious that no one and nothing was in the yard. Apparently no one was in front, either, because both dogs came to call (they will not, if they’re seriously distracted) and Ruby quieted down as soon as she patrolled the side yard and found no threat.
So THAT was weird.
Back to bed. Back to sleep.
Between the waning hours of night and the waxing hours of dawn, it was my turn to have a vivid dream. Worthy of a Twilight Zone episode it was, fully plotted, set in a clearly developed scene, even filmed in color. A sort of Hieronymus Bosch color, but unimistakably not the usual dreamtime b/w.
That was even weirder. First the dog has a nightmare that persuades her something real is out there. Then I have a nightmare that persuades me I’m trapped in a 1960s television show.
It’s a great story idea, though. I may try to write it up. Very strange.
Ruby and Cassie are up and ready to go by 6 a.m. Normally, we would avoid the park on Sunday morning, because gaggles of morons like to meet there on Sundays and let their large dogs run loose. No. It’s not a dog park. Yes, it’s against city and county laws to let your dog run around off the leash. No, none of them gives a damn. They all think their dogs are their children and kids need to run around the park.
However, our usual route, bypassing the park through a neighborhood of aging half-million-dollar shacks, has an inhabitant whom I also would like to avoid at this hour. He’s this adorable, sweet old gentleman, just the nicest old guy. He has an eccentricity: He loves to feed the neighbors’ cats and dogs.
I think he’s lonely, and this little hobby is a way to get out of the house. It also attracts people who like to chat with him. So as hobbies go, it fulfills an important need.
The shade-tree mechanics have a couple of big old scruffy cats, large and fat and calm, fixtures in the neighborhood. These cats live outdoors, left to take their chances with the cars and the pair of coyotes that cohabit the ’hood with them.
Our friend drives up to the front of the mechanics’ house at 6:30 or 7 a.m. every morning, parks, and walks down the side yard with cat food in hand. There he fills the cat-and-coyote dish to the brim. From there he goes around sprinkling piles of dog and cat kibble on the sidewalks.
If he sees a dog-walker, he’ll offer dog treats.
One tries to be polite. I would prefer that Cassie (in particular) not eat these things, because sometimes they make her sick. But more to the point, Cassie the Corgi is getting fat in her old age. And nothing is worse for a corgi than obesity.
It’s very hard to say “no” to this guy. He’s sweetly insistent: “They come from Trader Joe’s! They’re ORGANIC! They’re good for your dog!” Meanwhile, of course, your dogs are salivating and going batshit for the biscuits he’s waving around.
Yesterday, Ruby choked on one of the things. And really, it was looking serious there for a minute. We were half a mile from home and there was NO way I could get her to a vet in time to save her life if she couldn’t get it out of her throat herself.
She gagged and wheezed and horked and gagged and wheezed for several very scary minutes. Finally she managed to get rid of it. Thank God. If she hadn’t, there would be no Ruby to write about this morning.
So…that’s another route we have to avoid. At least early in the morning.
Really, it’s very frustrating.
You can’t go to the park because there’s likely to be half a dozen large out-of-control dogs racing around.
You can’t walk up into Richistan because there’s a crazy old guy who wants to feed your dogs stuff they shouldn’t have.
You can’t walk along Conduit of Blight because of the nitwit woman with the out-of-control Great Dane dragging her down the street, a dog that tries to attack your little corgis every time it sees them.
That doesn’t leave very many directions you can go in.
Think how much better the world would be if there were no humans in it, except for me and you.
So the carpet-tack strips I zip-tied along the tops of the cinderblock walls by way of discouraging Other Daughter’s nuisance cat from jumping into the yard, predating on the birds and geckos, and using my desert landscaping as a giant litterbox have worked middling well. I haven’t seen her atop the wall for a long time, nor have I found any of her parasite-laden little doggy treats laying around the backyard.
And so, as crackpot as this particular decorative element appears, it seems to be working to keep the damn cat out.
A year and a half later, the strips have buckled and warped under the onslaught of rain and sun. Fortunately, this was easily fixed simply by adding a another half-dozen plastic zip-ties. They’ll last a few more months before I have to take them down and replace them.
But the problem of the caps atop the cinderblock support columns remains. They present no practical way to tie down pieces of carpet-tack strips. Aluminum pans full of water, besides looking even crazier than the tack strips, breed mosquitoes and get tipped over by mockingbirds using them as watering holes.
I ended up jury-rigging some little squares of carpet tacks, which provided a couple of crossbars that could be tied to the decorative blocks abutting some, but not all of the columns. These worked to keep the cat from perching on the columns, but they can’t be tied down firmly — or, in one corner, at all — and so the buckling renders them even more bizarre-looking than the straight pieces and, where no tiedown is reasonable, essentially nonfunctional.
What to do?
Several folk sites on the Internet claim that cats dislike tinfoil. With a lifetime supply of Costco aluminum foil residing in the pantry, this would be an easy and cheap fix.
However, one crass skeptic has mounted a video in which he tests this theory. He tapes lengths of tinfoil down a short, hardwood-floored hallway and lets the camera run.
Kitty approaches the new carpeting with suspicion. She sniffs. She tests it tentatively with a paw. Then she strides over it, marches up to the camera, and rubs her furry flank across its lens.
😆 Yay, crass skeptics!
More believable is the claim that cats don’t like sticky stuff under their feet. We’re told that double-sided tape stuck atop a counter or on furniture you would like to remain un-clawed will discourage counter-roaming and sofa-ripping.
Possibly. At Amazon, reviewers of an anti-cat product designed to stick on upholstered furniture report that the cat simply removes the tape and then proceeds with its project of shredding the sofa.
However. Perching on top of something is different from clawing fabric. There actually IS a good chance that sticky stuff could repel Other Daughter’s cat from the cinderblock column caps.
However1. Sticky stuff will stay sticky about 48 hours out there. So much crap drops out of the Devil-Pod Tree and also, at this time of year, out of the paloverde tree that a sticky surface would soon be rendered nonfunctional.
This returns us to the question of how to affix tack strips to the column caps, even if temporarily.
How about using double-sided tape to hold them down? Scotch sells an exterior mounting tape that is beloved by a huge majority of Amazon reviewers. The minority who whinge about it complain that it doesn’t hold up certain objects. But as a weapon in the Cat Wars, the stuff would lay flat — it wouldn’t be called upon to stick anything to the side of a wall. Some of the product’s admirers claim that heat only makes it work better; it seems to lose effectiveness in sub-freezing temps. Those do not occur around here, at least not often.
This could be the answer. Four hundred and fifty feet of heavy-duty double-sided tape would hold down a lot 18-inch strips of cat-repellent tack sticks.
In the absence of Other Daughter’s accursed cat, life has begun to return to the backyard. The gecko population is slowly recovering.
And in the presence of geckos, the mosquito population has declined.
We still have some, but nothing like the swarms that normally harass the Funny Farm’s warm-blooded denizens at this time of year.
The flies also seem to have declined a little. Still enough to be a nuisance, but not six or eight in the house at a time.
And I believe there are more birds out there than before.
And there’s a duck.
Yes. DUCK. A little research reveals that it takes baby ducks about 60 days to fledge. So if they hatch and if they survive, they’ll be around for most of the summer.
DUCK is not disturbed by the presence of the human in the pool. Today I do have to shock-treat, since we’re starting to get some algae. But the only time she leaves the nest to forage is around 3 to 4 in the afternoon. So I figure if I slip some chlorine into the drink early in the morning, by mid-afternoon the water should be safe for her even if she happens to go into the pool. Which she doesn’t. Not often, anyway.
M’hijto remarked that the ducklings are likely to be picked off by the neighbor’s damned cat, if not by the coyotes, the raccoons, and the resident red-tail.
Hence the project to shore up the battlements. Quack!
That would be “Stupid Human Stories,” actually. Over at the Corgi forum, some of the enthusiasts are grousing about the overall stupidity of the people who show up at dog parks with their pooches in tow. LOL!
I don’t take my dogs to dog parks, first because of the risk of injury, but also because of the concentration of various doggy pathogens — more than one vet has inveighed, over the years, against visiting these places. As one of the corgistis remarks, though, the biggest risk at dog parks (and just about anywhere else) is not from the dogs but from the idiot dog owners.
So commonplace that they’re beneath mention are the Cheerful Chuckleheads who let their little yappers lunge up to your German shepherd (who privately is thrilled, for reasons both humans and dogoids are too dumb to guess).
“Oh, Fifi wants to say hello!” cries CC.
…or so you think…
“You might want to keep your dog back a bit,” the GerShep’s pet human replies.
“She just wants to play.”
Really? My dog wants something, too: to have your dog’s head stuffed and hung as a trophy on the wall over her dog dish…
Gaaaaaaaahhhhh!
But you haven’t seen stupid humans until you’ve seen stupid humans around horses. My god! Horses bring out the most baroque forms of human stupidity.
Case in point: moi.
Back in the Middle Cretaceous, when I was in graduate school, some occasion arose in which my then-husband and I invited the chair of my department, his tartly unhappy wife and their daughter, then about ten, to spend a day at our ranch, a garden spot that resided up a little past lovely Yarnell. Why, I do not remember and I cannot even begin to imagine. But there it was. Chairman Marvin, Mrs. Marvin, and Kid out on a working cattle ranch just below the Mogollon Rim.
If only I could remember what I was smoking…maybe I could get some more of it…
For reasons even more opaque, we somehow suggested that this crew should take a horsie ride.
The Hassayampa River flowed right through our deeded land. It passed by the cluster of buildings that included the house, the foreman’s house and bunkhouse, and the barns. Very, very lovely: riparian high desert, full of birds and little animals and watercress growing in the trickling water beneath vast shady cottonwoods. To die for.
Indeed.
Nothing would do but what we had to saddle up and ride along the cattle trace that follows the Hassayampa easterly toward Crown King. Of course, we’d have to stop at the bob-wire fence between our ranch and the Smoketree, the neighboring ranch. But that was a good thing.
In what at first glance seems amazingly stupid but what turned out to be the one tiny glimmer of sense any of us evinced, I suggested the girl, who’d never been on a horse in her life, should ride with me on our quarterhorse Babe. I proposed we should ride bareback, because a) this is a good first step in learning to sit a horse and b) it meant I could have her in front of me with me hanging on to her, rather than having her perched on a saddle behind me, supposedly hanging onto me. It also meant I could see her and watch her every minute.
So it went.
All right. We’re riding along this narrow trail, single-file, beside the Hassayampa. The river doesn’t flow continuously, nor does any part of it flow all year round. But now and again it does produce ferocious, astonishing, jaw-dropping flash floods. Over the decades, these have excavated a channel that drops the riverbed about three to six feet below the surrounding terrain. We are riding along the edge of the bank that borders this drop-off. Below us, the river bottom is a chaos of rocks, boulders, old shattered tree trunks, washed-away Model T’s, and similar debris.
As we’re going along, Marvin keeps letting his horse come right up on Babe’s rear end. Babe does not like this. Neither do I.
I tell Marvin, imagining (wrongly) that he can figure out how to rein in a horse, to keep his horse back off Babe’s rump. I tell him that Babe will kick if he doesn’t hold his horse back a few feet. Three times I tell him this, and three times he lets the gelding creep up and stick his nose up Babe’s tail.
Finally, Babe loses patience. She picks the psychological moment — just as the trail teeters on the knife-edge of the river’s bank — to haul off and belt Marvin’s nag.
Of course, Marvin’s horse shies. Babe does a little jig and, well, yes: she stumbles off the side and starts to fall.
I drop the reins, wrap both arms around the kid, and throw myself off Babe, hauling the girl with me. With me doing the best I can to protect the child’s head and neck, we hit the ground about five feet from Babe, who tumbles off the riverbank into the dry riverbed.
Shee-ut.
Mercifully, no one was hurt. Babe got up, miraculously uninjured, and allowed me to retrieve her without further incident.
Don’t know when I’ve ever been so furious. The rage didn’t kick in until after I saw that Babe hadn’t, after all, broken a leg (as I assumed she would while the girl and I were rolling away from ruckus).
But of course, Marvin was my boss so I couldn’t tell him what a moron he was.
But of course, the real moron was not on Marvin’s horse. The real moron was on my horse. The one in charge of my horse.
What on earth was I thinking when I asked Marvin “do you know how to ride a horse,” heard him answering tentatively — tentatively swaggering — “oh, sure; oh yeah,” recognized that as a ridiculous exaggeration, and acquiesced to it? What was I thinking when I put a ten-year-old on a cow pony, bareback, and climbed up behind her? Oh, hell: what was I thinking when I invited the effete chair of the department up to the ranch to start with?????
So there you are. Stupid is as stupid does. I account it as some kind of miracle that the child wasn’t hurt, the horse wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t hurt. God watches over children and fools.
These little sheep dogs are so amazing! Given how small they look, you’d never realize how much speed, energy, and endurance they possess.
People certainly dote on them. I’m afraid that won’t be good for the breed. These days instead of asking me what kind of dog Cassie or Ruby is, passers-by instantly recognize them as corgis and then go on about how much they want one. {sigh} I fear the corgi will be the next breed to be ruined by love. That seems to happen every time a breed becomes popular.
Problem is, admirers see Cuteness(!) but have no idea what’s entailed in living with Corgi Cuteness. Cassie ended up at the dog pound, so her former humans noted, because she “barks.”
Well. Yes. That is what we would call an understatement.
Cassie does not bark. She converses. Her conversation consists of a series of loud yaps. She likes to talk with humans. A lot.
And as Ruby attains adulthood, she’s also come into her own in the communication department. She doesn’t bark, either: she bays. Not quite like a hound, though. The sound she emits combines a bark and a bay: ARF-A-ROOOOO! It’s used for alerting the world to every cat, dog, coyote, neighbor, and bum who passes by in the alley, for harrying the teenagers across the street, and for conversing with distant barking dogs.
While I would say that raising Ruby was far less difficult than coping with a young, high-drive German shepherd, it certainly hasn’t been easy. House-training a corgi can be quite a challenge. I’ve had quite a few dogs over the years, and I think I’m pretty good at house-training. So…I kinda doubt that my fumbling was the reason it took a good six months to house-train this dog. Other corgi owners say the same: expect to spend half a year to get your puppy reliably trained.
It really is a powerful, energetic dog — so much so that in spite of the dwarfed legs it’s classified as a “large” breed. The corgi needs a “job” to do, many daily dog walks, plenty of training…and it can’t be left in the yard or house to entertain itself or sleep the hours away. Believe me. A corgi will not sleep the hours away.
Here’s Ruby’s idea of mountain-climbing…
Kinda have to click on the image to actually see it, in WordPressland…
Ruby can jump onto M’hijito from the floor. Cassie, on the other hand, does not climb on anything except her mattress.
Yesterday I needed to buy some new dog food for the Ruby-Doo, she suffering from allergies and now needing foods whose contents can be verified. I’d discovered that the exceptionally fancy stuff peddled at Whole Foods and PetSmart could be had for much cheaper at the Fry’s Supermarket in Richistan, and had thought after the doctor’s appointment I’d traipse up to Paradise Valley and restock that stuff.
In fact, since the next surgery takes place in a week and we’re running low on dog food in general, what I really wanted to do was buy enough to carry the dogs through to surgery day and about a week beyond it, since I know very well I’m not going to feel like driving around and I’m not going to feel like cooking, grinding, and mixing real food for the dogs. But yesterday I had a lot of errands to run and work to do, and after spending close to two hours chatting with a high-powered oncologist, I really truly did NOT want to drive way to hell and gone to Paradise Valley. There’s a mid-range Fry’s and a PetSmart near the mid-town Whole Foods & Trader Joe’s I frequent, and so I figured I’d run into that Fry’s and see if it carried the coveted dog food. Failing that, I’d check the PetSmart, and failing that, I’d pick up the stuff at the Whole Foods along with the human food items I coveted.
So after bouncing to the three other places I had to go, along about 1:30 or 2:00 p.m. I surfaced in the Fry’s at 20th Street and Camelback.
No. They did not have the fancy rolls of fresh unadulterated dog food.
So I walked across the parking lot to the PetSmart.
They wanted $27.99 per five-pound roll. TWENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS for the same damn thing I’d paid $12.99 for the day before!
Out the door and across the street to the Whole Foods.
Yes, I remember correctly: Whole Foods charges $19.99 for the product. Bought one roll to tide us over, since we were about out.
So today it was out to Tatum and Shea, thereinat to run several more errands. While there, I went into the now-famous Whole Foods on Steroids, where yea verily! We find exactly the same product for $12.99.
Heh. Think of that. We’re looking at prices for the same product, same brand, same amount, that range from $13/package to $20/package to $28/package.
And Petsmart charges $8.00 more than Whole Foods (!!!!!!!) and TWICE AS MUCH as a local grocery store! A pretentious grocery store that gives itself airs and locates itself in Scottsdale, a place where men are millionaires and women think they own the roads.
Petsmart. What a freaking rip-off agency. I will never buy anything there again.
My son buys a fancy kibble for Charley the Golden Retriever. He’s taken to buying it at a tack & feed store, because he gets it for a better price there. But one day when he and I were driving back from the Mayo, we spotted a tony-looking upscale pet boutique in the depths of darkest Richistan. For some reason we decided to stop in — as I recall, there was some exotic item he hoped to find there.
What he found was his fancy kibble: for significantly less than even the tack and feed shop was charging.
So. Look around. And don’t be afraid to look in unlikely spots — the best price may not be had at the most obvious retailers.
Speaking of places that cost your whole paycheck, yesterday at Costco I got gasoline for $2.79 a gallon!!!
A fill-up cost $25 and change.
Haven’t filled up the gas tank for under forty bucks in years.
What a weird night.
The 
