We've Had Our Dog Daisy for Three Years Today

 

 

Daisy is a mix-breed rescue dog that Melissa and I picked up at a pet adoption fair held at a PetSmart store in southwest Gainesville on May 12, 2022...exactly three years ago.  Daisy was a tiny puppy back then at 7 lbs...but she had a loud, menacing bark even back then.  She's grown to full adult size for some time now, leveling off at 50 lbs.  She's a sweetie, for sure, and is sitting right now on my favorite recliner in the living room.  Even though Daisy is an adult dog, to me she is a big baby, especially whenever her "mommy" steps out of the room for a few minutes and Daisy starts her pathetic whimpering, just as she did on adoption day three years earlier when I was holding her and she wanted me to lay her back down next to her litter mates...

Just Finished Reading The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

The Art of Racing in the Rain is a 2008 book written by Garth Stein, adapted eleven years later to film with what I've read were mixed reviews.  The premise of the story, narrated by a dog, is his affection and bonding to his owner Denny, a budding race car driver whose in-laws connive to legally extract custody of his young daughter following his wife Eve's death due to a brain tumor.  It's very sentimental and cute, and Enzo, named after a famous race driver Denny admired, knows everything, including all about auto racing. But being a dog, he is unable to express himself.  After reading the book through, am I motivated to go see the movie? No chance of that, but I always respect an author like Stein who skillfully and coherently put together this story. Would I recommend it to you?  Well, the only reason I read it in the first place was because it was one of the "Playaway" MP3-based audio books available at the time at my local public library, it caught my eye, and I checked it out.  I wasn't all that interested, frankly, in the domestic goings-on between a dog, his master and the master's family...no matter how compelling Enzo made it all seem.  Maybe it will work for you...I've read much worse, and this book wasn't bad...

Quote of the Week...from Scut Farkus

What, you're gonna cry now?  Come on, crybaby! Cry for me, come on! CRY!     ---Scut Farkus

Scut Farkus was the big bad bully character in Jean Shepherd's immortal 1983 movie A Christmas Story, for which he compiled a number of already published short stories and wrapped them together within a holiday theme.  It's become a TV staple, with a couple of channels running nonstop marathons at Christmas.  I already knew Jean Shepherd in the mid-1970s for his late-night humorous monologue shows on my local talk radio station in Miami Beach, WKAT/1360, shows that originated from the mighty WOR/710, (50,000-watt clear channel) in New York City.  I also had read the short story he wrote to which the above quote pertains.  Little Ralphie, around eight I guess, is all excited as Christmas approaches...he desperately wants a Red Rider toy air rifle, but his mother says no, "You'll shoot your eye out".  And now his own teacher has just written the same thing on a homework assignment he wrote about it...and Ralphie is trudging home in the snow, tears falling from his eyes.  Suddenly Scut Farkus, the school bully...accompanied by his little, stocky toady Grover Dill...jumps in Ralphie's way, confronting him and ridiculing his crying.  And then our hero does something unexpected: he charges his adversary, pushing him to the ground, proceeding to beat him up.  The scene didn't look realistic to me and, besides, I knew from Shepherd's earlier short story that it was the more manageable Dill that Ralphie fought, not impossible Farkus.  I also had a problem with the bully in this story being a social outcast among the kids...where I grew up in South Florida during the sixties and seventies, it was the bully who was the popular kid on the block or at the bus stop.  I could take the above quote of an imaginary figure in different directions, but since I always remember this jeering taunt of Scut's, I decided to turn it on its head and make something sweet about it.  You see, we have a year-old mixed breed puppy dog named Daisy, and when Melissa ("Mommy" as far as Daisy is concerned) ever goes into another room in the house with the door closed, Daisy sidles up to the door and begins to whimper just like she did when she was very young and temporarily separated from her litter.  And every now and then when she does this, I go straight into my Scut Farkus routine, repeating almost verbatim the above quote...but with some good-natured affection thrown in...                                                                            

Enjoying Jigsaw Puzzles Over Holiday

 

A few days ago, Melissa bought a Christmas-themed jigsaw puzzle for us...together with our grown children Will and Rebecca...to work on as a collective, fun effort.  We had a good time with it, and it turned out that Melissa and Rebecca each in turn gave me new puzzles, both pet themed.  I enjoyed doing both the dog and cat puzzles...the three ranged from 550-750 pieces.  For me it's a lot of fun to discern different patterns out of the chaos of the unassembled pieces and making them all come together.  Guess I'll now take a short break before tackling some more...

Miscellaneous Musings with Daisy This Morning

While Daisy the Wonder Dog stalwartly guards our home from squirrels, crows, other big birds...and FedEx trucks...I'm sitting here ruminating over a random assortment of stuff.  First of all, the 2022 general election came and went, yet six days later we still haven't confirmed that the Republicans will narrowly take control of the House of Representatives and several close elections are slow in determining the winners because of mail-in balloting.  Aside from this, Alaska and Georgia have runoff election provisions whenever no candidate achieves a majority in the general election...and that's just what happened there.  Yet the Democrats will remain in control of the Senate, helping President Biden with his various nominations for the next two years and offering a counterweight to whatever the House Republicans dish out on the other side of the Capitol building.  Our local area elections and referenda served up typically mixed results...I haven't gotten around to checking them all out yet.  As of this writing I haven't heard of anyone trying to overturn election results...I kind of have a feeling that this type of mischief is mainly a Donald Trump thing, and interest in doing it drops off precipitously when he isn't bullying people around for his own ambitions...we'll see what the future brings.  Yesterday, as a couch potato, I was treated to two great, close football games, Minnesota somehow managing to beat Buffalo in overtime (jettisoning the Dolphins into first place) and Green Bay socking it once again to Dallas in a nailbiter...the fact that I was rooting for both eventual winners didn't hurt, either.  As for my wavering running race plans for this upcoming Sunday morning, the long-range weather forecast doesn't bode well, with rain predicted for race time.  I'll wait a couple more days, but if it doesn't change, I think I'll just pass up on it...

Daisy in the Frame

 

We've had our little mixed-breed puppy for a little more than four months now...Daisy was only two months old back in May when we adopted her at PetSmart off Archer Road through a pet adoption non-profit group.  Then she weighed just seven pounds...click HERE for an earlier article (and picture).  Now she's 29 pounds but still a little puppy...I took the top picture above a couple of days ago while holding her in my right arm.  Melissa came up with the name, which I quickly took to, but didn't recognize the significance in "Toon World" as Daisy is also the Bumsteads' pet dog in their comic strip Blondie.  One thing tying the two together is that both Daisy's make it a point to make sure they're "in the frame"...check out an old one featuring Dagwood shirking his chores.  I've been walking Daisy around the block each morning in order to train her to follow me and not her own agenda...mixed results so far.  She loves standing on her hind legs and looking out the front window, watching alertly from the left to the right (and back) and huffing and puffing and growling...and occasionally barking at passing cars, people, and of course dogs.  She's very much bonded to both of us but much more so with Melissa...when she leaves the room for just a little bit Daisy turns into a big crybaby.  For a few weeks recently we took her to "puppy kindergarten" where she met up with fellow pups and practiced training Melissa and me to be better humans.  Her growth seems to have slowed down a bit, but maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.  We love Daisy and wish her a happy, well-behaved life...

Taking in Daisy as Our Newest Family Addition

 

Back in 2019 our family dog Freckles, a mixed-breed rescue dog we adopted as a puppy, passed away after 14 years with us.  It's been a while, but the Saturday before last, PetSmart on Archer Road here in Gainesville was holding a pet adoption fair through one of the non-profits and we went...and little Daisy was the result.  She is also a mixed breed rescue dog, two months old and very motivated to bond with us while establishing her supremacy throughout the house.  Naturally, the first few weeks are a bit tedious, with us laying down the rules and (trying to) train her to wait to do her "business" outside...crate training seems to be helping with this although she tends to whine and howl sporadically as you would expect.  As for me personally, although everyone else in my childhood and adult nuclear families are very keen on pet ownership, I have never felt the inner urge to go out and get some critter to hang out with and give me some kind of psychological lift.  Not criticizing those who "have it"...just about everyone in my family is crazy about dogs and cats.  I like them, too, but in all the years I was single and on my own I never once had the remotest urge to take in one as a pet.  Still, I love other people and through them I bond with the pesky little animals.  Daisy is a real sweetie, no doubt about it... 

Great Old TV Episodes...from the Andy Griffith Show

 

DOGS, DOGS, DOGS, from the comedy classic Andy Griffith Show, was first broadcast during its third season in April, 1963. A slew of friendly dogs of all shapes and sizes has descended on the Mayberry courthouse, and Andy and Barney have to figure out what to do with them before the man from Raleigh arrives to assess their request for extra funding.  While Andy is out, Barney has an idea and takes the dogs miles away to an open field, releases them and drives back, smug in his own ingenuity.  But as a severe thunderstorm approaches and Andy and Barney are sitting there in the courthouse...along with Andy's very concerned little boy Opie...Barney goes off on a guilty soliloquy about how dogs are naturally built for withstanding heavy rain and lightning while looking out for each other, unlike giraffes, "But dogs are short and they take care of their own...giraffes don't, no, giraffes don't at all. Boy, giraffes are selfish! They just run around looking after Number One, getting hit by lightning...but dogs..."  Don't worry: everybody, including the dogs, ends up safe and sound with a typically happy ending.  But Barney's few seconds of rationalizing has to stand as one of the high, sidesplitting moments of the entire series...it's a shame that Don Knotts, who played him, decided to leave the series a couple of years later...

Just Finished Reading The Right Side by Spencer Quinn

In Spencer Quinn's 2017 novel The Right Side (which I just finished reading), LeeAnne Hogan is a young soldier returning from multiple tours in Afghanistan...this time it is because she has been seriously injured in a blown operation...or was it a betrayal from the inside?  In any event, after staying in a German hospital she is now at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, trying to come to grips with the difficult fact that she has lost her right eye and the face immediately around it is horribly scarred.  LeeAnne's attitude is bitter and hard toward those around her, including her psychiatrist, for whom she reserves a higher degree of animosity than the others.  But he knows that there is more to her injury: there is shrapnel lodged within her brain, inoperable, and this may pose a major problem to their plans for her eventual recovery from this ordeal.  There is one person at Bethesda, though, who has befriended LeeAnne: her roommate there, Marci...also a victim of war. For her this occurred in Iraq when she lost a leg to an IED (improvised explosive device) while driving a truck.  The two bond and LeeAnne learns of Marci's life, including that she has an eight-year-old daughter living with Marci's mother.  Marci tragically dies from a sudden infection and LeeAnne has had enough of the hospital life:  she sneaks out and heads west with the intention of finding her friend's family in northwestern Washington state.  Meanwhile, a military investigator is seeking her out to return to Kabul and help him solve the mystery surrounding the debacle that had cost her eye and the lives of several others.  I'm not giving away the story by relating all this...this happens as a background story to LeeAnne's experiences as she seeks some kind of inner peace about her life as it seems to have become completely unraveled...

At a crucial stage in her journey LeeAnne encounters a large stray dog that seems to have an instinctive sense of protectiveness exclusively for her, even knowing to stay on her right side where she is essentially blind due to her missing eye.  Never a dog lover, LeeAnne tries to get rid of it to no avail...Goody, which she later names it, becomes an important character in her story.  And Marci's daughter Mia is another...except that she has gone missing...

With The Right Side we have a painfully close examination of the soul of a proud and injured veteran as she faces the rest of her life traumatized, disfigured and partially blind...not to mention the searing headaches she suffers, likely from that shrapnel.  How can LeeAnne reconcile her experiences with her life ahead?  Whom can she trust and whom must she avoid?  She is quite a character...I recommend this book if only for that stubborn willfulness and defiance she displays toward others.  Not that I want to adopt Sgt. Hogan's demeanor: a lot of it is based, I think, on erroneous conclusions she has made about the intentions and attitudes those around her have for her...something that this story also brings out.  I also liked the story itself, with the mysteries about Mia and the Afghanistan tragedy drawing me to its conclusion.  I've never read anything from Spencer Quinn before, but I understand that much of his fiction is of a more lighthearted and humorous nature.  Still, I think I'll poke around some of his books and see how they stack up to The Right Side, which I heartily recommend...and also which just might be the start of a series (I hope so)...

Just Finished Reading The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

I had just finished reading Clifford Simak's 1952 science fiction novel City, which initially gave no indication that it would made a big deal about dogs, and picked up Dean Koontz's 2007 horror/suspense novel The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz...guess what, it's all about dogs, too!  Only with Koontz's story, it's about golden retrievers in particular.  Amy Redwing, a young woman with a secret past, has devoted her life to caring for abandoned or abused golden retrievers.  Brian McCarthy, her love interest, has his own past...including a sadistic ex-girlfriend with custody of their mentally handicapped daughter Hope.  Amy and Brian are the clear-cut "good guys".  On the "bad" side are two of the most evil people I have ever read about...and there have been some pretty awful ones.  There is a lot of killing and torturing...both physical and psychological...in this novel, and I think the author went way overboard in depicting how Hope (who her mother calls "Piggy") is mistreated.  But have no fear, folks, for the noble golden retrievers...led by the seemingly angelic Nickie...have come to save the day...

The Darkest Evening of the Year, on one hand, is a feel-good story about dogs and how we should treat them better.  But little children are also vulnerable, and they should be treated better than they often are.  The problem I had with Koontz's novel, though, is that his characterizations of the protagonists Amy and Brian seemed too shallow while he dwelled deeply on the thought processes of the evil Vanessa, her boyfriend, and the completely amoral hit man they hired.  On one hand the author is saying to be good to dogs and kids...on the other, he's giving a primer on how to develop for oneself a philosophy of pure evil.  So no, I didn't care for this book...but then again, you might beg to differ: why not try it out and give your own impressions?

Heavy Rainfall of Late Where I Live

I suppose I should be grateful that we're getting plenty of rainfall...after all, the folks out in California are suffering through a painfully harsh drought.  And for a while this summer, it seemed, we had settled here in northern Florida into a pattern of sunny mornings and early afternoons, with late afternoon and evening thunderstorms and showers.  I liked that since the humidity would go down during the day just as the temperature climbed up into the 90s...and then it would all get cooler with the rain.  But now it seems that the humidity is staying high around the clock, and the storms are starting to hit us in the morning, too...

All of this rain is turning my lawn into a swamp, and the grass seems to be growing twice as fast as usual.  Our poor ten-year-old dog Freckles, who was already traumatized by the booming and crackling Fourth of July fireworks various neighbors of mine were setting off from several days before the holiday (and a few afterward),  now has to suffer through the often continual thunder bellowing around us.  As for me, I don't mind the thunder, but the humidity, along with the hopelessly wet surface conditions,  has made running outdoors unfeasible.  Also, no one I know, including myself, likes to get out on the road driving under these conditions...

Loose Dog Alley

I like dogs.  They are cute and usually emotionally bonded to people.  I've owned at least one since 1987 and grew up with another. But I know that dogs are sometimes violent and attack people.  Around my neighborhood, some residents keep their very scary, nasty sounding (and looking) ferocious animals behind fences.  When I am on one of my runs, they usually remind me of their presence with some threatening growls and barks.  But they are restrained...and I feel safe.  There is one block in my neighborhood, however, that, practically every time I run down it, has a dog running around loose.  This stretch of residential road apparently has some incredibly indifferent dog-owners who have personal issues about inflicting their beasts on anyone happening to pass by their house.  First, there's Jake, a large grey mixed breed dog with a scary appearance but a friendly disposition.  Still, when he sees me and he is out loose, Jake tries to jump on me, follows me home, and even tries to come into my house.  Not fun.  There is another house where I saw a man walking by on the public street  having a scare from a large white dog loose in the front yard, who looked as if he were going to attack him.  Then I ran by and the angry dog turned its attention to me.  Fortunately, both of us managed to slip on by without somehow enraging this already disturbed animal into action.  Thanks a lot, inconsiderate owner!  And then there is another dog, if it really is a dog.  This guy I've seen a couple of times.  It looks like an overweight chihuahua mutant, has a very angry bark, and when it notices that whoever it is barking at isn't impressed and is still walking or running by, it suddenly sprints away full-speed down the very long block (and around the corner).  I think that's pretty smart on its part, for a dog like that has no business confronting anyone in public. 

We have a law in our area requiring dog owners to restrain their pets, but unfortunately some of my neighbors either don't care or deliberately want to set their dog out on people passing by their house.  But it's not THEIR street; it's everyone's, and they damned better keep their precious little monsters restrained if they don't want animal control knocking on their doors in the future...

Phony "Bad" Dog Videos

While waiting for the air conditioning installers to finish putting in our new system, I was channel surfing during a time of day when I usually wouldn't be watching television. I came across the Animal Planet channel.  On it was a show titled "Bad Dog".  It was one of those cutesy home video shows that pet lovers are supposed to watch and get bowled over by the adorable antics of other people's little animal possessions.  The particular episode I was watching showed dogs supposedly behaving very lazily.  But after seeing just a couple of the videos, I disgustedly switched channels...

One video showed a bulldog that was into watching TV.  Sitting on the sofa.  Like a person sits.  Wearing clothes.  With the remote by its side. Bad, lazy, silly dog.  Another video showed a different "lazy" dog lying on the floor, with dry dog food morsels spread around its head.  In this clip, the dog just moved its head around to snap up the nearest morsels while continuing to lie on its side.  Wow, what a bad, lazy, silly dog (too).

In the first video, the unbelievably compliant dog suffered through the indignity of being dressed and unnaturally set up for a contrived video.  The second was equally contrived.  The whole show, it seems, is an exercise in pet owners drumming up different angles of portraying their "property" in silly situations.  Ha-ha, what a blast...NOT.

Of course, I'm sure that the dog owners here really, truly love their animals and care well for them.  But seeing dogs presented this way still makes me sympathetic to a degree with PETA's often extreme objections to animals being used in shows for human entertainment.  Sure, there's no abuse here...but it sure as all ain't funny, at least where I'm coming from...

Stray Dogs, Then and Now

I am not fond of running through my neighborhood on weekend afternoons. Besides the increased traffic there due to more people being off from home and/or school, there is also a problem with dog owners letting their often large and vicious sounding pets run loose in their unfenced front yards as they work on their cars, in their yards, or just in their open garages. A small number of these chase me down the street as I pass by (the dogs, that is). Almost always, when this happens, the owner catches on and frantically yells at the dog to stop. What morons. They obviously care little about their pets, and even less about any pedestrian who happens to walk by their house. After all, animals not used to being on the street are prone to getting run over!

Usually, though, and often to my amazement, many dogs are very well trained to stay within the confines of their "territory" in the front lawn, as ferociously and loudly they may bark at me. But that is still an unwarranted nuisance, in my opinion. And I know people who would be scared to death trying to walk past such a house.

I have a very intricate running course that winds up and down miles of residential roads and past a few hundred homes. In the past couple of years, I have encountered dogs running loose on just about every stretch of road at different times. Most of the time they growl and bark at me as they notice me, and a few run after me a bit. But the fact still remains that, in the entire time I have run what amounts to about two thousand miles through my neighborhood, complete with its sometimes straying canine residents, I have never been bitten. In fact, the last time I suffered a dog bite was in February 1973, when I was running with my high school track team in Davie, Florida.

Not having suffered a dog bite in 39 years is quite a contrast, though, to what happened earlier in my childhood. For I grew up in the 1960's, and society (at least where I lived) treated dogs very differently. Dogs ran loose around my neighborhood just as cats did (and still do). The kids all got used to the different dogs who hung around, some of whose homes were unknown. I can't begin to count the number of times I would see a stray dog and approach it to pet it (if it didn't approach me first). We had a dog ourselves at the time, but didn't let it run loose. But when we would take Michelle out for a walk, her presence would almost invariably attract a multitude of neighborhood dogs to keep her "company" (and she was spayed). We did know of certain "mean" dogs behind fences that we weren't supposed to get near, but the general feeling was that dogs liked us and we liked dogs. Very little fear. And still, during all of this in my childhood, I recall being bitten lots of times. But we never made a big deal about it. So when I got bitten that afternoon in February, I just continued running and then showered and went home. I told my mom about it, and to be safe, she drove me down to get a tetanus shot. The next day at school I was confounded by my track coach's angry consternation: how could I just leave like that after being bitten by a dog? It was only then that the very real danger of rabies was impressed upon me and how oh-so very dangerous stray dogs were...

This fear of stray dogs is probably much more warranted today than it was in my childhood, though. For back then, running around loose outside conditioned dogs to be more accepting of people in general. But in today's era of leash laws and rules against dogs running loose in public, those dogs that do occasionally "break out" are much more likely to see strangers as enemies to be feared and attacked. So I'm afraid I'm not likely to ever regain my relative openness to chumming up with stray dogs...