Angus vs. The Stapler

Angus has been so perfect since we adopted him almost 3 months ago.  He is just this lovely, well-mannered, beautiful dog who does absolutely nothing wrong.  Which is a little sad, because we like to laugh when things go wrong.  But he's sweet and sleepy and we are just in love with him.

Many people ask about the slobber factor in Great Danes, to which I normally reply that they aren't so bad.  They do tend to create their own weather patterns over the water bowl, but other than that, they tend to keep the drool to a bare minimum.  Angus, however, defies all of our previous experience in this area.  We now have weird crusty slobber marks on the ceiling.  We have 20 foot ceilings.  That stuff is not coming down.  It's on the television, on doors, on the refrigerator, on the walls, on the cats.  Last night Angus shook his head and fifteen feet away the product of that shake landed squarely on Uma's head. 

For the first couple of months it seemed that Angus was not interested in chewing on anything other than his own food.  Therefore, I was surprised the other day when I was working up in the studio and looked down to see him trying to eat my stapler.  Let me tell you, it was moist.  There was a definite end result in his mind.  I do not know what it was.

We Are Still Working Over Here

Hi there.  It seems that when someone starts a blog, there are certain expectations that are created regarding the frequency and quality of postings.  After a long hiatus, complete with verbal lashings from a few and a swift kick in the shin from one, I am going to try to meet these expectations, if only to avoid the stress that comes with such lashings.  Thank you for continuing to read and for what seems to be eternal optimism from some of you that I will post something new.  I assure you, things are indeed being eaten.  For now, however, a quick post (this is for you, T).

In chronological order:

1.  We adopted two cats, Eli and Uma.  Eli is crazy.  Uma is lovely.

Eli, no shrinking violet.

Lovely Uma

2.  We adopted a 3-year-old Great Dane.  We call him Angus.

 

Angus, Mike & Ivy.  Ivy has only tried to eat him twice.

3.  The emmi website is now fully functional!  You may now purchase collars and leads for your dogs until your fingers bleed!




 

So This Happened

A timeline of the gradual degradation of the Mountain Alder
that we planted this summer in honor of Mike's grandfather:

June - Our beautiful Mountain Alder.
Thriving in our extremely acidic soil consisting of
decomposing granite, which we thought would be
the only hurdle to clear.

Evidently we were mistaken.

An early August morning - Surely mine eyes deceive me.
Beautiful Alder is now two-thirds eaten.
Words fail me.

October - Completely gone. Two inches of stump.
Ivy has never been accused of not being thorough.

Thank You

Mike and I just wanted to say thank you for all the flowers, plants, donations to rescue groups and humane societies, cards, calls and emails. And mostly, thank you for understanding the connection that we had with our beautiful boy. It is so very clear to us that the light in his heart and soul was visible to everyone he met.

In other news, Ivy seems to be giving us a break from constantly eating everything in sight except for an apple pie that we were actually really looking forward to eating ourselves. I am sure this is a temporary abstention, as she is a little down from missing her big brother.

Milo

Our sweet boy
November 26, 1999 - October 24, 2011

I Really Don't Make This Stuff Up

I am always impressing myself, as I am sure you do as well. The other day I decided to dismantle a rather ugly fence in the backyard that has been driving me nuts for about 10 years. There was this incredibly stupid bar that ran across the gate, so every time I went down to the chicken coop I had to duck down at a right angle to get under it. And almost every time I did I bumped my head pretty hard. I had asked a friend to help me take it down, thinking it wasn't a job for just one person, but as said friend was selfishly off getting married and subsequently honeymooning, I decided to just do it myself. You can only bump your head so many times before you are forced to start asking yourself the definition of insanity (according to my mother, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - perhaps that was actually Einstein, but my mother is just as brilliant). And I hit my head so hard the night before that I actually made myself a little nauseous. So no more insanity. We are people of action in this house.

After using my do-it-herself tools, including but not limited to, rubber mallet, socket wrenches, zip ties, metal sharp thingy, crow bar type thing that doubles as a pencil (yes a pencil!), and sledgehammer (please - someone needs to invent a sledgehammer that is light as air but that gets the job done. Those things are ridiculous), I ended up with a massive disaster area. I put the fence fasteners in a large ziplock bag so I wouldn't lose any of the parts as Mike seems to think that some delusional will want a free ugly fence off of Craigslist (no, we're not going to do that, honey. No delusionals other than ourselves up here at the house). I left the ziplock bag on the table for a day and kind of forgot about it while I ran some errands.

Poor Milo - he is so hungry. He is practically skeletal, but we are feeding him a ton of food. I guess once you greet the century mark in life, you just get super skinny. Wow, what a generous tradeoff. At any rate, he is evidently so hungry that he tore into that bag of fence fasteners like nobody's business. I don't think he actually ingested any parts once he figured out that they weren't very accommodating to the teeth. Seriously, it's a texture thing, people.

Down the Pie Hole

Ivy and I went hiking in the National Forest with my friend Julie and her Rhodesian Ridgeback, Kylie, one morning this week. Everything was going well, meaning that Ivy was slightly curtailing her exuberance due to Kylie's fairly shy nature. We were hiking along, everybody was pointed in the same direction (trust me, if you hike with your dogs you know how difficult this can sometimes be), and we spotted something red and gooey just up ahead. Julie sucked in her breath, I believe because she thought it was a chewed up critter. Ivy normally leaves those types of things alone, so I knew by the way she was running to it that it was something sweeter than carcass. As it turns out, it was actually an entire pie, of what looked to be the strawberry variety, right there on the trail. Seriously? Somebody left a perfectly good pie on a hiking trail? When you start seeing pies on hiking trails you really have to wonder where our country is headed. Just seeing such a lovely pie on the trail makes me feel both morally degraded and utterly dejected. I love pie.

This is a close approximation of what the pie
looked like. I would have taken a picture, but
it was down the gullet within a matter of seconds,
so this stock photography will have to suffice.