Talk About Autumn

I'm finally getting over losing my dog.

I feel like I'm supposed to call her "our" dog, because she was certainly a joint project. There was plenty of vomit I never cleaned up personally. So I acknowledge my wife and friends who helped bring her this far. But fuck it, Autumn was my dog.

Meredith always said Autumn was a Texas dog. She's lean and loved being in the sun, lying on concrete, soaking up heat from every angle. When we moved here, to finish the Texasing of our dog, I put her in her crate in the back of our minivan, and we made the 2-day trip together. She whined for three hours, all the way past Baltimore, until somewhere in Virginia she stopped and accepted her fate.

Dogs are not renowned for their foresight, so we sort of assumed that Autumn had decided her life was now all about riding in a dog crate in the back of a minivan with me, and adapted.

I slept in the car with her at rest stops. We were both caged for 48 hours during the drive. We took a break the next day in Alabama, and I let her run around off-leash on Samford's quad in the bleak late January of 2015. Here's our selfie with the Ralph Beeson statue.

Still staring down the drive at Lakeshore after all these years.

Autumn and Player 3 coexisted for a while. We were wary of ever putting them together, but when he was small and immobile, we shooed her away and she got the idea. Eventually though, Player 3 learned to walk and he learned to grab and he learned that Autumn did fun things.

He was right! Autumn did lots of fun things when she wasn't vomiting partially digested fecal matter on the carpet. She jumped and ran and chased balls and was cheerfully violent—no malice, just strong and enthusiastic. From puppyhood, we trained her to roughhouse because we liked roughhousing with her.

We are not particularly renowned for our foresight either. We never planned ahead for what to do when someone small and grabby came along who wasn't good at roughhousing.

July 2015, things came to a relatively gentle head. I was kneeling on the floor, and Player 3 tottered across our small apartment trying to get a hand on Autumn. I tried to keep them separated, but was literally in no position to stop either one of them. 

Autumn got freaked out by my discomfort and the kid's unpredictability, so she told him to back off with a growl and by grazing his cheek with her teeth. She didn't bite him. She didn't draw blood. But he cried at the shock of it. The incident was portentious. Player 3 would not learn boundaries as quickly as Autumn needed him to. And I am not sufficiently ubiquitous to police them.

I briefly considered not telling Meredith, but I'm not into keeping dirty secrets from my wife. And even if I hadn't, I knew we needed to change before next time ended less benignly. We had seen Autumn fight a dog before. She is not big, but she is strong and tenacious. We could not wait and hope that her pit-mix jaws would never clamp on the boy.

I spent some time looking for another home for her, but our network in Austin was (still is) very small and quickly tapped. So I made an appointment to take her to the shelter. There was no opening for three more weeks, so we lived in a state of arrested relations for six weeks with Autumn in her crate almost constantly, to insure against further unpredictable interactions. It sucked, but maybe the drive from Philly to Austin six months before helped her adapt.

The day I took her to the shelter in mid-September, I fed her well, and we went for an extra-long walk. On our return, she plopped next to me in an armchair, hanging over one arm. We sat together for half an hour. I read and stroked her back. She smelled things. Then it was time to go.

Surrendering a family pet to the shelter is an unnecessarily lengthy process, especially when one has an appointment. One is asked to wait long past the appointment time, on a precipice of sorrow. You cannot fall in yet, because you must keep your dog from mingling with all the other dogs and cats in a constant trickle through the doors. Vigilance overrides sentiment. A dog fight in the shelter waiting room bodes poorly for your dog's chances of getting adopted.

Then, you must stand next to a kiosk with your dog and verbally answer the questions you already answered on the surrender form. Interruptions are frequent, and you have low priority on the task list. The intake administrator ignores your sniffles and eye leaks. You admit your failure as an owner to all the kindness and sympathy that government employees are known for. I had to check the box that said we could not take her back in the event that she had to be put down. If they could not find a home for her, that was her end.

After half an hour of standing and re-answering questions, they took Autumn's leash. She hid behind my legs when they took her. She was joyously explosive when we were around, and (we heard) timid when we were away. Fortunately, the administrator's demeanor sea-changed once she was not talking to me. Her borderline dismissiveness with me turned to sweetness and babytalk for Autumn. 

But Autumn did not want to go. She wanted to stay with me. Her tail curled under; the timidity we always heard about kicked in as she pulled away, trying to stay with me. Someone I had never met took her leash and dragged her through an institutional metal door. And then it closed.

That was the last chink in my failing dam of stoicism. I fled the waiting room. Sat on a bench under a tree and cried my face ugly.

For weeks after I would lie awake at night wondering if we had done the right thing. If I took her to exercise more, she could burn off energy. If I devoted a couple of hours to her every day, I could rehabilitate her. Right? I'd never done that before, but now would be different? 

"I think maybe I should go try to get Autumn back," I would say sometimes.

"I don't know what to say when you say that," my wife said eventually. 

I stopped saying it.

When you surrender a dog to the shelter, you don't get updates. Maybe she was adopted immediately. Maybe they put her down last week. You don't really get to know. But we got lucky. Twice, Meredith inadvertently found updates.

 Once, Autumn was the pet of the week on a local TV show. There was a video of a volunteer bringing her home overnight, and Autumn was laser focused on a tennis ball throughout the entire video.

This is also how we found out that the "mix" is autumn's pit-mix is probably "black mouth cur." The Philadelphia shelter where we got Autumn as a puppy told us she was likely a German Shepherd mix, which we scoffed at immediately. We didn't know what she was, but it wasn't no german freaking shepherd.

After we looked at pictures of black mouth curs on the internet though, it was obvious. Her color and build scream BMC. It's just the skinny pit head and maniacally strong jaws that look like a pit bull.


And the second time, on December 24, 2015, Facebook coughed up pictures of our girl being taken home by someone.

You can tell it is her, because of the intensity with which she is clenching that ball.

 (And the one eye.)

I don't know who this woman is. I probably never will. But I am so happy that she gave Autumn another home. So glad Autumn got another shot.




I still miss my dog, but we made the right, hard choice. And now, going on a year after we decided to give her up, I have room to talk about it. Here's one more picture of her in lapdog mode, which was most of the time, and which no one outside our house ever really got to see, lying in the crook of my leg on the couch.

We still love you, Autumn. I hope your life is joyous and filled with tennis balls.

I like to move it

According to some social science report I'm not going to bother researching for this post, moving is one of the most stressful events in an adult's life. And it is!

A lot of the stress revolves around how much petty crap you have to remember to do. Address changes and tying up loose ends at the old place and still walking the dog at the end of the day.

I imagine that if some disaster hit, a fire or earthquake or war—from which we all made it out safely—and we had to flee our old home and start up in another location... that would have been almost preferable. Just drop the mic and walk away.

Instead there are literally dozens of hanging tendrils from the change that remain unaddressed. Nothing terrible, but all need to be done.

No one's bothered to make a list of what remains undone, so one floats by occasionally (Did we get the car registered yet?) and free-floating stress just drifts in, interrupting and complicating whatever else you were doing. (No! And it's overdue! Hope no one notices!)

My wife has commented before that I only get irritable over small things. She has been surprised by my calm during large, intense events. When our beloved (and sometimes behated) dog almost died, she was, I think, almost angry at how casually I behaved.

But then, I knew what I could do and what I couldn't. I knew what my responsibility and capability was. I wanted Autumn to live, but if she didn't, it was out of my control. If she died, we would grieve and keep living. If she lived, we would play-fight with her and take her down to the river for swimming again and things would be well.

Contrast that to a bat-swarm of responsibilities that come after a move, with no clear boundaries or action plans, or even a scope of what must be done. And we're not even done! We're just in the starter apartment! Buying and occupying a permanent home is still on the horizon!

But I still like moving. I like new places. Circle of Hope in Philadelphia taught me the joy and value in staying. But that pied piper plays a mean flute, and now I'm stressed in Austin.

Art Shop 2009 Post-Mortem

Art Shop is over, and I did pretty well! I'm about to go into a long review, mainly for my own benefit, so feel free to drop out any time this gets boring.

I have only two data points: last year and this year. So I'm not sure how meaningful my conclusions are. But I'm trying to draw some anyway.

The overarching lesson this year is from my neighbor Liz, who was selling smart-looking hand-knitted sweaters. The lesson: "Business is fickle." You do your homework, and you hedge your bets, and then you show up and hope. You don't know when it's going to go well or go badly. You go anyway.

More specific observations:

• This year's commercial breakthrough was diversification. I had a few normal monsters (fewer than last year), a bunch of pattern monsters, some tetris magnet sets, and random stuff I glued googly eyes onto. This provided a nice price spread from $40 down to $1 for the Things With Eyes. (I also sold coasters for my sister-in-law, Alison).

• The ratio of "Cool!" to "Sold!" is about 10:1.

• I didn't bring some things I wanted to. I wanted to make hats, but I never did the R&D to be able to churn out a bunch, and I didn't want to show up with only one or two. I also had meant to make pillows out of t-shirts, but the dog ate my homework there (literally), and I was already staying up late finishing monsters and freelance as it was. So I let it go. It's probably just as well -- the table was full enough. But I coulda sold the headlice out of hats, I think.

• Got lots of compliments, and someone said to me, "Everyone is talking about your stuff!" Meredith pointed out that it must feel good to hear people say nice things about my work. And it should. I've tried to figure out why it doesn't.
  
  My guess is that I have a subcutaneous cynicism that distrusts inert talk. Telling me you like my work is swell, but like it with your wallet, and I'm more inclined to believe you.
  
  I mean, regardless of origin or intent, a compliment is a compliment, and kindness is not so abundant that I'm willing to wave it away. But there's still a stark line in my heart between "talk" and "walk."
  
  Cynicism is low on my list of favorite character traits. But it's often coupled with a constructive shrewdness. I haven't discerned how to gerrymander my feelings to properly segregate "good judgment" and "bad faith." But at least I'm happy I've discovered it's important to do that.

• Everybody DOES love monsters, but everybody also loves utility. Based on some half-verbalized semi-criticisms, I got the impression that many people think stuffed monsters are only for children. Items that look fun and cool are ok for children, but not adults. Had I ingrained some sort of usefulness into the product (here's where a hat would have come in handy) I would have had more admirers and customers.

• I can't tell whether low-pressure sales is better for business in dollar terms, but I can tell I feel icky about applying pressure. I only want to sell to people who already want to buy. I get no joy from persuasion.
  

• Some of last years' monsters didn't sell, and I brought them home thinking that they must have been defective in some way. They were unbeloved, and therefore I had failed. I took them back this year anyway, to fill out the ranks. To my surprise, they sold, to people who seemed happy to have them.
  
  So the new conclusion is that some products hit certain people a certain way, and you don't know who or when. There might be some genuine stinkers in the bunch, and you hope to weed those out as soon as possible. But sometimes a creation's buyer just hasn't come along yet.

• Last year I sold a bunch of stuff on Friday, and Saturday was dead. Low point: Some woman spent most of an hour letting her daughter amuse herself at my booth while she talked, and then bought nada. However, my goal had been to make enough to cover my new sewing machine, and I did that, so mission accomplished.
  
  This year, I did only so-so on Friday, and going into Saturday I did a lot of hand-wringing about how bad I feared business would be, especially after a quiet first hour. I heard people say "Friday is more social; Saturday is the day more people buy." But that hadn't been my experience.
  
  Turns out, people were right. Saturday mysteriously picked up around 1:00, and I did decently thereafter. When I tallied up sales, I made a significantly larger amount of money this year compared to last year.

• I dropped my prices a little on magnets and big monsters on Saturday after disappointing Friday night sales. Both sold better on Saturday. I don't know whether it was because of the price drop or the motivated Saturday shoppers. For monsters anyway, my hunch is $40 is a breaking point for a lot of people. They'll bite at $35, but $40 is too much.

• When I say I did "decently", we're still not talking a lot of money. I probably did a little better than break even on the hobby this year. Which is cool with me. I'm interested to turn this into more of an income stream, but a self-funding hobby is sufficient gratification.

• An artsy consignment shop downtown wants to sell my monsters. Sweet! I'll probably have more to say about that in a couple weeks.
  

• I've set a goal to attend at least one more art/craft show in 2010 as a vendor. I need more data points.

If you came out to Art Shop this year, whether or not you bought a monster, then my sincere thanks. If you DID buy something, then I hope it brings you joy and amusement. See all y'all next year.

Adventures in junking: Watch the birdie

My new favorite hobby is walking the dog on trash day. I always find something interesting in other people's garbage. Occasionally, it's interesting enough to bring home.

About a month ago someone left an Apple IIcPlus and a Macintosh SE on the sidewalk. I know! I sold them on Craigslist for $10 a piece, and found out later that I way undercharged for the IIcPlus.

A couple days ago, I was almost done with a walk and had found nothing worth bringing home. I was feeling a little sad about it when I wandered by a TV and a blender box. I wish I knew what to do with old TVs, because people junk them regularly in my neighborhood.

While Autumn nosed over that, I looked in the blender box, wondering if there was actually a blender in it. There wasn't.

It was incongruously full of mid-20th century cameras!



Here's a Brownie Hawkeye:



Here's an Argoflex Seventy-Five:


Here's a Kodak Duaflex III. (It has its original flash and instruction manual.):



Here's a bunch of plastic shoe inserts that were also in the box:



According to Internet, there's a community of photographers who use these to do Through the Viewfinder (TtV) photography, hooking up their digital cameras to take pictures through the viewfinders of these old cameras. I've clicked through a few galleries in Flickr, and I love that people are doing this! Hooray for people!

These cameras are not super-duper rare or expensive. But they might bring a few bucks. Plus, they're neat. If you know someone who might like to have one of these for a reasonable price, email me, k?

Lucidity is becoming optional

Oh my gosh, have I listened to The Flaming Lips cover of Borderline a lot today. Like, seriously, if I weren't already me, I would have made me turn that off. I watched the video about three times, and then put it in the background while I wrote, and then tabbed back to hit play again every time it stopped.

After about 10 of those, it was time to download it. I just set it on "Repeat One" in iTunes, and it played and played and played. Now, about 10 hours later, I'm singing the Madonna version in my head. What the hell?

My wife is gone for the weekend, and of course I miss her, except that I don't miss her at all because I love having the house to myself. I can retreat so far into my cave that daylight becomes an ironic metaphor that you use to mock people who make the mistake of showing emotion.

Except that there's still 2 dogs I have to pay attention to, because if I don't they poop in the house and it stinks and I have to clean it up. That's when I really miss my wife.

If there's one thing I don't recommend it's getting your hand stuck in a vise. If there's another thing, well you and I both know, there's a lot of things I don't recommend.

I never even say, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," because that means your only allowable actions are sitting in the half-dark and reading the Internet for 36 hours straight.

Speaking of which, I can't recommend that either, because I've been up for about 36 hours straight now, and you start making choices like listening to The Flaming Lips for about 4 hours in a row, and reading 50 pages of a Jack Handey book, and then leaving a rambling blog post.

Here's the video, if you want to watch it 9 or 1o times too:

The flaming lips Borderline

Time for a dog picture.

I took Autumn to the park on Saturday, and somebody had built a snow fire hydrant. Ha ha! Great idea!

I wanted to get Autumn's picture with it. But immediately after roaming into range, she leaned on it and knocked it over.

Look what our city budget cuts have wrought.

Religion in the cold months

I’ve been on the outs with God since Christmas. At the Christmas Eve service, there was a lot of talk about faith, and I remember thinking, “You know, I just don’t have that much faith. I don’t think I believe in this.” I find Jesus annoyingly unknowable for the living incarnation of God -- the ostensibly accessible member of the Godhead.

I’m journeyman-level at Jesus worship by now, so I’ve had enough experience not to get thrown by this. Crises of faith aren’t cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank.

I felt relieved to admit it. As a journeyman follower, I also know by now to follow the relieved feelings. It’s a signal that I’ve been over-trying somewhere; taking it easy is probably a better path.

So I haven’t been working at being spiritual for the last few weeks. I haven’t wanted to go to public meeting or cell group, and sometimes we/I go anyway, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. You know, okay.

A frequent bugbear in my spirituality is the seeming arbitrariness of prayer. Sometimes God grants you your requests, and sometimes God does not, and sometimes there is a silent void that does not appear to acknowledge that you said anything, or that there is a you even making requests. It’s that last one that gets me.

Our heat has been on the fritz for... well, since we’ve owned the house. This winter, the furnace has added a twist by working only intermittently. The heating guy comes out at least once a week to tinker with it, but nothing sticks. Money saved on gas bills is literal cold comfort.

I just bundled up and stuck it out at home today. I don’t like it, but I can distract myself. However, M’s cell has been meeting at our house lately, and a 50 degree living room is poor hosting material.

I took Autumn for a walk before cell group started, and while I was out I didn’t choose to pray. But I thought about praying. I thought that if I were to pray, I would pray for the heat to come on at our house, so M’s cell could meet there, and she could enjoy a warm house.

When I got home, several people were in the living room, and M informed me that the heat had come on. It just started working again. Like it does sometimes.

There’s no moral here. Just another small point of reference in trying to figure out how to live with and worship a God who claims to be love, yet seems to act arbitrarily. I want to understand. I do not want to reject, or to shrug and accept. I want to understand.

Double dog daring

We have another dog, Autumn. She's a 5-month old something-or-other, from the shelter again, but this time, young enough that she hasn't been near-ruined by a previous owner's neglect.

She has seen trouble though. Roughly a month ago, a cop found her in an alley in north Philly, her left eye huge and distended. She's still kind of bug-eyed on the port side, but heavy doses of antibiotics have reduced the swelling from gross to merely unsightly.

She'll probably always be blind in her left eye. Nobody knows what happened, but the consensus seems to be "trauma", i.e. someone poked her in the eye. When we took her to have the shelter vet check her out last week, some thick dude with armloads of tattoos saw her and said, "I think I recognize that dog. I think she used to be near where I live. I'm glad you've got her." Words dense with meaning.

Dylan is less afraid of Autumn than he was Merit. She's more his size, and shows him respect -- especially since he's nipped her a couple of times to get her to back off. Merit drew blood from Dylan (and from me). We don't expect those problems again.

Autumn is spazzy and mouths things and pees indoors like you'd expect from a puppy. But she seems to be learning and fitting in. I think we've got a keeper.

New Dog Blues

We ended our foster period with Merit about three weeks ago. She kept biting Dylan out of what we think was a combination of jealousy and anxiety. We wound up keeping the dogs separate all the time.

It was hard. It meant separate walking, separate feeding, separate rooms for their crates... it was a lot of effort. It wasn't working out.

One day, not long before we took her back, she was loose, and bit Dylan again. I tried to break them up, and got my hand chomped. M and I spent the afternoon in the emergency room. I'm fine by now -- my chronic nail biting does worse damage -- but I spent a week as a righty.

That was my bad judgment. Stick your hand in a blender, and you can't blame the blender for what happens. However, the shelter wouldn't see it that way. If we told them Merit bit our dog and me, and then tried to return her, she would be put down within the hour.

That wasn't acceptable to us. We'd rather have lived with the craziness than let that happen. But "live with craziness" is nobody's Plan A.

Luckily, the volunteer we fostered her from in the first place still had a kind spot for Merit. She already has two dogs, but took Merit in anyway, and really worked to get her adopted. She did stuff that didn't even occur to M and me.

Tonight, the volunteer emailed me and told me that a couple in Allentown had seen Merit on the Web and just today came down to Philly to adopt her. They're cool with her anxiety issues. One of them works from home, so somebody would be there with her. They don't have kids or other pets. They want a high energy dog. It sounds ideal for lil Knothead.

I'm thrilled for Merit! This is so plainly a better deal for everyone, that I can't be unhappy about it. But I am sad. I like dogs. I've met lots of friendly dogs, but rarely one that I click with. She was a dog who liked me back.

I hope she likes Allentown. I hope they take her for runs. I hope, if we're ever up there and happen to see her -- like you imagine happening, but you know never will -- that she remembers me with the same affection.

Name Dropping

Thanks to everyone who contributed potential dog names, or even expressed interest! The winner is: Merit.

I wanted to name her Ranger, because it sounds cool and adventurous, and we both like Lord of the Rings.

Meredith wanted to name her Coconut, because that's kind of her coloration, and it's funny, and we could call her "nut" for short.

Neither of us wanted to budge. Then my clever, lovely wife proposed that we go to our second choice, which we both agreed on, the quasi-aspirational Merit. Now if we can just get her to live up to that name.

New Dog

So what we went and did over the weekend was we went and got a new dog.

The old dog is distressed, but man, whatever. He's an old dog. Make way for Dog Progress!

New dog's from the shelter (which I guess is different from "the pound") and predictably undisciplined, but a sweetie nonetheless.

She seems to be some greyhound and some other thing. My own scientific analysis is: dalmatian or beagle or something. She's got a build I like to call "rangy."

We don't have a name for her yet. The shelter called her "Cricket" but M had a dog named Cricket when she was a kid, and you can't double up on these things. Also, why name your animal after another animal? Does anyone name their dog "Dromedary" or "Panda"?*

Here is a partial list of potential names, most of which we have rejected. Feel free to use any of these for your unnamed pets or office supply products:

• Bathsheba
• Ranger
• Gilraen
• Fletcher
• Tirade
• Buechner
• Zelby
• Knothead
• Fortunata
• Zonks
• Fake Steve Jobs
• Coconut
• Merit

The last two are the current front-runners, but there's plenty of time for something to come out of nowhere and take the lead. Post your suggestions in the comments! If we use the name you suggested, then won't that be great?

*Come to think of it, they probably do.

Tough Customer

I was taking pictures of various items I no longer wish to own* and transferring them to my computer.

Looking through the dozens of pictures sleeping in their electronic cocoon, I found this picture of our corgi, Dylan.

I am not, typically, a post-pictures-of-pets type of blogger. But what the hell. It's a good picture.


*If you would like to own some of my items, I am selling them on eBay.

Dog Days

I am co-owner of a dog now, which is nice, but annoying.

I like dogs. But what I really like are other people's dogs. My head is full of things to think about, and dogs are notably outside.

Too bad. Because wherever my head is, the dog is still right here, and still needs attention and food and exercise, and, dare I say, love.

Parents talk about pets as responsibility trainers for children. But no one ever talks about pets as responsibility trainers for would-be parents.