Still Here After All This Time

It's been a really long time since my last post on this blog.  That was caused by a number of things: recovery from surgery was slower than I expected, at least in terms of getting back the energy to do things during the day.  For awhile there it was all I could do to go to the park and sit for an hour while the dogs walked around.  It took almost six months to get up the energy to walk any distance myself, but once I started doing that, my energy started coming back at a faster pace.  Now I can do 3 or 4 hours of (mostly non-physical) work a day after walking the dogs.

But once I had the energy, more things intervened.  Our Lhasa Apso, Jemma,  suddenly (over the course of 2 or 3 weeks) went blind.  We spent some time going to vets and not getting a definitive diagnosis until we saw a veterinary opthalmologist.  He diagnosed SORD (Sudden Onset Retinal Disorder), a disorder whose etiology and mechanism are pretty much unknown, but whose prognosis is 100% blindness in almost all cases, and which has no treatment.  Jemma has been blind now for several months, and has mostly acclimated herself to it.  Dogs aren't as strongly affected by blindness as humans, because smell and hearing are so much more acute for them.  Jemma's only serious problem (aside from a non-related eye infection that lasted several weeks) is that when she gets excited or upset she gets disoriented and gets stuck in loops between obstacles, going back and forth until she accidentally goes off at an angle and misses one of them.  We''re working with her on that, but she is a very stubborn dog (a breed quality) and is having trouble taking direction when she gets that way.  Spencer, our Rat Terrier, has been very solicitous of her, following her and trying to help her (though not very consistently). He has come to get us a couple of times when she got into trouble in the back yard.

The other thing that's been keeping me from the blog is a project I've started.  Now that I'm able to do useful work at least part of the day, I've decided to come partially out of retirement and create software that, with a little luck, I can sell to bring in a little extra money; at least enough, I hope, to pay for the additional hardware and software I've had to buy for the development work (that's not really a lot, but retirement hasn't been quite what it was supposed to be, thanks to the Current Financial Unpleasantness).  I've got a project that I think I can do myself, one that I've been thinking about off and on for a year or so.  It will start out as a Macintosh application, sold through Apple's Mac App Store, and if that's successful, I plan to port it to the iPad. Details in a near future blog post.

I'll continue to post here, but probably not as often as I was doing last fall.  I'll be spending about 20 hours a week on the software project, and that will include some postings on a new blog I'm setting up now along with a website for the company that will sell the software.  I'll post the details for the new site and blog here soon.

Hot Today

It's hot today (94 ℉ at 5PM) and the upstairs floor of our house, not being air-conditioned, is uninhabitable.  The downstairs floor is set into a hillside, so conduction into the dirt and rock keeps us reasonably cool unless we have a heat wave where it never gets cold enough at night for the air to cool down again.  So right now my office, which is downstairs, is in the mid-70s.  There's a portable airconditioner in the TV room, where we eat dinner most nights, that's holding that room at about 72 ℉.  So the only uncomfortable part of the day (aside from having to go out, of course), is making dinner.  I tend to keep that simple and fast.

The one thing I can't figure out is why the dogs like to lie around in the heat upstairs so much.

Exciting animal story for today

(at least the animal found it exciting)

I was sitting here at the computer when Eva yelled down the stairs from the living room, "There's a bird trapped in here." Eva ran down as I ran up, because as a little girl she once got a bat trapped in her hair for a minute or two, and is very averse to that ever happening again.

The bird had come in the sliding door from the deck, which is at the end of the north wall of the living room. The rest of that wall is picture windows (this is an Atomic Age split-level ranch, and the amount of light coming into the living room was one of the reasons we bought the house), and the bird tried to get out again through a window. It was trapped in the window by Spencer, our rat terrier, who wanted to either play with the bird or eat it, either of which would have been seriously bad for the bird. Either way, Spencer was trying hard to get to the bird, and the bird was frantically flying around in the window, but afraid to move away from it, so it was trapped in the casement. The bird was further confused by the fact that another bird (perhaps its mate) was flying around just outside the same window, and the trapped bird clearly wanted to join it.

There's a baker's rack with plants and some display vases next to that window, and now there was also an excited terrier trying to get to the window, so I had to spend several minutes moving things out of the way while holding the dog off. Luckily, Jemma, the Lhasa Apso wasn't quite so excited about the bird, though she did circle around that part of the room, a few feet back from the window. Eventually the combination of my persuasion and Eva's calling the dogs from downstairs got them both to leave the living room. The bird by this point was too scared even to be fluttering around in the window; it had landed in the corner of the window and stayed there.

The bird didn't seem to be going anywhere, so I looked around the room for something to catch the bird in that wouldn't hurt it or let it hurt me. I grabbed a blue felt blanket off the couch, the security blanket that we put on Spencer at night (he likes to sleep curled up in the fetal position on the couch completely covered by the blanket). I carefully surrounded the bird with the blanket and very softly closed it up so that I had my hands around the bird's body and wings. The bird didn't move; I guess it was still pretty scared. Then I carried the blanket out on the deck, held it over the railing above the back yard, and shook the blanket gently so the bird could get out. It flew straight away from me as fast as it could, apparently undamaged.

Spencer doesn't seem to have noticed any new smells on his blanket, which I'm happy about. He can wind himself up quite enough even without the smell of prey to excite him.

More Dog Pictures

Here is a slideshow of some more recent, and better, too, pictures of Jemma and Spencer (click on a photo to see it full size). We've had them six months now, and they're working out very nicely. Not to say they don't have problems, but we expected more than we've had. And they are really cute ...

New Additions to the Family

We've been threatening to get a dog again, and now we've adopted not one, but two dogs. We'd originally planned to get them last Monday, but couldn't get everything ready in time, and then we realized that on Tuesday, the roofers would show up and decided to wait. Good decision.

Tuesday reminded me of that scene in The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T where they're touring the dungeons, and Terwilliger shows them the poor wretch who's been imprisoned in a giant bass drum while someone beats on it. The roofers wanted to get the entire job done in one day, so they threw a crew of 6 or 8 at it, and went at it like gangbusters (or maybe eardrum busters). The dogs would have gone nuts; we almost did even though we went out for a couple of hours.

So Wednesday we went to the shelter, and after wanting to take home just about every dog we saw (there were a lot of Border Collie and Australian Shepherd mixes; our last dog was a Border and we fell in love with the breed), we found a pair of older dogs who'd been kenneled together. When we took them out for a meet and greet, they were friendly with us, and got along well with each other, so we adopted them.

There was a strategy in this. We've always had large working breed dogs; the Border, at 45 pounds, was the smallest dog we'd ever had. But now we're neither of us up to giving a dog like that the exercise it needs, and there's nothing worse you can do for the physical and mental health of a dog than not get it enough exercise. This is also true of children; in fact, there are so many similarities that we got a lot of our child-rearing techniques from a book on dog-training written by a Hollywood dog wrangler. So we were looking for small dogs; these guys are both small and past the young adult stage, so their need for exercise is (at least theoretically, see below) lower now.

One of the dogs is a Lhasa Apso female named Jompa, about 9 yo, and the other's a Rat Terrier male, Spencer, who's 6 yo. They're settling in fairly well, though the terrier turns out to be a bolter who can get through our chain link fence in seconds. The good news is that it's not running away, just the urge to explore, because he will come back. The bad news is we live on a busy street, and he doesn't have good car sense, so he's now on a leash whenever we go out, and will be until he's obedience trained.

ETA: our bolter is starting to learn to come back when called. I lost him at the Arboretum that we've been taking our dogs to since we moved to Portland 30 years ago, while trying to hang onto both leashes and get a stool sample for the vet (I need to get a couple of extra arms). But I yelled for him, and he came back and let me grab his leash again.

Neither of these dogs was ever trained in any way as far as we can tell, though they're housebroken and they recognize their names. Worse, the terrier has scars where a harness was put on too tight and left on him all the time, and he flinches from loud voices and criticism. So we have some work to do to win the dogs over (though after only twofour days they're both willing to cuddle and be petted by us, which is a very good sign).

We've taken them to the vet, and had some good news and some bad news. Jompa has an ear infection, a sore mouth where 2 teeth were extracted, and is a little overweight. On the other hand, she's healthy in other respects. Spencer has developed kennel cough since we brought him home from the shelter, and seems to have an allergy to grass. But we've got medicines to deal with most of this, and they are fairly good about taking them (Jompa doesn't like getting stuff squirted in her ear, but she doesn't get angry and snappish, and she doesn't hold a grudge afterward. All in all we're really pleased with the dogs, and we think they'll fit in very nicely.