Mark Doty’s book on description — The Art of Description — is such a good read even my dogs liked it, or I think they liked it. They certainly enjoyed ripping through the pages.
We finally had our backyard regraded to address a flooding problem we’ve been dealing with — parts of the yard would become lakes. And while that will be good in the long run, it makes for a bit of a hassle now because it means we can’t let the dogs back there. So, that means we have to walk them and walk them frequently.
With the good weather we’ve had the last few days, that is not a problem — except at midnight when it’s a bit dark and foreboding. In fact, it’s been nice, getting out for the trek around the neighborhood. Today we walked 2.4 miles — a record for the dogs (Rosie, top; Sophie, bottom) — and the pooches are now asleep and likely will be for quite some time.
That should give me some time to get some work done and watch the game (working from home).
Call this the perfect ending to the perfect week, a dog fight that drew blood and left my arm with a painful bruise.
The dogs were outside, sniffing around in the grass and mud, much of the snow having melted. Everything was fine until they found an old, muddy piece of rawhide that they must have left behind before the snow came.
I was watching them from the window when I saw them stiffen and tense up. I went out, grabbed the rawhide and then — call me stupid — attempted to toss it over the fence. It missed, landed in the yard and the dogs got to it and then got into it.
I was outside by myself, which made it difficult to stop — I got behind one and lived her like a wheelbarrow, but the other one kept coming. AFter what seemed like an eternity, my neighbors came running over and Annie’s sister Susan came out of the house along with my brother Mark. Susan grabbed one dog and I had the other and we finally pulled them apart.
Both had bloody wounds, a gash on Rosie’s snout and a larger gash on Sophie’s leg, but I think they look worse than they actually are. We put peroxide on the wounds — which caused Sophie to scream from the burning — and we’ll monitor the situation for now and hope they heal on their own.
In the meantime, they have decided to be friends again, as the above photo shows.
It was the first fight since Christmas Eve and probably would not have happened were I able to get to them sooner or had I been smarter about disposing of the rawhide.
It was just a capper to a week that included a death of a close friend of my sister-in-law, bad news at work that will make paying my bills more difficult and a brutal cold. It has to get better, right?
Benny loved to play ball and take long walks when he was a pup, back when Annie lived in an apartment in Plainsboro and then when she was renting a house in Brunswick Acres. He was an amazing pup.
When she moved into the Kendall Park ranch we now live in, Benny developed an interesting quirk — one we always laughed about. He would hide in the bathtub during thunderstorms, just run into the bathroom in the center of the house, climb in and try to burrow deep. It was understandable, I guess, because the bathroom is the only room without an external wall.
Hank Kalet 