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Posts Tagged ‘dog kennels’

Lazy Sunday

Posted in Lifes Observations, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 24, 2010| 3 Comments »

It was a difficult week at work, and it doesn’t look like it is going to change in the near future.  But it is Sunday and I’m not worrying about it, just enjoying a lazy day.  I am sitting with my feet up reclining under a blanket on my recliner. We are catching up on some tv watching and I’m wondering what the next post on my blog will be about. A cat is lying down in the crook of my arm, my wife is beside me working on her cross-stitch, dinner is in the crockpot smelling wonderful, dog is lazing on the deck. It is a Norman Rockwell moment.

Suddenly the house explodes in pandemonium.  The dog is on her feet thundering down the deck snarling and growling, hitting the end of the zipline so hard that her paws came out from under her bringing to a sudden stop on her back. Inside the cats are on full alert, hair standing on edge, tails fluffed twice their normal size.  I’m already half way out of my chair untangling myself from my blanket, my wife is on my heels.  Something is going down outside and it’s not pleasant.  I’m expecting to see a full-blown dog fight.  Husky doesn’t like other dogs and its even worse when they are on her territory and very little else causes this kind of reaction.  I step out the door and there is Husky at the end of the porch, while there is no sign of another animal she is clearly agitated and looking down the driveway.

At the end of the porch I grab husky as I look in the direction she is looking, keeping just out of her reach are 3 soaking wet, half-grown english bulldogs.  I grabbed husky and brought her into the house while my wife checked on the three stooges.  With a little food my wife manged to coax the stooges into Husky’s kennel where we could keep them contained and safe. Now, it just so happens that at the end of our street there is a guy who breeds old english bulldogs.

We hop in the car, minus the dogs as there is no way I’m letting three soaking wet muddy dogs into our vehicle, and no, we don’t have his number. It turns out the family had just gotten home from a shopping trip.  He knew the dogs had escaped but he decided the dogs would probably find their own way home and if not he would look for them once he got back. I’m not sure how going shopping would be more important than looking for three of your lost dogs but a lot of things I don’t understand. Luckily, everything worked out in the end, as it usually does.  Eventually the adrenalin stopped pumping (except for Husky who is still agitated)  and we were able to settle down and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. 

This serves as another example of how one moment you are happily relaxing secure in your life enjoying your time when bam, suddenly even if only for a short time your life can be tossed into sudden upheaval.

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Fate Or Circumstance: Part 2 Introduction

Posted in Lifes Observations, Small town life, tagged , , , , , on January 13, 2010| 5 Comments »

This is the second part of Fate or Circumstance?

This post like all the others has taken on a life of its own. Many forgotten details are floating to the surface as I write.  All of which means it will be broken up into more than the two parts I had planned.  I hope you continue to enjoy.

One Friday not long after the Shadow incident one of my wife’s co-workers asked my wife if we would be able to help out a dog that was in a bad situation.  A relative of this co-worker lived next to this guy who would leave his husky tied up for days outside without food, water or shelter.  It is believed that the dog, out of hunger killed and ate a cat. The landlord had enough and gave the guy an ultimatum, he had to get rid of the dog or leave. 

We had four cats certainly we couldn’t keep a dog that eats cats.  Besides, a husky would never be happy spending most of the day indoors and they always have to be contained which meant not only a dog house but a dog kennel.  Huskies are very active and we live a pretty sedate lifestyle.  When huskies get bored they chew everything and they get bored easily.  Huskies have no guarding tendencies and huskies shed and shed and then shed some more.  However they are big enough, they don’t drool often and are not known for barking, howling is another story.  We needed a plan!

I made a call to Sandra the customer at the bank who, two years earlier had shown me the picture of her husky puppies. It turned out that Sandra was raising yet another litter of huskies, she did have an available kennel and would take in the dog in while we found it a home, (or as she put it, until we decided to keep the dog).  The next morning we would make the 48 mile drive to Avis Pa to rescue the dog, if we got back into town early enough we would bring the dog around to Sandra’s work so she could get a look at her new charge.  Indeed, we had our plan!

Upon meeting the dogs owner it was clear that this guy was not exactly the pillar of society but he signed husky over to us without incident.  What my wife and I found interesting was husky never looked at him and when we drove away husky never looked back.  We had been driving for just a few minutes, us in the front seat, husky in the back when husky put her head on my shoulder and licked my ear.  Some would tell you it was at this point that we knew we would be keeping husky, but let me set the record straight, it was not.  That day was still over a month away.  We did shed a tear or two knowing that this was a great dog and we were not going to be able to keep her.  She eats cats for crying out loud.

We had seen many huskies in our day.  In fact when I was young we owned one for a while (to spare my mother from tears I won’t go into that story) but we had not seen the likes of this one.  She had obviously never seen  a brush, there were tufts of fur popping off her body, it was sad that she had been so neglected but funny as heck to look at.  She was a pale yellowish colour and her coat was/is incredibly thick and soft despite all the tufts.  We got back into town earlier then expected and decided we would run her by the bank and show her off a little, perhaps somebody there would want her, (nobody was in a position to adopt her)  but husky was an immediate hit she rolled over on her back and let everyone rub her belly and of course left a pile of fur on the carpet which remained there for a week or two.  We brought her to Sandra’s work as planned.  You know you have an impressive husky when the husky breeders are in awe.  The plan was for Sandra to come over after work stay for a bonfire and take husky home from there.  In turn we would pick up husky on Sunday and take her to a local pet place and start trying to find her a home. 

Sandra came over that evening and we had fun talking about huskies, roasting marshmallows and eating smores.  We decided that we would keep husky on the weekends,  Sandra assured us that husky would be fine in our laundry room with the cats sequestered in the bed room.  Monday we had to go back to work and we couldn’t leave her locked in the laundry room all day so the new plan was to drop husky off at Sandra’s sometime Sunday night.   Sandra was going to be working the late shift so she told us where the kennel was located and we should just put husky in the kennel.  If we wanted we could let her neighbour know that we were dropping husky off, being husky owners themselves they would be sure and look in on her until Sandra got in that night.

Stay tuned for part 3

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Fate Or Circumstance: Part 1, Shadow

Posted in Lifes Observations, Small town life, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2010| 4 Comments »

In the early 2000’s I was standing at my teller window when one of our regulars came in to make a deposit. She showed me a picture of the cutest little Siberian Husky puppies one could ever imagine.  Except for the fact that they were adorable and that for once somebody wasn’t showing me baby pictures,  I didn’t think too much about it.  Time passed, another litter of puppies came and went and life continued on its merry way as it tends to do.

Two years later my wife and I are standing in the parking lot of a grocery store in the tiny town of Phillipsburg when my wife tells me she is ready for a kitten, we already had four cats.  “I’m ready for a dog” came my reply.  She told me to start building a dog house.  Building a dog house sounded like fun so why not?  We thought about what kind of dog we would like, we both agreed it had to be big, no drooling, no barking, good both indoors and out, had to like cats and have some guarding instincts.   The doghouse had just gotten underway so we were not quite ready for a dog but we decided to check out the SPCA,  upon entering the dog room the first thing that struck me was the unimaginable amount of noise, it was truly an assault on my ears.  I made my announcement in the middle of the chaos.  “The first one of you who is not barking has a shot at coming home with me.” In a corner kennel was a massive black dog.  It wasn’t barking, it wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to me, the dogs or anything really just lost in his own world.   My wife and I looked at his information.  Shadow was the dog’s name, he was surrendered by the owner with no explanation and it came from our little town.  We asked if Shadow had any issues with cats.  Shadow was then taken to the cat room where a staff member shoved a cat right up into Shadows face.  Shadow could have swallowed the cat whole but he didn’t so much as bat an eyelash, the cat was too stunned to do anything, so far so good.  We put Shadow on a leash and took him outside. The minute he hit the fresh air he came alive and took me for a drag.  He probably knew his name but certainly didn’t care.  He didn’t stop, he didn’t sit, he didn’t even acknowledge our existence and he was amazingly strong, stopping him was quite the issue. My wife would not have been able to walk this dog. There was a mountain of issues involved with adopting Shadow, he had no manners making him difficult to control, he had some health issues as he was loosing hair, but there was something about him that touched both my wife and I so he became a possibility but we were not about to rush into anything, the responsible thing to do was wait, we were not at the point of dog ownership and Shadow was a large handful.

At the end of our road across the highway there is a travel trailer and a dog house which was home to a large black dog.  (At this point we have to travel back about a year from the above story) while driving to work one day we noticed that the travel trailer had disappeared but the dog  was still there, worried that somebody had abandoned the dog we knocked on the closest door we could find.  Turns out the people who owned the house also owned the dog.  That dog was Shadow. (Another jump in time, to our current story) Earlier in the week my wife had commented that we don’t see the dog anymore and we figured the owners schedule had changed (he was a security officer for Penn State) and we didn’t give it another thought until driving home from the SPCA when my wife put it all together.  Once again life in a small town rears its head.

We never saw Shadow again but I think about Shadow often, I feel I let him down. I know Shadow was never meant to be ours, life has a way of telling us what is and what isn’t, all you have to do is listen and in this case there were just too many obstacles being thrown between us and Shadow.  In the end we wound up with the right dog.  Still when I think of Shadow I can’t help but feel a little heaviness in my heart.  I can only hope he found a good home.

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Working It Out

Posted in Lifes Observations, tagged , , , , , , , on December 27, 2009| 2 Comments »

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships and what makes them work.  I’ve been told you should go on a canoe trip with your significant other and that should tell the tale.  I believe it, my ex-wife and I couldn’t even drive the car into uncharted territory without getting into some sort of argument.  My current wife and I have no trouble driving to new places and the canoe trip was a walk in the park.  It took us 2 days and lots of swearing to put together a dog kennel which the instructions said should take two adults two hours to put together.  We never swore at each other, well perhaps once or twice under our breath seriously though it was the total lack of instruction that was frustrating.  The point is that we were able to accomplish it together.  I guarantee that if we had to do it separately it would have never gotten done.  We also know when to back off and let the other do their own thing.  For example I built the dog house from scratch.  A few ideas I ran by my wife just to get a different perspective but in the end I pretty much did it myself.  I’m quite proud of it,  it has its own front deck, louverd windows, ceder shingles two rooms, fully insulated.  But thats enough bragging.  My wife knows how to decorate the house.  She has a great sense of what goes with what, Me? I would buy the cheapest paint they had in the store throw it on the wall and hope for the best.  Point is we know where our individual strengths and weaknesses are and how to work them together.  That is not to say we don’t have our moments, but we work them out and let them go and if the need should ever arise I’ve a pretty nice dog house I can move into.  Of course any relationship is more than the sum of its parts there has to be that thing!

When I was quite young we were driving by a cemetary my mother said, “Look, it is the dead center of town.”  My father replied, “People are just dying to get in there”  I probably won’t live this down as this is the first time I’m going to admit it, but I didn’t get it I figured cemetary’s marked the center of town and they were fenced in to keep all the people out.  eventually I figured it out.

For our honeymoon we went to Vermont.  It just so happens that there are a lot of cemetaries in Vermont.  I decided to see if my wife would take the bait.  We passed a cemetary and I made the comment,  “Oh look a cemetary it’s the dead center of town, people are just dying to get in there.”  There was no response except for The Look.  My wife is smart and she knew me long enough to know something was going on, after all she figured out that a beefmeoak is a porcupine  and ceilingchaos translates to a floor plan not to mention the host of others that I previously thought only my family and possibly Victor Borges could work out on their own and find funny.   Each time we passed a cemetary I said the same line.   It must have been the third or fourth cemetary we passed that my wife shocked me into silence:

Me:  “Look its the dead center of town and people are just dying to get in there.” without pause my wife responded completely dead pan: “I’m betting its the underground economy”

We sat in absolute silence for about 30 seconds before we both broke out in fits of laughter.  But in those 30 seconds a whole new door opened for me, I remember the exact thought that went through my head, It doesn’t have to stop there!  To this day I’m not sure when my wife figured it out but obviously she had been thinking about it for some time.  The very next time we passed a cemetary it started in earnest:

Me: “Look its the dead center of town, people are just dying to get in there”

Wife: “Must be the underground economy”

“Yeah and they listen to that 60’s music after all they are a bunch of dead heads”

“And you have to worry about catching a cold with all the coughin’ (coffin)”

“And the gambling! they really like to roll them bones”

With each cemetary we passed we kept adding more and more lines.  Not long ago we drove to California from Pennsylvania it got to the point where we could hold a 25 minute dialogue going back and forth with the puns.  I believe it was when we finally hit New Mexico where whoever was not driving would pretend to be asleep at the first sign of a cemetary.

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