When Wylie first came to live with me, he came with a note of caution. He also came with a number of signs on his kennel inlcuding, “Live Animal,” “This Side Up,” and the classic “I’d rather be fishing” (I don’t doubt for a moment that he would have preferred fishing over air travel). But what Steve told me over the phone was, “He’s gonna trash your house.”
For the first ten months, everything went splendidly. When I left for work, Wylie would watch me out the window and when I returned, he’d greet me at the door. After a few weeks he even started imitating Snoopy, but instead of sleeping on top of a doghouse, he’d sleep on top of the couch with his head strategically positioned so he could see out the window. It was a good arrangement and I soon forgot about Steve’s warning.
Over the course of the summer I became increasingly busy with work and the planning for the Jaycees’ participation in a series of events that became known as “Pumpkin Season” (with three back-to-back “Paint-A-Pumpkin” events in under a month, the label certainly fit). All this activity necessarily left me with less time at home and Wylie noticed. When I came home from Oktoberfest, one of the sofa cushions was in ruins with pieces of stuffing scattered throughout the first floor.
There was no point in getting angry with Wylie, he wasn’t going to make the association between his actions and my anger, so I did nothing. Assuming it was a one-time occurrence, I left him loose in the house the next day while I went to church. It wasn’t a one-time occurrence, when I got home a second cushion had met its fate.
Over the next two years, any time I had to leave the house, Wylie spent the day in his kennel. First in the plastic travel kennel, and later, after he’d shown a talent for breaking the latch on that one, a metal cage. As evidenced by his frequent escapes and attempted escapes, Wylie never liked spending time in the kennel, but we at least got into a routine where Wylie would already be in the kennel before I came downstairs.
Although he accepted the cage, it was clear that Wylie didn’t like it. He had frequent anxiety attacks, drenching himself in slobber and more than once hurting himself. Needless to say, I felt quite guilty about it, but what was I to do? As much as I didn’t want him to have anxiety attacks, I didn’t want him to destroy the furniture either. So I did some experiments.
The first experiment, conducted a few months after the first couch incident, was to try leaving him out during the day. I started out leaving him alone and out of the cage for a few hours at a time over a long weekend. It didn’t work, when I came back from work on Monday there was another (mercifully undamaged) cushion in the middle of the living room.
Over the past couple years, I’ve tried the experiment a few more times. The most promising one was when I tried leaving him in my bedroom. That worked great for the first week. Then I went out of town for a weekend, leaving him at the kennel. I picked him up on Sunday, giving him the day to re-acclimate. It didn’t work. I came home from work and found that in his efforts to find me during the day, he’d tried digging out of the bedroom. There were shreds of carpet everywhere!
Back in May I decided to repeat the experiment with leaving him in the bedroom. This time there was more than a month before I’d be going out of town, giving Wylie plenty of time to get used to being in that room. Just to be safe, I decided to take a lesson from the previous experiment, bought the smallest chair mat I could find, and cut it down to fit in the doorway. That way there if he tried digging again the damage would (hopefully) be limited.
The experiment seems to have worked. I’ve been out of town twice in the past six weeks and Wylie hasn’t destroyed the house.
One of the results of Wylie’s anxiety attacks has been an incredible amount of drool on the floor and bars of the cage. The result is that over a short amount of time, the cage has rusted and become quite an eyesore. Wylie seems to be OK staying in the bedroom all day (no doubt the softer bed is as much of an attraction as the larger amount of space), so on Saturday I took the cage apart and plan to put it out for Tuesday’s recycling pick up.
Wylie spent most of Saturday smirking.
Category Archives: Stories
Overhaul
Two years ago I created the web site for the Germantown Oktoberfest, basing it on a publicity flyer from a year or two earlier.
The problem was, from my perspective anyhow, it looked like something an engineer had created. It got the point across and people were able to find out about the festival, but I just didn’t like the appearance. The web sites I create come up quickly and – I hope – aren’t too hard to navigate. But they also tend to be more functional than aesthetically pleasing.
A couple months ago, after perusing a few other information sites, I set out to create a new Oktoberfest site. My criteria were that it had to A) have all the information from the old site, B) be easy to maintain and add to, C) be easy to navigate and find information on, and last but not least, D) look good.
It took a week or two, but I eventually came up with something that met my goals. I even managed to meet one of my secondary goals and do it without overusing HTML tables. (As a result, it even looks pretty good on a handheld computer.)
Naturally, right on schedule, life got busy and even with a week off from work I couldn’t find time to finish it and replace the old one. sigh
Thursday evening I decided that enough was enough and pushed everything else off my schedule. (Hey, I’m a guy! Who cares about a sink full of dirty dishes anyhow?)
It took five or six hours (part of the design involved an easily reused template or it would have taken quite a bit longer), but the new Germantown Oktoberfest web site is now open for business.
I kind of like it. 🙂
Party Animal
Wylie watched as I carried my overnight bag and his supper dish out to the car in preparation for an overnight trip to Pittsburgh. “Whatcha think Wye? Are you thinking ‘road trip’?”
Wylie looked up and blinked as if to say, “‘Road trip’? I was thinking ‘toga party.’ But sure, ‘road trip’ sounds good too!”
When infrastructure attacks!
I think my company’s IT infrastructure is out to get me. Maybe not physical harm, but my productivity is definitely being impacted.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I spent the day twiddling my thumbs because the computer’s power supply failed. The twiddling was, of course, metaphorical. It’s been several years since I spent any significant amount of time literally twiddling my thumbs. Instead, I spent the day researching uses for the word “metaphorical.”
And then, just last week, I got a bonus day off when the building power went out. The backup generator failed too, so I got to go home and start my July 4th celebration a day early.
This morning, it was the corporate network that failed. I rebooted my computer and when it came back up, it could no longer connect to the network. It wasn’t just my computer having problems, a number of my co-workers had the same problem.
I’m not complaining though. Technology has always promised us more leisure time. I may as well enjoy it.
Perhaps I’ll brush up on my twiddling technique. 🙂
Rough Week at Work
The original plan for this week was pretty nice: Saturday & Sunday off, work Monday, Tuesday off for the Fourth of July, work Wednesday, and then take Thursday through Monday off for Shore Leave. Or, put another way, two off, one on, one off, one on, five off. If you have to go to work, that’s not a bad way to do it.
After a fun weekend that included the Germantown fireworks, I showed up at work on Monday, raring to go. I got there right around 9:00 and not only was the power out (rumor has it there was a fire on the lines and the fire department cut them), but at some point the emergency generator had run out of oil and now there were no lights in the stairwells and the key card system was dead. (Folks could leave the office, but they couldn’t go back in.) Around 45 minutes later the first manager from our group arrived and after a short interval, started telling people to go home. (At this point the lights had been out for three hours with no known timeline for a resolution.)
Cool! Now I effectively had a four-day weekend, a one-day work week, and a five-day weekend. Now that’s the way to do it! (Especially since I didn’t have to use any extra vacation days.)
The lights went out at home for two hours on the fourth, so I thought it would be kind of fitting if my only remaining work day this week was canceled due to a third outage, but no such luck.
But it was still a great way to spend a holiday work week!
History Lessons
A few months after Wylie first came to live with me, we were out for our evening walk when he spotted a rabbit hopping through the yard, trying to get away. He kept on walking but never took his eyes off the rabbit.
That’s how my dog hit a car.
The next night, he did it again. It was the same driveway, the same car, and probably the same rabbit. That was three years ago.
Laura came to visit this evening and around 10:00 we took Wylie out for his evening walk. We were on the last leg of the trip with less than a quarter mile to go when Wylie yelped. I don’t know what he was watching this time, but he clipped his shoulder against a pickup’s trailer hitch.
They say that those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. This worries me somewhat as Wylie’s approach to life seems to be best summed up as, “Remember, I don’t want to learn anything from this experience.”
It went Foosh!!!!
Back on Monday, I read an article on Slashdot about a pair of artists/performers who recreated the Las Vegas Bellagio Fountains. But instead of using electric pumps and water, they used Mentos and Diet Coke. The videos on their site are hysterical and after watching them a few times, I got curious about whether the reactions were really that dramatic, or were they somehow “juiced up”?
Always up for a good science experiment, on Thursday I explored a nearby Safeway store but couldn’t find Mentos on the shelves. (I wasn’t at all worried about whether I’d be able to find the soda.)
Laura and I went to Target on Thursday night to get a bag of dog food for Wylie. Twenty minutes later, we walked out with a 20-pound bag of dog food (the reason we’d gone there), two 2-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi (on sale), and a package containing five rolls of Mentos.
After dinner we came back to my house and went into the back yard (soda on cars is to be avoided). We opened one bottle and leaned it against a log so it wouldn’t fall over (and also so it wouldn’t rain back on us). I only managed to drop three mints into the bottle before the foam started rising.
The stream of soda lasted about five seconds, arcing ten feet in the air. And that’s without doing any fancy stuff like the guys in the video did with drilling holes in the bottle top or rigging things up so they could drop five mints in simultaneously.
After five seconds, the soda stopped flying, but what was in the bottle kept bubbling for another ten seconds or so. In the end, more than three-quarters of the soda was gone and what was left had gone completely flat.
Sure, it was a silly thing to do, but it was still pretty neat 🙂
The Call
The first time it happened was about a month ago. Wylie started barking around 3 A.M. and after a few minutes I realized it was because of an unidentifiable noise coming from out past the backyard. I closed the bedroom window so the sound was muted and Wylie decided that was good enough and went back to sleep.
It happened again last night, but this time I listened a bit more carefully. At first, I thought it sounded something like a wild turkey or some other large bird. But very few birds (not even Terry Dactyl) are awake at 3 A.M. After listening a bit more, I thought it sounded a bit like a cat yowling. At least one of my neighbors has a cat that spends most of its time outdoors so I’ve heard plenty of yowling during the summer months, but that wasn’t quite right either. As the sound drew nearer, I identified it as more of a yipping bark. That’s when I realized what was going on. The coyotes were checking out the neighborhood.
Not so long ago, the Washington Post magazine section had a feature article about coyotes coming into this area. Although some people don’t like them, they’re generally the same people who overfill (or otherwise don’t properly close) their trashcans and then wonder why they draw nuisance animals. The coyotes are just exploiting a food source. For myself, I find their willingness to adapt to be somewhat fascinating.
Wylie and the coyotes (which I can’t help thinking, would be an excellent name for a band) traded barks a minute or two longer and then the yipping receded into the distance. Wylie then curled up next to the bed and went back to sleep.
It wasn’t until our walk this morning that I realized what had happened. Wylie had heard "The Call of the Wild" and, disgusted with the early hour, he’d hung up on them.
Twisted TV
Digging through an old web site I’m planning to decomission "Real Soon Now," I found a story synopsis that Dave and I came up with some time ago.
It was the mid-90s, The popularity of The X-Files was on the upswing and Angela Lansbury was still solving a new muder every week on Murder, She Wrote. A collision was perhaps inevitable.
I’d been thinking for a while that it was very strange how there was a murder every week in Cabot Cove, and it always happened in such a way that Jessica Fletcher was nearby. Sometimes it was a friend of a friend, once in a while it was someone she knew personally. Even when she went out on book tours, she’d wind up getting involved in the investigation.
I’m no statistician, but it always seemed unlikely that one person would encounter that many murders that frequently. A homicide detective in New York or LA might, but "Mystery Writer" just doesn’t seem the sort of job description where people would be dropping dead around you on a regular basis. Clearly something else was going on.
The idea that something else was going on in Cabot Cove had been bouncing around the inside of my head for a while, so one evening I let the idea out and sent Dave a short email detailing how an FBI agent had been sent to investigate.
Neither Dave nor I watched Murder, She Wrote with any regularity, but he liked my twist on the show well enough that he decided to send it out to the usenet rec.humor.tv newsgroup. (This was, of course, back before the spammers took over usenet.) Evidently there are a few other twisted minds out there, because an anonymous usenet reader wrote back to Dave saying how funny it would be if the FBI agent in question was Fox Mulder.
Dave sent that back to me and the wheels got to turning. Adding Mulder and Scully was simple enough, but even though I’d only seen the first season of The X-Files, it was clear that Mulder and Scully’s appearance couldn’t be anything straight forward. There had to be a twist of some sort.
The story never grew beyond a brief summary with only a few sentences of dialouge, but that’s really all it needed to be. Of course, if one of the studios wants to do something with this, I’m all ears. 🙂
Read Murder, She Caused.
The Extra Letter
Well, it happened again. Someone made one of the classic mistakes about my name.
Assuming “Blair” to be a woman’s name happens pretty often, and sometimes has “interesting” consequences. When I first joined the workforce, my employer accidentally signed me up for maternity-related insurance.
That wasn’t today’s goof.
Another common error is for people to assume they misheard my name. The most common “correction” is to change it to “Brian.” (I always have to add my name to spell-checker dictionaries so they won’t automatically get it wrong.) Over the years, in addition to Brian, I’ve also been called Blake, Bill, Jim and just a few weeks ago, Cliff.
That wasn’t today’s goof either.
Today was name error number three – the dreaded Extra Letter.
For some reason, people like to add an ‘e’ at the end of my name. It kind of ties back into the first mistake in that the one and only time I’ve ever seen it spelled “Blaire,” it really was a woman’s name.
But Scotte [sic] and I have met on several occasions. He knows me well enough to avoid that mistake. And we’ve traded enough e-mail that he should know the correct spelling. I figure he just made an honest spelling error. It happens.
But the person with the best excuse for that goof is a woman I know named Claire. Aside from the ‘c’, our names are pronounced identically and calling out either of our names will likely get both of us to respond.
According to Claire, the way she spells my name when typing it on the computer is B-L-A-I-R-E-[Backspace]. 🙂