Question of the Day

Why is it that I can more or less keep my head when I meet a new, larger-size dog and remember to try to copy dog manners, with a non-frontal approach, no direct eye-contact, some blinking, maybe a yawn, letting the dog make the approach--but when somebody comes in with a little dog I completely lose my head and just grab? Geez, louise. Someone came into the office with an adorable little poodle/schnauzer cross, and I took her and held her on my lap. Poor little thing obviously hasn't been out much--she's a year and a half old and was shaking like a leaf. At least I didn't stick my face right into hers like someone else did, but man, I didn't even think of trying any calming signals with her. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Um, for those of you who may have had trouble opening the pictures in last night's post, you might try hitting "refresh" several times. I don't know what the deal is. Everything looks fine on this computer, but I had trouble with the site from my work computer (showing pictures to folks at work), and several people told me they couldn't get the pics to load--but hitting "refresh" does seem to help; you can get most of them to load.

I subscribe to Review A Day from Powells (the famous gigantic Portland OR bookstore), and the review today was very good. It was a review of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, by Ali A. Allawi; the review is by Fuoad Ajami and appeared in The New Republic. You can find it at http://www.powells.com/review I'm not sure I want to read the entire book, but the review is an intelligent, articulate summary of both the book and the historical and political background that has brought Iraq to the state it finds itself in. I found the review itself very informative, not to mention sad.

The Bayerische sock is coming along. I'm a lot more relaxed about it now that I have the stitch pattern set and can see what I'm doing, and it's fun. I'm not really far enough along for any of the goodnesses to show, but maybe once I reach the 16th and last row of Chart D (when the other 3 charts will have been repeated twice) I'll have enough to photograph. (Or not. I just discovered a stitch I dropped FIVE ROWS AGO. Can I fix it? After the monumental battle I just had with this Dell piece of junk computer, I don't think I can face it tonight.)

My shoulder is still waking me up. I'm taking MSM (anti-inflammatory) during the day and aspirin before bed at night, but about 2:30 my shoulder wakes me up. I do some trigger point massage and sometimes massage the neck muscles just under the skull, and after about 5 or 10 minutes it lets up enough for me to go back to sleep, and it's fine until 2:30 the next morning. I see that the guy who wrote the original Trigger Point Therapy book now has one specifically for frozen shoulder--not exactly separated shoulder, but I bet a lot of the trigger points are the same. I think I'm going to have to get it; Amazon has a bunch of used copies.

It rained pretty hard last night and today. I was out looking at the grass in the puppy pen. It's not complete coverage, but I think it's about the best I can do this year. I think I'll have it mowed--and tell them to set the deck HIGH so their blades don't get caught in that netting--then put out the tunnels and maybe get the Ts back out there last next week--just about on schedule, actually. If I have it mowed, I'll be cutting back daffodil leaves, but nothing bloomed this year, despite my having gone around on my hands and knees last spring with a buck of bulb fertilizer and a tablespoon and carefully annointing each bulb with a tablespoon of bulb fertilizer. I think the pounding of puppy paws may be too much for them.

Two hundred daffodils down the drain. Oh well. They were Stella's--the fall I planted the first hundred, I still had her, and on one sunny afternoon she lay out in the grass while I planted bulbs, and stopped from time to time to rest and sit beside her. I originally envisioned that space thick with naturalized daffodils in the spring, but that was before it was fenced. Stella and I did a lot of walking the last two or three years of her life. I ordered the other 100 the spring of the year she died. I didn't really have the heart to plant them, and they didn't get into the ground until about February, if I remember correctly. Taenzer, then about 4 months old, "helped." "Taenzer, put that bulb down! Taenzer, stay out of the fertilizer. Taenzer, come back with my trowel! Taenzer!"