Olive

"That didn't take long" I said to Nikki when she handed me her phone.  She was getting ready for work and I was barely awake.

"I know, she's pretty cute isn't she?"

I knew we were all in the second I looked at the photo.  Damn.

Less than 24 hours earlier we made the excruciating decision to put our beloved Bella down.  It was the right thing to do, but it was still devastating.  We were working on processing the emotions and dealing with a dog-less house for the first time in 19 years. Empty.  Everything felt empty.

I took a closer look and the adrenaline I felt completely surprised me.  I knew we would get another dog eventually, but I didn't think I could feel this excited about a dog so quickly. No doubt it was the resemblance that reeled me in.  The puppy looked eerily similar to Bella when she was young.  Within an hour I had the required adoption forms completed and I told Nikki as she left for work, "I'm gonna go get her."

"Olive", she said, "Let's call her Olive."

According to the rescue agency (The Dog Spot Rescue), Olive's mother is a Treeing Walker Coonhound and the father is unknown.  She was one of a litter of 9 puppies, living outside in squalid conditions, arriving at our house having been treated for giardia, kennel cough, and various parasites.  The owner didn't speak much English, but the staff was able to convince her to give the puppies up for adoption. All indications were that the dogs would have been given away to people in the neighborhood, or grocery store, or whatever, all sickness included.  The odds against her survival were long.  She wasn't off to a good start in life.

Prior to adopting Olive I had never heard of a Treeing Walker Coonhound so I immediately set about learning more. Through diligent reading I've come to find out I'm in for a mess of shit.  This breed is known for being very intelligent and stubborn.  Both of these traits have been clearly manifest in our brief two weeks together in her actions and (dog) words.  We're working on coming to a resolution.

Her intelligence was at the forefront of our initial interactions.  Hell, within a matter of days, Olive appeared to understand the concept of going potty.  She begged to go out, then promptly did her business and ran back inside.  "I can't believe how easy this is," I thought.  Then, she showed the dark side of her intelligence:  She used me as a springboard to get onto the couch, which she couldn't reach otherwise.  "Nikki, did you see that?", I screamed.  I had to read some more to find out if that happened the way I thought it did. I found this on Wikipedia:

"This breed is highly intelligent, and consequently they require absolute consistency of training, as they look for loopholes to exploit. They may attempt to negotiate, responding to human direction by offering an alternative course of action they prefer.  They have been known to use objects as tools or to manipulate their environment to accomplish a task (e.g., moving furniture to climb over gates, using household objects to manipulate kennel mechanisms, etc.). 

Uh-oh.  If she had thumbs she'd be a primate. 

In the next several days I saw all of these traits play out.  The first day I put her in her pen we had a huge negotiation about her thoughts on this matter.  She protested when I put her in the pen so I gave her my best alpha dog stare and used my deepest voice to put her firmly in her place.

"No!" I bellowed with an intense gaze.

 She considered my offering for a brief second, then gave me a counter offer.

"HELL NO!  NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" she said emphatically, looking me directly in the eye the whole time.  Then she sat and stared at me.

This was repeated several times.

The negotiation seemed to be going well. Both parties stated their case with equal vigor.  I stated my position and she offered an alternative course of action.  Wow, raising dogs is really rational and rewarding, except for the fact that I'm supposed to win.  This conversation made me realize I needed the upper hand in the negotiations and I saw the solution in the form of a squirt bottle.

Initially, the bottle has an element of surprise to it that a puppy can't quite figure out.  A stream of water magically appears from the heavens and startles them into ceasing the current behavior.  This worked for a short amount of time until she figured out where the water came from.  Then she got a gleam in her eye.

(Olive Digging a huge chunk of grass out of the ground):  

Me:  SQUIRT!  No, stop digging!

Olive: (shakes water off of her head, looks at me out of the corner of her eye).  KNOCK IT OFF!

Me:  (SQUIRT, SQUIRT, SQUIRT).

Olive:  (Shakes head again, butt in air) Seriously!?  That's annoying.  STOP! (continues digging)

Me: (SQUIRT SQUIRTSQUIRTSQUIRTSQUIRT). 

Olive:  (Hauls ass over to new spot and starts frantically digging)  F*&ckin' thing don't reach over here does it, smart ass?

And so it goes, a battle of wills that I imagine is just beginning in this great adventure of raising a puppy.

I write this stuff down because much of it will be forgotten when she's mature and "normal" life has returned.   I've never had kids, but having a puppy in my 40's makes me understand the irrational impulse to shake a baby.  She's infuriating, frustrating, time consuming, and demanding.  And she has me wrapped around her finger because she is absolutely loving and trusting.  At the end of the day when she's tired and plops her head in my lap, she owns me.  I'm all in again.

Bella on the left at 5 and Olive at 3 months

Olive at the Casa Madrona hotel

Playing

She spends all day plotting how to get on the couch, but when I place her on the bed for a photo, she frantically tries to get down.

Christmas Table Center Piece

Looking guilty, although she hadn't done anything wrong.

She's Gone

Shocking, body rocking waves of tears flood over me. Do I really sound like that? It's been one day, not even quite.  She's still real, but she's gone.  Her smell is still here.  I want to love on her, she's not there.  The impulse is real, it's physical, I can feel it in my arms, the sensation of grabbing her skin, rubbing her neck, I can still feel it on my hands, but she's not there.  I know she's gone, but I don't, because I turn the corner to see her, expecting her to be there, but she's gone.  I make some coffee and think, I guess I should feed Bella now, but she's not there to eat.  Her homemade food is still in the refrigerator.  Goddamn she's become so fussy about eating late in life.  Wait, she was fussy.  Now she's gone.  I don't need to heat up the food.  There's no dog to eat it.  I sit down at the counter and try to do something normal.  I read ESPN. Suddenly I think, I'm sure Bella wants to go out now, it's about time.  Every morning for the  last 14 years. I turn, she's not there.  She's gone.  Her leash is right over there, but she's not.  She's gone. Forever.  I can see her hills out my window.  She loved those hills.  See that one?  She frenzied every time we got to the top.  It only took  a small glance and she knew.  Butt high in the air, staring at me, waiting for me to move.  The smallest gesture and she's off, I can't touch her, she's too fast.  She's laughing at me, now I'm laughing.  Left.  Right. Low to the ground.  How long can she do this?  I'm back in my kitchen.  She's still gone.  We won't be doing that anymore.  No more getting chased by cows.  No more rolling in shit.  God that made me mad.  And it made me laugh.  Hey Nikki, check out Bella, she rolled in shit again.  Get her outside now.  Now she frenzies again.  Baths make dogs do that.  They all do that.  Around the table.  Rolling crazily on the floor.  She's laughing at me, I can't catch her.  I'd love to give her another bath.  But she's gone.  There's her blanket in the laundry room, her hair all over it.  I pick it up, it still smells like her.  Corn chips.  All dogs smell like corn chips, especially their feet.  I can feel her feet in my hands.  But she's gone.  But she's here, I can see her hair.  I can smell her.  But she's gone. I can't reconcile the difference.  More body rocking waves of tears.  Splitting headache.  I think I just drooled during that wave.  Uncontrollable waves of grief.  Life goes on.  But it doesn't, not today anyway.  I'm in between worlds.  She's here and she's gone.  I pull out the old photos.  There she is as a puppy.  4 months old with fully grown legs, completely out of proportion.  Running, chasing, laughing with the other dogs.  Now she's gone. The dogs link us to the start of our married life.  The others have been gone for awhile and I've reconciled that.  Today, though, Bella's gone and it's confusing.  She's here and she's gone.  I go upstairs.  She was never here, her hips too tired to make it up the stairs.  Refuge for my mind.  I work a little.  Small relief.  I haven't heard Bella go out the dog door this morning.  Oh yeah, she's gone.  She won't do that anymore.  I want so badly to walk downstairs and love on her a little bit. But I can't.  She's gone. I've been through this before.  Time heals all wounds, right?  Maybe.  I don't know.  Not today, though.  She's gone.  I want to see her.  Today.  But she's gone.  It will get better.  But not today.  She's gone.

Power tools

"Is that the first power tool you've ever bought?" Brian asked when I told him about the drill.

"No, smart-ass, when I broke the one you lent me 10 years ago, I bought a new one to replace it, remember?"  I had him on a technicality.  I wouldn't be the first American male to never purchase a power tool until age 43.

"Yeah, well your new drill should have an asterisk by it because it's the first one you ever bought for yourself."

Whatever, let's not quibble here.  Whether it's the first or the second, the point remains that I don't buy or own many power tools.  In fact, I only have two:  A drill and a racket stringer.  There is some controversy as to whether the latter is a power tool, but here are the facts:  It plugs into the wall and it has a mechanical wheel that rotates and stretches racket strings.  I'm sure if you got your finger caught in there it would hurt a little bit.  I believe that qualifies as a power tool.

The tool wall of shame

Don't get me wrong about tools in general, I have several.  I keep them around in large part due to the fact that other males occasionally walk through my garage.  I have to maintain appearances. The tools hang on a wall of shame in the garage where they linger about, largely unused for long stretches of time.  I have doubles of many of them, a result of borrowing them from somebody else and never returning them (I kept Brian's backup drill for 4 years).   Alternatively, I often go out and buy a duplicate copy of a tool because I can't find the one I own.  When you go four years in between needing wire cutters, why would you assume you have some already, or bother to look for them in the jumbled chaos of the garage? If you see something of yours on that pegboard, let me know and I'll return it as soon as possible. The pegboard you see is organized only because we just moved into a new place.  Give it three months and I won't know where any of those items are.  The next time you see a photo of it, there will be 3 wire cutters hanging there.

Naturally, the first thing I did after buying the power drill was to photograph it.  I didn't see a new shed,  kitchen cabinets, or wine rack in my head when I got it.  No, I saw a photograph waiting to happen.  The lines, colors, and textures are what caught my eye, not its inherit value as a tool.  I think it's pissed at its fate because I can see it sitting there mocking me.

In a matter of 3 days, I've crushed its soul. Something this manly doesn't like to be patronized.  It sits there boasting of its "skil" and 18 velorameters (velocitometers?) of power, knowing it is too much tool for me, the baby skinned suburbanite.  It stands in proud defiance of its fate, a hermetic life of hanging out with the mere mortals of tools,  near the wall of shame, which it drilled holes for, in relative darkness, with intermittent bouts of hole drilling for hanging pictures.  I have asked it to make its own grave, and it knows it.  It also knows the next time you see a photo of the wall of shame and the surrounding space, there will be two of them.  I think a blue one will look good next to the red one in a photographic diptych.

Power Tool?