Do Corgis shed?

Last evening I bathed the girls, hoping to remedy the increasingly 'doggy' smell in our environs. Neither pooch is very happy about bath time, but Elky, to whom all grooming constitutes torture, sulked and hid and, when finally dragged to the tub, stared at me with her shocked and injured look. For reasons that escape me, this week both dogs are (in the parlance of Corgi people) "blowing coat."

Corgis have what's called a double shedding coat. Contrary to all the supporting evidence, this does not mean that Corgis shed twice as much as other dogs. It's a technical term that distinguishes dogs with a certain kind of hair: some dogs, like Poodles, have hair that is like the wool on a sheep: it just continues to grow and grow. I don't think they ever shed. Corgis, and many other dogs, have two kinds of hair: stiff guard hairs and a much finer, softer undercoat. They shed more or less continually during the year, but on special occasions (known only to themselves) they shed 98% of their undercoat. Dog show people refer to this as "blowing coat." If this were a competitive event, Corgis would take the gold every time, hands down.

This link will give you an idea:

http://www.terenelf.com/SpockShedding/Shedding.html

So last night it was shampoo and conditioner rinse for the Elky girl, who has been looking increasingly shaggy and dull. The hair came off in handfuls...and this morning I sat down with her (that is to say I sat down on her) to see about brushing some of the remainder out before it got all over the house. (Corgi hair shows up everywhere...it may be their attempt at immortality: I have no doubt it will drift merrily around this house long after the dogs and I have shuffled off our mortal coils.) I bribed her with kibbles while filled a plastic grocery bag with what I removed with a comb. Then I ran the vac over the rug where I had her cornered, and got another bag full.

One would think this coat blowing business would happen in the spring, which it does, when dogs no longer need their undercoat to keep them warm. One would not expect it to happen in the late summer...but I'm still learning how surprising these girls can be.

Whose woods these are....

Across our dirt road is a 40 acre patch of woods, one of several parcels that constitute The Grand Forest of Bainbridge, according to the sign at the crossroads, and thus technically owned by the city. Happily, they are the least used and virtually undeveloped section, and when Tassel, Elky, and I walk there every day we almost always have them to ourselves. And so we have come to think of them as our own.

On a sunny morning the light streams in under the high canopy, brightening little spots along the trail. Here are some photos I took today while the girls explored "our" woods.

Monks and dogs

We had visitors from California this week: Rev. Master Kinrei Basis, prior at the Berkeley Buddhist Priory (left) and Rev. Master Seikai Luebke, assistant prior at Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple, stopped in for a couple days on their way north to visit fellow monks in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives in Canada. Elky and Tassel soaked up lots of affection and I think if they'd have fit into Rev. Seikai's luggage he might just have taken them with him.

We had glorious patio-living weather and a good time was had by all.

That's why they call 'em bitches....

The sweet dog beside the flowers, though you wouldn't know it, has learned to drive her anxious companion (lurking in the doorway) to distraction when it comes to mealtime. The routine goes something like this:

1. Take Elky into the laundry room and closes the door, leaving Tass in the den.

2. Refill water bowl and prepare the kibble.

3. Give Elky her bowl and hurry out the door, hopefully closing it before Elky devours her kibble. Listen to Elky start to whine.

4. Put Tassel's bowl down near the back door (about where Elky is sitting in the photo).

5. Go back and let Elky out of the laundry room and keep her from charging Tassel's bowl. (Tassel at this point is standing at her bowl, but not eating.)

6. Put Elky in the next room so Tass can have her breakfast in peace.

The problem is that Tassel shows little interest in her food unless Elky is staring at the bowl from 4 or 5 feet away. (Closer than that and we have an intense interlude of the snarly-growlies, which I discourage.) Tass wanders away from the bowl, seemingly in search of her antagonist, and will often return to it only when it looks/sounds like I'm about to release Elky the kibble-hoover from her mealtime confinement.

And I swear there are times when Tass seems to bait Elky the Tapeworm; it goes like this: I put E in a down-stay beside my chair in the dining room, say, while we wait for Tass to dine in the den. Elky grudgingly holds the stay, though she remains ever vigilant for my attention to lapse, whereat she sneaks around the corner to see if there might be a morsel left in T's bowl. Tassel leaves her bowl to come peek around the corner at Elky. Elky stirs and gets a "no!", and Tass hurries back to her bowl. Rinse & repeat several times until either Tass has inadvertently eaten her kibble or I have become exasperated and set her bowl aside until dinner time.

What a soap opera....

There goes the flat screen TV...and other musings

Just wrote a $1400 check to my credit card company for Elky's vet bills. Needless to say, we won't be getting that sexy new flat screen hi-def digital TV that I was lusting after. Here's what I told Ellen when I wrote her a periodic update on the doggies:

Ellen & Marv, just a quick doggie update. We're all fine now, but we had a scary few days there when Elky was hospitalized with hemmorhagic gastroenteritis. The vet says they don't really know what brings on this condition (prolonged gastric upset, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration) but I think it was due to gobbling crumbs of suet and birdseed that the large woodpecker spilled onto the ground below the feeder. Whatever the cause, our Elky girl was a sick puppy for about 5 days, and for 2 of those was kept overnight on i.v. fluids.

She had been sick for three days and, even after I put her on a very bland diet (boiled rice and poached chicken breast) she didn't seem to be getting better. Glad I took her in: the emergency vet (these things always seem to happen on a weekend) said she was seriously dehydrated, and that she was in pretty serious danger of sepsis due to the condition of her bowel. You know how vocal Elky normally is. She had gotten very quiet and subdued and very listless, so it was obvious this was no ordinary tummy trouble. I'm very relieved to report that she's back to 100% now: barking at the TV, at the evil UPS truck that delivers her kibble, at the dangerous children walking to the bus stop, at me when I'm mixing up her kibble, etc. etc. And she has regained the contagious bounce in her stride as she and Tass lead me down to the woods for their morning walk.

Do you find her to be a very serious dog? She seems to be intent on everything she's doing, and I swear she looks at each walk as a major career move: she's completely absorbed, totally concentrating. Tass and I are often 30 yards down the trail ahead of her because she's stopped to study some smell or other, and then she comes racing to catch up. Tassel, on the other hand, is happy-go-lucky Miss Relaxed. Aside from her penchant for staying at the head of the pack, she seems much more light-hearted in her enjoyment of the outing. If I stop for some reason, she politely waits for me 10 yards up the trail, her tail wagging as she watches me to see that I'm not going off on another route or something. If I say her name or just talk to her, she trots happily back for a skritch, and then goes back to resume her position. She will stand there and soak up being petted and loved on, while Elky barely tolerates it. It's as if she's got important work to do and is impatient to be off and doing it.

When we're inside it's sometimes a completely different story. Joanna has put a quilt over the hassock/foot stool where I sit to keep the dog hair off, and Elky loves to jump up there and lie between my feet and rest her head on one of my legs. Joanna says I'm turning her into a lap dog, but I think Elky's really too independent ever to go that far. But she likes her cuddles on her own terms. For example: early morning is my meditation time, and this occurs after I take the dogs out for their early potty break. I sit on a low kneeling bench and a padded mat. Both dogs come to greet me and get a skritch when I'm settling into position, and then Tassel normally wanders off to her heated bed we got for her hip problems. Elky stays there in front of me with her head in my lap in perfect position for me to give her skritches with both hands. This goes on for five minutes or so and then she either lies there snoring through my meditation or walks off to join Tass on the cozy bed. She trots along beside or behind me whenever I'm in the middle of a chore, going to get the mail, take out the recycling, etc, and she sits and the entrance to the kitchen and watches me while I'm cooking. She usually snores beside me when I'm reading or working on the computer. It may be that she figures I'd wander off into the street if not for her constant vigilance...maybe that's part of her job.

Tassel will follow us outside, but when she sees we're only going to the mailbox she stands at the top of the driveway and waits, ears erect and her tongue protruding that silly half-inch that it does when she's concentrating on something. As I write this I note that we just returned from the mailbox: she waited at the top of the driveway and, when Ekly trotted back toward the house with me, did her ambush tactic to get some playful wrestling on the way to the front door. Tassel has taken it upon herself to closely monitor the chipmunk that took up residence under the outdoor storage box where I keep (and usually spill) the birdseed. If Elky is intent on my every move, Tassel is doubly so when it comes to this little guy. She stands and stares into the narrow space between the box and the house, then trots to the other end of the box where it is pushed up against the chimney.

Tass is our protector: no pedestrian or hiker makes it down our road without a sober and prolonged warning from her. No car door closes within a block without her disapproval. She is as intent on our protection as Elky is on supervising my every move.

Well, the trillium are in bloom in the woods across our road and the starflowers aren't far behind. And when we've had a day without rain, it makes for a very pleasant place for walking, despite all the fallen trees we have to scramble across. You're welcome any time to come for tea and time with the girls. Hope the spring is going the way you like it.

Jim

Time does its thing...

Today we celebrate Elky's and Tassel's arrival into our lives. They have become my devoted "posse", as Joanna calls them, and are better for morale than my 400 daily miligrams of Welbutrin. Who would guess that scratching a smelly dog behind the ears would have such a beneficial effect on the one doing the scratching? But there it is...another miracle in the Big Mystery. Still, it ain't all roses:

The Buddhists call it annica, or change: the observation that nothing remains the same, not really, not even for a minute. Everything is in a state of flux, always. For us the big implication of this, of course, is that we are here on the earth only temporarily. The evidence of this truth is everywhere, and yet in our drowsy wishfulness we ignore it as best we can, preferring to dwell on other things. But reality has a way of persisting on its own course, and however pleasant and comforting they may be, the fact remains: our dreams are awry of the world.

On the left of this x-ray you can see a dog's laterally luxated patella. I snagged the photo off the web, but if it were from the several-hundred-dollar examination Tassel got back in January it would also show mineralization of one of the discs in her lower back (interestingly, the same one in my back that is herniated: L5-L6) and considerable arthritis in both legs and ankles.

This, our kindly vet explains, is why she now limps around the house after our walks. Several hundred dollars worth of x-rays revealed that her knees and back are as bad or worse than mine. So our forays are shorter and more to the point, potty-wise, unless I leave her behind and take Elky (and sometimes Jojo) to the park or woods for a good romp. Tass is on a combination of rimadyl (for pain), adequan (a wonder drug for arthritis), and a heated bed beside my reading chair. At the age of nine dog years (Tassel last January, Elky next month, Jim way back in 2004) I have discovered that our mortal coil has ceased to be so tightly wound, and I often remind myself that whatever it is that I want to leave behind post-shuffle is best moved to the front burner.

Dog people are silly

It was about a year ago that we pulled up behind an old gas-guzzler sedan at the stop light. I'm guessing the rather large and seedy guy behind the wheel was somewhere in his sixties. As we waited for the light to change a Chihuahua jumped from the front seat onto the head rest and then into the guy's lap. The driver shifted the dog to his left arm and cradled it there and began to rub noses with the dog. The dog was in ecstasy, licking the guy all over his face, and you could see his lips moving as he talked to the little dog. When the light changed he did a reasonable job of dividing his attention between the dog and the road, but you could tell by the look on the dog's face (in rapt attention on the driver) that the conversation was still going on. Joanna and I chuckled at how some people get sort of loopy about their dogs and to what ridiculous extremes they sometimes go with them. At the time we were coming back from Costco where I had encountered another sixties-something guy, this one with a little schnauzer sitting in his shopping cart. I rolled my eyes when I heard him talking to the dog, explaining things as though the pooch wanted to know the difference between saltines and club crackers, etc. I rolled them again when I saw that he had brought a towel to put in the child-seat portion of the shopping cart so the dog would be more comfortable. Some people.

Three or four months later we adopted Elky & Tassel. Fast forward six more months. I was sitting at the very same traffic light, and realized that I was explaining to Elky where we were going next on our errands (Home Depot). She was looking at me with this rapt expression on her face and when I leaned down to her, she licked me all over my face. When the light turned green, I pulled her up next to me so she could stand on my right leg and see out the windshield (well, if it were possible to see around all the 'nose art' she had deposited there), then I proceeded to Home Depot, having done a reasonable job of dividing my attention between dog and road, where I studied the various kinds of shopping carts to decide which one would be most suitable for wheeling my two dogs around while I looked for plumbing parts and paint. The two dogs looked back and forth from me to the merchandise and other shoppers. I am fairly sure I detected some eye rolling on a couple of them. I suppose it is a common reaction to seeing a seedy-looking, sixties-something guy, crooning away to his dogs and wheeling them around the store in a shopping cart. Some people.

On the way home I found myself wondering if anyone would mind if I brought the girls into the library. I was only planning to be in there for 10 or 15 minutes....

Happy Birthday, Tass!

Please join me in wishing Tassel a very happy 9th birthday! If you shared your mornings with us you'd recognize Tassel as the goofy red and white girl who starts all the rowdy games with her side-ways dance and "helicopter" tail action. Yep, and she's the one who quickly finishes her morning relief break and then runs back to me for a skritch while Elky studiously sniffs the weeds at roadside for evidence of overnight visitors. Now, for the brag:

A couple of days ago I opened the front door and stepped out on the porch to let the girls have their morning potty break. I'd been getting sloppy about the leash (we live at the end of a dirt road in rural area where there is very little traffic) and just as I looked up to notice a man taking his large boxer for a walk in the road, the girls spotted same and took off at a dead run, barking their heads off. Man and dog stopped suddenly (his dog was on leash), anxious at what these two crazy muscle bullets had in mind. I shouted "no" and called Tassel and Elky to come. By this time the dogs were more than 2/3 of the way to their target and visions of lawsuits were dancing in my head when, lo and behold, both dogs slowed, turned, stopped, and looked back at me! I called them to me again and Tassel immediately trotted back, happy as a clam. Elky followed, looking back over her shoulder and muttering at the boxer, no doubt saying, "You are one lucky dog, mate." Red faced, I apologized to man and boxer alike, sent a silent thank-you heavenward, and stood there astonished, praising the dogs as they stood at my feet waiting for me to clip on the leashes. (Note to self: from here on out, attach leashes before opening the door.)

I've had dogs over the years, but I have NEVER had dogs who would, on command, break off from flat-out, hard running pursuit of the temptation of the moment, and come to me. Am I not blessed to share in the lives of these two miracles?

Dog noises: When Tass is tired of waiting for me to finish my coffee and serve up the kibble, she flops on the floor nearby giving a loud and laughable sigh/grunt that is equal parts world-weariness and exasperation. What a character!