Beneath the Radar

Life  is what happens to you
While you're busy making other plans.
                            -John Lennon

Finches in the Summer

During our recent blizzard (Snow Days and Other Miracles) I picked up a book called "The Birdfeeder's Bible" which is just chock full of practical tips for the care and feeding of backyard birds. I am not sure why I picked up this book after it spent a over a decade dormant on my bookshelf, but I did, and was reminded that during these cold winter months, it is very important to provide high fat food sources for our avian friends.  So, I decided to hang a basic suet feeder.  This took just one trip to Home Depot, and cost under $5.  Within a day or two, my meager efforts were rewarded with the appearance of nuthatches, downy woodpeckers and best of all, the misnamed red-bellied woodpeckers, which may indeed have rubicund abs, but more obvious are their beautiful ruby-red heads.  All that for only $5!

Anyway, I am sure those newcomers have actually been in our backyard all along; I had just never seen them out and about.  It was the suet feeder that made them visible to me.  I started thinking about this and it occurred to me that there are lots of things that are just there all along, but go largely unnoticed.

For example, every second, about 250 billion solar neutrinos per square inch hit your body and everything else, for that matter.  Similarly, your skin is bombarded by billions of gas molecules every second,  each one traveling in excess of 1000 mph.  We remain blissfully unaware of this onslaught-- the gas molecules just sort of bounce off, and since they are so light, you never even know it.  The neutrinos are also exceedingly light, much lighter than individual atoms, and don't interact with matter much at all.  In fact, so weak are the interactions between neutrinos and matter that they pass right through you and you never even know it.  Neutrinos pass through everything- rocks, metals, even kryponite.  In fact, the big challenge in studying neutrinos is detection.  They are and always have been all around us, but since they don't interact with anything, it is nearly impossible to find them.

Woodpeckers are a lot easier.  It turns out that you just need some suet.

What else lies hidden?  Do you ever wonder what else is happening right under our noses, unbeknownst to us?

Well....

Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog about our beloved dog, Pippi.  At that time, we were celebrating her 100th birthday with cupcakes, her favorite treat.  I wrote a lot about her, but did not even think to mention a slight limp that she'd had for a couple of days.  We assumed that she had slipped on the ice and snow and that her gimpy leg was insignificant.  But just one week later, she could hardly stand up and we had to carry her up and down the stairs.  She was pretty lethargic and seemed to be in a great deal of pain.  A trip to the vet confirmed our worst fears.  While we were blissfully unaware, her bone cells were mutating and multiplying madly.  Pippi had developed bone cancer.    

This is very bad news.  At her age, there is not much to do for the cancer.   All we can really do is to keep her happy and comfortable, so she now takes a couple of medications. To make them more palatable, I embed the pills in cupcake frosting, a small joy for her.  For now, she seems much better.  The painkillers and anti-inflammatories have relieved the pain and she has regained a remarkable amount of energy.  She has been running and playing like the jubilant doggie she has always been.  But we all  know it won't last for long, which saddens us deeply.  I don't know how much longer she will be with us, but I do know that it is time to slow down, to pay attention and to make the most of her remaining days.

Today I am grateful for the medications that have made my furry friend so much more comfortable.

Doggone Dogblog

The human population seems to be divided between cat people and dog people.  I am decidedly in the latter camp.   Don’t get me wrong, I love our two cats, Buddy and 2kee, but when kibble comes to bits, I would pick our dog Pippi any day.

Everyone knows that dogs are man’s best friend.  Woman’s too.  We wax eloquent about the virtues of dogs—how little they ask of us, and how much they give back.  And there is a great deal of truth there.   Pippi’s list of needs is pretty short.    Food, water, an occasional pat on the head.  A place to run and frequent walks.  Being let out often enough to accommodate our mutual cleanliness standards.  

Yes, pretty basic stuff.

And what does she give back?  Absolute unconditional love.   She has never failed to bring a smile to my face when I return home, and no matter what anyone else might think, SHE thinks I totally rock.  While Buddy and 2kee tend to be moody-- snuggly and affectionate one minute, aloof and distant the next --Pippi only knows one mood.  Joy.  When she was younger, joy manifested itself as unbridled jubilation.  At over 14 years of age, that joy looks more like self-satisfied contentment.

Pippi has always been a beautiful dog, and people often ask about her breed.  The truth is that she came from the wrong side of the tracks, and  we don’t know much about her origins.  She is black from nose to tail and as best as our vet can guess, she is mainly Black Lab and Husky.  Judging by her polka-dotted tongue, there is also little Chow DNA mixed in there, and some people have speculated that there might also be some German Sheppard.  Who knows?  We rescued her from the dog pound when she was just nine weeks old and since then she has just been another member of the family.

Pippi, 1996

The kids wanted to name her after Pippi Longstocking, one of their favorite storybook characters.  Ellen, who was just five when Pippi came to live with us, thought she needed more formal name and officially named her Pepper.  “Pepper” has been called lots of things.  Pippi , of course.  Pipster, Pips, Muttface, Stoopid Mutt, Pippilada Enchilada, and so on.  But never Pepper.   While many dogs have human favorites, Pippi has always been loyal to the whole family.  When we are spread out within the house, she does some fancy geometry to station herself equidistant from each of us.   If you drew a free body diagram, I suspect she would be pretty close to the center of mass of the family. 

Pippi is a talker.  Some canine aficionado friends tell me that Huskies are like that.  When we picked her up at the vet’s office after she was neutered, she walked over to us, sat down and began baying and yowling the story of her medical woes.  The vet laughed and told me not to believe a word of it, that they were, in fact, very good to her.  When we get home from work, she yowls for a while, presumably telling us what she and the cats have been up to all day.  We humans are pretty smug in our knowledge that we are much smarter than dogs, but while Pippi probably knows a dozen English words,  I have never mastered a single doggie word.  If she wants to go out, she can’t just bark “out,” she  has go to the back door so I get the idea. If she wants a doggie treat, she has to go to the cabinet where they are kept.  If she doesn’t stand by the cabinet while barking her “word” for treat, I am likely to misunderstand and shoo her outside.   Yet, I can sit on the sofa and ask in a normal tone of voice,  “Where is your leash?” and she goes straight to the table where it is usually left and if it is not there, she’ll go to the laundry room where it actually belongs.    She must think we are real morons.

But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.  She is no paragon of virtue. 

For example, she is a  thief.

A thief and a glutton. 

Especially for cupcakes.

The first cupcake incident occurred a long time ago.  Pippi was about three and Ellen was a Brownie Girl Scout.  It was our turn to bring snacks to the Girl Scout meeting, so I made 2 dozen cupcakes.  These were made to please a bunch of second grade girls, so they were vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting, decorated with “chocolate” jimmies or green sugar.     I had just finished frosting them in time for our meeting.  I left them on the counter and ran upstairs to finish getting ready.  Less than five minutes later, I was back but there was not a cupcake to be seen.  No cupcake crumbs, no smeared frosting, not even a paper wrapper.  In just a couple of minutes, Pippi, the world’s best dog ever, had inhaled 24 cupcakes, wrappers and all, obliterating all evidence of the cupcakes’ short existence.  Al walked into the kitchen and said, “I thought you were bringing the snack to Girl Scouts.  Did you change your mind?”    You might think that 24 frosted cupcakes would make a 65 pound dog pretty sick, but you would be wrong.  She was just fine.  Happy as could be.

Years later, I had made a batch of cupcakes to take to Eric when he first started college.  These were chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting.  I left them in a covered box in the middle of the dining room table.  The box was closed.  It was pretty far out of reach, I thought.  When Ellen got home from school, she found the box on the dining room floor.  The cupcakes were gone, the frosting rubbed into the carpet and Pippi had a guilty look in her eye.   There was really no question about the perpetrator,  her fur was still stiff with frosting.  Based on the fact that both her face and her back were covered with icing, we figure she must have been writhing on the floor in cupcake-induced orgiastic ecstasy.

Between those cupcake incidents were numerous cases of stolen cookies, brownies, pork chops, pancakes, popcorn, chicken… really, nothing was safe if left out.  People always tell me that chocolate makes dogs sick, but nothing has ever made our Pippi sick—not even an entire 2 pound box of chocolate turtle candies we received as a Christmas gift one year.  We have learned to keep food completely out of her reach and  to this day, if we are serving hors d'oeurves to guests, we have to sequester her in our bedroom or else her rather large nose is right there sniffing the delicacies on the coffee table.

But it is cupcakes she likes best. For the last couple of years, whenever her 'calendar year' birthday or Christmas rolls around, her gift is a package of chocolate Hostess Cupcakes.  She gets one, and Al, always concerned about the Pipster's health, eats the other.

Pippi is getting pretty old.  Recently we did the math and discovered that her 100th doggie-year birthday was last Friday.   Maybe I am sentimental, or maybe pathetic, or maybe just an empty nester looking for something to do, but whatever the reason,  I baked a batch of homemade chocolate chip cupcakes just for her.   Because, after all, you don’t turn 100 every day.  She and Al have been enjoying them all weekend.   They may not be healthy for her, but at this stage, I am not too worried.

December 2010

There is no doubt that the Pipster is slowing down.  The jubilant energetic puppy has transformed into a (usually) dignified old lady.  She is nearly deaf now.  When we get home, she no longer greets us at the door eager to play.  Instead she is usually sound asleep on her mat in our bedroom.  We go upstairs, calling her name, but she often doesn’t hear us until we gently touch her shoulder and say, “Hey Pips!  We’re home,”   She slowly gets up, tail wagging and greets us with the stories of the day.  Happy to see us.  Just happy to be.  

Yes,  Pippi’s list of needs is pretty short.    Food, water, an occasional pat on the head.  A place to run (a little slower now) and frequent walks.  Being let out often enough to accommodate our mutual cleanliness standards.   And cupcakes.

Today I am grateful for our good friend Pippi.  Happy Birthday Muttface!

Fire and Ice

Fire

Ice

Fire

In winter I get up by night

And dress by yellow candle-light. (1) 

Ice

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind (2)

Fire
Cairo Egypt, February 2011(3)

Some say the world will end in fire 

Some say in ice

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great 

And would suffice (4)

Ice
Blizzard over most of US, February 2011(5)

These photos and poems were inspired by a concert of the Midland Symphony Orchestra  that we attended last night.  The concert was titled "Fire and Ice" and began with de Falla's Fire Dance and ended with Tchiaikovsky's First Symphony (Winter Daydreams).  Thinking about the musical contrasts led me to think about visual contrasts and a few old favorite poems.  And of course, world events.

(1) Bed in Summer, Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses and Undewoods, 1913

(2) The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens

(3) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12347185

(4) Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

(5) http://weatherblog.abc13.com/2011/02/weather-gone-wild-major-blizzard-and-major-hurricane.html

I always end these blogs with something I am grateful for, and of course there is a nearly  infinite list of things for which I am indeed grateful. But somehow, when I end my blog with images of a blizzard that shut down much of the nation for several days and of political instability in an already unstable part of the world, it seems both silly and selfish to be thinking of my own good luck.  So, instead, today I will express my concern for those who are suffering in the wake of the storm or the midst of the conflict.

Snow Days and Other Miracles

While my extended family on the east coast has experienced repeated record breaking snowstorms this year, we have been enjoying a relatively easy winter.  The temperatures have been very cold with even colder wind chills, but the snow has come in civilized amounts—an inch or two at a time, maybe 3 or 4 now and then.  Just enough to keep things winter-white and beautiful, but not so much that roads were treacherous or schools were closed. 

That of course, ended yesterday.

I knew we were in for a biggun when the university, which closes as rarely as possible, announced late Tuesday afternoon that we’d be closed on Wednesday.  I was surprised, because usually that decision is not made until the wee hours of the morning on the day in question.  When I went to bed last night, the snow was just beginning to fall ever so gently, ever so nicely, and I began to think that the predicted “Snowpocaplypse” would be a “Nopocalypse”

Barb's tree.  Our yard!

My first peek out the bathroom window this morning told me that I was both right and wrong.  Of course, there is nothing apolcalyptic about a major snowstorm in Michigan in January, but neither were the forecasts off the mark.  The storm had come in full force and in the early morning hours it was still snowing pretty hard and the winds were fierce.  It was hard to tell how much snow had fallen—there was so much  blowing and drifting.  But it was enough.  Enough that one of our neighbor’s 40 foot trees fell  into our backyard.  The fence between our properties broke its fall, and its fall broke the fence, but at least it didn’t fall onto either house.  The storm was enough to warrant school closures across the state.   The storm was bad enough that I was relieved to stay home from work today, even though my commute is an easy seven miles.  It was enough that even Al decided to work from home, both of us grateful for the internet connections that allow us to stay safe but keep up with necessary duties.

Al keeping up with necessary duties. With drifting, snow ranged from 1-4 ft.

Not-so-necessary duties.

I drank my morning coffee in the warmth and comfort of our family room which looks out over our backyard.  I watched the squirrels and birds feasting at the feeders and watched the snow blowing wildly, swirling and gusting through the trees.  Snuggled under a blanket, cat on my lap, dog at my feet, and  hot beverage in hand, I thought about how incredibly lucky we are to have a safe and warm house, plenty of food, good health, and no significant worries. I thought about how it didn't have to be that way. I thought about how many things could have worked out differently and I realized yet again how truly blessed we are.

Indeed. 

And for this miracle, I am beyond grateful. 

Pippi, the 100 year old dog, still plays in the snow!