Month: December 2020

When dogs fly: cower in place 43

– in which Louis’s adventures as a Carlson begin.

Kathleen met and fell in love with our new puppy Louis (pronounced “Louie”) from a picture of him she found on the internet. Just like Archie before him. And just like me, 45 years before that.

Louis was living at a labradoodle breeder/trainer’s house with his brothers and sisters. We had been thinking about adopting a new puppy to help complete our pack. Nobody could replace Archie, but we recognized we were better, happier people with a dog in the family.

We closed a deal as quickly as we could, then waiting anxiously until Louis was old enough to leave his mom and start a new life on his own. He would be 11 weeks old and ready on December 22, and we wanted him immediately after that. What could possibly be better than a puppy for Christmas!

There was but one significant obstacle to our plan: Louis lived in Kentucky, 700 miles away. That’s a good nine-hour drive, google says. We couldn’t just drive over and pick him up without violating our self-imposed coronavirus safety protocols, which included importantly that we don’t go into any public restrooms, anywhere, ever, until we’re vaccinated.

Why, oh why, didn’t we think about how we were going to get him when we arranged the adoption? It had been well into the fall and we had many month’s experience in not traveling anywhere that we couldn’t get back from before we needed a pee break. But too late now, we’ve made virtual eye-contact with Louis and now no one else will do, whether he lived in Kentucky or another world.

The breeders had the solution. For a few extra bucks they would arrange for an “angel” to fly from Kentucky to DC, round trip, bringing Louis as carry-on luggage. Pricey, but not as pricey as it could have been, and probably not any more expensive than us working out our own corona-proof road trip. We had a brief period of worry that nobody would be willing to brave an airplane flight so close to Christmas, but they found a stalwart soul. Problem solved!

*I’ve christened the new variant of covid-19 “covid-1Q” as a call-out to a fascinating novel I read a few years ago, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The book (more…)

Or almost solved—the question remained: were we brave enough to go to the airport to pick Louie up? Second only perhaps to a public restroom, it’s hard for us phage-o-phobes to imagine a scarier place than a large international airport at Christmastime, full of people from all over the world. Including people from England, home of the new improved (from the virus’s point of view) coronavirus variant that I call “COVID-1Q”*.

The things we do for love! We made sure our travel “angel” was willing to meet us outside the airport buildings, at the passenger pickup curb. We bought some hazmat suits to supplement the face shields, masks and gloves that we wear to ordinary public places. We brought along some anti-covid wipes, and asked them to apply Louis’s flea medicine to his coat several days early, so we could give him a good covid wipedown the minute we got him without interfering with its effectiveness.

Then we waited. The days ticked by so slowly, as we waited for Louis to take up his new position in the Carlson pack. It was more stressful than waiting for Christmas! I practiced not getting any sleep (apparently Louis liked staying up until midnight, and then rising at 5 or 6 AM the next morning), and we bought two of every toy, treat, bed and jail we could think of, just in case.

The fateful day rolled around, December 23. Everything seemed to be “go” in Kentucky. We debated hopping in the car first thing in the morning, to make sure we weren’t late for the late-afternoon arrival, until we calmed down enough to realize that we’d be safer from the coronavirus vampires sitting at home than idling in a parking lot. We gave ourselves a reasonable amount of time and took off. And let’s just leave those tyvek suits behind, ‘kay?, they’re just too unwieldly (not to say silly-looking).

But where’s the beltway exit to the DC airport‽ Have they rearranged the entire city in the two years since I retired? We (Kathleen, Google maps and I) wound our way through the scenic part of Alexandria and finally found where they had hidden the new secret passageway to the airport. Some of our built-in spare minutes were lost, but we were still okay.

New scares awaited. The airport authority had apparently decided that the zombie apocalypse, with its drop in airline passengers, was the perfect time to set up construction crews to spiff up the airport. (This caused us some worry, but on reflection seems like a sensible decision.) Among the disruptions—the cell phone parking lot where we were to wait for our angel to let us know she’d arrived was closed for construction! More of our precious buffer minutes were lost!

The signs told us to go to the short-term parking lot, which they said was free if you were just waiting for a pickup. But that was within a multi-storey parking structure, which Kathleen felt was just too close to being trapped indoors with all those covid germs. So we exited there and headed for passenger pickup, planning to wait there. But oh no! Passenger pickup was closed for construction too! And unlike the cell waiting area, there were no instructions or detour signs here.

Prison Drawing, c. 1780
Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Where to go? The minutes were ticking by, and we were getting panicky! What if we can’t make contact and the travel angel has to make her scheduled flight back to Kentucky without making the dropoff! It’s hard to think when you’re frantic, and the whole airport complex, which must have circumnavigated four times looking for an opening, was starting to resemble one of those “imaginary prisons” that Giovanni Battista Piranesi drew (in the throes of a fever-induced delerium, it is said) back in the late 1700s.

The only place to pick up a passenger seemed to be at the passenger dropoff curb. We pulled in, immediately behind an airport police car with lights flashing, and hoped he was too busy with some other problem to notice that we were waiting right under the “No Waiting” sign.

We were in time. We called our angel, who was already wandering the airport, and told her of our new rendezvous point, and shortly after spotted her walking toward us with a bright orange backpack over her shoulder. In the backpack was Louis.

Louis took to me immediately, scoring me an immediate first goal in the “favorite parent” contest. I attribute this to my foresight in mailing the breeder a stinky T-shirt a couple of weeks ago to throw into Louis’s pen. (I offered to send something of Kathleen’s too, but she eschewed the idea. Ka-ching!)

Once he hopped into Kathleen’s lap, we forgot about our wipedown protocol. I told Kathleen, “he can’t have any covid, he’s TOO CUTE”. This isn’t dramatic license. I literally said those words out loud. (Don’t judge! This year, in this country, that is not the stupidest covid risk assessment I’ve heard. Not even close.)

The drive back home was mercifully uneventful. We let Louis sleep in a travel crate in the back during the drive home (“poor thing, he must be exhausted, taking two flights to get here”).

We (and Louis) took a while to recover from our respective travel adventures and start to get to know each other, but that’s a story for another day.

Thanks for listening, and Happy New Year!
Dorn
12/31/2020

 

Editor's note: this post contains an anachronism and an Easter Egg. Did you spot them?

The (K)9 Days of Christmas

Trentin Quarantino’s
 DOG ALMANACK 
* CHRISTMAS EDITION! *

It’s Christmas time! Are you and your dog ready? I think we can all agree that if anyone deserves to enjoy Christmas, it’s our dogs. They’ve got that good cheer even when the rest of us are grumpy, as might happen now and then, especially in a year with no movies, no restaurants, no travel, and no physical contact with non-nuclear loved ones. In fact, one could argue that they deserve Christmas more than we do!

So why shouldn’t they get it? A dog-year is only 52 days long (by the old rule that one human year = seven dog years). Why shouldn’t every dog-year include a dog-Christmas? If you agree, then your dog should be celebrating Christmas not only on Dec 25, but also on Feb 15, Apr 8, May 30, Jul 21, Sep 11, and Nov 2! Have you been short-changing your pooch??

Recent advances1 in biological science involving telomeres and mammalian DNA methylomes and whatnot have shown a logarithmic relationship between dog aging and years as measured by humans (I mentioned this before here). That relationship can be expressed by

agedog-years = 31 + (Loge[agepeople-years] * 16)

click for readable calendar

Maybe, if you really want to do right by your pups, you should start by synchronizing their dog-Christmases with their physiological ages, using the above formula. This will result in more Christmases per people-year when they’re younger, balanced by fewer when they’re older.

Here’s a handy calendar of nonlinear dog-Christmases, each indicated by an orange highlight. It assumes Fido was born on Jan 1, 2021. These logarithmic formulas go kind of crazy when you put in values close to zero, so I started counting only when the dog has reached one nonlinear dog-year old, on Feb 26 (let’s face it, anyone younger than one year old doesn’t really get Christmas anyway).

This is great! When the dog is just a puppy, it seems like almost every day is Christmas! This is so great, in fact, that I’m thinking maybe it should be applied to humans too. Imagine if when you were young, you didn’t have to wait a whole 365 days for the next Christmas to roll around?

So I took the above dog formula and stretched it out to match a human life span, and produced a formula that provides more Christmases when you are young, balanced out by less when you are old, so that by the time you reach age 70, you will have experienced 70 Christmases.

If you used this formula to calculate when to celebrate human-Christmas:

when-does-Christmas-roll-around =
[ 31 + (Loge[agepeople-years] * 16) ] / 6.12

    you’d get 38 Christmases by the time you were ten years old!! You’d celebrate another eleven by the time you were twenty. Each decade there­after would be fewer, until in your seventh decade you’d only get three. That’s not very many Christmases for us old folks, true, but you got ’em while you were young and could enjoy them better. That’s fair, right?

But I’ve strayed from my topic of dog-Christmas. Okay, so whenever you plan to celebrate Christmas with your dog, what’s an appropriate present? Here’s the list of what’s most popular with pups in 2020 (to be fair, this list is pretty much the same every year):

favorite
unfavorite

FIRST CHOICE: treats or any food.

SECOND CHOICE: toys, sticks, shoes, or any other object in the world.

THIRD CHOICE: dog DNA test, a dental cleaning, or fake antlers. Literally, the best you can hope for with these gifts is that they don’t mind them much.

And what to watch when celebrating dog-Christmas? I looked, but found relatively few dog-centric Christmas offerings on TV. The 12 Pups of Christmas sounded promising. It’s a Hallmark-y romcom that was redeemed (IMO) by having both romantic leads be unapologetic jerks that got to stay that way even after they found True Love. But the titular Labrador puppies, while they provided high-grade puppy eye-candy whenever on screen, actually had nothing at all to do with the plot. Come to think of it, Christmas didn’t have anything to do with the plot either.

Raised by Wolves, a new sci-fi series on HBO, while it seems good, didn’t fare any better as a dog-Christmas show. But at least it didn’t have a bait-and-switch title. The protagonists were rationalists who didn’t believe in religious sentimentality, and the wolves turned out to be metaphors for . . . well, I won’t spoil the plot by giving too much away.

Max

My best dog-Christmas find was that old stand-by, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. (Not any of the new, dreadful movies, though: it has to be the 1966 cartoon version, with Boris Karloff reading the story. Also acceptable would be simply reading the original story aloud to your doggie.) Now, this is a tale that can grip a canine’s imagination—the hero Max has adventures (snow!), existential crises (he has to wear fake antlers), and a satisfyingly triumphant conclusion (roast beast).

However, whenever, and with whom- or what-ever you are celebrating the holidays, may they be safe and joyous, and virus-free!

Till next time,
  Trentin “Tin-tin” Quarantino

Editor's note: did I happen to mention that Kathleen and I are getting a new puppy for Christmas? His name is Louis, and he'll be arriving on Christmas Eve Eve. What could be better than finding a new puppy under the Christmas tree! (Except of course there's no tree this year because, well, there's a new puppy.)


Thanks,
Dorn
12/15/2020

Ch-ch-ch-changes, part 2: cower in place 42

– Dorn’s transformation continues (from part 1) ….

My friend Elizabeth revealed to me some arcane wisdom that has been passed down from father to child in her family for generations: that the hair on an adult human body may change color, length, or distribution pattern, but the total amount remains constant throughout life. So far, at least, I can personally vouch for the accuracy of that observation.

For months now I have passed the long hours engaged in that pastime so popular among those of a particular age and culture in this country: making fun of people on TV who don’t take the coronavirus pandemic and protective measures seriously enough, or who are serious but just get it all wrong.

You know the people I’m talking about—those who cover their mouth but not their nose with their face mask, or vice versa; those who wear a mask into the grocery store but take it off to sneeze; and those who not only don’t wear a mask at all, but give you dirty looks if you do, as if you wearing a mask was somehow infringing on their right to catch covid.

It’s a wonderful game, the kind that othering was invented for: it’s lots of laughs, but only as long as the people you are making fun of are others, people in some category to which you yourself do not belong. The fun and games ended for me recently, when I realized that I was in that category.

I learned in Hazardous Waste training decades ago that a face respirator didn’t protect you from those toxic fumes if you tried to wear it over a beard. Though I haven’t trucked in HW for many years, I still always knew this truism, somewhere in the back of my mind. It has niggled at me all summer, but only broke through the surface tension to my waking mind a week or so ago. “Gee, I wonder if my beard is interfering with my face mask’s ability to filter the air I’m breathing?”

A quick test by holding my mask’s edges tight with my hands revealed the awful truth: because of my vanity and laziness (I hate shaving), I had basically been wearing a placebo on my face all year! Time to shave that sucker so my mask can do its job!

Despite the fact that if I didn’t shave I was going to die, I was hesitant. “What if I look silly?” My beard was pretty short, so maybe it would be all right. To see how I’d look, I decided to Photoshop a selfie and take the beard out, or at least the parts around my jaws where the face mask was gallantly trying and failing to seal the aerosol germs out.

Well, that’s not so bad! A casual observer might not notice any change at all (luckily my beard turned white years ago, and blends in with the natural Scandinavian pallor of my cheeks). I’m going do it!

There is another truism, knowledge passed down through the generations in my family, and known I suspect by all men with beards who have reached their third age: there is a point in one’s life when shaving a man’s beard no longer makes him look younger. Instead, it makes him look older. And not in the good way.

There’s no way to know in advance when this gaunt milestone will be reached, even with the technological miracle of Photoshop. But anyone with a beard to shave off will immediately know if he has passed that milestone since the last time he was cleanshaven.

I have.

Well, nothing to do for it but to mail-order some bigger masks designed to cover more of the face (I should have thought of that first!), and start letting the beard grow back in the newly-safe areas. Fortunately, I’m quarantined so the number of people I will shock with my newly haggard visage until the beard comes back will be small. And it doesn’t include you, gentle reader—every horror story writer knows the most terrifying parts of a story are those left to the imagination.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of my head…

*   *   *

…the hair on the rest of my head has continued to repartition itself, always observing the law of conservation of hair mass (see above). The number of strands continued to decrease, while the fact that I hadn’t gotten them cut since the pandemic started meant that the average length of each strand was considerably longer now than at the outset of our national trial.

I wonder if it’s long enough yet for… a ponytail‽ Not one of those sissy Eurosexual man-buns, but a real he-man coonskin-cap ponytail!

I remember back in, oh, maybe the 80s, I was fascinated by a number of movies that came out where the protagonist sported a ponytail. If I remember right, in each movie, the guy was somehow more than human, or at least other-than-human. The movies symbolized this by each guys’ man-tress, and when the time came for him to discover or reveal his humanity, the ponytail came down. Let’s see, what were those movies?

One of them, I think, was a Steven Seagal action flick where he played a cook on a train or a boat that was hijacked by villians. He turned out, of course, to be secretly a ninja or a Navy SEAL or something like that, and handily kicked bad guy butt while never messing up his do.

Another movie of the time that I liked a lot better (and remember better) was The Fisher King, starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. It was a sometimes funny but mostly poignant movie about trauma and loss. Jeff Bridges was this shock jock who presented a macho coolness (and a ponytail) to hide his pain and guilt over an awful crime. Robin Williams played a mentally ill man who finally gets Jeff to let his hair down.

But my favorite man-ponytail movie of the era, the one that got me thinking at the time that maybe I should sport one, was the hilarious if amoral Witches of Eastwick, starring the one and only Jack “Heeere’s Johnny!” Nicholson playing, as he puts it at one point, “just your average horny devil”. There’s a priceless vignette in it, only a second or two long, where he’s preening in front of a mirror while holding a hand mirror in each hand, trying to triangulate a line-of-sight to admire his own little pipsqueak ponytail. The movie’s not for the faint of heart at a few points, but I found it a real hoot. And an inspiration!

So anyway, I tried, and yes, my hair is long enough for a ponytail now, but just barely. Here’s me in a tableau vivant of my favorite scene from the Witches of Eastwick:

Watch out, Willie Nelson!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/13/2020

Ch-ch-ch-changes, part 1: cower in place 41

– In which Dorn is transformed by the pandemic in small but insignificant ways.

Theme music

Overall, I feel that I’ve come through 2020 and the covid pandemic relatively unscathed, so far—if it’s been alternately frightening and boring, at least it hasn’t been devastating to me and mine, as it has for some. If my retirement travel plans and ability to see my family have been upended, at least we are still covid-free, and receiving our pension checks.

That’s not to say that the experience hasn’t changed me psychically and physically. When the news of the virus first came out in February, and no one knew exactly what to expect, and toilet paper and hand sanitizers vanished from the shelves of grocery stores, Kathleen and I went into zombie apocalypse mode. We didn’t seal ourselves into the basement (couldn’t—don’t have one), but we did stock up as best we could on survival-type items like food and no-fridge-needed milk, just in case. And why not? Who knew when next we’d be able to enter a grocery store?

We started on a diet regimen that, looking back, I see was rather spartan compared with our usual gourmand lifestyle. We prepared our meals with a limited palette of ingredients that were selected for hardiness and longevity rather than sumptuousness. After a few months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had lost a significant amount of weight. Bully for me, I thought. If I can keep this up, I’ll be at my healthy goal before the year’s out, without even trying.

But the hysteria and hoarding subsided, businesses reopened, and grocery stores perfected the art of online ordering and curbside pickup. Huzzah! We could now get most of what we bought before. So now, we could add a new activity back into our daily routine: fancy cookin’! You’ve probably guessed where this is going: since I wasn’t really trying to lose weight, and the external circumstances that allowed it were going away, by mid-summer I noticed an alarming trend. My weight was inching back up! If I didn’t want to regain it all back, I needed to get more mindful about my weight-watching.

Fortunately, one of my late-summer activities was to clean out the shed in the back, which had been gathering junk indiscriminately for the last 15 years. I’m not kidding, there was some OLD stuff in there. There was my entire collection of cheap tourist thermometers from around the world, and even an old 45 of the forgettable “Edge of the Universe” by the BeeGees.

(Children, by “45” I’m not referring to a gun from the Old West, but rather a data storage medium that went obsolete long before you were born. It was designed to store mainly audio data, and was in vogue about half-way between the Compact Disk or ‘CD’ (remember those?) and the piano roll, that rolled-up scroll of paper with holes punched in it that you fed into your player piano. You can still find 45s in use today if you look hard enough for them. Piano rolls too, for that matter.)

But more importantly for this story, I found a photocopy of a diet given to us by Kathleen’s old family doctor, Dr M—. This was so long ago that I bet that when Dr M— was just a young upstart, he knew a old doctor that claimed that he used to make house calls. (“House calls”, children, are another obsolete technology. They were kind of like Door Dash or Instacart, except instead of groceries, they delivered a doctor to you who gave you medical advice or treatment right in your home! You can imagine how long a business model like that was able to sustain itself.)

It’s a relatively simple diet, consisting of three days’ worth of meals, showing exactly what you should eat (do they even make saltines any more? Or beets?), and how much, and not allowing any deviations. I could tell this diet was a relic from a simpler time, because it said right on the diet itself, “This diet is based on science, and is proven to work.” Such confidence makes me nostalgic for the days when we had things like science to believe in.

  Before and after.

In a shocking plot twist that I’m sure none of my readers could have anticipated, this story doesn’t conclude with me actually using this diet and re-losing all the quarantine weight I had re-gained. No, just finding the copy of the diet has made me confident enough in my ability to lose this weight that I no longer worry about it. Besides, Christmas is coming!

The next change in my story, though, resulted in a much different conclusion…

TO BE CONTINUED … Here!!!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/6/2020