It’s here – A book I illustrated is published!!! Once before, I illustrated a book and it turned out to be a lot of work so I said to myself that I wouldn’t do that again unless I wrote my own book. However, I started putting some of my pandemic journaling pages on Facebook and Labar Laskie saw them and became convinced that I was the person to illustrate her remarkable story. She succeeded in persuading me and, friends, I have to admit that this is just the sort of book I would have written if I had a life-threatening disease, and if I wasn’t wary of heights, and if I could sing, and if I had lost my mother at a young age to breast cancer, and if I was a better ice skater…many more ‘ifs’ but, yes, it’s all here, along with over a hundred full-color illustrations. Some of the pictures were challenging for me but that made the project fun – as is the book itself. Here’s the link to the book’s page: https://henschelhausbooks.com/product/above-the-din/
Trentin Quarantino’s DOG ALMANACK Springtime Edition
The long covid winter is over, and with spring comes the promise of people, places and activities long banned and forgotten! Maybe, for me, it’s also time for blogging again!
Louis, the puppy we so rashly acquired around Christmas, proved such an inescapable drain on my time, brain- and blog-power that I couldn’t get it together enough to write. Our grandchildren are now adults, mostly, and I had completely forgotten the exhausting and sometimes heart-wrenching 24-hour attention one needed to keep babies (of any species) from inadvertently harming themselves or others.
But now, finally, two things have happened to change that: (1) Kathleen, Louis and I have all gotten our species-appropriate vaccinations, so at last we can leave the house and interact with the outside world, and (2) Louis is starting to grow up.
The relationship of dog-years to people-years has been extensively covered in this Almanack [here], but those discussions were all about physiological years. We haven’t discussed psychological dog years.
Louis is six months old, which we at the Almanack are told makes him the psychological equivalent of a “rotten teenager”. Our job has now morphed into watching him 24 hours a day to keep him from intentionally harming himself or others. Just as exhausting, but not as heart-wrenching because he’s a rotten teenager so we don’t care as much.
And Louis is a boy rotten teenager, which means he’s only concerned with two things: eating, and you know.
We’ve lost, or nearly lost, to his bottomless omniverous appetite: several dog beds, human chairs, stuffed toys, hard toys, all our throw rugs, a couple of remotes and my cell phone.
He’s also made “special friends” with all the legs in the house (chair, table, and human) as well as his stuffed animals and dog bed.
We talked to the vet about his manic incessant humping, but she allowed that this isn’t a medical issue—it’s a “lifestyle choice”. Then she gave us more bad news. We had been holding on to our sanity (barely) with the knowledge that when Louis reached six months, it would be time to get him fixed. But the vet said she’d just been to a vet seminar on the topic, and the new current wisdom is that it’s better to wait until he’s ten months, to give his bones time to grow right.
“How much does Louis really need bones?” we pleaded, but she would not be moved. Then she twisted the knife further with the observation that his humping is a learned behavior, which he would probably continue even after he’d been de-oystered. In fact the longer he does it before the cut, she said, the harder and harder the habit will be to break. (HA HA I said “harder”.) (I’m so tired.)
Louis’s favorite paramour is a big, boneless, shag-covered dog bed that makes him feel just right. I should have known better when I bought the thing—in hindsight, it’s so obvious that the product title, “Cozy Calming Bed” is just a thinly-disguised euphemism, like the “happy ending” offered at a certain kind of massage.
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New Dog Products
“COZY” “CALMING” BED
Pamper your pet with our self-warming and “soothing” bed that is finished with a luxurious faux “shag” fur! Paired with deep crevices that allow your pet to “burrow”, your fury kids will have full, restful “sleep” for improved “behavior” and better “health”.
3D PRINTED STEAK
The world’s first slaughter-free ribeye steak has been produced using 3D bioprinting and real cells from a cow. Israeli company Aleph Farms has teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to cultivate a lab-grown ribeye intended to have the qualities, textures and taste of a real steak without killing an animal. “It incorporates muscle and fat similar to its slaughtered counterpart and boasts the same organoleptic attributes of a delicious tender, juicy ribeye steak you’d buy from the butcher,” Aleph Farms said in a statement.
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Dog Walk Botanywith Professor T. Quarantino, BsD.
POPCORN BUSH. On a walk with Louis I came across what I think must be known as a movie popcorn bush, because that is what its smallish yellow-white blossoms most resemble. God, how I miss movie popcorn! We tried to make our own with some extra fine salt I bought on a quarantine ordering spree and that yellow powder in the Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese Box. It was pretty good, but it was more like convenience store popcorn than movie popcorn. (I also haven’t had convenience store popcorn during the Time of Covid, but I don’t miss it as much.)
MAY APPLE. Thanks to eminent biologist and faithful reader Leon Cammen for identifying last week’s mystery plant, a picturesque ubiquitous ground cover boasting up to 9 radially-symmetrical leaves, as the May Apple. Dr Cammen points out that 4-leaf May Apple DNA possess about 40% as much luck as 4-leaf clover, and since a May Apple is much larger than a clover, finding a single 4-leaf May Apple about as lucky as scoring a small handful of 4-leaf clovers! I have yet to see a 4-leaf May Apple on our dog-walks, but my search continues.
Figure 13. Two-, 6-, and 7-Leaf May Apples. (The 2-leaf May Apple, although extremely rare, is unfortunately not lucky. Not that it’s unlucky: the plant is fortuity-neutral, or in botanical terms, “afortunate”.)
GRASS CAKES. If your walk takes you by a newly mowed lawn, you may be lucky enough to see some of these little patties that were ejected by the mower, made up of thoroughly chopped and matted together grass and leaves mixed with a healthy portion of rich loamy soil, and a bit of lawn mower oil to hold it all together. Dogs love these tasty treats.
Grass cakes also enjoyed a period of human vogue when I was young back in the age of Aquarius, providing the basis for the original veggie burgers in the seventies. The ingredient humus is often mistranscribed in modern recipe books as hummus.
Happy Spring all! Louis has been repeatedly been rescuing Kathleen and me from the twin evils of sloth, boredom, and sleep, and with our (and others’) new immune powers we are looking forward to emerging from our covid hibernation and maybe reconnecting with the outside world again. No more cowering-in-place for us, until the next catastrophe. See you then!
It seems like I am actually in a slow return to ‘normal’. Too bad I forgot what that is! But my first painting of the pandemic was one of Willow representing social isolation and my post vaccination painting is also of Willow. Seeing her in her white overalls and yellow boots (yes, I had a real, in person, grandchild visit!) somehow made me want to paint her as Alice in Wonderland – I guess that can represent the strange world we are trying to emerge from – or is it where we are going? Good luck to all of us as we burst forth and gradually get back to doing whatever it was that we did!
In yet another pandemic themed painting, I wanted to register the ‘zoomed out’ feeling of being not just tired of the pandemic in general, but also tired of the ways we now communicate over the internet. Experts say that we get especially fatigued because a lot of the non-visual cues that we usually use to communicate have become much more difficult or impossible to read. The ‘zoomed out’ feeling seemed to be perfectly exemplified by my brother Roal, as recorded in a recent screen shot of a family video chat. That became the subject for this painting. I am really hoping that the time when we can get together again in person is not too far away!!!
Many people who have been following my Social Isolation journal on Facebook think of my Dad, Pops, a.k.a Quick Carlson, as a poet, but he also has impressive artistic achievement of other kinds. I was amazed the other day, when I was looking for something in his basement, and stumbled upon a map drawer filled with dozens and dozens of his beautiful watercolor paintings from the 80s and 90s. “How come these are just living in a drawer?”, I accused. “Oh, those are my rejects”, said Pops. Maybe time is also the great healer of self-criticism, too, because when I showed him some of the photos I had taken of the paintings he admitted that they weren’t too bad. “There’s enough to have a show”, I said, but he had zero interest in that or in selling any. So, I have turned my attention to getting them to live on the walls of his descendant’s homes by introducing them in the family chat and getting response that way. The scribbly picture above is what I am getting to sort things out. In the meantime, Pops said I could make a 2021 calendar, free for download, for anyone that is interested. It’s done! Get it at
Trentin Quarantino’s 
