Early Signs

I have another trip to the puppies at New Skete today, before I have to skip visits due to music and house issues. I won't be taking them outside - that starts at 4 weeks - but they will be more active. It should be fun to see if my initial impression of their personalities from last week was correct.

When I first started handling the puppies, I was surprised by how early a basic personality appears. At just three days old you can already see whether a dog is a big compliant wad of fur or a more "active" (challenging) personality. Details like how noisy they are take a couple of weeks to show up.

Back from the trip now, a few hours later, and my first impressions of the current litter are holding. The white ribboned female is the biggest and the most responsive to human attention of the three. Yipping converts to quiet very quickly upon hugging her close - and she can yip.

They are distinctly bigger than a week ago, but they are still at a stage where the heads and bodies aren't quite in proportion yet. They remind me of fuzzy cone heads when I hold them up to blow on their face.

The breeding kennels were loaded. Lila and Petra were still there, Bella was newly arrived for breeding and Xenia, the mother of red, white and blue puppies, was catching a break from the kids. Dux, a large male trained as a therapy dog that is also in the breeding program, was in a kennel around the corner. Everyone got a walk, though Dux was more distracted than usual because of the females in heat. I earned my fattening breakfast this morning.

Intermission

We have a short window before we get an April Fool's Day snow storm, with the temperatures hitting 50 today. So today many of the horses had their lighter weight rain sheets on rather than the heavier winter blankets. Even with the lighter sheets some were really knocked out by the warm sun, too zoned out to put in a really good messy roll in the mud except for the old white mare. She had no trouble making a mess of herself.

Thanks to the time in the sun, the horses were also calmer coming in for their evening feed. They usually hear the hay being dropped and start pacing the fence line. They knew that food was imminent, but came in without their usual high heads and sense of excitement.

They need to enjoy it while they can - the predictions put us under several inches of wet, sloppy snow in a day and a half. This winter just has to go!

Snow on Top

This week I am pet sitting for long term clients of my service. I inherited this job from the person who I replaced because the family lives so close to me. They have a dog and some cats, and like many of the long term clients the sitters have seen these critters age or more. They had recently lost a cat when I picked up the job.

Winter temperatures still rule this week. I noticed yesterday morning that the dog came out a little stiffly, moving cautiously in the cold air until his legs had found their traditional spring. By the second visit of the day the two of us were a match. He took his time to stretch out and I hobbled after him, limping from some darn fool thing I had stretched in my right foot while cleaning stalls and lugging buckets at the barn.

This morning, the dog and I made a perfect tableau for the day. There are still bits of snow under the shrubbery along the fence, and pockets of fluffy new snow in hollows on the lawn. After I had tossed the ball for a while, he and I sat in the sun and listened to the sounds from the nearby yards. I saw that the winter has left behind much more white around his eyes and muzzle than he had last summer. My own white hair would have completed the picture for anyone observing us.

Even the cats, who often run into corners and confound my feeding them in the preferred location, seem to be more mellow. The most hesitant of them has accepted more handling from me this week than before. Perhaps they are feeling their age, or maybe I have quietly drifted into a state of older age that they recognize.

Merging Forms

Yesterday was the start of rehearsals with my Vermont orchestra for Debussy's "La Mer". The early rehearsals are running separately by section with violins first in order. We made it through the first and into the the second movement, focusing intensely on small sections of the work. The challenge of this work is to make the written notes sound like the waves and the surge of the sea.

As the conductor talked, I realized that my music and my kayaking may be joined. Right now our practice is mostly about getting the notes and time signatures under our fingers so that we can play to the intention of the work. It is hard to do that well if you are still fussing with note by note details.

But once I get these notes under my hands, my focus will shift. I will be able to use my memory of the sound and feel of the ocean where we kayak on vacation as the framework for the notes I am playing.

I have had a few people suggest that I could use my music to help relax me for rolling a kayak. This is the first time the arrow seems to be pointing in the opposite direction.

3-4 Beat

The three of us in our string trio - two violins and a cello - finally got together last night. It is always hard to find a time we can all make. But for a moment the rest of life stopped and we had a great rehearsal.

It takes time for a new group to hear each other well. Once that happens an ensemble can more easily assess new work and develop a solid repertoire for performance. Until that point is reached - and there is no formula for this - simple things like misreading notes (oops!) can be jarring enough to stop a read through. Last night, it felt like we had passed a milestone. We seemed to play easily through glitches that had stopped us before.

One of the silly themes of last night was finding music in 6/8 time. Our trio can sight read that time signature the most easily, usually counted as two beats per measure subdivided into three clicks per beat. The musical works with four beats per measure don't flow quite as intuitively. Perhaps we like number of the beats per measure to match our own numbers.

I was thinking about last night's rehearsal on the way to the barn today. The new season is starting in a couple of weeks and I needed refresher training on helping with the hippotherapy sessions.

There were two new volunteers when I arrived and one of the barn folks was finishing up a riding lesson. She stayed in the saddle and pretended to be one of the therapy clients while the new volunteers were shown how to be side walkers. Side walkers are the people who support the client in the saddle as the horse is walked around the ring. I was leading the horse, and my job was to spot any signs of trouble or discomfort in the horse.

There are obvious signs that a horse is getting frustrated - shaking the head, the set of the ears or a move away from where you want them to go. But there are more subtle signs, one of which is a less settled rhythm to their gait. The walk, the gait used for therapy sessions, is a four beat gait. That is, it takes four strikes of a hoof on the ground to have lifted and put down all four legs. A trot is a two beat gait because two legs move together,  and a canter is a three beat gait. We never use a trot or a canter in a therapy session - it's not safe (and even if it was none of us can run that fast).

The horse I was practice-leading today is a wonderful character, but has barely been ridden over the winter and needs some time under saddle to get his springs kinks out. The wind was coming up, so the metal doors of the indoor ring were banging against each other at the rear of the barn. As we walked I was tuning into the rhythm of his walk, especially as we went near those doors. One - two- three - four one - two- three - four around and around... finding that last night's rehearsal was a good warm up for today even if I had to add a beat.

Tomorrow is the first orchestra rehearsal for Debussy's "La Mer", so the beats may get more complicated.

Clearing Clutter

We are in the process of clearing out a couple of decades of accumulated stuff. Like most I have spoken with who have done this, a tremendous amount of it is going to the discard pile. Some of that pile is going to recycling, some for donation and the rest is increasing our impact on a landfill somewhere. The last part is far from perfect, but I suppose it just boils down to whether it arrives in smaller bits or one big pile. The solution is to acquire less stuff, and going through this should make that easier.

I spent a couple of so hours this afternoon clearing out another room. I was struck by the obdurate permanence of something that has almost no value after long enough, like records for surgeries 15 years ago and the tennis racket that fell apart while I was figuring out if I'd play again. It seems that the stuff you don't care about will find a corner and live forever.

Unfortunately this isn't true for the critters that I have spent much of my life with - our cats, the horses at the barn and some of the pets that I have cared for as a pet sitter. I've lost a few cats as an adult. One was the only breathing creature thing, including people, who had been a constant part of my daily life for nearly 20 years when he died. I caught the last days of a pet's life on a sitting job, and we've lost two of the old ponies since I started volunteering. One died from cancer and the other had years of issues with lameness that finally went beyond remediation. I spent extra time with each in their final season, mostly hosing them down or grooming them.

It doesn't seem fair that a bank statement from an account closed 15 years ago gets to outlive the creatures that were always there to hug on a bad day, or go on a ride or a walk to forget about things.

Walking the Dogs

Today was my first session of puppy socialization at the New Skete Monastery since last Christmas. They sent a large batch of puppies home with their new owners for the holidays, then there was a gap waiting for the next round to be born. I have gone up and walked some adult dogs during those times. But the stormy winter, concerts and other events around home conspired against that this winter.


There were three adults in the puppy kennel today. Lila and Petra are in heat and were there to be bred, and Xenia was with her new litter. She was nursing three 2 week old pups, which means the socializers started handling them about ten days ago.

All three of the ladies were anxious to get outside for a chance at those wet spring scents. There are paths in the woods, but they were still mud and ice so we walked along the dirt road that runs up the mountain to the Monastery.

Petra surprised me with her good manners. For the first time, I could walk her on a regular (non-choke) collar without it being serious exercise for my arm. She was terribly sweet and responsive, smiling and leaning into me for a pet every time we did a sit while a car went by.

Lila can be a handful, but will settle if she has a chance to retrieve sticks at the start of the walk. She would like the distance to be longer, beyond the length of the retractable leash, but even a short bit of this will calm her. Without that, she is a big, bold girl that can pull your arm off. 

The program for puppy socialization - what you do at each visit - starts when they are a few days old. The puppies can't see or hear at first, so the earliest activities famliarize the puppy with human scent. Today was still mostly that - blowing on their faces, touching their paw and holding them in my palms. Tasks are added each week. By the time the puppies leave the kennel they have learned to stay quiet when held, follow a person, go up and down steps, stop nipping and and walk on a leash.

All of these behaviors are still at a rudimentary level, so the new owners have plenty to do to finish the job.  The pup has been on a leash but knows no commands, for example. And nipping can ramp up after this age, though I doubt it is a big issue. Most of the New Skete pups I have handled lacked any tendency to nip.  

All that said, the biggest kick is that the puppies are astonishingly cute. It was a truly pleasant sunny day on the mountain

Pacing the Floor

Our oldest cat, Val, got up in the middle of the night and wouldn't settle. She is very frail and her kidneys are toast, but her morning head bump to get our attention and the purring tells us she is not quite ready to call it quits. So we are keeping her comfortable by hydrating her with subcutaneous injections of Ringer's. It felt like a heck of an assault on a tiny creature when we started several weeks ago, but by now it is clear that she dislikes being so confined more than the treatment itself.

She's always been a pacer, and while she stays near she has never liked to be hugged. Most of our pets have been Velcro cats, gluing themselves to us when seated and living on a shoulder as we go about our activities. Val will climb on top with the others, but finally settles at the edges of the cat stack. At night she prefers the pillow above my head to the deep valleys in the bedding.

As she has gotten older she has become more insistent on having company for her strolls. She appears in front of us, yelling with some annoyance. At first we tried the obvious things - treats, a taste of milk, attention, toys -but we soon found that the only fix was to drop whatever we were doing and follow her around the house. It is a short distance before she loses focus, maybe from the rear of the house down the hallway to the front with a loop around the coffee table. But she makes it clear that she must be followed, stopping to look back and waiting until you are closer if you have dawdled. Leaving the walk too early just causes more yelling. It would be annoying if she wasn't so darned cute.

Last night was a round of pacing, starting at 3am. We walked to water, to the food, to the kitty litter... she is so vague now. She finally settled on a spot on the couch, but I am still feeling the effects.

On my Monday shift at the barn, one of the senior citizens had to be walked out to cool off because he tried playing like a much younger horse. He is probably the oldest horse at the barn but, like many of us, refuses to accept that as a limiting factor. I am hoping that he acts his age today, so I don't have to follow pacing with the cat overnight to pacing with a half ton of horse. I'm walked out.

Paperwork Day

I could wait no longer to spend the day on taxes. I still have a couple of hours of work left but it'll be to our prep guy by Friday morning. We pull all the stuff together, organizing the W2's and 1099's and 98's and other forms and making up spreadsheets of charitable donations with the supporting letters, the real property tax amounts and such. Then we take the package to a friend who does what he can with our bad habits and produces something that will pass with the state and federal authorities. We could do the last step ourselves, but not as well or as easily. Once a year it is worth paying someone for the hassle.

Much of the mileage on the car is from pet sitting, but that's not an issue for taxes. In most services, the sitters get paid the federal rate of 50 cents per mile for travel to and from a pet sit job. What is left from the pay after covering the cost of the mileage is taxable income. That is why pet sitters usually have their primary clients within a limited distance of their house. If the job was far away, the amount the sitter gets paid wouldn't cover the cost of mileage. One solution is to charge a clients that live well out of the service's range an additional mileage fee, and the service for which I work has a couple of long-standing clients who do pay this fee. But most people look around for someone closer by when they hear this part.

That is also why I appealed to this pet sitting service. The person who was quitting lived just outside of the City, so I could cover the same geographic territory without running deficits on mileage costs. There is good money to be made pet sitting if you are an independent operator, but working for a service is not a way to get rich. That said, it also means that someone else has to handle the insurance, the bonding, the clients, the payroll.... something which I have no ambition to manage.


There is an impression that people make tons of money in pet sitting. I suppose in the rarefied air of northern New Jersey or similar metropolitan areas that may be so. But after a couple of years of pet sitting, I feel that if anything the pay tends to run a little low against the requirements of the job. There are no educational degrees that I know of for this job, except for perhaps veterinary technicians. But it takes a formidable amount of calm, creativity and comfort with animals to walk into someone else's house and deal with the difficult cat or a dog that is dangerously anxious because its owners left town.

So far I've only encountered one situation where I had to get the animal hauled to a kennel for my own safety, and I am told that was one of just three such instances in the history of this service. But that one time was enough to get my attention - I've been a little more cautious of new clients with difficult dogs since then. It's not the animals' fault. They can't help their own dependencies. But the owners can't always tell how those issues will play out when they leave the critter alone with a stranger coming in the door.

From Symphony to the Stall

The concert yesterday went well, though the audience was leaner than usual for the Youth Concert. The day was glorious and warm, so we may have been competing with too many good reasons to be outdoors.

The woman sitting next to my husband in the audience said that this event was part of what she loved about living in Vermont. Earlier that afternoon she had been mucking out horse stalls, and by 4pm she had come a short distance to hear a wonderful orchestra concert. She assured him that she had changed clothes. Of course, since I regularly come home in clothes smelling of the barn this might not have been so much of a problem for him.

I went out for my shift at the barn this afternoon, waking up to a first day of spring that is why people move to southern states. It was snowing overnight and changed to a chilly mist by midday. It will be near freezing tonight and the horses are back in their heavier winter blankets after a couple of days in their lighter weight sheets. This is the time of the year that it becomes most difficult to try and figure out how warm a cover they should have.

Put on too heavy a blanket, and you risk the horse getting sweaty which can cause colic if they eat when still hot. Put on too light a sheet, the older horses can get chilled and get colic... the bottom line is that getting a number of equine senior citizens from winter to late spring is an art form. Horse owners and barn operators who do all the right things can and do lose a horse. The more even temperatures of late spring and early fall are welcome times compared to handling the extreme cold of winter, the heat of summer or the days of 30 degree temperature swings on each side of the change.

One of the more recent volunteers at the barn, Jen, is a woman who is great fun and a joy to have for help. She arrived knowing absolutely nothing about horses and really thinks about everything she is told. So if she asks a question it could be a real head scratcher, or some basic thing that many people may want to ask but lack the nerve. Jen doesn't have a problem with risking embarrassment, and will learn faster than most because of this. On the work side, she happily hauls water buckets and wheel barrels full of muck for two hours at a clip.

Jen took her first riding lesson last week, She said today that she now has much more respect for riders. She never realized how hard it was to learn the controls - seat, leg, hands - while sitting on a half ton of animal that had its own ideas about where to go. She also had not expected to be shy on the leg muscles needed to get the horse's attention, a surprise for her since she does manual work for a living and is overall quite strong for her size.

It sounded like they put her on a daisy picker, a horse that is safe for newbies because it won't buck or try to dislodge the rider. But these horses are usually pros at recognizing when they can get away with smaller disobediences. Apparently Jen's lesson included a trip to a feed bucket and a number of other locations that were not on the intended riding loop. And this was on a horse that was mostly blind.

Jen was a good sport about it though - she accepted the trainer's word that as the rider she was responsible for controlling the horse. She is thinking that she may spend a little more time on the ground getting to know them before she gets on a horse's back again.

Sunday Melange

We stayed at a friend's house overnight along with another couple, celebrating a birthday. This morning there are three laptops being used on the kitchen table and another two plugged in along the wall behind me. Happily many printers can run wireless like the three being used, via the home network. Otherwise there would be no room for knees under the table because of printer shelves.

Half of us will be playing a concert this afternoon, one of the reasons for this overnight stay. The couple that was staying on the bed in the office just got evicted to print a few hundred program inserts before the concert. The owners of the house have a bank of six printers, with various paper size and color options, to handle jobs like this. Was there an ulterior motive in offering to have the birthday dinner here, to have ready hands for the inserts? Maybe, but it's all for the sake of the orchestra so arm twisting is legal.

Today's performance is the annual Youth Concert, featuring performances from violin concertos by three seniors at Bennington College and several works composed by area high school students with the support of a professional musician as a mentor.

As always with this kind of program, I am floored by the talent and maturity of all of these students. The college students are bold, strong players that are easy to follow.







But the high school students are truly amazing.

Most of the high school students lack a musical vocabulary to talk about how an instrumental section should play their part. This is partly due to experience and partly due to how people compose these days. Many composers now work out how their compositions on a MIDI machine. This is an electronic device that plays back the parts and creates sustained, flat notes of absolutely precise length. That is, a quarter note is always the correct length to the millisecond; the volume will be the preset level from the first to the last instant. The problem in translation is that this is not how humans play the music. The strings may or may not play vibrato, notes will rise and fall in volume as the player's wind or bow speed changes, musicians will automatically play note lengths based on what sounds right in the ensemble rather than what is written on the page. These details on how to play the piece get worked out at the first rehearsal with the orchestra.

It is here that we see the maturity of high school students. To a person, they know what they want to hear even if they don't know how to say it. A couple of them are very particular. One young woman of Korean extraction has created a quite beautiful piece, called Embracing Memory, which was hard for me to play last night at rehearsal. It was an accessible, more romantic work that made the events in Japan seem very close. At last night's rehearsal, she spent a long time telling the conductor how she wanted some sections played. My guess is that she plays an orchestral instrument herself.

Breakfast is on the table and it is time for me to stop. This will be a fun concert.

Blended Families

One of my pet sitting clients has a pit bill that they never planned on after they found her running loose and homeless down their street. It meant that they had to relegate the family cat to the second floor and set up gates to keep the other dog and cat apart from the pit bull, but they are dog people and were willing to do it. The family with the Dachshund acquired one cat after one of their mothers had to go into assisted living, another when their daughter had interrupted housing. These are not at all cat people, but they are animal people so they are making it work. Friends of our who never planned to have a cat acquired one after their parents died. Our own home became a three cat family when one walked through the front door one day.

Somehow many animals have an instinct for finding people who will find take care of them, even when it isn't convenient. And they find a way to make it work out between themselves, albeit their solution often fails to take the comfort of two-leggeds into account.

It's too bad people can't do this so well.

Simple Moments

The news from Japan is horrific. With the growing difficulties keeping water on the spent fuel rods at the northern nuclear facility, I could live to see a significant portion of the country made uninhabitable for generations to come. Things are close in Japan. The distance from the destroyed nuclear facility in the northeast to Tokyo in the middle of the country is slightly less than the distance from where I sit in mid-state NY to Manhattan. It is minor on the scale of this country, but it could be a third of Japan.

The concept of a regional zone of nuclear damage isn't new, with long term concerns about accidents at plants in this country and the more recent worries about dirty bombs. But it never had the reality of this week's news.

People are feeling the nearness in Japan - many have fled Tokyo. Business has ground to a slow crawl due to the loss of workers as well as rationed electricity.

I noticed in the shots of shelters in Japan that they had allowed people to bring their pets with them. For people who have survived an earthquake, a tsunami, loss of family members and now loss of their homes due to radiation, very small things could be the difference between someone making it through the day or giving up. Having the company and the care of the family cat and dog may be one of the few remaining life lines in this disaster.

On one trip to the living room I noticed that the younger Siamese Atlas, who spends much of his time yowling nastily at the cat who came in from the street, had declared a detente long enough to use him as a pillow in the sunny spot. We've been wondering how long it would take the pig-headed fool to realize that Andy (the street guy) is the softest bed in the house. Andy has shown remarkable patience through years of this behavior and for the most part walks by it, though once in a while he decides to play with Atlas because it is so much fun to get him to make noises.

But seeing them piled up this morning is nice.

Conjunctions

Once in a while you get a particularly powerful reminder that the world is a small place. We are living in one of those moments now. I, my husband and our three cats are temporarily residing in an apartment while work is being done on our house. It is close enough to our place to make daily visits easy, but it is still in a different neighborhood. We expected that there would be little crossover with any portion of the last 25 years of our lives.

We couldn't have been more wrong.

Our landlord and his wife are long term friends with my sister-in-law Pat, and when I saw his road bikes it was clear that I must have bumped into the landlord many times at rides with the local cycling club. He had classic bikes from the same era as my first bike, when I was riding heavily and leading some trips. The tenant below us, a long term friend of the landlord, was married to the woman who was Pat's best friend and her midwife. He came up the other night to show us pictures of the birth of Pat's second child, our nephew, taken moments after the birth. Sadly, the woman who was his wife and Pat's friend died several years later from cancer.

The conjunctions even extend into this apartment. I met the prior tenant, Cindy, at a gathering at the landlord's place. It turns out that several years ago she had worked for the same pet sitting service as me. We chatted for a bit about the families and pets that we both have known.

Animals seem to link this group of people and this neighborhood. Cindy brought a cat in off the street when she lived here, but he won't stay entirely inside. The house she bought is close enough that he regularly returns to this neighborhood. When he is missing into the evening she drives up the alley and calls him. He hops into her car and they both return to their house, or she visits with old neighbors.

The landlord's wife scavenges discarded Christmas trees to be safe havens for small birds from a very territorial Cooper's Hawk. She puts them in their narrow side yard, and when the babies are fledged she has the trees chipped up. Our own Christmas tree apparently passed muster as a bird haven - she is picky - it was gone from the alley before I had the chance to tell her it was there.

One block over, two families share the ownership and care of a small flock of chickens. Chickens are the one farm animal that is legal inside of city limits. One of the families is a regular pet sitting client, and the coop is carefully nestled under a stand of pine trees in the yard of the other family next door. Once in a while I have gone through the gate to check on the chickens when I was out back exercising the dog and I heard a huge ruckus. The wife in the couple next door is the daughter of someone I knew for many years, in fact I first encountered this young woman when she was a child. Now she has two of her own.

This is a long post - I first thought of breaking it into two days. But the connections are all about this place, this neighborhood, and they don't untangle easily.

Best Laid Plans

When pet owners hire new sitters, they usually leave extensive instructions about how to feed, walk and generally entertain their critters. Unfortunately the pets often have a different plan for dealing with strangers. The cat that will go to a set location to eat for the owner won't come out from under the bed, or the dog may take a lot stronger arm for you to handle than for their owners. So you have to improvise. Maybe you feed the cat at a different location, or you get the dog on the leash in a confined location and make them sit before going through doors. After the first couple of visits both the critters and the pet sitter find a routine.

Sometimes the owner forgets to mention something because it has become so automatic. One dog was supposed to be very reliable about pooping in each of the two visits per day, but I had the devil of a time getting out of there in half an hour the first couple of visits. I tripped over the solution on the third visit when I let the dog take me back into the house after peeing. I fed her, which she inhaled, and took her out again to immediate results. I later found out that was the routine the owner usually followed, but she had forgotten to tell me.

Luckily, the animals that require extra work like shots for diabetes or oral medications tend to be easy. Perhaps it is because they are already used to being handled so much by their owners, and they are often elderly.

There are totally serendipitous discoveries too. I was sitting for a dog that was sweet but tough to calm down. I had tried all the usual approaches and had gotten her to a tolerable point, but we weren't near placid. I happened to have her in the kitchen once when I washed out her food bowl, and when I turned around she was in an almost Zen-like trance. Somehow being in the room with the washing ritual acted like a balm. No one had ever mentioned that, but I took full advantage of it. And the dog had exceptionally clean bowls.

Driving the Car

As a result of what I do I spend a LOT of time driving - to pet sit jobs, to rehearsal, to the barn and to other volunteer stuff. I usually listen to public radio, but there are times that I switch over to commercial radio talk to get a less soothing tone. I almost always hear at least one thing that has me shaking my head, often the ads.

Last night was no exception. I was coming back from rehearsal and needed something more abrasive than the show I had on so I went to a commercial signal. The radio show is not a screamer, but it had the ads and other expected interruptions.

The ads did not disappoint. The one that most got my attention was for a plastic surgeon. Supposedly this practice uses a less invasive process for removing excess fat from under the skin. They asked whether the listener would like to look leaner in various body parts – neck, midriff, butt and many of the usual places that people feel they are too fat. Most of them made sense as places where someone might be willing to pay for having less fat.

But they lost me when they dangled the prospect of getting all that ugly fat out of the knee.

It’s not that I’d expect people to want a fat knee, though I wouldn’t mind borrowing a little for over my bony knob for yoga classes. A truly fat knee, in an otherwise normal leg, probably makes it hard to find well-fitting pants.

But I don’t understand how anyone would have a fat knee without a bunch of other, larger fat body parts like legs. Nor why they’d worry about getting just the knee liposuctioned (or whatever this surgeon does). It seems to me that if you have a fat knee, there is some other part of the body that you would want to have worked on first.

I may be wrong - perhaps fat knees are a serious issue. I haven't seen it myself, but I spend a lot more time looking at critters than peoples' knees. So I could be missing something important.

Sunday Ramble

There isn't a single thought this morning, at least to start. But maybe some of the loose strings will seem related by the time I get to the end.

On the drive out to the pet sitting job with the Dachshund this morning, I noticed that there is a string of fire hydrants still wrapped in plastic garbage bags all the way out. The ground beside the road looked like it had been disturbed, though not recently. It may be a water line that was laid last fall.

This house is not even three miles out of town, but the road goes from small city to rural very quickly. In the past, the volunteer fire companies would have filled their water tanks on a nearby farmer's pond to fight a fire. The terrain is rugged and some farm buildings remain, but with development the ponds are rare and the newer houses are anything but. Maybe the residents lobbied for the line or maybe the town had it planned, but the homeowners must be very happy. Those hydrants make the difference between losing a house or saving it.

It's a bad day in the news. The fallout from the earthquake in Japan is not a metaphor. In addition to the direct damage from the earthquake itself and the tsunamis that followed, one of the country's nuclear sites had some level of meltdown. The earthquake and tsunami damaged the pipes carrying cooling water to the reactor. They finally did get sea water in there for cooling, but not before a radiation leak had occurred. People are being tested and time will tell. The news story says that 170,000 people, all those within a 12 mile radius of the plant, have been evacuated.

Most of these people had escaped the worst damage from the earthquake and the tsunamis, so were still in their homes or at least their village. I can't imagine what it must be like to have survived those events and then, three days later, be told that a problem with a nuclear reactor may render your home uninhabitable.

The Middle East is not a font of good news either. The Arab nations finally (and very reluctantly) asked the UN to approve a No Fly zone over Libya because of reports that Qaddafi's troops are beating back the rebels and massacring citizens. Even if this happens it will take days, during which many more will be killed.

Driving home, I was wondering if the conductor for the Vermont orchestra would add a short piece to the upcoming concert in memory of the earthquake victims. One of the few things that a musical group can do is to acknowledge the damages of the world in a peaceful way. I expect that there will be many such moments in performances over the next couple of weeks. It is probably futile, but it's something to do when the scope of what is needed is so overwhelming.

On the heels of that thought, NPR aired a story about a woman who is getting recognized for her singing of sacred Tibetan music. She has been taught by one of the most revered masters of this music and, until a westerner recorded her, was known only to the religious community in Tibet. But that recording caught fire and she is now singing this music in secular settings. As a result, she is being criticized by traditionalists who charge that she is presenting this music in an inappropriate or disrespectful way. She was concerned enough that she asked her master about this - should she continue to perform sacred music in such settings?

His answer was one that, as a musician myself, didn't surprise me. But I thought it was was timely for this day.

He told his student that it was more important that people hear this music than that everyone understands and agrees with their beliefs. The music is beautiful, as is the way this woman sings it, and it just has to be put out there for people to hear. What happens after that is.... what happens. And you can't control that.

So this ramble seems to have found an ending. If there is a lesson, it's that you do what you can. You keep walking the dog or singing in the choir or playing in the local orchestra, donating a few moments of a piece in a concert in the hopes that it'll help make things better.

If there is something concrete, like getting the town to put install a water line and fire hydrants in your neighborhood, you do that. It won't do much for world peace, but if there is a fire it might mean you can focus on that good work rather than rebuilding the house. And the dog will still be around to take you out on walks.

Pets and Emergencies

Cats are easier when there is a family emergency as long as there is kitty litter in the house. Dogs, even small ones, are very inconvenient.

One of the folks for whom I sometimes pet sit was called away for a health emergency with their mother, who lives three states away. I was not on line yesterday evening when this and another last-minute request came through. (The service for which I work uses mostly email.) The client has two cats and a Dachshund and she thought that a neighbor could handle the pets. But after she arrived at her mother's she learned that was not possible.

She made a flurry of phone calls, and this morning's visit was handled by a co-worker from her job who she pressed into service. I just called her and arranged to cover the next three visits. My available timing is not ideal but I am still the best option she has.

The other last minute visit may be covered by now - and it is a situation where there'd be no emergency if they had cats instead of a dog. One of this couple just had surgery that has left them immobilized. The other has to be away until the late evening for a job commitment. I called back to the service to share my imperfect timing with them, if it would be useful, but haven't heard back yet.

We may have to place two of our cats at a boarding facility when we travel next because one requires subcutaneous hydration, and I can't find anyone other than myself who can handle it. But it would be the first time in decades of living with cats that we'll have had to use a boarding facility.

Blankets Off Day

I woke up shortly after 5am to images of the 8.8 level earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I ran some errands, then decided to go help at the barn. I needed to do something physical outdoors to get settled after the horrific news.

One of the moments of truth in a barn with old horses – which are usually in good supply in a therapeutic riding barn – is what the senior citizens look like on that first almost-spring day after a hard winter when all the blankets come off. Of course, they’ve been checked over all along and groomed on warmer days. But looking at them over in the confines of a cold and dark barn doesn’t tell you as much as you can see at the moment when spring is a near reality. That day tells you not only how the horses look physically, but whether they have come out of the winter looking forward to another season.

Today was blankets-off day at the barn, and they all looked wonderful. The 30 year old thoroughbred mare and gelding both looked perfectly healthy, the 25 year old pony that had needed nutritional work was carrying great weight and the about-40 year old draft horse was fuzzy and untouched by the winter. Two of the younger horses, most over ten, may even need a diet.

But the star of the show was the 40 year old quarter horse.

This old guy was already amazing, with the straight back and the pure reddish color of a much younger horse. But today, after a long and tough winter, his chestnut coat positively glowed and he was carrying perfect weight over his side and rump. No one would guess that a good number of his grinding teeth are gone, or that he relies on a special mix of grain to keep eating.

Visitors always notice that he acts like a big dog, sniffing their shoulders or their hair if they stand near him. 

No one ever guesses his real age. 





I came home wet and muddy. The turn out rings are half swimming pool under the soft top layer of snow. But being at a barn full of remarkably healthy old horses was a nice reprieve from the  bad news out of Japan.

Getting Cranky

In my younger days I wondered at the older folks who admitted that there were times when they just couldn't handle any more bad news, so the radio dial got turned to fluff and trivia. I've always been a news hound so that seemed impossible to me.

But I'm one of them now, at least a little. I was listening to a broadcast on the local NPR station from the Commonwealth Club in which the speaker was laying out all the reasons that the US couldn't have the kind of economic recovery it had in the past. Earlier in the day I had been reminded that the time we are buying for our oldest cat with the subcutaneous hydration may be quite limited. And the day had a few other of life's normal frustrations.

I lasted just a few minutes into the broadcast and turned the dial to a local talk and music show. I really couldn't listen to that information at that moment.

Is this a troubling withdrawal or a rational act of self-preservation, just shutting off the noise long enough to regain the ability to manage things? Time will tell. I hope it is the latter.

New Age Yet?

I am working though a classroom in a book to improve the look and reduce the maintenance time on the web site for one of my orchestras. I volunteered to put a site up for them a couple of years ago and have been lurching my way along since. The sad part is that, with my limited talents, I am probably the most technically skilled web person in the orchestra. We still have a few people who refuse to use a computer at all, and many of those that do are challenged at anything beyond the basics.

But their reluctance is understandable. Many of the players live in rural spots, some miles out from a town center that is itself limited in services. Internet access is slow or not available for these folks. It's difficult for them to view a web site, let alone create and maintain one.

Our new age of communication has some interesting contrasts. Revolutions are being run in the Middle East via Facebook and cell phone text messages. But 35-40 miles from a good-sized metropolitan area in the US, we have people who face an uphill climb to access the internet at all.

More is Too Much

We got MORE snow yesterday. The 1 to 3 inches over a little ice we were supposed to get overnight turned into 5 inches here and 12 or more inches just 20 miles north, all over an inch of ice. Most schools were closed across four counties and our county declared an emergency due to fallen tree limbs, downed power lines and generally dangerous roads.

I am glad that we didn't get 29 inches like they did west of here in Richmondville NY or up in Burlington VT, but this is still wrecking good moods. By the time I got to the barn yesterday the other old lady who works there was totally disgusted. She had gotten stuck in the driveway up to the barn and had to shovel out to make it the last 100 feet, after shoveling out of her driveway at home to leave, and then had to shovel out the rear barn door and two gates to get any horses out. After getting a couple of stalls done I cleared out a couple more gates and we were able to get the rest out.


The horses were happy to be out of their stalls but their jubilation was short-lived when they tried playing around and were sliding in snow.... again. It's just not fun.

Quiet Sunday

Today is quiet on the critter front. We'll be going to a performance of a town/gown orchestra at a local college in which friends play, then I'll head east to my rehearsal in Bennington. They are predicting rain turning to sloppy snow later tonight, so it will probably be a messy commute back home. I can't imagine how anyone who lives out in the middle of nowhere plays in groups as an amateur. The commute in winters like this one has been would get terribly tiring - at least the professionals are often getting paid for the bother.



I am not unhappy that they are out of puppies up at New Skete until later this month. We've had back to back weeks where that would ave been a messy drive.

News from the Wolf Pack

I got a call from the owner of three dogs that I nicknamed the "Wolf Pack" about a check that he had mailed but hadn't seen get cashed. It seems there'd been some confusion around the address so we'll just try again. It was settling up for a slight change in the final amount because of a change in the last visit, an amount which was not significant in anyone's bookkeeping.

The dogs are "fun" - nice individuals but as a group they are a lot of big dog. This would not be an easy job for someone who preferred their dogs to be small and well-mannered. There are two female Huskies and an older Malamute male, all of whom mob you when you go through the door to the garage where they stay. After he caught a nail in my jeans, I asked that they get the Malamute's nails clipped before we have to cover them for a summer. I don't want to have that happen on a bare leg!

The Malamute and the older Husky get into some serious mixes once in a while, but it is never directed at people. From the hair I saw one morning, the Husky ends up the loser. There'd been a tiff overnight and the hair on the floor was all hers. The third dog is the ringleader. Getting them all to sit and wait for a treat has to start by getting her to settle.

The owners are moving to Florida by this summer and, now that they've found a pet sitting service that can handle the pack when they are both at the new place, are working on how to move the dogs. The best idea so far involves renting a big truck, with space for three big crates, and crossing fingers that they can get the trip done fairly quickly. These are owners who will do a lot for their dogs, something which is typical of people who use pet sitting services. But they have their hands full with this one.

The More it Changes...

I was reminded yesterday that the world still operates person to person regardless of our wonderful technology.

I had sent email asking if a local Arts web site showed traffic from Bennington VT and Williamstown MA, areas from which one of my orchestras draws audience. Their advertising rates were reasonable and I thought it could be worth a trial run. I received a wonderful response. One of the Arts site's owners looked over our web site and noticed that we performed for free. Because of that, they offered to put together a small ad for our next two concerts and run it for free. I'll be able to tell if we are getting visitors directed from their site, to judge whether it is worth paying for an advertisement.

The way this is all happening - email, ads on web sites and using web site statistics to judge success - is very much about technology. We will probably complete this entire thing without ever meeting in person.  But the core of it - an offer to help out our orchestra because we do something that is appreciated - is as old as human communication.

More Breakage

It was blowing wicked cold yesterday at the barn, a one day front that dropped the temperature to single digits by early this morning. The horses had been put outside at midday and I arrived about 2:30pm to another day of them being bored out of their minds with winter. The Halflingers had broken through a section of fence and were wandering around the inner part of the grounds, bothering horses in the turn out rings and trying to find something else to break. They were being ignored by the pony that usually has the run of that area, who was staring me in the face when I opened the rear door to check on things. 

An hour or so later, when we started bringing the horses in for the night, we realized that the old thoroughbred mare was standing calmly behind a gate between paddocks that was secured by... absolutely nothing. The chain for the clip on the gate was snapped. Maybe the Welsh pony in heat had started a ruckus under the mare's nose again or maybe the mare had spontaneously kicked out. One of the buckles on her blanket was hanging loose.

The wind was sucking the warmth out of the barn, which usually stays surprisingly warm thanks to the 14 horses inside. I closed the two year old in his stall earlier than usual and retrieved his ball from the ring to put inside with him. He relies for some of his sanity on toys, balls with rubber loops that he can grab with his teeth and toss around. Unfortunately he hasn't had much luck getting other horses to play with him. We regularly find his balls in the stall of the 37 year old draft horse, or the middle of the aisle after an unsuccessful attempt to toss it to a horse across the way. The youngster won't give up on the idea that one of these days the other horse will pick it up and toss it back to him like we do.

Contrary is a Siamese

Our oldest just got herself stuck in the spare bedroom. I realized after a few minutes of hearing her yell that this wasn't a normal moment of confusion. I also realized it was time for her medication.

Part of her treatment for failing kidneys is a daily dose of a drug called Azodyl. It's basically dialysis in a pill, and we take it out of the gel cap and mix it with the smallest amount possible of ice cream or baby food. It's hard to believe that it tastes other than horrible. She accepts our sticking it in her mouth but immediately drinks or eats after, and the youngest cat literally turns up his nose at smelling it.

Her companion, a slightly younger male Siamese, is the hardest cat to medicate we have ever had. Even using liquid medications in an eye dropper, he occasionally draws blood. Luckily he has yet to develop a condition requiring long term daily meds.

But he LOVES the smell and taste of Azodyl. Not only will he clean up whatever is left around her mouth, he'll lick the small plate I usually mix it on. We haven't had a reason to get his kidneys tested, but he isn't much younger than her and even if he is healthy he is older-healthy. So we let him finish it off - it can't hurt him at that small amount and maybe we have found a way to get other medications into him if needed. Perhaps we can mix whatever he needs next with a bit of this foul-smelling stuff and he'll just lap it up.

Boys will be boys

The horses were all very ready for some turn out time yesterday. The weather had kept them in stalls until noon today and at least one day of the prior three. Four of them - two Welsh ponies, an aging thoroughbred mare and two Halflingers - were in especially good form. They were all gathered in a corner where two turn out areas meet. One of the ponies is in heat and was inserting herself between the fence and the mare, who was playing "halters" with the Halflingers over the fence. She finally was so underfoot that the old mare chased her away from the fence and over the top of a snow bank higher than the pony. All the little pony needed was an Alpine hat and a yodel.

The old mare took that moment to wander off and grab a little sun, leaving the two Halflingers to entertain each other. After a little chasing, they turned to a game that they have played since they were colts together. One rears up and acts like they are mounting the other, but that's all they do. I found out later that they were able to lead the horses from an outdoor ring to the barn that way once, the darker one parked over the butt of the blond so that two horses came in on six legs.