I haven’t made a blog post in a while.. I guess I’ve been busy at work and I haven’t really been inspired to write anything.  To help keep something fresh on the site, I’ll share some interesting canine survival instincts I have noticed when taking our dog out:

1.  When she is sniffing around exploring, and sticks her head up to sniff the air (as opposed to following a scent on the ground), she will always face directly into the wind.  This makes sense, as that is where she’d be most likely to find a scent of something to hunt (or avoid).

2.  When she is pooping, she always faces downwind.  I’m guessing this instinct allows her to see any predators that might have been alerted to her presence by the new scent.  In addition, she often (but not always) sniffs into the wind (see observation #1) first, which means she has to do a 180 just before pooping.

True story:  A few weeks ago I took Punky out for a walk, and I saw an Asian lady walking her dog without a leash.  Once her dog saw Punky, it began barking wildly (as is the custom among dogs).  The lady then proceeded to yell something at her dog in Chinese.  The first thought that popped into my head: “that’s silly, your dog’s not going to understand you if you’re speaking Chinese.”

I realize that my last post was about our new puppy, but she does all these cute and/or annoying things that I feel I must share with the rest of you.

Punky, we believe, must have been a descendent of some cat-dog union.  She seems to love climbing up onto the back of our couch, and going to sleep on the skinny ledge that it creates.  She also loves to play with my yarn that I sometimes leave out after I’ve finished knitting for a moment.  I came into the living room the other day to find an entire skane of purple yarn strewn all over the floor.  I then had to rewind the entire thing (I had barely started using it on a project I have had to put on hold).  Last night I started another project with the very same yarn.  This morning when Kip came into the living room, he found punky with my project and the ball of yarn on the floor.  Her doggy tendencies resurfaced in that my wooden knitting needle had been chewed on the end so that I can no longer use it.  Kip had to rewind the yarn and I had to buy new needles today.  She also likes to claw at things, like cardboard boxes.

Despite all the annoying things she does to destruct all the nice things I have around the apartment, I still love her very much, and I’m so thankful to have her in my life.  She is so cute when she curls up in my lap or beside me on the couch to take a nap.  She is so much fun to play fetch with.  I love my puppy!!!

As Stephanie said in her post yesterday, we got a new puppy named Punky.  We got her last Tuesday, and now I’ve got several pictures of her up.

She’s very cute, but for the first couple of days I wasn’t sure how well it would work out.  She just made us both think about how much we missed August, and it seemed a little too soon.  But then we grew to love her very quickly. :)

A word about her name- we didn’t pick it, but it’s what she already answered to so we kept it..  And to the Havens, if you are reading this, I don’t mean that to put down your choice of name.. it’s just not what we would have picked. :)  And we also give our dogs middle names or nick names, following the tradition of my parents who have Grace “Goose” and “Big Head” Ted.  August was August Louise Robinson (I’m not sure why, it just kinda seemed to fit), and now Punky is Punky Pants for some reason.

Anyway, you can see the new pictures here.

Tuesday evening, Kip and I drove back to Newton to pick up the newest addition to the Robinson Family.  We are happy to welcome Miss Punky “Pants” Robinson, a 6-month-old wire haired terrier mix, to our loving family.  I would like to tell those of you out there, that she and I are very good buddies right now, but it did not start out as such a good relationship.  The first night Punky spent with Kip and me, she didn’t want to go to bed when it was time.  We crated her for the night, and for those of you that don’t have dogs, that means that we put her in her crate and closed the gate on her so that she couldn’t get out.  Well she didn’t like that, and after about twenty minutes of whining and scratching from the crate, we decided to see if she would be ok with just being penned up in the kitchen.  We learned all too quickly that she could jump or climb over any kind of blockade we could create to keep her in the kitchen.  We had to put her back in her crate in hopes that she would eventually calm down and go to sleep.  By 12:30 am she had finally calmed down some, but I couldn’t sleep.  I stayed up playing solitaire and reading in the room.  I finally thought that I might be able to go to sleep around 1:30 am, but as soon as my head hit the pillow and I rolled over, she was whining again.  It didn’t last long, but it kept me from sleeping for the next two hours.  To top it off, Kip started talking loudly in his sleep, so loudly in fact that I was afraid he would wake Punky up and she would start barking and whining again.  Anyway, after that first night, we realized that Punky needs to be in a more closed off place to sleep at night.  Wednesday night we tried out keeping her crate in the pantry room, and we didn’t hear her at all.  Since then, everything has been going quite smoothly.

This weekend we are spending in Newton for a family reunion.  It was quite exciting when Punky first arrived at Kip’s parents’ house.  The last time we had a puppy here, August chased Ted and Grace around the house.  They were both terrified of her.  This time around, Punky is big enough to take on Grace.  But Ted keeps growling and barking at her.  Grace and Punky are still trying to get to know one another, and their playing scares me a little.  I’m always worried one of them is going to get hurt.  But I’m told that is how they get to know one another.

Pictures of Punky will be coming soon.  Keep an eye on Kip’s posts for when they are online.

Stephanie and I are doing much better now than we were when I made my last post.  After twenty-four hours most of the hurt has gone away.  Thanks to everyone who’s sent me an e-mail or instant message, it means a lot to us.  I’m always amazed that anyone actually reads my blog.  I know of at least five or six people with blogs and I only have (make) time to read one of them with any frequency.  Of course that particular post was kind of advertised by my away messages and my mom’s e-mail, but still.

On a related subject, for anyone keeping track, these are my two most favorite pictures of August.

Today our puppy had to be put to sleep.  I have put up the last set of pictures on my photos page for your enjoyment.  Please excuse the blurriness of many of them.  I need to figure out how I managed to turn up the exposure time, and then turn it back down.

August, born (about) June 20, 2005, died today, at an age of twelve weeks.  She got very sick over the weekend and could barely breathe this morning.  We took her to the vet and they x-rayed her and found that her lungs were clouded and her heart was too big and was actually blocking air from getting to her lungs.  They think it is most likely a birth defect that would have continued to give her problems.  They kept her all day and gave her oxygen.  When they give a little dog oxygen, rather than using a mask, they put it in a mostly-closed (not air-tight) aquarium and stick the tube of oxygen into the top.  By evening she was not better and was in pain trying to breathe a few minutes after taking her away from the oxygen.  We did not even get a chance to take her back home and play with her.  The vet told us that there was very little they could do for her.  So I had to make the decision to let them put her to sleep.  It was such a difficult decision to make, even though I knew it was the humane and responsible thing to do.  But we had grown so attached to her.  I keep seeing in my mind the image of her in that aquarium full of oxygen this morning, looking at us with big puppy eyes, probably a little bit high, and knowing that she trusts us completely.  And then this evening I had to make the decision to end her life and I feel like I betrayed her when she was helpless to do anything about it.

My heart goes out to anyone who’s ever lost a child, because I can’t imagine how much more strongly you must feel everything I feel now for just a puppy.  I’ve lost grandparents before, but losing someone who looks up to you as a parent (even if it is just a puppy) has an entirely different kind of emotional pain associated with it.  You may be reading this and thinking I’m overreacting; I probably would have thought that if I read something like this in someone else’s blog a few months ago.  This is really hard emotionally and I never would have expected it to be so difficult.

We’ve got a new puppy!  Her name is August.  I put a set of pictures up on my photos page.  Check them out, she’s super cute. :)

This Saturday Stephanie and I are getting a puppy!  It’s at my parents’ house right now.  Here’s a picture of Stephanie playing with her.  What Stephanie really wanted was a Norfolk Terrier or a Yorkshire Terrier.  We don’t know for sure what kind of puppy she is, but from looking at a book that has pictures of puppies of every breed of dog, we’re pretty sure that she is predominantly one of those two, which is amazing! :-)

We were thinking about names for her tonight.  I personally suck at naming things.  Last Valentine’s Day I built Stephanie a bear at Build-A-Bear Workshop.  When you’re done building your bear, you go to a computer and enter information, including the name of the bear.  I sat at that machine for at least thirty minutes.  I finally settled on “Mr. Hugs.”  Meanwhile about ten kids came through the computer terminals, thinking of names just fine.  They probably wondered what this old guy was doing just sitting at the computers in Build-A-Bear workshop.  And their parents were probably very unnerved by it too.

Back to the topic of puppy names.  We have narrowed it down to (in no particular order): August, D’arcy, and Pepper.  August because we are getting her in August, and because we started dating and got engaged in August.  D’arcy because: a) it is the name of a member of my favorite band (D’arcy Wretzky, bass player of The Smashing Pumpkins), and b) it is the name of Stephanie’s favorite male character in her favorite book (Mr. D’arcy from Pride And Prejudice).  And Pepper because Stephanie likes the idea of using the name of a spice/herb, and this was our mutual favorite.

It’s Christmas Eve and I am back in Newton for a few days.  Unfortunately, I have to go back to Charlotte today.  You see, I am taking care of Stephanie’s fish over the Christmas break, and I’m apparently bad at it, because I left him at my apartment yesterday and he’ll probably die before I get back there--unless I make an emergency fish-trip today.  His name is Mo, short for Molybdenum, which is element forty-two on the periodic table of the elements.  This is the kind of thing that happens when you marry a chemist. :)

I also finished reading Michael Crichton’s State Of Fear Wednesday night, which meant I only spent five nights reading it.  Not that I exactly set any speed-reading records for that, but I don’t typically read that fast so I’m mentioning it as an indication of how much I enjoyed it.  This marks the fifth Michael Crichton book that I’ve read since Garrison introduced me to the author in seventh grade.  I’ve read: The Andromeda Strain, The Lost World, Prey, Jurassic Park, and State of Fear (in that order); I think it’s my favorite of them.  I am starting to pick up on a certain “Crichton pattern”: a part fiction/part research paper story about a few good guys--at least one of whom is extremely intellectual and holds radical new theories that modern science rejects--go up against bad guys who started off meaning well but things got out of control.  And of course every book has to somehow incorporate chaos theory, the idea that humans can’t predict and therefore can’t control or understand the behavior of complex systems and that trying to do so is a recipe for disaster.  Look forward to long lectures wherein Crichton states his scientific views through the personas of his characters.  The Andromeda Strain doesn’t quite fit into that model but it was his first book.  Not that I’m complaining--I happen to like the way he writes.  I’m just noticing a pattern.  State Of Fear stated a lot of things that I’ve really kinda thought for years but I didn’t realize there was so much evidence for it.  For those of you planning to read the book I won’t spoil it by talking about it...  I wasn’t even planning on getting the book, but it was on sale at the bookstore and I read the inside flap and saw something to the effect of “from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica” and I was sold.  I have always had a fascination with Antarctica for some reason.  Which might surprise some people who know me and my abhorrence for cold weather that seems to intensify with every passing winter.  But I still think Antarctica is really cool, probably because there’s so much there that no one understands or knows anything about.  And I wonder what all is trapped under the ice, since it was a jungle many many moons ago.  Speaking of cold weather, I’d like to see a survivor somewhere that’s not super hot.  I’m not saying they should go to Antarctica or Siberia or Greenland.. I’m more thinking somewhere mountainous like the Andes mountains or Nepal.  I’m getting tired of islands.

This morning I had a dream that the day before I had let an army recruitment guy talk me into signing up for the Marines, and that now I had papers saying Boot Camp would start at 1 am on January first and that after six months I was going to be deployed to Tokyo for some reason.  And then when I was slowly becoming conscious, I was freaking out thinking “why did I sign up for the Marines, there’s a war going on and people are dying, why would I do that??” and I was laying there trying to decide if I had dreamed that or if it really happened, and I finally decided that it was a dream by walking through everything I did yesterday and realizing that I never met any Marine recruitment guy.

Stephanie just called and said I don’t need to pick up Mo, her parents will pick him up on the way back to Laurinburg tomorrow.  That saves two hours of my day.  Wahoo!

I don’t care what your momma says
  Christmas time is near
I dont care what your daddy says
  Christmas time is dear