I’ve got some shit going on and I probably will get around to writing about it.
I started the month with a sore throat and was running daily Covid tests on myself for about four or five days. All were negative. I guess it was just another respiratory virus, but my immune system overreacted and I had a cough for a couple of weeks. And then I got better.
For Valentine’s Day, I painted another Fresh Direct bag.
I’ve got this one master list on the kitchen counter and I’m working my way through it in no particular order, but there are things on it that take five minutes and other things that won’t be finished in five months. As I work my way through it I remember all the things I’ve left off it, so it isn’t getting any shorter.
People are still getting Covid. People are still dealing with symptoms long afterwards. People are still dying of Covid. No one talks about it anymore. When they cannot avoid talking about the pandemic, they call it the panorama, or the pandemonium, like it mustn’t be invoked by name. But also, it is spoken of only as something in the past. A couple of years ago now.
Our 80s museum is above a wooded corner. It’s a good spot for election signs, and I am regularly contacted by a neighbor who is well-connected with local politicos about putting signs there. She bought me a bag of groceries during my first week of Covid lockdown, so I always say yes. Last winter after the political signs went up and came down, a local roofing contractor (but not the one that everyone uses) put up his sign on the corner, like that’s what the corner is for: ads.
I thought about calling the number and telling them to take it down (which is what you do when the creepy guy running for a judgeship thinks he can slip his sign in with the others), but it snowed and a plow knocked it down and when the snow melted, I found the sign, took it home, cut it into a square, covered it with gesso, and painted it black. On one side, it is December 24, 2022. On the other side, January 1, 2023.
The January, 2023 box has the smaller boxes from December, 2022 inside it.
This January, we had an abundance of Tuesdays, and a shortage of appropriately winterish weather.
If you look closely at the first three January collages, you will see that I wrote “2022” and not “2023.” I am sure somehow that if I would have posted them on Twitter someone would have corrected me. I posted them on Mastodon, though, so either no one looked carefully enough, everyone was too polite, they felt it was an artistic choice, or they were respecting my tender feelings.
I picked up the embroidery again for the first time in a year and each time I do it I have the same feelings: I am not good at this; this takes an infuriating amount of time; I must remember never to do this again.
You spend most of your time threading needles, dropping needles, looking for the tiny scissors, cursing about threading needles, marveling at how bad it looks, wondering where the good reading glasses are, and hoping there is enough of this shade of purple.
The Fresh Direct bag I cut open and gessoed for the 22nd’s data painting is now sewn back together and full of other collages.
It is now the beginning of the end of the third year of our pandemic. In the past month in the U.S., we had 1,559,533 new Covid cases, and 15,419 new Covid deaths.
January 2022 The 1619 Project, by Nikole Hannah-Jones et al The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow The Big Six, by Arthur Ransome The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by Katie Mack
February 2022 Lady Death, the Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper, by Lyudmila Pavlichenko Dawn: Xenogenesis, by Octavia E. Butler A Story Lately Told, Anjelica Huston
March 2022 The Country Life, by Rachel Cusk Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Excellent Women by Barbara Pym The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki Missee Lee by Arthur Ransome
April 2022 Adulthood Rites, Book Two of the Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia Butler Imago, Book Three of the Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia Butler She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan The Picts and the Martyrs, by Arthur Ransome
May 2022 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger Great Northern? by Arthur Ransome Piranesi by Susanna Clarke The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
June 2022 A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt The Crocodile Bride by Ashleigh Bell Petersen Corrections in Ink, by Keri Blakinger (my favorite book this year) Sandra Newman’s The Men Ursula K Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
July 2022 Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millett The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, by Catherine Raven The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
September, 2022 City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin Fuzz, by Mary Roach Because of Winn Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo Cuba, by Ada Ferrer
October, 2022 So Big, by Edna Furber Anne of Windy Poplars, by Lucy Maud Montgomery Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow
November, 2022 Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher Anne’s House of Dreams, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
December , 2022 Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons
While December was 31 Tuesdays long, it was punctuated mid-month with the sort of boring personal crisis of conscience that almost no one who knows me in real life cares about, and so I went over to a Mastodon instance that was open to newcomers, made an account there, and within a few days started posting these paintings there instead of on Twitter.
A few pocket friends found me on the new site, and no, it isn’t the same, but right now it feels like it could just be better. Anyway, one friend pointed out that I was already on Mastodon, and lo, and behold, I had an account for my cat dating back to 2017, because he was into alternative social media before it was cool.
Do take a moment to marvel at my thinking that both Sunday and Monday were the 12th in December, when obviously both were Tuesday.
There is a video for the 17th, with edits and music chosen by what we call the clock app, and willing participants Eggi and Fellow.
Towards the end of the month, when there was holiday stuff going on, I started adding a lot of data about individual states, a few states at a time, until I worked haphazardly through the whole U.S. and somewhat regretted the attention it took.
Xmas snuck up on me, arriving with a warm front, a lot of rain, a power outage, and followed by an arctic blast. Our generator ran for 2 1/2 days.
Did I think that one big painting would be easier than 30 smaller ones?
More satisfying? More informative? More challenging? More efficient?
One thing that’s great about the one, big November painting is that for the people who thrive on ignoring me and all my grim paying-attention-to-the-coronavirus-data-crapola, they can just not look at the one big painting about it this month. Concisely and conveniently kept in one location.
I was exposed to coronavirus this past weekend at a dog show where I was competing. I have no symptoms, and I’ll start testing as soon as I can unravel the semi-official unretracted non-advice now vaguely suggested by the CDC.
Someday, after I find out why no one in charge suggested fresh air and masks to prevent the spread of this plague in the first place, I’d like to know why the total U.S. covid deaths reported by the New York Times went from 1,072,285 on November 18, 2022 to 1,085,139 on November 19, 2022 with no explanation, as if a difference of 12,854 dead people in the U.S. is not worth mentioning. Couldn’t we get a footnote?
It’s clear from the persistently high numbers of people hospitalized and dying in the U.S. that Covid is doing great. It’s also clear from the drop in number of cases that people with symptoms aren’t being tested, or they’re doing their testing at home.
As we arrived, our wet brakes locked and ineffectually screeching at the end of a blind turn in a downhill, damp, humid October, out from the shadows of the Twitter timeline lurched the hulking, monstrous news that thanks to the threat of the U.S. legal system actually somehow applying to some of the people some of the time, the weirdo bajillionaire who’d troll-threatened to acquire Twitter and was taken seriously and is now apparently its owner. I’m pretty confident that the stated goal of making profits off the hell-site is impossible to achieve, and they’re starting with lots of firings, humiliating code reviews, and half-assed tweets about making people pay to keep their verified checkmarks. Fun stuff (as long as you don’t work there)!
I have something a bit different in mind for November. I dare everyone to stop getting Covid so I can stop making these.
September had several Thursdays, and I meant to write about them, on them, near them, and for them, and may have even written something and squirreled it away somewhere, but it isn’t finished. Meanwhile, I got up every day and did one of these.
Every day, when I write the year, I always carefully say “2020” in my head before I write “2022.”
I have been trying to live more like we used to, planning short trips, accepting a dinner invitation, squeezing in the new, bivalent Covid booster late one afternoon like it’s no big deal. It feels some kind of way. I can’t quite name it.
Early in the month, I painted too many skulls over too many faces, and I had to stop.
We went out of town for a weekend, and saw some people it was very good to see, and, in retrospect, everyone seemed just as subdued as you might think they would be after a few years of a pandemic.
People seem weary, yet happy to have made it thus far. One friend was telling me that she had to stop drinking. I told her that my new migraine meds meant I hadn’t had any desire for alcohol in about 10 months. She said she only missed it when she had pasta. I agreed that pasta without a nice glass of wine is just noodles.
On the 29th of the month, I passed day 700 of this project.
Why did I start? Why have I gone on so long? When will I stop? What will I do with them?
I found another mangled cereal box in the recycling bin the other day, flattened and then bent in half. Of course, I’ve asked the one other person in the house who eats cereal to save me empty cereal boxes, but I guess they forgot. Really, I should stop using cereal boxes. They have creases. The ink sometimes peels off in a layer. It takes many coats of gesso and paint to cover the printing, and sometimes it still shows through. But something about re-using the cereal boxes–and then turning them over and using the other side–feels like we are trapped in this 80s museum in Bedhead Hills, waiting for the end of the plague, making due with whatever we have on hand.
Because we are. We don’t know which small decision, which quick errand, which trip to town leads to getting Covid. I don’t know many people who haven’t had it yet, but I do know some. I think it’s still worth trying not to get it. I am not ready to give up.
Sometimes I save newspaper photos of famous people that I like so that I can make them into skulls. Sometimes I save newspaper photos of famous people I don’t like so that I can make them into skulls. Most of the skulls are people I don’t feel one way or another about, and not all of them are dead yet. But everyone dies.
But not everyone has to get Covid, and so, not everyone has to die from Covid.
On the 26th through the 29th, I wrote down the number of total Covid deaths in each of the 50 U.S. States (and also the places like Guam and Puerto Rico that were listed along with the states), copying them from a list where they were in order of deaths per capita. I imagine it would be interesting to study the differences between Mississippi’s coronavirus response, where the deaths have been 430 per 100,000 so far, versus Vermont’s, where the deaths number 113 per 110,000. Maybe it’s their vaccination rates (Mississippi 53% vs. Vermont 83%), or maybe those rates reflect the efficacy of the states’ respective health departments. Mississippi’s many public health challenges predate the pandemic, though, and correlation does not imply causation.
It is so scary and frustrating to know that an American’s chances of getting through the pandemic unscathed is going to come down to being lucky enough to live in the right state in the first place.
All summer in Bedhead Hills, it’s been hot and humid with the promise of a few days of storms in the forecast, but tomorrow’s thunderstorms never come. We’re left with dry and drier grass, shriveled flowers, and withered shrubs. The squirrel are attacking the heads of the sunflowers before the seeds are ripe and in their water-starved state the sunflowers are brittle and easily broken.
Just to escape the relentlessness of August, I signed Eggi up for an obedience show in Amsterdam, New York, near Schenectady. The drive up on Friday was a little intense as it’s getting to the last weekends of summer and Schenectady sits north of Albany, out where New York State begins to be much bigger and wilder than many imagine it to be. The Friday highway scene was miles of cars loaded with boats and bikes and coolers and camping gear.
Eggi and I stayed at a dog-welcoming hotel situated between a popular seafood restaurant and a wedding venue , all sharing a nice view of the Mohawk River. She and I took many little trips around the building, through the parking lot, practicing our heel work and going potty, watching people wait for a table for four, or line up in matching red bridesmaid’s dresses to see their best friend get married.
The next morning
Saturday morning we took our time. it was going to be just as hot here as it had been in Bedhead Hills. An email from the show secretary warned that GPS did not always find the venue, but we did, and parked the white whale in a spot that was not shady but might be, later. I used our reflective knitted aluminum blanket and rolled down all the windows and set up two fans, transforming the white whale into baked potato mode. In this set-up, it stays shady and nice in there.
Inside the show venue, I found a busy show scene underway. The dog training club was divided into three rings, all in a row, running simultaneously. Dogs in crates and handlers in camping chairs were packed into much of whatever space was left, with a corridor running along where exhibitors entered the show rings. Handlers and dogs at the ready were milling about, yet the mood was workmanlike. There was none of the barking or whining you hear at breed shows, as dogs left alone in kennels complain without result or reprimand.
Eggi
While we were waiting to go in, we met another vizsla owner, who correctly guessed Eggi’s mother once I said who her breeder was. And with this new friend standing by, Eggi and I went in the ring and got 189 1/2 out of 200 points from the judge, looking not quite flawless, but definitely on the verge of perfection someday soon.
It was good enough for a 4th place ribbon in a big, competitive class. When I hung the ribbon from Eggi’s collar in the ring she seemed not to know what to make of it.
She got over it.
With this score, it meant we only had to get one more score above 170 for her novice obedience title, known as the CD, for Companion Dog.
I picked up some take-out from the restaurant next to the hotel, and we had a quiet night.
Eggi absolutely loves hotels.
Sunday we woke up pretty ridiculously early, having gone to bed super early the night before. We packed, ate breakfast, loaded the white whale, and headed up the road to the show.
Sunday’s judge was more efficient than Saturday’s, perhaps, and was further along with the classes when we arrived. I brought in a kennel and a chair so we wouldn’t have to stand the whole time we were waiting for our turn.
At dog shows, the handler wears a number under a rubber band on their left arm, assigned beforehand and distributed when they check in at the show. But in obedience, if it’s not, say, the Vizsla National Specialty, where all the dogs are the same breed, exhibitors are referred to by their breed. So on Saturday, I was told we were after the standard poodle, and on Sunday we were after the Berner.
Now a Berner is a Bernese Mountain Dog, which is a large, tri-colored, Swiss, fluffy, friendly kind of dog, mostly known for being self-confident and alert. Eggi and I were focused on warming up to go in the ring, so we weren’t paying any attention to the one competing, so when he erupted into loud, excited barking, and came flying out of the ring he was working in, nearly bowling over both Eggi and me, and ran loose through the competition until someone corralled him, we were extremely surprised (in my case), and frightened and upset (in Eggi’s). And suddenly the efficient judge was standing at the in gate with her clipboard, asking us to come in.
So instead of having Eggi all perfectly focused and concentrating on me, she was staring bug-eyed, hackles raised, ready to take on whatever just scared the wits out of that huge dog, three times her size.
We did not have the kind of trip around the ring that we had had the day before.
We did keep going, however; me, grinning the most encouraging smile I could muster, especially between exercises, doing everything I could to regain Eggi’s attention, and Eggi, still twisting to see what was happening on the other end of the room. Our heel work on leash was rough. The figure eight was so weird, I felt like I had someone else’s dog. I may have given up some points talking to her here, just trying to get her to concentrate on me.
The stand for exam marks the moment where you take off the dog’s leash, give it to the steward, tell the dog to stand, step away about 6 feet, wait while the judge quickly touches the dog’s back, and then you go back to your dog when the judge says, “Back to your dog.”
When I got back to Eggi, she was back in the game. Our off-leash heeling was better. The recall was great. We made it to the group sits and downs. Back to your dog, indeed.
There were 12 dog and handler pairs asked back to the groups sits and downs. We were lined up in two rows, about six feet apart. Eggi looked around during the sit, which is only a minute long but of course seemed like at least three, but stayed sitting so that’s what matters. During the down she was perfectly good this time.
Which meant we qualified. No ribbon, but the third leg of our title.
We will need to do a bumper leg or two, so she doesn’t think dogs explode and run out of the ring all the time. But now that I know we can get a 189 1/2, I’m wondering if we get get an even higher score.
And then, after this, the next levels we get to start working with fetching dumbbells.
There are bigger dog shows. There are fancier venues. There are shows with media hoopla and some dog world prestige. But the Vermont Scenic Circuit, dog shows held on the Tunbridge Worlds Fairgrounds in mid-July each year is still my favorite dog show.
You’ll be parking on grass, and walking a lot. It might get dusty. There’s no mobile phone coverage on the way in and out of the show, so make sure you’ve got your navigon programmed in advance.
It’s a bit of a drive to get there, so I loaded up the car with both dogs, flat buckle collars and six-foot leashes, dog food and treats, packable kennels, and some changes of clothes for me. On the way, I stopped for a grinder in Connecticut and tried to visit a fabric thrift store in Massachusetts, but they weren’t open.
Last year, I was unimpressed by the desolate lodgings I booked online, so this year when I found a gorgeous, dog-welcoming, old-school bed and breakfast called Hubble Shire Farm in Chelsea, Vermont, I snapped up a room. The innkeeper, above left, is an Australian shepherd named Tristan, who welcomes well-mannered people and dogs to this exquisitely decorated gem of an inn, and is, of course, supported by capable, hospitable human staff who will take your reservation on the phone or by email. And make breakfast and dinner.
There was another person, Doug, staying at the bed and breakfast, and he, too, was there for the dog show; we had most of our meals together. The food was expertly prepared, featuring seasonal dishes. I didn’t have wine but the inn has a full liquor license and some very nice wines were consumed. What fun to make new friends.
After my too lovely breakfast the first morning, I loaded the dogs in the white whale and started it up and got an ugly warning on the dash: one tire was low. I hopped out and looked and, in fact, that tire was almost completely flat. I called AAA. While I waited, I unstrapped the dog crates, took out one dog, removed the first crate, put the dog back in the crate, took out the other dog, took out the other crate, and put the dog in his crate. It had started to rain.
The spare tire in the white whale is stored outside, under the way-back of the car, but the cable that keeps it in place is loosened by a wrench that is stored in a compartment under the floor in the way-back, with the jack. The guy dispatched by AAA pulled up, unpacked the tools, and got to work lowering the spare onto the road. Soon enough he had the flat tire off, the spare on, and the bad tire loaded into my car, the tools re-stowed, and the compartments closed up again. I wiped down the wet kennels, removed one dog at a time, lifted the crates back in, replaced the dogs, strapped the crates back into place, and headed to the show.
When we arrived at the dog show, I checked in with the woman who tells everyone where to park, and she offered me one of the shadier spots on the property. I grabbed Eggi, left Fellow in his crate with a fan on, and walked and ran and walked and ran across the show grounds to the obedience ring to see if we had missed her class. We were just in time. The ring stewards asked me to take some deep breaths (which was impossible), told the slightly irate person who thought she was going in the ring next that she wasn’t going in next, and sent us in the ring instead. We weren’t great. But we managed to get a qualifying score so we were invited to return for the group sits and downs.
Now we had to wait for the rest of the class to go, including the sulky person we’d cut in front of, and the adrenaline that had carried us to this point had been used up and would take us no further. When it was time for the group sits and downs, we were lined up in catalog order, next to the first dog in, and though Eggi sat as asked, she spent the 60 seconds rolling her eyes around and looking every which way except at me, and when the judge said, “Back to your dogs,” she jumped defiantly to her feet, which was our moment of disqualification. It was a strange relief to be excused.
When we went outside, Eggi pooped immediately, which certainly explained why she couldn’t sit.
After a bit, it was Fellow’s turn, and even after he got his potty-business taken care of, he still seemed like he was on the verge of explosion. After a day of travel, a night in a new place with a genuine dog innkeeper, a flat tire, and a whole dog show to walk through, a Fellow was pretty fired up. I felt like he might jump out of the ring to greet a ring steward, or pee on the jump pile, or leap up and lick me in the face. But he stayed with me, and must have seemed obedient enough, despite barking twice, because in the end he had a 191/200 and won the beginner novice class.
We went and found our friends‘ RV: Eggi and Fellow’s show handler T and her whole entourage. Nothing like having someone to show off your blue ribbon to! Fellow was rowdy and riled up, jumping all over me and barking and not letting me talk and looking like I’d stolen the ribbon from someone whose dog was not the embodiment of disobedience.
After that, I put Fellow away and went to watch my new friend Doug showing his dog in the groups. He has a rare breed, an Azawakh, named Ksenia. This breed, a West African sight hound, was new to the AKC hound group in 2019, so as a spectator, it is fun to watch the dog and the look of excited recognition on judges’ faces. Oh, they seem to be thinking, here’s one of these leggy and lean dogs that fits into a rectangle…what else do I remember? Ksenia is an exceptional example of the breed, of course, and through the weekend a number of people approached Doug to ask about her or to say that she was as nice an Azawakh as they’d ever seen. Of course, she is absolutely the nicest Azawakh that I’ve ever seen, and she carries herself with the polite, delicate, serene aloofness of a desert queen.
Doug came all the way from south Florida to do this show, and Ksenia had never been shown outdoors on grass before. The first day she seemed to think maybe Doug was confused about the grass and they were having a very strange potty walk. But every trip they took around the ring she got a little more relaxed and comfortable with it.
The next day, I woke up with a headache, so I tossed back a migraine pill with that deluxe breakfast on fine china. After walking my dogs, I loaded them in the white whale and drove up to Barre to see if I could get my tire repaired so we wouldn’t have to drive back home to Bedhead Hills on a janky-looking spare. It was another beautiful day, and the innkeeper’s human staff warned me that the way to Barre had potholes, so when the navigon sent me up a road called “Washington Turnpike” that felt suspiciously like a well-maintained dirt road I didn’t give it much thought until it narrowed and began to get winding and uphill. Then there was an entire loose herd of cows on the road and my state of anxiety in firm command and a quiet voice in my head saying well I could get a picture or even turn around. But, no. Onward.
In Barre, they patched my tire and did not return the spare to the storage underneath, but it was only $40 and they were very nice and I was so much happier driving back to the dog show with four proper tires again.
Arriving later at the dog show, there was no primo shady parking spot for me, but it was ok; I joined all the other late arrivals in the big grassy field to the south of the main action. I’d missed Eggi’s class but was in time for Fellow’s. The thing about migraine meds, though, is they sometimes take away my keener attention to detail, so when I left Fellow sitting and staying in the center of the ring to perform the walk-around, which is meant to be a neat, brisk rectangular walk ending with returning to my dog, what I did was a brisk perambulation of roughly 400° so that when I did recognize my over-rambling ways and return to my dog, he exploded with relief. It was my error and the judge informed me as much. So no qualifying score for us that day, which was just was well, because it was just for practice anyway. I thanked the judge, told Fellow he was a good boy, and went to find the group rings to watch Doug and his grand champion Azawakh.
We were in time to watch the terrier group, and to remember why we come to Vermont to show dogs in July: for the blue sky and green grass and pleasant breezes. There’s almost no place to stay nearby, so most of the professional handlers come and camp on the fairgrounds in their RVs, and everyone brings a chair over to watch groups, and no one rushes off for a dinner reservation. Every single day at this show feels like a party. Many days include ice cream.
And when I got back to the white whale, the tire that I’d paid $40 to repair was dramatically flat again. So I called Doug and he came back for me and my animals, because AAA was not to be summoned for love or money.
When I did finally get through to AAA later that night, it was by phone, and we arranged a service appointment for the flat tire the next morning between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.. I gave detailed directions for finding the white whale, owing to the lack of mobile phone coverage outside of the show grounds and the size of the fairgrounds. I handed the flat tire to the next day’s agenda.
We had another amazing meal, and a walk up the beautiful hill behind the inn.
The next morning, Doug got up early to give me and my pets a ride to my abandoned car at the show even though he didn’t need to be there until 1 p.m. Aren’t friends great? We were there a few minutes before 8, as arranged, and I sat for about 45 minutes, my quiet phone in my hand, while I watched the woman who tells everyone where to park at work. A few cars tried to park next to the white whale, and I told the drivers that I had a flat and was waiting on AAA and they all wished me luck and chose to park someplace else.
Then, around 8:45, the woman who tells everyone where to park came over and hollered at me at some length, saying that I couldn’t tell people not to park next to me, and that anyway AAA wasn’t coming because they came earlier and couldn’t find me so they left.
While she was scolding me, I thought about what I might reply to the woman who tells everyone where to park, and decided that there was no reply that could improve my predicament at the moment. So I said nothing to her, stared at her dumbfounded, while she drove off in her golf cart to tell some other people where to park.
When I called AAA again, they were eager to connect me directly with the person who had been scheduled to deal with my flat that morning. This irritable man in Montpelier has no business doing roadside assistance for AAA, and had apparently shown up before our appointment at 8 a.m. that morning, and was now claiming he’d tried to call me repeatedly, that he’d spoken to the woman who tells everyone where to park, that she said she knew me and had searched the grounds for me, that she hadn’t found me, that she knew where I was staying and had called the manager of my hotel and had been told they didn’t know where I was. I unexpectedly terminated his telling of this ridiculous story because the man had escalated to shouting at me in addition to lying to me. My phone never rang; I had no missed calls or voicemail. If the woman who tells people where to park knows who I am I’d be very surprised and if she spoke to Tristan at the inn, well, I hope she wasn’t as rude to the innkeeper-dog as she was to me.
So, I started over with AAA, feeling pretty emotional about the heaping helpings of verbal abuse I’d had to take this morning and all before 9 a.m., and having had to explain that my tire had been flat since the day before, asking if they’d expected me to sleep in my car, and pausing my narrative to cry quietly but somewhat dramatically and making them wait.
Once I was able to finish telling what happened, and they pulled up my account and saw the details of my calls and scheduled appointment on their end, I could hear the change in pitch as true, righteous indignation crept into the voice of the AAA person on the phone. My call would be expedited, to a different shop, and I was told not to worry.
Actually, it was a nice day, I was at a dog show with my pets, I could go get a fruit flip soon and maybe there’d be time to show Fellow.
The new guy AAA sent from Rutland was nice, though his jack wasn’t quite up to the task of lifting the white whale, so we had to get out my jack, which was in the compartment in the floor in the way back, under the dog crates. So, once again, I unstrapped the dog crates, took out one dog, removed the first crate, put the dog back in the crate, took out the other dog, took out the other crate, and put the dog in his crate. Once we got the white whale up, the new guy was able to get 5 of the 6 freshly tightened lug nuts loose in good time and however he got the sixth one off is between him and his gods. I couldn’t watch.
I asked him to check the pressure on the spare, explaining that I was driving all the way back to New York on it, and he did, saying that it was full size, and it would be fine; it was just dirty.
Then I removed one dog from a crate at a time, lifted the kennels back into the white whale, replaced the dogs, strapped the crates back into place front and back, thanked the guy, hung a bucket of water and set up the fans and the reflective blanket so Eggi would stay cool while I showed Fellow.
Fellow and I had our best day of showing so far, with 192/200 points, which was good enough for a second place ribbon.
My friend Doug and Ksenia got a judge who was really digging seeing such a great example of an Azawakh, and gave her a nice owner-handled Group 2. Then we had the barbecue to go to, with great food, a real good band, and good fun.
When you went to summer camp as a kid, your counselors also made up songs to entertain you while you ate ribs and corn on the cob and baked beans and drank lemonade, and for this group of dog professionals, the fact that these handlers show up every year with a new song, which they’ve written and practiced just for this event may be one of the highlights of their year.
Last year, we came for a title. This year, I came to show both dogs in obedience, but mostly hoping to finish Eggi’s novice title. Fellow’s beginner novice title is finished, and he isn’t quite ready to compete at novice. Eggi managed to be just close enough to coming into or going out of season that she couldn’t quite keep it together for good scores in obedience. Or maybe it’s my nerves in the ring. So we will have to keep going.
Almost Every Thursday