Anyhow, somewhere along the line, we discovered that the alien was on the bed! I don’t remember who first noticed him–Does anyone remember why I think of the alien as a he? I don’t.– but none of us had any idea how he got there.  Below is a quasi-re-creation of this Great Event. I didn’t take this picture until the bed was back up in the office and Bee was determined to have her rear end in every shot, but you get the idea. It was pretty hard to miss him there.

Since then the alien also showed up on my yoga mat which I only unroll for the 45-minutes or so that I use it each morning.

You would think that, given the shortness of the interval and that I’m rarely off the mat during this time, I would know how he got there. But I don’t. Maybe he was attracted by the mat’s bright colors or sticky surface. Maybe he thinks he needs more exercise…

Currently he’s in the middle of the kitchen rug and I have no idea how he got there, either. When I went downstairs yesterday morning, he was there.

My Ms Clean Gene tells me I really ought to wash the little grub-ball  if he’s going to make appearances when when I have company. But then I remember something Maria Callas supposedly said to photographer Richard Avedon when he mentioned softening the wrinkles in his portrait of her. She told him not to because she’d earned every one of them. So it seems with the  alien’s layer of grubbiness. I don’t know where in his travels he earned it, but I’m sure he did.

Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a daily routine with me and further evidence that I have no life) it surprised me to see that she was missing some hair on the skin between her eyes and the nose loop of the collar. Because the loop is loose enough that she could easily get it off if she wanted to, I couldn’t understand what was going on. But then I started to watch her more closely and discovered that this was a consequence of a game she now played primarily with Ollie, although sometimes Fric and the cat joined in, too.

The game consists of Bee pounding on Ollie who then races under the chaise with Bee in hot pursuit. But although Bee can wriggle under it, she has to slow down to do it. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t get her head down far enough. When this happens only her needle nose goes under and the rest of her head plows into the padded chaise and suddenly stops the action. Concurrently, the nose loop of the collar gets shoved up on her muzzle with enough force that, after multiple shoves, it’s worn the hair off. While all this is going on, Ollie or whoever is under the chaise escapes, gets Bee from behind, Bee backs up, and the game is on again.

That solved the mystery. But what to do about it? I did consider wrapping the nose loop with duct tape simply because duct tape is my first answer for everything. However, I quickly dismissed that idea for reasons too numerous to mention and decided moleskin was the way to go. 

So off I went to the local Wal-Mart to support the Chinese economy, undermine the American way of life, and hopefully find some moleskin. As it turned out, once there I remembered exactly where to find it because I had been misdirected to it by a clerk the previous week. Yes, you read that correctly. I did say “misdirected.” I forget what I wanted but the clerk I asked told me I could find it against the wall next to the pharmacy. Wrong. All I found there was such a dizzying array of condoms and vaginal creams and douches it made me wonder what went on in Claremont that I didn’t know about, but then I decided I didn’t want to know. Because what I wanted obviously wasn’t there, I’d wandered around a bit in that general area and found what I was looking for next to–in case you were wondering where this was going–the feet-related section with its moleskin products among others. Thanks to that what I now I considered a fortuitous past event, I could find what I wanted immediately.

Because one of the trials of being anal is that you worry about things that no sane person would, I worried about how Bee would act when I removed her GL long enough to put the moleskin on the underside of the nose loop. Would she immediately charge after Ollie with the idea of prodding him to death with her nose to make up for all those weeks she’s behaved? Should I put her in her crate to prevent this?

As so often happens with my anal worries, they turned out to be groundless. Not only did Bee not go after Ollie, she never left my side the whole time I worked on her collar. In fact, she kept her eyes glued on me and that collar the whole time. She reminded me of a little kid watching her beloved security blanket being mended. When I had finished, she stood perfectly still while I put it back on her.

Then she looked at Ollie, gave her peculiar but nonetheless loud and irritating deaf-dog bark, and chased him under the chaise.

Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened  to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the snow gradually melted.” I mean ended as in kaput, pffffttt! One day and it was winter and the next, the Big Thaw was on. Plow lines along the road, driveway, and front walk shrank so rapidly, I felt disoriented and even somewhat vulnerable. Until it wasn’t there, I didn’t realize what a safe cocoon all that snow made. Human and animals had been pretty much limited to the walk and small parking area in front of the house with few distractions. By January, the plow lines on either side of the road and driveway were so high and deep that skidding while driving wasn’t much of issue. True, I might bounce off a snow bank, but there was no way I was going to go through one and down an embankment or into a ditch.

The snow melted so quickly that I had the distinct  feeling that, sans all that snow on either side, I could fall off the walk and into the flower beds lining it. The slight feeling of vertigo that accompanied this fortunately waned before questions regarding my mental stability had time to form. As the snow receded in the parking area, I felt like a dog confined to a run whose barriers suddenly disappear: Where did all this space come from?  As the area exposed rapidly grew larger and larger, I also discovered another faulty perception on my part: the dogs hadn’t been eliminating around the perimeter of the parking area; they’d been eliminating around the perimeter of the plowed parking area. Because this area kept shrinking, that meant quite a large area.

Another perception that bit the dust was that I’d been able to clean up after them all winter, except when there was a storm. On second thought, that perception was probably pretty accurate. It was just that we had so many storms that there still was a lot to clean up. The worst part of that was that some of it was Watson’s. In that instant I sensed what it must feel like to stumble upon the disintegrating remains of droppings left by the last member of an endangered species. Seeing that irrefutable physiological evidence of a being once so alive who was no more and never would be again hit me very hard, much harder than finding one of Watson’s old  toys.

But while I was trying to negotiate this metaphysical morass, the puppies, Fric, and BeeBee were in heaven. Each day brought a new layer of scents for them to process and more ground to explore. Best of all, it brought puddles of water and mud to chase each other through. I’m sure there are those who would disagree, but I don’t think any breed of dog can get as much splash distance out of a mud puddle than a corgi who hits one at full speed with his or her fat front feet. The only exception might be a brain-damaged corgi named BeeBee whose normal high-speed gait consists of lunging attacks on the ground with her front paws. This is not a dog you want to be wearing your white prom dress around on a rainy day! In spite of this and providing further evidence of my questionable mental state, I took the puppies out every day and watched them transform themselves and each other from fluff balls into sodden lumps of mud and debris.

Since I last wrote the last two puppies have gone to wonderful homes and things dried out in more than a week of days so dry and sunny I felt giddy.  The pups’ departure was easier for Fric this time (see http://www.mmilani.com/commentary-200606.html for a description of what happened the last)  because this time one of them stayed, although there are times she looks at him then at me as if to say, “Remind me again. Why was it that I didn’t want them all to go away?”

Getting back to perceptions, from the time the puppies were born, I had to constantly remind myself that they weren’t deaf. I’d become so use to linking “puppy” with “deaf” since BeeBee’s arrival that I had to consciously override that inclination. Now that it’s Fric, Bee, and Ollie, the human-canine communication is such a curious mix of signals for the deaf, visually impaired, and uncoordinated, a “normal” adult, and a “normal” puppy that–I admit–I periodically get confused. So, for example, I sometimes might give a verbal command to Bee and an exaggerated hand signal to Ollie. Interesting (and thankfully!) Bee is becoming very good at reading my lips or the body language associated with those verbal commands while Fric has mastered the exaggerated signals I use with Bee and is teaching them to Ollie.

What’s even more interesting is that there are times when BeeBee is, as I refer to her, “the good dog.”  This usually occurs when I use both a verbal and a hand (more correctly a sweeping arm) signal when I want the dogs to come in after a play session. Perhaps because she intuitively recognizes that she needs to stay on my good side more than the other two, Bee is usually the first to respond. Fric has already figured out that, if Bee comes, pretty much all of her excuses for not coming go down the toilet.  I can easily imagine her saying to Ollie, “Son, if the deaf, half-blind brain-damaged dog obeys when she gives the signal, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing her you didn’t know what she was talking about.”  Whatever the reason, Ollie’s response is getting much better, although I’ve had to remind Fric on several occasions that verifying that the young and disabled are headed safely into the house is not her signal to take off and do her own thing.

Meanwhile the yellow alien has vanished and reappeared so many times, I’ve lost count. I assume it has something to do with Frica because, until the past two days, she’s the only one I’ve ever seen pay any attention to it. However, two days ago Ollie discovered it and likes to drag in under a chair where he’s safe from Bee’s probing proboscis. Once there, he happily gnaws on it for a while until the cat goes by or Bee turns her back. Then the chase is on.

And so life continues.

Sunday was a gorgeous day and the snow was still melting so the puppies had lots to explore. Although playing “King of the Snow Mountain” and “Let’s Sneak Around to the Back of the House and Watch the Old Girl Stagger After Us in the Deep Snow” kept them busy for a while, by far the favorite game was “Chase Your Brothers Through the Puddles and Slush.” In addition to what it’s name implies, the latter also includes stomping in said slush and water to see what happens, with its corollary being”America’s Favorite Puppy Dirtbag,” which involves running full-speed at “She Who Might or Might Not Be Obeyed” and leaping on her to confirm one’s grubby status. Because jeans or sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and LL Bean boots have been my at-home ensemble all winter, this wasn’t that much of an issue.

At this point I could describe how ecstatic I was when various puppies defecated or urinated outdoors, but I do not want to provide further proof of the limited life I lead.

The other newsworthy event this past week was introducing BeeBee to Ollie outside of the pen. From the beginning, I’ve allowed her to sniff all of the pups and to have her front paws on my lap when I checked them daily. Although she never did anything harmful, BeeBee is BeeBee; because of her deafness and visual problems, she lives in a world in which things can appear and disappear without warning and sometimes this upsets or frustrates her. And because she’s so low to the ground, there isn’t a piece of furniture in my place that a puppy could go under to escape that she couldn’t get under, too. Still, I knew I had to introduce them downstairs where it was more open and away from the rest of the pups.

But I chickened out. Or rather, semi-chickened out. Because the image of what Watson did to Bee was still fresh in my mind, I knew I couldn’t trust my emotions not to interfere in any evaluation of Ollie-Bee interaction. In that case, my fear could turn what otherwise would have been a neutral or positive encounter into something negative. Hoping to avoid that, I invited best buddy Ann over to observe the action with me because I knew she would have the objectivity that I might not. So she held BeeBee and I brought Ollie downstairs and after a few minutes Ann tactfully observed that Bee was a very “drivey” dog, which is one of those terms that elicits images of an out-of-control-freight train. This is actually pretty accurate if you think about it because corgis are working dogs and like all working dogs they’re more aggressive. This isn’t to say that they’re more violent, but rather than they’re more responsive to changes in their environment. If you imagine a 25-35# dwarf bred to herd cattle, I’m sure you can appreciate the value of this. However, when the change to which you’re responding is a 3.5# pup who, in Bee’s reality, conceivably silently pops in and out of her visual field, an increase in the level of reactivity to keep track of this new addition is the logical response.

That increased reactivity extends to her paws and BeeBee doesn’t use her paws like other dogs, either. Because she lacks the fine motor skills and coordination to easily lift one paw and lightly bat another dog in play, she either hits with both paws or throws herself on the other dog. The more aroused she is, the more energy she puts into these displays.

Ann and I watched the two of them a little longer and then both agreed that BeeBee needed a Gentle Leader head collar to, we hope, help take the edge off. And, in fact, it settled her down a great deal and she barely resisted the message. So for about a week, I’d take Ollie downstairs and let him run around while I held a leash attached to Bee. She knows the signal for “Gentle” and I had to use that initially, but then I realized that, aside from using that nose of hers like a shovel, she was no rougher on Ollie than Fric was. Still I hesitated to let go of the least, let alone let the other pups out with her.

Until today. It began last night when the puppies had so much energy they just about destroyed the pen. Every paper that could be reached was shredded. Everything that could be tossed or stomped on was. Every loud noise that could be made was. More exercise was obviously needed. To remedy that, I took them outside to run and run and run and run some more, including up and down the plow mound and even over the lower parts of the woodpile. When they all had their little tongues hanging out, I stuffed their soaking wet bodies into my coat and brought them in. Bee was very interested in then as usual when I went out, but she stayed when I told her to. Ditto when I returned. Later, I was working in the office and the puppy frat house got into full swing behind me again. Because I wasn’t getting any work done anyhow–puppy chaos is not conducive to putting together a presentation on pet loss–I took Ollie downstairs for his daily dose of Aunt Bee. Each day she’s gotten better and fueled by the memory of last night’s rowdiness, I brought her and Ollie back up to the office and got the other pups out of the pen, too. As soon as I did that, she started trying to herd them, probably because they look herdable, kinda like the tribbles in that famous Star Trek episode. But Bee quickly discovered that, quite unlike the tribbles who only wanted to please, the puppies had no desire to do anything so, so bovine.

It started with the biggest puppy sizing Bee up while Fric watched.

Then the attack began and it was merciless. My worst nightmare was coming true. No, wait. That’s not a defenseless puppy being attacked. That’s two rowdy puppies attacking poor Aunt Bee! Ho-hum says Fric.

Oh, the canine carnage! Here you can see the puppy formerly known as Peanut Buttercup now known as Finnegan launching an aerial attack while Ollie comes in for the kill.

And a great time was had by all.

If BeeBee wasn’t sound asleep on my foot, I’d get up and take one last picture of them all zonked out.

So all that worry for nothing. Still, I know myself enough to know I could not have done it any other way. Now the puppies have a new playmate and, if I’m lucky, she’ll tire them out before bedtime tonight. And every night from now on.

And also one of them with their mom and Watson in happier days.

This morning when I came downstairs, the alien was right in the middle of the kitchen floor and the porcupine beside him. The last time I’d seen the alien it was upstairs, and I haven’t seen the porcupine in ages. Maybe Bee sensed the alien locating the porcupine, or the porcupine locating the alien, or the two of them rendezvousing in the kitchen to do whatever aliens and porcupines do in such places. While I was fixing their breakfasts and doing my yoga, all of the dogs walked around the two toys without disturbing them. It was only later when Bee and Fric got involved in one of their increasingly common, boistrous games in which one of them tries the flip the other by grabbing the other by the muzzle that both the alien and the porcupine took a hit.

I guess it’s also possible that something related to the puppies set BeeBee off because she seems to view them far more maternally now than she did in the past. I don’t know if that’s because she’s in heat or because the pups are now big enough they don’t look like rodents of other edibles any more. But even if she sees herself as Aunt Bee, Fric still isn’t convinced. As soon as she sees her puppies getting too chummy with Aunt Bee through the pen, she leaps into it and does the snarly bit. Fric also seems determnined to keep nursing the pups, allowing them to eat just enough puppy food to develop their eating skills, then snarfing up the bulk of it herself. Other times as soon as I put the puppie’s food down, she shamelessly throws herself down beside and flaunts her mammary glands as if to say, “Why eat that when you can have this?” Can’t imagine what Freud would say about that.

Below is the first decent close-up of Bee that I’ve had in a long time. Her wonky jaw is pretty obvious as is the ear that continues to march to the sound of a different or distant drummer of its own.

No doubt about it, they’re definitely getting bigger.

The alien has pretty much been demoted to the status of toy, albeit a special one. There was one incident this week in which Fric went on a playing jag downstairs and then started to race upstairs with it. Unfortunately, she only had ahold of one leg and she lost her grip when she hit one of the steps with it. I was right behind her and, even more unfortunately, kicked it. Then the two of us watched it as it plunged downward and came to rest behind the couch. She looked at me and I vowed to bring it up for her but so far I’ve found other things to do besides getting down on my storm-battered hands and knees and dragging it out. Maybe today…

[Later addendum: I brought the alien out and she brought it upstairs, then took it down again to play with it and then brought it up again.]

As interest in the alien has waned, interest in playing with Bee has increased and the games of tag have moved indoors. For the most part Fric still doesn’t want her near the puppies, but the puppies are as interested in Bee as she is in them. Her nose is pointy enough that she can stick it through the holes in the playpen and their paws are small enough that they can fit through the holes from the other side. The result of this is a game of nose-nudging and batting which they all seem to enjoy. Well, except Fric. But she’s not nearly as hypervigilant as she’s been and these nose-batting sessions often occur while she’s sleeping.

Even the snarly routine with Bee now seems more of habit than a necessity. From the beginning, it was rare that she’d hassle Bee when both of them were outside the pen, opting instead to merely put her body between Bee’s and the pen. Now she still does that, but there’s not as much of an edge to her as there was before. More like bossiness than defense. Even so, there are still times when Bee will do something (although I admit I’m not sure what) that will trigger a more energetic protective response. In this case, Fric will immediately race to the hassock beside the pen, jump on it, then onto to the crate, then down to the floor inside the pen and lunge and snarl at Bee in a remarkably short period of time. What intrigues me about this behavior is that it’s obvious all for show because she was standing right next to Bee and, had she desired, could have easily attacked her if she really thought the pups were at risk.

Years ago when I was pregnant with one of the kids I read an article about how pregnant women tested closer to schizophrenic (I think that’s what it was, although it may have been psychotic, but I associate psychotic more with peri-menopause) than normal. And I also recall a female MD who got off smacking a trooper who stopped her from speeding using what the judge considered a credible PMS defense. And then there are all those crazy things women do post-partum, including crying a lot or, in my case, consuming large volumes of chocolate. It’s routine for women to speak of being “hormonal,” thereby acknowledging the conflict that may arise between the behavior society expects under certain circumstances and the mandate coming from some far deeper and in many ways more real part of the psyche. Naively, I expected Fric and Bee to be immune to that and yet particularly with Fric I can see that isn’t true. For weeks she been living in a world in which her hormones called the shots that thousands of years of trial and error evolution have proven were the most likely to ensure the survival of her pups. Now she’s extracting herself from that ancient world, tempering it with the bond she has with me and other people.

Once again she leaves me in awe of how little we know.

I fear I destroyed the scientific validity of this study when I picked up the yellow alien and moved him. In my defense, I did this in self-defense. Fric went through a spell when the alien went out and came in almost every time she did. But when it started snowing in earnest on Friday, she left it on one of the little landings up to the front steps. Seeing it there immediately elicited an image of it become covered in snow, me not seeing it when I took the dogs out, stepping on it, and becoming scared out of my wits and falling on my keester when it squeaked. So I brought it inside instead.

In general she plays with it more and more like a toy, although it continues to hold special charge that it didn’t have before the puppies were born. When she’s stressed, either positively when visitors arrive or negatively when she’s not quite sure what’s going on, she either grabs it if it’s nearby or looks for it if it’s not. Yesterday when my youngest grandchild (one of two she adores) visited, she just lay quietly about as close to Geneva as she could while Geneva made the alien squeak by stomping on it. As soon as the two-year-old moved on to other activities, so did Fric, i.e. she didn’t grab the alien to try to hide it or anything like that.

The puppies are rapidly changing, spending more and more time playing every day. I intend to start offering them food this week and see what happens. The biggest one was drinking water from Fric’s bowl yesterday so at least he’s got the concept of lapping down, and they’ve all got lots of teeth erupting which adds another dimension to nursing. Lots of play with each other, toys, and the paper in the pen. I hesitate to say this because I don’t want to break the spell, but it’s been over a week since anyone peed on anything but the papers…

Below is a picture of Geneva with the incredible, lovable, hulk who was so good with her as were all of the pups. Still, he’s usually so active and jumping on his sibs, yet he graciously accepted being picked up (gently) and put down (gently) time and time again. As you can tell, she thought that he was quite incredible, too.

Then this morning we had a first in a long time. I took the dogs with me when I went down to put a letter in the mailbox, with Fric loose and Bee leashed as usual. I always hook Bee’s leash a distance from the road because I don’t want her to even think about going down there were she ever, God forbid, to be off-lead in that area. Because of the icy conditions in the driveway, I’ve been hooking her leash over a lilac stump further up the driveway than usual. When I do that, Fric continues down the driveway with me until I reach her end-point about 15′ from the road, and then she waits for me there.

This morning when I turned away from the mailbox after I put the letter in, I realized that Fric wasn’t in her usual place. Instead she was up with BeeBee and giving her a full-blown invitation to play: body stiff and facing in the opposite direction from Bee’s, tip of the tail quivering in anticipation. By the time I reached them and got the leash off, they were already engaged in knocking each other down and trying to grab each other’s muzzle, an almost impossible pursuit given Bee’s overbite and Fric’s undershot jaw. Once she was free, the chase was on. Bee tore after Frica up and driveway, Fric outdistanced her as usual (when she’s not pregnant) then hit her broadside and rolled her a good ten feet, which Bee has always considered the best game. She immediately jumped to her feet and bounced over to Fric who was standing on the walk looking down at her and daring her to pass. Bee accepted the dare and shot by her and beat her to the door.

I don’t know if the fact that she lost the race had something to do with it or not, but when she passed the alien, Fric suddenly stopped and went back and grabbed it. This immediately brought her up short because the alien’s little feet were frozen to the snowpack. However, she worked at it for a bit and soon broke it free. Then the three of them–BeeBee, Frica, and the alien–came inside with me. Once Fric was back in her pen with her pups, she snarled at Bee again while the alien remains downstairs with Watson and cat, possibly thawing out by the stove.

Frica did the “Oh, my God, there’s the yellow alien!!!” routine yesterday morning, running toward the alien on the kitchen floor as if she’d been searching for it for years. She picked it up and started to take it upstairs, but the cat was on the back of the couch and took a swipe at her. When she opened her mouth to bark at the cat, she dropped the alien–isn’t there an Aesop’s fable about something like this?— and it bounced off the back of the couch to the pillow, then off the coffee table onto the floor in the living room. She stayed on the steps long enough to watch it go, but then went up to the puppies. As so often happens, I then forgot all about it, too.

I read in the paper Sunday that we’ve had over 85″ of precipitation this winter, compared to an average of 40-some and less than 10 last year. I’d guess that at least 30-35″ of that has been in the form of sleet, freezing rain, and rain. There’s now so much snow on the areas where the dogs usually relieve themselves and it’s covered with such a hard crust, that they’ve taken to going on the walk. Needless to say, this does not appeal my anesthetic sense. Sunday morning I went out to clean up as usual, forgetting that it was below zero and windy Saturday night. The shovel bounced off my target turd and I, for reasons that escape me but surely dwell somewhere in the realm of senile dementia, decided to kick it loose. As usual, I was wearing my LLBean boots and let me tell you, it hurts like hell when you kick a frozen turd wearing such footwear. I thought I broke my toe, , thought of offering up such an explanation in the local emergency room (providing it hadn’t already healed by the time they got around to seeing me), and rejected the idea immediately. Instead I ascertained that my toe was as intact as that turd, limped into the house, and decided to wait until the next thaw–which is sort of happening today as yet another batch of snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain comes through.

Yesterday, though, my desire to wait lost out to more practical thoughts and I reminded myself that, unless I wanted the pets and myself to freeze to death, I ought to get back outside and clear the snow the plow guy had left next to the woodpile. I foiled the hard crust by beating on it with a sledge hammer, then shoveling what remained. Crude, but effective. But also tiring. After that I rewarded myself with a rare interlude of lying on the couch watching a movie. Watson, BeeBee and the cat immediately joined me there, but Frica alternated between the couch and the stairs behind the couch.

Or at least she did until she spied the yellow alien on the floor. Once again, this triggered an enormously joyous response and for the next 5 minutes or so, she played with it, tossing it into the air, chasing it, making it squeak. In short, engaging in an orgy of bliss with it…until BeeBee took it away. Considering Fric’s instant snarly act whenever Bee gets anywhere near the pups, it always amazes me that she gives up her toys so graciously. So now the alien lies on the living room floor where BeeBee dropped it after she’d tossed and stomped on it a few times herself.

For sure, what Fric did to the alien yesterday did not even remotely resemble maternal behavior. Yesterday the alien was obviously a toy, albeit a very special toy, at least for that short interval. What it will be today or tomorrow is anyone’s guess.

But this addition in warmth comes at a price. I finally got around to tidying up the haphazard grooming I gave her and gave her a bath on Friday. Naturally, after I had her all dry and spiffed up, I saw some places where her hair was longer on one side than the other and trimmed them up, too. I thought I’d brushed all those hairs out of her, but I now know I didn’t. I know this because I can feel them in the vest. They remind me of Doberman hairs, more like tiny needles capable of penetrating fabric and stabbing skin. It’s a good think I like that dog a lot.

Today I plan to move one of the purple aliens into the pen with the puppies, the one I periodically step on when I’m making the bed whose squeak invariably makes me jump being as I am in my early-morning bed-making stupor. So far the puppies are showing minimal interest in the toys, much preferring to poke, prod, roll, and gnaw on each other. Another favorite activity is to bump noses with Fric through the openings in the pen when she’s on the outside and they’re in. The two brindles, in particular, now have an air of purposefulness that I tell myself does not translate, “Abandon all hope. We are plotting.” Although so far they’ve only used the papers to pee on, any day now I expect them to discover that they’re a lot of fun to tear up, too.

Below are the 4-week portraits.

So the alien was gone, then it came back, but then once again it disappeared. After I went to bed, I did hear an alien squeak, but did not turn on the light to see what alien that might be. Instead, I was so tired I convinced myself that Fric had either picked up or stepped on the purple one that’s still on the floor. This morning, the alien yellow is back downstairs again. No evidence of the stove glove. Damn.

Meanwhile, the puppies are starting to play with each other as well as the toys I’ve put in the pen. The chocolate one is the most active as well as fairly vocal. He’s also very smart. (He and the maskless brindle share the Noisiest Puppy award.) As I write this, the brindle hulkers are sleeping on a rug outside the crate, one right side up and and one upside down. The chocolate one went over and practiced grabbing the upside down one by the muzzle to signal dominance, something he’d never get away with if his brother were awake. The males tend to hang together whereas smaller Coriander is much quieter and is not adverse to sleeping by herself in the crate. Once she realized the males were asleep, she staggered out and checked them out and then the toy (see below) and then the grounds for a bit before going back into the crate again. Then she came back out again and fell asleep on top of the male-pile.

Fric is doing with this litter what she did with the last, which is to nurse in shifts, getting the bigger pups filled up and then, after they go to sleep, going back into the pen to nurse the other two. If the chocolate male nurses with the other two, she’ll just nurse Cori. It will be interesting to see if she weans them at different times, too.

Apparently Mars is not retrograde enough that it enhances alien communication because there have been some strange things going on around here the past 24 hours. The yellow alien remained downstairs and did not move overnight, but yesterday Fric carried a catnip mouse downstairs the same way she carried the alien. This, too, she treated as something other than a toy. This morning, she tried the lug the hedgehog down, but only made it half-way down before she gave up. Watson later knocked it down on his way to bark at the plow guy who was here converting my snow cement-covered driveway into an inclined skating rink. It–the hedgehog, not the driveway–now lies at the bottom of the stairs.

Now things start to get weird. When I went to put wood into the stove mid-morning, I realized that one of my stove gloves is missing. If you hear a collective groan here it’s my kids because this happened once before. Once again I’ve torn the place apart looking for it and I can’t find it anywhere. It’s big blue fireproof welder’s glove, this is not a big house, nor do I have a lot of furniture, but I looked under and behind everything I do have. I also looked in the garbage, under the stove, in the refrigerator (and freezer), the clothes hamper, all cupboards and closets. Nothing. I have no idea where it could be. The good news is that I saved the remaining half of the pair from the last disappearance and it was the opposite hand I lost this time, so I still have a pair.

While I’m looking for the glove, Fric came downstairs and, after walking by it I don’t know how many times in the last day, suddenly spied the yellow alien from more than 10′ away and ran toward it with great joy. She picked it up and ran into the livingroom in an obviously thrilled state: “That which was lost is found!!!!” It was on the couch for a while where I assume she carried it when she jumped up there to harass the cat. Later I noticed it on the floor near the coffee table. Still later, when I accidentally kicked it when I was looking under the table for my glove, she immediately came over and picked it up and headed toward the stairs. I have no idea what happened next because I was so puzzled by that damn glove. And still looking for it. Once again, I assumed she brought up it to the office.

Well, if she did, I don’t know what she did with it because I don’t see it anywhere. The only place I haven’t checked in under the mound of sleeping puppies in the crate because they look so peaceful and I have work to do and it’s so hard to work when they’re awake because they’re moving more every day and making funny noises and doing silly things that inevitably distract me. But I really don’t think the alien is there. I have visions of him sliding down my ice-covered driveway on my glove in the rain….

On the puppy front, today Fric stayed out the pen when the pups were hungry, forcing them to walk over to her. When she still didn’t come in, the two brindle males started jumping on each other and Cori went up to the pen and wagged her tail. I went back to work and the next time I looked around, Fric was in the pen with them, but she was playing with them rather than nursing. Pretty darn cute.

Another big storm in the forecast for tonight. More of what has become the usual, lots of snow followed by sleet and freezing rain to make it brutally heavy to shovel. Between shoveling and hauling BeeBee up and down the stairs, I’m going to have arms like Popeye.

Frica also continues to become more playful, playing by herself and with BeeBee, although the latter still only occurs downstairs.
Below are some much better 3-week pictures taken by friend Rita on Saturday. The black rear on the left belongs to Cori who always seems to wind up facing the wrong direction or at the bottom of the pile. The dead-dog position of the chocolate pup in the picture on the left is a typical Fric sleeping position.

When she took it downstairs later, she would have taken it out but I made her leave it inside because it was snowing like crazy and I no desire for her to drop it out there and a) have to go looking for it in a snowstorm or b) and have it buried by the plow and have to dig it out. When she came in later, BeeBee beat her to it and was tossing it up in the air. Fric froze for an instant, apparently torn between getting the toy back vs. going upstairs to check on the puppies. The puppies quickly won out and the alien remains on the floor downstairs.

Fric and the puppies aren’t sure about their new set-up and, to tell the truth, neither am I. After I moved them into it, they looked so small, I wondered if I should have waited another week. I then started running all kinds of what-if scenarios with the big one being that they crawled out of the crate at night, couldn’t get back in for some reason (which escapes me) and got chilled or lonely. Like as if Fric would allow this to happen, especially since they’ve all discovered that their vocal apparatus has a volume as well as tone control. BUT, if nothing else, I do have a fertile imagination and once those images took hold, I had no choice but to resurrect their original box. Only this time I turned it upside down with one side open over a thick towel so it forms a cave for them. So now they had a Big House and a Little House. (Speaking of people who need to get a life!)

Fric took one look at that upside down box and looked at me in a way that made me wonder if dogs have cultural memories like humans a la Joseph Campbell’s work. I say this because the look she gave me when she saw that box seemed to communicate, “What a whack job! Are you going to start putting Preparation-H on your toothbrush again?” Of course, she had no way of knowing this because this happened before she arrived. Anyhow, the look was sufficiently withering that I turned the box right side up and decided the pups could just play in it.

Below are the three-week portraits which I admit aren’t the best of quality. I had put them on my desk which Fric does not like at all. When I hunkered down in a chair to get at eye level to the pup, she would crawl up my back and whimper. Plus sometimes the flash went off and sometimes it didn’t, plus they’re surprisingly fast. But I think they’re pretty darn cute, although I admit I’m biased. The little black female whom I’m keeping has been christened Coriander after the spice. According to The Joy of Cooking coriander seeds are “the most venerable of spices. Their flavor is an exquisite blend of white pepper, cardamom, and cloves with a hint orange” all of which reminds me of descriptions of wine rather than a dog, but what the hey. I also learned that cilantro is coriander leaves. Who knew?

The cat has appropriated the pile of nonskid rug stuff in the back of the closet for a bed. I decided this is a good thing because he is the only one of the quadrupeds who does not get a daily brushing (because I have no desire to face death or maiming on a daily basis) and he contributes more than his share to the hair floating around this place. Although I have yet to verify this, it seems like that sticky stuff ought to act like a sort of fly paper for cat hair which would be fine with me.

I also discovered that Fric is more concerned about BeeBee getting her food than her puppies. I’m so concerned that she–Fric–has enough to eat while she’s nursing that I tend to overdo when I have to go out. Yesterday I made a 20-minute run to the post office and left her enough food to guarantee quality milk production should, God forbid, the highway collapse under the weight of all the political bs floating around and I had to make a detour through Spain to get back home again. This meant there was a fair amount left in her bowl later. Unlike BeeBee who is a food vacuum cleaner who will suck up anything, Frica weighs her options. If there’s something better on the horizon–such as, in this case, a fresh dinner–why eat the leftovers? Consequently, when Bee stuck her head in the pen and started to snarf down what was left in the bowl, Fric just laid on the rug and watched her. And even as I write this, BeeBee has walked back and forth in front of the pen between it and Fric, pausing in the open door to sniff in the direction of the pups then casually but purposefully swinging her head toward the food bowl Fric had carefully hidden under a mound of paper. Instead of going into full Cujo mode as she did earlier this morning, Fric just watched her and it was Mother Two-Legs who gestured to Bee to get her short little corgi butt over here which she, surprisingly, did.

Once the puppies started making “I’m awake, feed me” murmurings, Fric went into the pen and ate just about everything before going into the box to feed them. When she was in the box nursing and Bee approached, she started growling at her again. The problem, which is always a problem with Bee, is that she can’t hear and her vision isn’t that great, either, so she misses a lot of Fric’s preliminary warning. The result of this is that, unless I keep Bee out of the way, the puppies experience some less than serene meal times during which their mother acts like a grizzly with PMS. Right now, for example, Bee is on the chair with me where she alternates between trying to put her needle nose on the keyboard and using it to work out anything that’s in my pockets. Consequently, if I don’t get a Pulitzer for these entries, you’ll know why.

The puppies are also becoming more vocal. Yesterday one of the brindles barked then jumped back in surprise at the sound. Pretty funny.

Meanwhile Watson the hound is staying down by the woodstove, possibly because it’s warmer down there, but more likely because the cat is sleeping in his drawer.

On the left is a picture I took of them yesterday at 19 days old when I had them out on the floor and they took a snack break. On the right for comparison is one I took when they were 3 days old. There’s no way those aliens could fit in the box now.