Anniversary

November 1 is a special date--it marks when I started working for Aramco. Yes, the dogs and I managed to survive one year here in Saudi Arabia.

In honor of my first-year anniversary, and assuming my cyberstalkers gave up their stalking sometime in the past 12 months, I am once again opening up Circus K9 to the world. No more logins required! No more invites!

Welcome!

"Community Event"

You think the US has an unhealthy obsession with political correctness in the context of multiculturalism...well, I certainly do (don't even get me started about the US's fear of, god forbid, offending Islam or Muslims; and don't kid yourself, it is fear, not respect, at the heart of it). But KSA can top any of that stupidity with room to spare.

Aramco is always in a difficult position with respect to Western holidays and events, particularly if they have any whiff of other religions about them. Legally, technically, other religions do not exist in KSA. Even though Aramco occupies a special bubble of rarefied air, they still have to dance around a bit to keep the mutawas at bay.

There are more than half a dozen church groups...um, I mean, friendship groups, that meet every Friday. The Catholic Philippino population alone is so large that they bus them in from Khobar and hold four masses on Fridays.

We celebrate the December "holiday season". Items that depict the baby Jebus, angels, and other Christian symbols are strictly forbidden and are rarely displayed even in private homes, certainly never where they can be seen through windows. But people do sneak in Santa, reindeer, snowmen, christmas trees, etc.

I got the email below this afternoon. Had to read it twice before I figured out what it was going on about--then I burst out laughing!

Note the time restriction! And the crazy detailed instructions for what to do if you "choose not to participate," i.e., are a Saudi who thinks the whole idea of Halloween is grossly distasteful.

Community event. What a great mutawa-distancing euphemism!

Fall in Dhahran

We've been having the most amazing weather the past couple of weeks. It's been in the low 70's in the early mornings with a light breeze. As I write this at 10am, it isn't even 90F yet and all of the windows in the house are open. It still gets up to 100F in the late afternoon but only for an hour or so. The dogs take every chance I give them to lay out on the patio in the warm sun--there is nothing as relaxing to look at as a dog taking a nap in the sun.

The trees here are desert or tropical species and their foliage doesn't change color. Still, you can squint and pretend that there is a hint of fall in the air.

To go along with the seasonal changes, I tried a sparkling whine recipe I got from a woman in my bookclub. You start with bottled sparkling grape juice (in glass; sold in the commissary bulk store), add a few grains of yeast to each bottle, loosen the caps, and let them sit for a week. Most people mix white and red grape juice to make sparkling pink. Then you decant it off into plastic Coke bottles (has to be coke; the plastic bottles made by other manufacturers aren't strong enough), tighten the caps, and let those sit for a week. You have to loosen the caps twice a day to let the excess CO2 out or the bottles will explode. Then you put them in the fridge. In a day or two, the fermentation process stops and the yeast forms a paste at the bottom. Gently pour into a wine glass and enjoy! The recipe makes a pretty-colored and refreshing drink with just enough alcohol to notice.

Making whine takes weeks (months, really, if you include the time it has to sit before you can drink it). So I think the sparkler recipe is a decent compromise--you get drinkable product about two weeks after you start the process. Oh, you detest bubbly wine? Well, beggars can't be choosers. I would never buy this kind of thing back home. But not only do we not have many other options, it's a bit of a challenge to see what we can make for ourselves given the limited resources we have.

So this evening I will make pad thai with fresh shrimp from the Arabian Gulf and drink a glass or two of pink sparkler on my patio, watching the sun set while I eat.

Tsingy's Obsession

Tsingy has an obsession with paper and cardboard in all forms. She expends a tremendous amount of energy ripping any cardboard she finds into tiny pieces. She loves her cardboard scratching box but that isn't enough. Here is a photo of her next to her latest work: a storage box in my office located conveniently next to her bed. She rips on this box every morning after she has her breakfast and a run around the house.

A few weeks ago, I bought two bags of cat litter and left them in the office, planning to store one there and use the other that weekend. Well, paper, cardboard: it's all good to Tsingy. I was on the phone with my mother when I heard a commotion in the office. And this is what I found:

She's a very silly cat!

DOG-101

We just completed the fourth week of DOG-101. It's going very well. There are 10 dogs in the class--and nobody has dropped out yet. Eight is the ideal class size for me to manage but I suppose I can't say I want anyone to drop out just to make it easier for me. They are all working very hard with their dogs. I managed to get photos of 7 of the dogs.

 

This is Peaches. She's a small poodle mix. Very sweet. She doesn't have any particular behavior issues other than the common small dog habit of jumping on people for attention. Her family just wanted to learn how to train her. I can usually pull her out for a class demo.

This is Yankee. He's very probably an Eskimo mix. Cute but rather nippy. Last week he showed some rather nasty aggression towards another dog so he does have some issues. His owner doesn't work quite as hard as I would like at the training but they are doing okay.

This is Moe, one of three labs in the class. Moe is a rehomed K9 unit dog so he's already pretty well behaved. Moe's big problem is that he doesn't know how to be a pet. He's a very friendly, calm dog. He seems to enjoy the training and class environment.

In the background of this pic is Charlie, the BC. Charlie has some major issues with the other three big dogs in class. He becomes frantic with barking at just the sight of them. After doing some research, I came up with a rather involved plan to try to nip this little habit in the bud. Charlie and his owner did have to spend most of the last class behind blanket-draped chairs. She was prepared to squirt him with water if he barked but we never heard a peep out of him. She also C/T when he was quiet and did some simple TTouch petting at the same time. She was totally amazed at the success!

This is Nellie, another lab. She is also a rehomed K9 unit dog. She's quite a bit more boisterous than Moe (that's probably why she flunked out of K9 unit school) but she's a typical goofy lab. She got a bee in her bonnet with all of Charlie's barking and stink-eyes and spent most of the third class trying to outbark him. Last week, we were prepared to squirt her with water too. But by keeping Charlie quiet and out of stink eye range, Nellie was quiet and focused on her handler for the entire class.

This is Macy. She's another poodle mix of some sort, a rescue from the Bahrain animal shelter. Her biggest problem is that she found just about everything on the planet more interesting than her family. I've been working on them a lot to "be more interesting than dirt" (and worms and dead pigeons and cat poop and....) and we are starting to see an improvement in her focus and attention on them.

This is Ido. She's a Saudi street dog, rescued by her family from some Philippino workers when she was a few months old. All feral Saudi dogs look a lot like this. She's probably a mixture of Saluki, Canaan, and god knows what else (GSD, lab, retriever, dobe...). For a variety of reasons (I can share my theories on this in another post), these dogs are paralyzed with anxiety and fear when they are outside their homes. Some of them act out with extreme aggression, attacking other animals and people. There are unfortunately too many of those dogs on camp. They aren't allowed in the DOG-101 class. Thankfully, a good number of them are like Ido. She has yet to take any food during class in four weeks. She wouldn't even come in the classroom the first week--her owner carried her in the room. The second week, Ido came in the room but slinked along the wall to face a corner. The third week, she came in the door under her own power and sniffed around my things a bit, then stood or sat the entire class next to her handler, ears down or back, tail tucked. That third week, I introduced the concept of using a mat as a "safe place" or "calm place". Her owner takes copious notes, does all of the exercises as home, and introduced Ido to the mat--with quite a bit of success! Last weekend, she came in, put down the mat, and Ido promptly sat on it. During one of the exercises (a recall exercise), her owner managed to get Ido off the mat, asked for a sit, Ido sat, then she told Ido to go back to her mat. Ido stretched out on her mat, front paws crossed, and calmly watched the rest of the class. Her tail was stretched out behind her and her ears were pretty much up as they should be. It's the most amazing thing to see these dogs come out of their shells. This is now the fourth dog of this type I've been able to work with. It is so satisfying to see these dogs become more calm each week and to see their owners be so proud of their accomplishments. Sure, sure, Ido still isn't taking food in class or doing the exercises. But we have to use a different metric for each dog--it's not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, dog training. If Ido will do a sit in front of the entire class by week 8 and take a treat for it, I'll consider that a training success.

Dogs Just Wanna Have Fun

The Hardmans invited me and the dogs to the Ras Tanura beach today. It was our second outing with them. My pics of our first trip there didn't come out at all. But this time it was a beeyootiful day, the camera was cooperating, and the dogs had a wonderful time.

Technically, we are still within the boundaries of Ras Tanura, which is an Aramco compound like Dhahran, but we are on a separate beach fenced off from the main beach, which is maintained in a Disney-like pristine state. On the dog beach, we can let the dogs run around as much as they like (well, except for Hurricane Mimi, of course).

The two black dogs are Michele's Portuguese Water Dogs. There are other people in the pics--those are Doug's father, sister, and her husband. The brother-in-law drove my car, doing me a favor, actually, as it needed to be taken out on the highway.

Here is a link to the online album. Enjoy!

Flora and Fauna

I found these tracks a couple of weekends ago in the jebels. I have no idea what made them--mammal? reptile? Judging by the tracks, it's a fairly good sized animal with a much wider body than the dogs have. Hedgehogs make delicate little round tracks. Foxes make tracks that looks kind of like cat prints. Lizards usually have a tail track down the center of their path. So what could this be?

These aren't strictly speaking local fauna but I realized that I have accumulated a rather large population of the "roadkill" dog toys. The T3i rating of these toys has inched up to the coveted 10 points. Both dogs love these toys!

Harry's collection of bear babies is looking a bit sad: one is just a brown rag and the other is missing an arm. He loves his froggy too but you can see that Mimi tried to get to his brains through his throat, removing the squeaker pouch for bonus points.