Boodle

Boodle, the companion of my friend Moya in Dhahran, died a couple of days ago. His big, loving heart couldn't keep beating for him any longer.

He and Moya were one of my first private training experiments, and a highly successful one at that.

Boodle and Moya were our regular walking companions. Boodle and Harry made up the grumpy old man contingent, mostly content to watch the pummeling and racing from the sidelines.

Boodle and Moya were part of my agility "regulars". It took a lot of hot dogs and a bit of pushing, but he did learn to enjoy tunnels!

The jump chute challenge.

Going in!

Coming out! He is so pleased with himself!

Boodle loved digging deep, pointless holes in cool, damp sand, usually in Penny's backyard.

He guarded the communal water spigot.

Mr B barked at the gardeners up until the very end.

He will be missed. 

Upgrade

One of the useful skills I picked up while in Saudi Arabia was how to manage home fermentation. I won't say that I am particularly good at it but I did enough experimentation there to get an idea of the ingredients and equipment needed, and of how the process should generally work.

A former resident or owner of the house I'm in now planted white grape vines (pernicious things) and a pear tree, among other interesting flora. I picked the pears over a month ago--apparently you have to put them into cold storage for weeks to ripen them, you can't pull a ripe pear from a pear tree--and harvested several pounds of grapes a few days ago.

The beauty of fermentation is that you can ferment just about anything that contains sufficient food for the yeast. And fortunately, yeast aren't that picky. Humans have probably been managing fermentation for thousands of years, probably at least as long as we have had containers or other ways to store fruit or grain.

I brought back 16 of the green glass bottles from Saudi, and my decanting equipment, but I needed some fermentation containers. You'll recall that I used a 20-liter plastic Coleman cooler for my primary and new 20-liter plastic water bottles for my secondary containers (I would even take them back with yeast sediment on the bottom to exchange for a new one). I figured that it was time for an upgrade, so I got some glass carboys at the local brew shop.

I decided to start with a small batch of pear wine--emphasis on small since I might end up with around three gallons of the stuff in the end. The pear mash (which I flavored with fresh grated ginger and black peppercorns) is settling in.




I haven't added the yeast yet. Most of the recipes I found for making wine from fresh fruit suggested letting the mash sit for a day or two before adding the yeast. (None of them said why to do this but perhaps it is to equalize the sugar in the solution or let the pH change or something.) Since I've only attempted whine from juice, it will be interesting to see how this experiment proceeds.

I could discover in a few weeks that I fermented up a couple of gallons of shite but that wouldn't be the first time. I've got several pounds of white grapes in the freezer waiting for round number two!

Canine Chaos

I drove up to Anne's in Portland yesterday afternoon for dinner (reluctantly dragging myself away from a palate fistula repair in an elderly dachshund's mouth at the clinic). I took my three dogs. Anne has three dogs. A friend from Utah was visiting her who had three dogs. Another friend from Portland joined us with one of her dogs. Lost count?

The role call:

• Azza, 2 yr old desert dog
• Mimi and Harry, 8 yr old and 15 yr old smooth fox terriers
• Forrest, 10 yr old parson russell terrier
• Skeeter, 4 yr old parson russell terrier (since she is matter and Mimi is anti-matter, their meeting would annihilate the universe so Skeeter isn't in the video below)
• Rumble, 1.5 yr old aussi
• Bender and Tolt, 6 mo old B&W BC pups
• their dad, 10-ish yr old, and older brother, unknown age, also B&W BCs

Another way of looking at this chaos: four border collies, three terriers (four counting Skeeter), an aussie, and the desert dog. It was a seething mass of dogs.

It was a little bit rough with Azza at first because she was overwhelmed by all those dogs. Lots of cringing, whining vocalizations, teeth baring and snapping, and generally not very nice behavior on her part. She's also not had the best experiences with black dogs so that might have played into her fear. Thankfully, the BCs and the Aussie were all well adjusted and simply turned away from her instead of engaging or escalating.

We ended up dumping Azza and Skeeter, who get along very well, in a side yard. That turned out to be a Very Good Idea as those sorts of random decisions can be. While watching everything for 20 minutes or so, Azza was able to calm down and work out that none of those dogs had any interest in harming her and might in fact have some play potential.

After behaving badly in the intro, it took Azza quite some time to convince the other dogs to play with her. They'd look at her and think "you crazy, bitch" and walk away. She kept trying though, and she can be pretty persuasive. She avoided the older dogs and eventually had great success with the younger ones.

I can only say this about the video, which I unfortunately shot late in the evening: Harry seems to at last be doing great on the Adequan (he's the only one who's barking, too), and that's a lot of dogs!

Getting Experience 4

I've been shadowing at the same clinic now for a while and have gotten to know the techs and a couple of the doctors pretty well. One of the doctors in particular seems willing to spend some time with me, show me cool things (like what a normal canine prostate feels like), and answer my endless questions (I never ask half of the questions I have because it would be entirely too intrusive; the techs and vets have a job to do, after all). I am extremely grateful to her for this.

There's an odd line that one walks as a pre-vet shadow. You aren't a tech or a vet, and you spend far more time with the techs doing what can best be described as routine scut work. You see and hear things that sometimes even the vets don't know about, or don't bother about anymore. Vets had to do this scut work too, during their college training, internships, and residencies. But once that is behind them, most of them seem perfectly happy to let the techs do all that stuff. I figure you can't know how something is to be done properly unless you do it yourself so I am quite happy at the end of the day to clean cages, scrub exam room mats, and clean ear cones.

I keep a small notebook with me at all times and track my activities, which I transcribe later in a spreadsheet under the headings "performed" (vet-like things I actually did), "observed", and "additional learnings" (like not to say "ew" in front of a client).

I'm always very excited to record a "performed" activity (like a jugular blood draw or the prostate exam). Those don't come around very often because there are some very reasonable legal restrictions on what I, not an employee or certified specialist, can or should do.

Today I got to take down the history of a new client. The clinic uses a fairly clunky patient management system and I'm not authorized to use it. So I had to write everything down by hand then type it into the system later under someone else's ID. I was sort of nervous when the lead tech printed out the list of questions, handed it to me, and said, we are behind, go collect this info from that client who's been waiting far too long. But as soon as I stepped into the room, I slipped right into a familiar mindset. I had heard these same questions a dozen times or more, they weren't surprising. All those years marketing geoscience project proposals and those short but intense years teaching the dog classes while I was in Dhahran armed me perfectly for this sort of interaction. I realized I was nervous only because I was excited--excited that the lead tech trusted me enough to do this task and not screw it up (it was her client so all the info would be transcribed under her name). But I wasn't nervous about speaking to this young man about his dog.

I won't say I have the gift of gab. I am painfully socially awkward. But put me in the right context, and everything flows like water.

Shit Soup

I was rather proud of my poop disposal system for our new place here. Note the past tense.

I got one of those small rake and flat pan sets at the store and placed a plastic bucket out by the compost bin. Each week I fit the bucket with a recycled dog food bag and other plastic-bag-like object.

I scoop poop once a day, sometimes twice. Not because the dogs shit truckloads, but because they like to run around and play when they are outside and I'd rather scoop poop than clean it off the floors inside. I dump the turd collection into the bag-lined bucket. Cat litter box cleanings go in there too.

Once a week, on trash day, I slip the poop bucket liner into my household garbage bag. Since there was only a thin layer of plastic between me and several pounds of shit, I felt double bagging was prudent.

The system worked fabulously all summer. The unusual summer when it didn't rain for nearly four months.

On Thursday of last week, a storm rolled in decked out with thunder and lightening. It poured for 12 hours.

When I out the next morning, I discovered that I had made around a gallon of shit soup.

Clearly the system will need modification.

Getting Experience 3

There are a handful of items that one needs in order to apply to any vet school. The personal statement shouldn't be that hard for me to write. I think the hard part of that will be the thousand- or so-word limit (I rarely lack for words). Another is at least one letter of recommendation from a vet. That item goes hand in hand with the third one, documented experience in a vet-supervised setting. My only option for that right now is shadowing.

I need to have a minimum of 300 hours of this type of experience before I can begin my applications. Most schools don't specify the exact number of hours but there are unspoken, unwritten understandings of some minimum.

After two months, I have so far accumulated around 50 hours. The task seems daunting but I keep looking for opportunities to get more hours. For example, I will be volunteering at a mobile spay/neuter/vax clinic for feral cat colonies later this month. So, daunting, yes, but I thought, if I just keep chipping away...

Until I came across a rather unsettling bit of information from UC Davis. While this is a very fine vet school, it wasn't on my list of five that I plan to apply to for admission. Good thing, because UC Davis says the median number of hours of experience that their vet school applicants have is more than 3200. Damned overacheiving 4H'ers!

Daunting just became impossible. I simply can't compete on that basis. I can only hope that my personal background is compelling enough to make up for the difference.

It also confirms something that I have suspected, that at my current pace, I will be done with my catch-up course work months before I have accumulated enough shadow hours. Frustrating indeed.

The Summer of Organic Chemistry 5: Done!

These past three weeks have been pretty hectic during the laboratory part of the organic chemistry sequence. There were pre-labs to write up (some of them took 3 hours just to write out the experimental procedures!), homework assignments, lab results to submit, a formal paper, the midterm, the final, and of course the labs themselves that had to be performed. And don't forget all those hours of lecture! I had to turn in something every day. The pace was exhausting.

The final exam was this morning. I went into it with an accumulated grade of 97 and aced the final, putting a very nice finish to the summer of organic chemistry.

In celebration, I took the dogs for a highly anticipated walk when I got home. We are all ready for a nap now.