The Wrong Dog Blog

Next, an update on my own food situation: I am phasing in a hypoglycemia diet. I did have a whole pint of Chocolate Obsession, but I had it slowly, over about four hours. I am not going to restock the “ice cream” when I run out. I am mixing sugared spaghetti sauce with unsugared. I’m eating small amounts of unsugared peanut butter. I’ve e-mailed my doctor about leaky gut syndrome to see what he thinks and whether I should go in for an appointment.

Meanwhile, I shall get you back to the dog part of the Wrong Dog Blog, with a reworked e-mail from last November (reworked to include HTML tags and WDB blog aliases ^_^) about when I got Sunny his new woofus kibble. Enjoy!

11/10/06

I recently got a raise. (Hi, Bianca! ^_^) I decided that I would start getting dog food delivered rather than having to carry it home, which in my opinion ranks as the worst thing about having a dog. I’ll scoop poop and go for WALKIES!!! in freezing rain, but don’t ask me to carry twenty-pound (or even ten-pound) bags of dog food for fifteen or more minutes by foot and then up the many stairs to my apartment!

Being as Sunny has been eating a store brand since I went into the hospital last spring, getting the food delivered in would necessitate a switch in dog food brands. I figured that if I was going to switch him to another food, I might as well make it a good one: the high-end dog foods weren’t that much more expensive than the lower-end ones at the food-delivery site. Although her vets attributed her longevity to the amount of exercise Augusta got as an uncaged rabbit, I have always believed that the key was her diet, and I want Sunny to live as long for a dog as she did for a rabbit. (Shameless plug: for those of you with small herbivores for friends, go to http://www.oxbowhay.com and protect their kidneys from burning out sooner than they must!)

The problem is that everyone disagrees about what is best for a dog to eat. There are the raw-food people: feed the dog something as close to wild-caught dead-animal as possible. There are the no-grain people: feed the dog something that is nearly entirely meat. There are the low-protein people: if the dog is of a weak-kidney breed (Sunny is), feed the dog something that is nearly entirely not meat. There are the rounded-diet people: feed the dog meat, grains, vegetables, and fruit. There are the organic people: feed the dog one of the above, but make sure it’s organic! There is a baffling array of choices, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

Fortunately, I have a personal friend who is a veterinarian. (Hi, Michiru!) I went to Dr. M with my confusion and asked her advice, as I so often do with critter issues (it used to be bunny advice; now it’s woofy advice!). Dr. M answered at length, with the bottom line being a well-rounded, as-organic-as-possible diet. I had mentioned Wellness as one of the brands I was looking at, and she said she had heard good things about it. Even within the Wellness brand there are an array of choices, and I finally narrowed it down to Wellness Super5 Mix Chicken Dry Dog Food. No, that it comes in a purple bag did not influence my decision. It’s just that it’s well rounded, organic, and based on chicken, which has historically done well for Sunny. The last time I gave him a lamb-based food, he didn’t keep it down, and I am a little nervous about going so exotic as the fish-and-sweet-potato mix. Sunny has a sensitive stomach, and I don’t want any more barfing incidents than I absolutely must face.

So as his last bag of the store brand started getting low, I ordered. The food would take a week to ten days to arrive, and I needed to still have some of the old food to mix with the new food, to transition the little guy gradually, one of the few points on which all the dog-feeding pundits agree. I got six two-pound bags because with the sale they were cheaper than two six-pound bags, and it would be easier to figure out exactly how much food Sunny ate in six weeks, which is the longest you should keep an organic food after the bag is opened. The shipment arrived yesterday.

Sunny gets fed two to three small meals a day. Yes, I’ve heard the feed-’em-once-a-day line, but Sunny has maintained a healthy body weight on the many-meals plan; at his last visit, his vet pronounced his body condition as ideal in both weight and musculature. I always feed him after I’ve eaten a meal, and so after breakfast this morning, I put in about two-thirds of what I usually feed of his old dog food, sprinkled a little Wellness on top, and mixed them together. Sunny was curious about the new bag, so I gave him one piece while I was about it. He dropped it on the floor, examined it thoroughly, decided it was actually food, and ate it. (Why do all my nonhuman companions always doubt that what I give them is actually food? Augusta used to do the same thing. The frustrating thing is that Sunny often decides it’s not food!) I put his bowl down on the kitchen floor, where it usually resides.

He went over and, as is very unusual for him, started crunching right away. Usually he spends at least a couple minutes bouncing his nose off of his food. This is his attempt to cache his food, hide it so that any marauding scavengers won’t find it and he can come back and eat it at his leisure. I’ve told him that I’m the only other one in the apartment who eats food and that I’m not interested in his, but he’s unimpressed. If I am foolish enough to leave a plastic grocery bag where he can get it, he’ll use it to cover the food dish. (In a satisfying “Stupid Pet Trick” moment, I carried out a successful demonstration for Joh, when Sunny was bouncing his nose and I dropped a plastic grocery bag nearby.) Often he won’t eat his food right away and will only come back an hour or so later, or sometimes even skip the meal entirely and only eat it later in the day. He is more likely to eat breakfast promptly, though, at least some of it, anyway, so I wasn’t surprised to see him at it this morning.

I did notice that it took him longer than usual, though. He also seemed to be scattering his food around more than is his habit, too. He does like to pick the food up out of the bowl and put it on the floor next to the bowl, sometimes going back to the bowl to eat some before he returns to the food on the floor, but he usually does eat almost all the food on the floor. This morning he was leaving a good bit around. I left the kitchen to go to the bedroom, and when I came back a few minutes later, it was as Sunny was leaving the kitchen. I glanced at his bowl and saw, first, that there was still a fair bit of food around it and, second, that there was still a fair bit of food in it. Sunny often leaves some food; I think because he gets fed so often, he’s a lot less worried about eating food whether he is hungry or not, and so only eats when he is actually hungry and as much as he’s actually hungry for. Still, there seemed to be more than he usually left, especially when he felt the need to eat right away. So I took a closer look.

All the food scattered around the bowl was his old dog food brand. All the food still in the bowl was his old dog food brand. The little woof had decided he liked the new food better and was registering his vote in favor of it by eating, as much as woofily possible, only the new food. After waiting until after dinner to add more Wellness, I believed I confirmed this theory: when I picked up the Wellness bag, which, remember, he had seen was the source of the new food, he started forward eagerly, wagging his tail. “Yes, Mommy, more of that!”

He did finally eat the old dog food too, but only after making a big play for yet more Wellness. “Oh, I am the cutest woofus of all the woofi, and you do want to give me the yummy new food instead of that old one! You want to give me lots more because it would make me so very happy!” I do have to do the transition thing, however, so he didn’t get any more than that little extra I added to the once-rejected old food.

Being hungry from his day-long campaign for Wellness and an extra long walk in celebration of good weather, he finally gave up and ate even the old dog food, but with an air of condension. “Well, I suppose I must, but you’re a mean mommy to deny me the good stuff!”

While reading up on hypoglycemia, I stumbled onto stuff about leaky bowel syndrome. Granted, the reality of the disease is questioned by many, but so is fibromyalgia, and I know people with that. I haven’t thought mainstream Western medicine knew it all since I was in my teens. The things that stick out for me in what I’ve read are that LGS has as symptoms depression, anxiety, hypoglycemia, food allergies, hives, gas, lower abdominal pain, menstrual difficulties . . . all things I’ve had most of my life. (I always tested as borderline for hypoglycemia, and no one bothered to tell me that meant I should avoid sugar!) The lower abdominal pain seems to alter with my menstrual cycle, not with when I eat, but when I had an ultrasound for it and complained to the technician that she was going nowhere near the pain, which was “over here!” she said that that was my gut and she couldn’t ultrasound that.

There are those who think that LGS is a factor in causing autism, too. I spent my first few years chronically sick; I don’t know the details beyond rashes, difficulties in getting me to eat, and constant head colds and throat infections that were finally brought to an end by a tonsillectomy so belated that some of my throat muscles had to be cut away to get rid of the tonsils. (They’d grown down instead of up, as most tonsils do, so the doctors kept saying my tonsils weren’t bad enough to be removed.) That is one factor in the against column: if it is LGS, that means I’ve had it most of my life, but I never had noticeable bowel problems beyond gas and very occasional abdominal pain? No inflammation? That makes it seem unlikely, but the rest of the picture fits fairly well.

Unfortunately the major treatment is a yeast-free diet, which means eliminating things that “support” molds or yeasts as well. That eliminates vinegar (I use rice vinegar), tamari, miso, mushrooms, “canned or prepared tomatoes,” all concentrated sugars, artificial sweeteners, and peanuts (I bought three jars of sugarless peanut butter yesterday, of course). Except for the concentrated sugars, all things I had intended to eat to reduce the hypoglycemia. Tofu is neither on the yes or the no list; my guess is that the preparer of the list is not a vegetarian, and tofu simply didn’t occur to her. Being a cultured product, my guess is no. The diet’s supposed to be lots of fresh veggies and meat, which besides meat issues means lots of shopping trips and a lot of cooking, which I do not have time and energy for. The yeast-free diet would be a temporary thing (at least four months)—I could phase in some of the other things later—but I honestly don’t think I can stick to it. I have my doubts about getting simple sugars out of my diet. As for the aerobic exercise four to five times a week, they can forget that. I do not “need to get out into the fresh air and sunshine”!

I can’t even decide whether I should bring it up to my doctor or if he’ll think I’m being a hypochondriac. Granted, he does work at an integrated medicine center, as well as his regular practice, but my experience with doctors is that they either think I’m avoiding them or that I’m a hypochondriac—usually the same doctor thinks both, which is something I’ve never been able to understand. Hassle me and hassle me and hassle me to get in there so he (or an NP filling in) can tell me I’m a hypochondriac!

I’m torn between being too scared to eat because it sounds like everything but the brown rice is on the no-list and having some chocolate “ice cream” and forgetting about it. I’ll probably end up watching more Lois & Clark and eating the “ice cream,” just to try to make it go away. I can’t bear the thought of my diet getting even more difficult. Like I said, I have my doubts about eliminating the sugars because they’ll take away the last bit of joy I have in eating. I can’t imagine trying to just eat plain veggies and meat, even if I can get past the meatness of it. (Last year, because of an emergency that took food preparation out of my hands, I started eating chicken again for a couple months, and it was very hard to get off of it, so I imagine I can get past the meatness of it, although I’ll still feel guilty. But I’d rather feel guilty about eating sugar when I shouldn’t than about killing someone!)

I should go shopping tonight, tomorrow at the latest, and buy some things that will support a low-sugar diet, but I don’t know about this yeast thing now. I was going to buy some Splenda and some rice vinegar.

I wish I could just go back to the days when the only worry about what I ate was whether it made me put on weight or not. (I’d say I could hear my evil mother laughing in the background except she never laughed.)

OK, I might have my favorite food (see Meet the Odd Couple) on occasion, but if I could give up on it as a regular part of living, I would.

Food is an incredible, huge, awful issue. In a way, it feels like the curse of my hated mother. She once told me that I was short-waisted and so would have to watch what I ate my entire life, and I decided that I wouldn’t if I didn’t care what I looked like. Not that I’ve never cared—it’s probably impossible to be an American female without at least having periods of one’s life in which weight is a concern—but for the most part, I have tried, with quite a bit of success, to view weight as irrelevant to my value as a person.

Like sneaky Erinyes, however, other reasons have crept up to force me to watch what I eat. When I was in my mid twenties, severe rashes forced me into the doctor, eventually revealing that I was allergic to dairy (all dairy—goat, sheep, you name the animal) and wheat. Since then I have collected food allergies as if they were fun things to have. The current list includes sesame (and therefore tahini and hummus), apples, carrots, turmeric, and doubtless I’m forgetting something now that still brings me up short when I see it on a food label. While we’re on the topic, milk allergy is not lactose intolerance; pills won’t help it and “non-dairy” foods aren’t tolerable. I had to explain that to a hospital’s nutrition staff when they came to scold me for never drinking the Ensure that they forcibly included with my meals; after all, their other milk-allergic patients obediently drank it. I told them to read what the label said after “ALLERGENS.” They stopped sending the Ensure.

Before you think this is trivial, I challenge you to go through your own kitchen and try eliminating all the explicit items on my list. Keep in mind that they lurk under other names: “casein” (the protein in milk), “caseinate” (a derivative of casein), gluten (vital or not, it’s wheat), modified food starch (unless it says specifically which one it is, it could be wheat or corn, so allergy sufferers of either have to eliminate it), apple juice (in all multijuice mixes); apple cider vinegar (in salad dressings and salsas, damn it!), “vegetable stock” (carrots—it always has carrots). Things that seem unlikely to have any of them have them: Thai Ginger instant soup has milk, for example. No label can go unread, and it’s a good idea to reread them occasionally in case the manufacturer changes the recipe (like the apple cider vinegar recently added to my brand of salsa). Still think it’s trivial?

Then came the gallbladder problems. I was trying to be Super-Mom to Sunny, but keeping up with his WALKIES!!! schedule had me eating loads of fat just so I wasn’t hungry every five minutes. My gallbladder eventually couldn’t take it and let me know, very painfully. No, so far I’ve still got my gallbladder (knock on wood!), but if I stop watching my fat intake, it reminds me it doesn’t like that.

And now it looks like I’m hypoglycemic. I haven’t gone to the doctor to get tested—I’ve been tested many times through my life because I’ve got all the symptoms and always tested OK—but I’m pretty sure I’m there. I have a terrible time hauling myself out of bed in the morning. I’m depressed and irritable. I get sugar rushes and crashes. This to take away my last food pleasure in life, chocolate, and to force me back into eating meat.

That’s the one voluntary restriction on my diet: I’m a vegetarian. OK, I do get sashimi with my sushi (sushi is just the rice; sashimi is the raw fish) and I do order shrimp when I get Chinese food, but those happen each about twice a year. My only real source of protein is tofu because nuts are fat-loaded (my gallbladder complains) and meat substitutes like seitan and all those Tofurkey and phony meat items contain wheat gluten (my skin and sinuses complain). Eating only the tofu is dangerous because the surest way to develop an allergy to something is to make it a major part of your diet. To be honest, I should’ve moved back into meat even before the hypoglycemia, but with that requiring me to push my protein intake, I don’t have much choice.

So today I hate returned to fish. I bought Salmon Burgers and canned tuna (dolphin safe, at my coop). I haven’t eaten it yet; I had Not Dogs for dinner tonight. But it’s there and I’m gonna have to start eating it while giving up the chocolate milk and the “ice cream”. I’m gonna try keeping the “ice cream” in the diet, but in small portions, only on weekends, never both days of the weekend, that kind of thing, and see if it works. I imagine I’ll have to actually give it up, though.

I’m hoping to keep my vegan cocoa in my diet. I make the mix myself from vegan baker’s cocoa, soy milk powder, and Stevia, although that last is super expensive in an already expensive mix (soy milk powder went up about 25% in price this past winter, to $12 per canister, and the baker’s cocoa is not cheap). At least Stevia’s supposed to be a zero on the glycemic scale, though, unlike the flavoring syrups that I have been adding to it, although I might be able to get sugar-free versions of those. I was reading about hypoglycemia and sweetners on the internet tonight, and although I’ve been told that natural sweetners like agave and brown rice syrup metabolize differently, I haven’t seen that corroborated. One article spoke disapprovingly of artificial sweetners, saying it encourages people to think they can have something sweet and have sweet cravings, but I think I’m going to go the Splenda route, at least to start off. There’s so little variety in my diet already, and certainly nothing on the YUM! list but the chocolate things.

Oh, and the dog? (It’s his blog, remember?) From his point of view, if it’s Mommy-food, it’s yummy and he wants some. All Mommy-food is not created equal, though: he goes nuts for the meat occasionally provided by Meatman. Sunny will unquestionably approve of the addition of fish to Mommy’s diet, provided he gets the occasional nibble of it.

I did hesitate before moving to what is—if Lori, the wonderful admin for Autiblogger will forgive me—something of an autistic ghetto, but there are reasons why people move to real ghettos. At Autiblogger, I don’t have to allow anyone to advertise on my blog, so no worries about the Mormons or Cure Autism Now or any other advertiser whose values are in direct contradiction to my own. I do recommend WordPress.com for anyone who doesn’t care what ads they run on your blog; it’s a great service and you can’t beat the security they can afford to give you because they advertise. I don’t recommend my old host and therefore won’t even mention the name here.

While I was searching for a new blog home, I happened to bump into my buddy Veganica (see her site at http://www.veganica.com), and when she said she’d stop by my blog and leave a comment, I mentioned that my blog doesn’t have comments enabled, which we discussed. Also during this time, I found a reference to an article on how to be a blog snob (the discussion of the article and topic, by members of WordPress.com, can be found here, and one of the “suggestions” is not to have any comments because no one’s opinion matters but your own. As a result of both events, I considered whether to allow comments here at the Wrong Dog Blog, and I feel a comment on why there are no comments is needed.

In the WordPress.com discussion of the blog snobbery article, there were two reasons for having a blog, either to start a discussion or to make friends, the latter being judged the prime directive for all blogs, and in either case comments are a sine qua non. Both reasons are human misconceptions if applied to the Wrong Dog Blog. First, a blog is an inappropriate place to start a discussion to which the poster is a party. That’s what forums are for. Granted, I have found forums tend to be more about solidifying group-think than having actual discussions, but if that’s what I was after, I’d stick with the forum thing until I made some headway. I hope with this blog to start thoughts in the heads of the readers, the precursor to real discussion despite it being a step generally skipped. Second, the Wrong Dog Blog is not about making friends. I suppose I should not have been astonished at that being considered the reason to have a blog—after all, we’re talking about a species that gets in groups to meditate—but I was because it’s not even on my list of reasons. I am an Aspie. Socializing for the sake of socializing is one of my unthings. If you’re looking to socialize, get in the “General Discussion” section of any forum, go to a blog run by someone who is looking to socialize, or, best of all, go Out and find other socializers. This place isn’t for that.

So I have no use for comments to achieve the above goals. I have also found comments to be of limited value information-wise. About 45 percent of all blog comments boil down to “I agree!”, another 45 percent boil down to “I disagree!”, and most of the remaining 10 percent boil down to “Ditch this site and go to mine, even though it’s at best barely relevant!” That leaves a very small number of comments that actually correct, extend, or otherwise add value to the post. Surely those few can contact me (see the link under “Pages” in the side bar), and I can edit, post a new entry, or refer my readers as appropriate.

Having no comments also accomplishes the most important thing to me: not to allow the curebies (as the Autistic Bitch from Hell calls them) yet another soapbox. No, I don’t owe them equal time. They’ve already had their time, they have the ears of the powerful and the mainstream, and there’s no moral imperative to negotiate with genocide anyway. The Wrong Dog Blog is part of autistic equal time, when autism really speaks, and doesn’t lie by putting that name in front of a bunch of humans bent on turning their nonhuman relatives into humans regardless of how those relatives feel about it. No comments, no curebie hijacking attempts.

Meanwhile, something important is going on. It’s raining.

It does that a lot here, but the important thing is that it’s raining and it’s time for the Last Outing of the Day.

The Last Outing of the Day is an important event. For everyone’s peace of mind, it is desirable that the spaniel who enters the house after the Last Outing is an empty spaniel.

This is a problem when it rains. The woofus hates rain. Persuading him to go Out into it and piddle is the toughest sell to a spaniel that I know. He’ll take tooth gel more readily.

Unfortunately the ultimate sales pitch is one that the Aspie hates. Like her spaniel, the Aspie hates to get wet. Bathing is a concession made to human society the magnitude of which said society does not appreciate. Going Out in the rain even with rain gear is to be avoided.

But often the only way to achieve an empty woofus is to show Spaniel Solidarity and [shudder] go Out in the rain with the woofus. I’m not sure why it works—maybe he figures that if I go Out in it, that means that rain is really important. He does think that I control it: whenever it rains and we go Out, he looks at the rain, looks at me, looks at the rain, looks at me, and wags his tail, just the way he asks me for anything else he wants, and from the way he acts Out in the rain, he certainly isn’t asking me for more of the stuff!

So while I weighed versatility [Blogger] versus security [WordPress], search engine priority [Blogger] versus import/export capability [WordPress], easy movement into advertising [Blogger] versus not being forced to move into it before I want to [WordPress], I stood on the porch and tried to ignore Sunny’s repeated requests to turn off the water. Finally I realized there was no help for it: if I wanted an empty spaniel and therefore no early wake-up call, I was going to have to go Out in the rain.

With a woofus-like sigh, I moved three steps down the porch stairs, well into the rain. Sunny charged down the steps, and then took off to the right. This isn’t good. There is no object that direction that he is willing to use for piddle purposes, his usual piddle pole being mostly straight ahead, but a little to the left. He wandered around a bit, and then walked back up the stairs, under cover.

I joined him. “Come on, Sunny, it’s not gonna get any better.” I pointed at his piddle pole. “Piddle!”

He did not charge Out to obey my command. He laid back his ears. Oh, well. Sometimes it works.

I walked back Out into the rain. Once again, my woofus joined me, but he again charged off to the right. He was Out there longer this time, but it still wasn’t long before he climbed purposefully back up the stairs, having accomplished nothing for his trouble. Acquiring cover, he shook off the wet.

I stubbornly persisted in standing in the rain.

He looked at me with his wide-eyed, alert head, surprised expression. Allow me to translate into English: “Mommy, why are you still standing in the rain?”

“Come on, Sunny!”

He trotted to the front door and then back to the spot where he had finished shaking. Translation: “Don’t be daft, Mommy. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

So much for Spaniel Solidarity. The third time may have been the charm, but I was not willing to try for it.

I was especially unwilling after we got inside and the little furry cuss proceeded to dry himself all over my bed sheets. He can just suffer tomorrow morning until I am awake enough for the First Outing of the Day.

As I observed before, it’s not easy to be a severely furry woofus and walking through a high-humidity, eighty-or-more-degree environment. It adds insult to injury when there is no shade. It is a guardian’s job to select the best route to the groomer’s, and this mommy failed to realize that there was nigh near no shade between home and the groomer’s along the shortest one. Shortest is not always best! We had to take a time-out to hydrate Sunny about halfway there, poor guy. We even had someone comment that it was awfully hot weather to be walking a long-haired dog, but I told her we were on our way to get him shaved. I was pleased that someone would be concerned enough about a dog to brave the wrath of a possibly negligent parent by commenting. I’m sure she was pleased that there was a method to my madness!

Inside PetSmart (not an endorsement—it’s just physically the closest dog groomer’s that does spaniels), first I had to get Sunny past the adopt-a-kitten stand, by explaining to the kitten caretakers that Sunny is fond of cats, and not to eat, but that I am very allergic to them. After that, he eagerly pulled me back to the grooming salon. Funny, he’s never eager to actually get groomed, but he’s always eager to go to the groomer’s! As we walked in I overheard the person discussing her poodle with the groomer at the front desk, saying that, no, he’s a boy, although everybody thinks he’s a girl.

“Sunny gets that, too,” I said. “Where do they think poodles come from if all poodles come in female?” It turned out that that toy poodle went by the manly name of Jake. I didn’t get a chance to ask if that was specifically to underscore his masculinity.

It seemed, strangely enough, a day for buff cocker spaniels, there being one being shaved when I dropped Sunny off and there being one being shaved when I came to pick him up. I did note that both were male (so much for light hair or cockerness being synonymous with femininity!), but it confirmed my opinion that Sunny isn’t a buff, no matter what the breeders say. He’s a blonde. Those other dogs were positively dark compared to my platinum pup. It occurred to me to wonder if that was officially a mark against Sunny as an example of his breed; it wouldn’t be the first time the rules of formal breeding were daft. The one of my rabbits that everyone thought was the most beautiful was a perfect Netherland Dwarf except that she was an unshowable color (”blue,” which is what rabbit breeders, being daft on the color issue, call gray).

It’s funny, but although I’ve heard of dogs misbehaving on being taken to the vet, it’s at the groomer’s that I actually see woofy resistance. One black Lab so didn’t want to go behind the gate that she lay on her back and was dragged. My theory is that although unpleasant things happen at the vet’s, those things happen in the company of fellow pack members. The first thing the groomer does, however, is send Mommy or Daddy away. Sunny put his head down in protest and had to be tugged through the gate, too, although he chose to stay on his feet. He does register his protest apparently by not drinking while there. I accused them of keeping him without water based on his frantic consumption afterward, but the manager assured me that she goes around and makes sure all the woofi have plenty of water. I’d note that he didn’t go on a thirst strike back in the wondrous days of Smelly Dog, the local groomer’s that Sunny and I loved so much but which went out of business shortly after PetSmart arrived.

Getting one’s woofus shaved was very difficult for a few years. Someone apparently published an article that fur helps keep a dog cool, and all the groomers around here swallowed the notion whole. Never mind that a dog is, like all warm-blooded animals, a heat source and that insulating a heat source (with, say, three inches of fur) results in a climb in temperature of the heat source, for a while it was like pulling teeth to get a groomer to shave a long-haired dog. I once got Sunny shaved somewhere after an extended argument with the groomer; I told her that Sunny was always happier after he had been shaved so regardless of what she and any article writers thought, Sunny felt he needed a shave, and I trusted his opinion over everyone else’s, since he was the one living in the fur. Six weeks later, I took him back to the same place to get him shaved back down to what he had been before. The groomer did not shave him and did charge me. That was the last time we visited that groomer, no matter that she has a passionate following in OurTown. I don’t care much for the impersonal feel of PetSmart, but at least when I say, “Shave the dog,” they only say, “How much?” (My guess on the article is that the writer was assuming that most dogs spend most of their time in air-conditioning, a completely mistaken assumption for Sunny until very recently. With an air-conditioner, cool air would get trapped in the fur and help keep the dog cool in brief trips through the hot outdoors. Either the writer or the groomers failed to note this assumption, however, and the groomers simply ran around saying “Long hair keeps them cool” when it’s physically impossible without bringing air-conditioning into the picture.)

It’s a good thing that dogs know their companions so well, for a Nekkid Woofus looks very different from a fully furred one. I would not be quite sure it was really Sunny they were giving back if he weren’t so very certain of me. The first thing I notice is how much smaller he looks; no matter how I remind myself that my mental image of him is about three inches all around larger than the actual dog part of him, it’s still startling. He looks skinny: I’ve had people comment that they thought Sunny was overweight until they saw him after his shave. His legs look spindly, but at the same time he seems to be made mostly of them as they move around a great deal more than they did under the self-grown carpet. His feet seem so much smaller than they were before that you might mistake them for being small, until you had them next to another dog’s. I think that’s just a cocker thing: I’ve seen German Shepherds with smaller feet, and I was comparing them to Sunny in his summer shave. At any rate, then you see how big the feet are just in themselves, and he looks like a clumsy puppy again.

The only part that wasn’t shaved was his ears, giving him the look of a little girl with ponytails on either side of her head and therefore the shave does not help with the “little girlie dog” thing as much as one would think, especially when he perks his ears up and they look even bigger. Otherwise, there is much less fur around the face than before, accentuating the “big and sad” spaniel eye effect. The lack of hair also makes his face look longer, so when he gets his surprised look on, in which he extends his neck as far as it will go up, he looks like his face is actually stretching beyond its usual confines. The lack of hair brings out the wrinkles in his face and makes his jowls look more pendulous, again contributing to the “sad” spaniel look. It’s a good thing Sunny is a naturally cheerful boy, inclined to smiling, or all that “sadness” might get him fat with treats from a mommy trying to make her woofy boy happy! As it is, he just looks pretty goofy in his nekkidness, what with big feet and spindly legs and the long face and the suddenly visible tail—before it was lost in bunches of fluff that moved from side to side rather than properly wagging—all moving about almost too quickly to see.

For Nekkid Woofus is as much a state of activity as a state of fur. Suddenly relieved of his heavy coat, Sunny is always giddy, dancing around, running back and forth on his flexi lead, when he only could manage a trot before. I took him back the long way, through a shaded park, and he tried to run literal circles around me. He also rolled in everything that could possibly kill the shampoo smell: dust, grass, dead leaves. Fortunately there was no poop lying around. Next time, we take a cab so the cleaning lasts more than the trip home.

Today I took Sunny to Agway. I like going to Agway. They allow dogs, and Sunny loves getting to go along on errands, with all the fringe benefits that implies. (Even as I type, he is chewing happily on a new DEAD COW BONE.) I try to go to Agway for things first, to demonstrate that I appreciate their dog-friendly policy.

I had called ahead to make sure they had the cedar blocks I wanted. I am collecting Sunny hair so that I can find a local spinner to make it into yarn so that I can crochet or knit something that I can have long after I no longer have a woofus but am trying to hold frantically to the memories of having had him. Chiengora (as it’s called) is liable to attract clothing moths, though, so I wanted something to put in the bag to keep ‘em off.

I noticed that they had my favorite fan ever for sale. This was good news. My favorite fan ever I bought two years ago, at Agway, and it oscillates in an oval rather than back and forth. The thing is wonderful, and no sooner did I discover its wonderfulness than I began to worry about what I would do when the day inevitably came that the fan broke. I didn’t see them for sale on the internet, so I supposed that they had been a market dud and were no longer made. Never mind that I loved it and had sold several other people on how wonderful the fan was, good products are more likely to fail than succeed in my experience. So seeing it was still available was no small pleasure.

“Look, Sunny!” I gasped in delight. “If Mommy’s fan breaks she can buy a new one!”

“Does the dog ever talk back?” a passing man put in.

Aspie to the end, I took his question literally. I started to say that Sunny does always respond nonverbally, and although of course he cannot understand what it is that I am happy about, he can tell I’m happy, and that makes him happy. Sunny had, after all, greeted my statement with wags. I was only a few words into this when the passing man gave me a look of whithering contempt and simultaneously a salesperson butted in: “Can I help you?”

Someday I really am going to get a shopping smock that says “SHY SHOPPER! IF I NEED HELP, I WILL ASK YOU!” It made it worse that this man’s face had the same look of whithering contempt. Clearly “Can I help you?” meant “Let’s get the crazy lady who talks to dogs about fans out of my department!” Proof positive: he told me the cedar blocks were in a different department, but when I went there, the man there brought me right back. The blocks were in the department I got hustled out of.

We are the Human Collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

I got the cedar blocks, and I got Sunny his bone, but the joy of the Outing was gone. There I had been, sharing a harmless Happy Anne moment with my dog, and humans had to come along and, well, pee all over it just because it didn’t conform to their notions of how one expresses joy. It wasn’t like I had been loud and obnoxious about it, and if they’d left well enough alone, I might have sold another one of those fans to a passing customer.

All I wanted was to go home and lump. Sunny made it clear that he expected real WALKIES!!!, but there was no way after that. I had to get away from the humans back where it was safe to be me. I gave Sunny the bone instead, so he could get out his denied-WALKIES!!! frustrations on that. Which, as I said, he is right now.

Helen (my therapist) periodically tries to sell me on the notion that autism needs to be cured because there are profoundly autistic people who do not interact with others at all. She’s not ever going to make a sale, and right here is why: if I had a choice and couldn’t have been aborted, I would’ve chosen to be profoundly autistic and just not deal with the humans around me.

I noticed when I posted my latest entry that a banner from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was on the page. That my blog should show for even one instant something supporting theocracy is revolting and intolerable. I paid BlogDrive $15 (the cost of a year of no ads) of hush money to get them off and wrote a protest to BlogDrive. I am now looking for a more satisfactory home for the Wrong Dog Blog.

That time of year that convinces me not to move south lest the season become the whole year. As I have said before and doubtless will say again in the remainder of my woofus-caring life, fleas are one of the few nonhumans I cannot tolerate. I grant that they’re just doing what they’ve got to do to survive, but what I’ve got to do to protect my woofus is eradicate their pestilential little selves, and I’d feel a lot less hostile about it if it weren’t so very hard.

Prior to the adoption of my woofus, I had only the vaguest idea of what a flea really looked like. I had seen sketches in books, but I knew that that wouldn’t be what they looked like: at the size they actually were, there was no way that level of detail would be visible, not to a severely myopic Aspie, anyway. (Of course in them days, I didn’t yet know I was an Aspie and had no way of explaining that I wasn’t really human, although I knew that. The only reason I could say with certainty that I wasn’t a flea was that they are insects and so have six legs and I don’t.)

Anyway, I had not knowing seen one prior to the Arrival of the Woofus. After that, I saw too many. Just as mosquitoes prefer some individuals (me) over others (my sister, Joh, although ticks like her very much), blood-sucking arthropods seem to prefer Sunny over other available blood sources. If there’s a flea, it wants to live on him, and he picks up ticks even dosed with Frontline Plus in February.

This year, I suspect that the fleas have developed an immunity to Frontline Plus. I have been assured by more than one veterinarian that it’s OK to dose the woofus once every three weeks with the stuff so I do, but now the fleas seem unimpressed. I can’t seem to look at him without seeing a dark shape moving under the surface of his pale fur, like a submarine just below the surface of the water, the F.S.S. Bloodstealer and the others of its seemingly unending fleet. The frustrating thing is that if I go after the invader, Sunny sides with the flea and does all in his woofy power to prevent me from catching it, all because I have to pull on his fur a little bit (can’t possibly hurt as much as being bit, but of course he does try to bite them and doesn’t try to bite me). Not that the fleas really need the help, which is one of the reasons I suspect they’ve developed an immunity to the medication: it used to be that any fleas I did see acted as if they had been poisoned. They didn’t move fast, their legs twitched as if they couldn’t control them properly, and sometimes they would clearly be in the last stages of a death too unpleasant for any being that isn’t making my baby miserable with bites and doubtless worms before I get them under control. (For those of you that don’t know, fleas often carry tapeworms, and when the woofus swallows one of those—which is extremely likely, given standard woofy procedures for flea control—he comes down with tapeworms. The Fleas’ Revenge, I call it.) Sunny’s current crop of fleas are far too healthy, looking like they are leading the flea equivalent of the good life as they move quickly and cleverly while leaping heights no flea has leaped before, far above the relative dreams of submarines. If fleas had the neurological capacity to do so, they’d be laughing at my bumbling attempts to call them to account.

When I do catch one, I envelop it in toilet paper (it then sometimes escapes with a leap fit to make a submarine blow its ballast tanks in frustration and thereby lives to torment my baby another day), dump it in the toilet, and flush it into flea oblivion. One flea down, out of at least ten attempts, and that’s only the fleas I see. As I angrily told The Neighbor last summer when she thought that all she needed to do was go over her then-eleven cats with a flea-comb and dump the fleas into rubbing alcohol, this is not an effective and therefore rational flea-fighting plan.

(Side note: The Neighbor proved just as annoying as my fears of her return from house-sitting suspected. About a week ago, I chewed her out for leaving two messages on my answering machine about a party that I told her I was not going to at least once (and to my memory, more) on at least four occasions (ditto). She has since been giving me what she probably considers the cold shoulder but which I think is a welcome respite and I asked her please not to disrupt this situation but do give me back several pieces of my property. She has not been harassing me but she did give me back something of mine that was not, by the way, one of the things I specifically asked for. She could’ve kept the baby gate, since I no longer have a bunny, and may have done so, because I put it out with the videotapes to be hauled away tomorrow and it disappeared from the pile. Now if I can only get the actually useful things back.)

So we may change to Advantix. I’m going to give his latest dose of Frontline Plus (put on today) until tomorrow this time and see if I notice a drop in flea sightings or greater ease of flea capture. I hate to shell out more money for flea control when I figured I was fixed for most of the rest of the flea season (I bought a large batch last November), but if it doesn’t kill the obstreperous little vermin, then it’s beside the point. No point with offending Sunny with the dosing (and he is deeply offended by it) if it’s not going to make a difference. Make a note, any children thinking to talk their guardian(s) into adopting a woofus, that this is one of the many costs of woofy companionship that you don’t consider until you are confronted with leaping, biting subfurines. Depending on what you buy and how big your dog, you can spend $200 on 6 months of flea protection, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg as dogs go. Before trying to talk any adult into assuming the cost of a dog for you, try to come up with $200 honestly, on your own, no allowance money allowed: ya gotta earn it. It puts woofus care in a whole different light. Not, mind you, that I am opposed to humans adopting woofi, but the responsibilities have to be seen to, and fleas are one of them.

Actually, I do count myself lucky in one respect: fleas don’t see me as a food source. They leap on me, sure, but leap off again as if I smell bad. Maybe I do. Maybe that’s why they escape me so readily: subfurine smell-dar, warning them of incoming attacks.

Sigh. It’s taken a couple of hours for me to write this to my satisfaction, and in that time, the fleas have not become fewer or acted less hardy. Sunny did, however, eat grass when we were Outside an hour ago and vomited. (Woofy Care Tip: If woofus grazes like unto the cow, do not take woofus back into the house until they have vomited twice. Trust me on this.) I wonder if that’s from eating too many fleas.

If you are one of the readers who know me (and with Google Blog Search determined not to list me, I think everyone who reads this blog knows me!), you know that I have a slowly healing nerve injury that’s about fourteen months old now. Its official name is compression neuropathy of the right purneal group. What that means is that when it happened I pretty much couldn’t feel my right foot at all, and although I had some ankle movement, the foot itself couldn’t flex or bend. The big toe could move back some, but not down, and the rest of the toes were immobile. It felt like I had on a giant thick-soled shoe that wouldn’t come off.

Now that it’s more than a year later, it’s more like a houseslipper that won’t come off. My toes, both big and little, are pretty much unchanged; they don’t move anymore than they did before, and I feel them only as a weight I trip over occasionally. The sole of my foot is still numb, but not by more than a half-inch or so. Eventually, the doctor said, I’ll have a foot again, but pretty much it’s just a waiting game until that happens.

It’s not a big deal in my life anymore. I have to be careful not to get into situations that require a fine control of my balance, but with the vestibular and proprioceptive manifestations of my Asperger’s, I have to do that anyway. It’s nigh near impossible to pick up Sunny poop on a steep incline, so I just take care not to let him on steep inclines if he shows any signs of thinking about leaving a deposit. Because the vascular pump that pushes blood out of the feet and back toward the heart depends on foot as well as leg motion, mine doesn’t work terribly well right now; if I walk for an extended period, like, say, WALKIES!!!, the blood tends to pool in my right foot and swell it and turn it a really scary brick-red color, but I can bend my foot with my hands when I get home and keep the feet up thereafter. It’s manageable until I have a foot again.

Today I was working on my laptop, which I do sitting on my bed, much to the annoyance of my financial advisor, who asks me every year if I have a space just for work that I can claim off on my income taxes. One of the advantages to the bed (in addition to keeping the tootsies elevated) is that Sunny can lie next to me, on my right, while I work. He doesn’t always—since the Coming of the Obession Corners, he’s been there often—but he is frequently to be found on the bed, reminding his mommy that she has a woofus and he’s ever so much cuter and cuddlier than that Nasty Silver Thing.

He was doing just that today, although not right next to me but rather along my lower leg. Whatever pleases His Woofiness. I rather suspected that he was going to play his “Rub My Tummy” game. In this game, the woofus lies just out of reach and rolls over on his back, asking for a tummy rub. Said tummy is too far away to be rubbed without interrupting work. He will stretch, bounce his feet, switch from being curved slightly one way to slightly the other, all in an effort to wear down Mommy’s resistance and get her to move the computer and give him a tummy rub. The Woofy Power of Cuteness: 1, Computer: 0.

I was a busy Aspie today, though, with a new challenge from work, and not inclined to be distracted by woofi. I honestly don’t know if he tried to play the “Rub My Tummy” game. One thing Aspies are very good at is focus, and I tell you, I was focussed. I cared only about figuring out when some payments were made.

Well, almost only. Something was nagging. It took me a while to figure out what was pulling on the edge of my concentration. Ah, yes. My right foot, what I could feel of it, seemed to be jerking in a peculiar fashion. Why on earth should it be doing that? The feeling having gone on long enough to become foreground and annoying, I tilted the screen of my laptop so that I could see my right foot.

Sunny was industriously licking my big toe. I suppose he probably was getting some of the little ones, too, their being in the line of fire logically and all, but I couldn’t feel that any more than I could feel the licks on my big toe. I only knew because it caused my foot to jerk, and the nearer part of my foot is now rewired to feel the jerking.