The Wrong Dog Blog

I had intended to use my vacation to catch up on my blogging, but I also used my vacation to get gallbladder surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy—yes, I did have to look up how to spell that! ^_^). Such fun. In fact, it’s a lot better than I thought it would be, but I don’t have the energy for blogging at length.

In fact, the worst trouble I’ve had with the actual surgical site is that I had not accounted sufficiently for woofy bounciness. On my return from the hospital, Joh was ready for Sunny, and after one near miss to my belly-button incision, he was fended off until he calmed down. It seems, however, I forgot one little custom we have.

I sit on the bed, with my legs spread wide so I can get close to Sunny. He accepts some hugging and rubbing, but eventually lies down to get his tummy rubbed. After a bit of that, he gets very excited and wags back and forth in the upside-down position, better known as part of the Snow Spaniel Tango.

All well and good except that part of the Tango when it takes place on the bed is to push off my stomach with his hind feet! I of course knew this intellectually but it only came home to me as I was trying to catch his feet with my hands, and he hates having his feet touched, so it just makes him kick more.

All these years I’ve been a woofy trampoline but it took surgery to make me notice!

My woofus told me so.

I was doing some work, when suddenly Sunny ran to the window and came to a point. (He’s been doing that lately—doing the formal dog pointing at things, I mean. I think he’s having a woofy midlife crisis and regrets that he wasn’t a hunting dog.) Then he turned to me and whimpered.

“What is it, sweetie?” I asked, and then giggled. “Is Santa Claus out there?”

He immediately went into a very enthusiastic version of his “She’s got it!” dance, yipping and bouncing and otherwise giving a vehement affirmative.

We hurried to the apartment door. First I had trouble with the zipper of my coat. Then I had trouble getting his leash on.

He plunged down the stairs and, contrary to the habit he has recently formed, past our downstairs neighbor’s door, to the front door. He bounced there impatiently until I made it down the stairs.

Once I got the front door open, he plunged down the porch stairs, again contrary to his habit, which is to veer right and try to get to the cat’s food before I yell “No!” and pull him back. He ran to first one side of the house and then the other, as far as his long retractable leash will allow.

He returned less quickly than he went. Clearly we would have caught Santa if I hadn’t taken so long to get us ready, and the Spaniel was miffed about it.

Sunny shouldn’t be worried, though. He’s been a good woofus all year. I am sure Santa won’t forget him, just because Sunny’s mommy isn’t a Christian and only celebrates Christmas secularly, because it’s what she grew up with and she knows it’s really about the Winter Solstice, like all the Northern Hemisphere holidays at this time of year.

After all, I’m sure Santa loves woofi, regardless of their caretakers’ philosophical views. There will be woofus treats in the morning, in honor of Sunny’s devoted support of his mommy throughout the last year.

May whatever your Winter Solstice holiday is be filled with joy and treats of your own!

Sorry I haven’t written. I’ve been working and knitting and now my wrist is in a brace (the usual winter story for snow country: I slipped on ice), so typing is difficult. So while I plan the post on the Last, Best Hope against the Rodent Menace, I’ll write a shorter post on pomegranates.

I first heard about pomegranates from Bernard Evslin’s Heroes, Gods, and Monsters of the Greek Myths, a fabulous version of the Classic mythology that I highly recommend. Of course what I heard about pomegranates was that Persephone ate some pomegranate seeds and had to stay in Tartarus for the same number of months as she ate seeds, but I had no clue what a pomegranate looked like until I grew up and moved east. (I guess pomegranates are too exotic for the Midwest. One of the reasons I left the Midwest was the number of things too exotic for it.)

I rapidly learned a number of things about pomegranates. They’re expensive. They’re difficult to eat. They are nicely tart. The juice stains permanently. This year, however, I learned another thing about them.

If a cocker spaniel happens to eat an escapee seed, the little furry guy becomes a pip-hunting fiend! He will carry his love of the tasty juice so far as to raid the garbage for the rinds, which just might have some juice clinging to them.

Therefore, pomegranate rinds are best stored in the freezer until garbage day.

I hate the squatters next door.

The people in the house next door didn’t pay their rent, so their landlord, who had been trying to fix up the place after years of neglect by the previous landlord, finally gave up, stopped trying to improve it, and in fact stopped paying the mortgage. Now the mortgage company owns it, it’s been condemned by the city, and there are many people there illegally occupying it. Yes, I’ve seen Rent and read the freegan take on squatting. I’m not convinced. As I said, the landlord was trying to make it better, and the tenants cut him off at the knees. A building cannot be improved if the landlord can’t get enough money to make his mortgage payments and he eats up his savings trying.

I resent the way the squatters behave. They treat the property I live on as if it’s an annex of the one next door, camping out on our stairs, cutting across our front lawn, and even allowing their guests to hang from our tree. (When I told the guest that the tree was on our property, that she didn’t belong here, and to go away, I got a lecture on how the “law of the universe” forbids the owning of a tree. Like she has a pipeline to the universe and I don’t.) They abused their landlord when he really did try to make the building a nicer place to live, in marked contrast to the way I had to pester my landlord literally all last winter for a ten-minute fix that has since given me reliable heat (as of course I’ve only recently found out because he had it fixed at the end of the heating season). The squatters look down at me because they are artistes (yes, that’s the French pronunciation!), and I am pedestrian enough to hold a job.

But I begin to wonder if my hatred is not because the squatters are parked right in the middle of a dilemma of my own.

Most of the squatters, like the characters in Rent, seem to think that society owes them a living because they are artists. (One of them described himself as a genius when objecting that I called the police when he was demonstrating his “genius” with his electric guitar on the balcony to the entire neighborhood, for the dozenth time, early one morning.) I grant that I think our system for making a living by art doesn’t work. It can’t be a popularity contest. The most important art flies in the face of the mainstream; it won’t be popular. It can’t be by connections for the same reason: the people in power want to stay the people in power, and so they will not assist any art that risks a change in the status quo. I’ve often mourned that the need to earn a living has left me little time to explore my own artistic aspirations. I’ve often deplored the soullessness of commercially successful art. And yet . . . the art the squatters are producing seems sterile to me. Except for that inflicted on the neighborhood unwillingly, they are the only ones who experience it. They touch no one else artistically, let alone any of the other ways they could be helping people if they weren’t playing artist to their tiny circle.

I am not sure I’m not rationalizing, though. I mean . . . I have this blog that is read only by people who know me (sometimes I wonder why I bother with the blog aliases when all these people know each other!). I debate whether I should concentrate on my writing or my knitting, which at least will yield something useful for someone else at the end, or just on my woofus (yeah, the Wrong Dog—it’s his blog, remember?—who loves the squatters, by the way). I try to decide whether the writing will actually accomplish something or just detract from what I can do that helps people. Take, for example, this precise moment in time. What am I doing? Blogging on said blog that only some of the people who know me read. What should I be doing? Quick survey of foremost obligations: catching up on Bianca’s financial sheets (two weeks behind and she’s got other work for me to do and there’s a third party waiting for me to do it!), taking Sunny Out (so he can try to con a few more biscuits out of Biscuitwoman—OK, it’s small, but it would make him very happy), knitting on those socks for Joh, or maybe even working on my fiction—it touches fewer people than my blogging, but the potential if I pull it off is greater, but the probability that I will pull it off is very low. So do I hate the squatters because of their inconsideration for the needs of those around them or do I hate them because they have the courage I don’t, to do without a lot of material things for their art?

I don’t know. In a way, maybe it’s better that I don’t know. I remember when George Bush said what people like about him is his moral clarity, and I thought that anyone who thinks morality should or can be clear, of all things, is a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up for the safety of those around them. I think this murkiness needs to be dispelled, though. Hating is Bad, both in itself and in its effects. I’ve always found it hard to stop hating unless I know why I do. Of course sometimes, as with George Bush, understanding the why only makes me hate more. If it turns out that my hatred of the squatters is really about the harm they do, then it’s going to be a lot harder not to hate them.

And here I am at the end of this entry, no wiser than I was when I started it. The financial sheets are no more caught up, the woofus is no happier, the socks no further along. Maybe next time I have a moral dilemma, I should skip the blog.

With the weather getting cooler, I have been trying to master the fine art of tofu baking. Well, that and the high price and high fat content of the baked tofu at the coop have inspired the tofu baking. At any rate, I’ve been running my oven more. I don’t use it much: ovens are pretty much for baking meats (so far I’m no higher up the food chain than fish), casseroles (usually with a wheat-based pasta and/or cheese, both of which I’m allergic to), or breads/cakes (also wheat based), so there just isn’t much call for it in my life.

About fifteen minutes or so after the oven would go on, the woofus would go nuts. I’d put in whatever it was to bake, go back to work, and in fifteen minutes or so, until I finally took the food out, Sunny would be at me, pawing, whimpering, trembling. My first guess was that he wanted the tofu I was baking (he likes tofu), but when I cooked salmon on the stovetop and he didn’t react, I began to wonder. A woofus wanting baked tofu more than some version of DEAD ANIMAL? Unlikely.

But there was a problem: I believe I have mentioned that I am a recovering clutterbug. My hated mother’s idea of house-cleaning was to assign each of us a task or an area, leave us to do it, and when we thought we were done she would come and “inspect,” by which she meant let us have it about how lousy a job we did. So “cleaning = trauma” is the equation in my subconscious, and my stove needed to be cleaned before anyone came to inspect it. It took a couple weeks, what with needing supplies to be got in and with my working the night shift, but finally yesterday, Helen and I had a counseling/cleaning session in my kitchen. Helen says that I try to clean too perfectly. I’ll try to keep that in mind in future.

With my newly cleaned stove, I called the utility company this morning. They thought I was a little nutty calling entirely on the basis of a dog’s testimony, but they can’t mess around with possible carbon monoxide poisoning so they sent a serviceperson. He also was dubious about the “call from a dog,” but he listened to my story and then pulled out his gadget and turned on my oven. We waited about ten minutes while the oven heated up and the gadget showed slowly increasing levels of CO, with occasional downturns. My CO detector went off for the first time. Sunny started getting trembly and whimpering. “What’s the matter, boy, think we’re trying to poison you?” the serviceperson asked. Sunny went on whimpering.

In the end, the serviceperson’s summation was “Good job, dog!” He tagged the stove and turned off the gas to it. My landlord is being informed that he must replace the stove or get it cleaned so that it burns more efficiently. One can’t help but wonder how long that will take. Meanwhile, I languish for lack of cocoa and miso.

Sunny continued to tell me about the CO for sometime after the serviceperson left, but we went down to the Biscuitwoman for some well-earned woofy treats and now the little guy is having a nap to recooperate from his stress. He knew that oven wasn’t safe, and his nose was better than the supposed CO detector that’s been sitting in my apartment all this time.

The moral, once again, is take your woofus seriously. Odds are that there’s something really going on and your monkey senses are insufficient to realize it.

“Knitting may not solve many ills, but it creates few of them.”
—King Rupert to his son, Prince Andre, A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

With all due respect to His Majesty, don’t you believe it.

I am returning to knitting after a twenty-year hiatus. In my previous incarnation as a knitter, I specialized in Icelandic wool sweaters. Most of the people I went to college with have one.

Since then I have learned about the horrors in sheep farming. To be honest, I should have known. The animals that are combed for fiber (cashmere goats and musk oxen) are safer than the ones that are sheared, but viewing a being as a production unit, whether human or nonhuman, makes for an abusive relationship. At least humans can do things to defend themselves, like organize. After hearing about the abuses, I remembered seeing a shearing demonstration when I was a child, after which I had protested to my father that the sheep had cuts all over her. He tried to convince me that the sheep wasn’t suffering, but that’s one of the advantages of autism: the parental tie does not bind so tightly that one believes flagrant nonsense like “Yes, it’s bleeding, but they don’t feel pain like we do.” So why was she crying so loudly every time more blood appeared? Animal fibers are out.

Not a problem, I thought. There are plant fibers out there: cotton, hemp, linen. I can try some of those.

I went over the internet, not to buy yarn but to find types of yarn to buy. I try to buy local when I can, and there’s a yarn shop only a couple blocks from me. Even just combing the internet, though, made me worried. Cotton yarn seems to all come from Brazil. This means that instead of contributing to the abuse of domestic nonhumans I am contributing to the destruction of the rainforest and the abuse of wild nonhumans. Yee gads, what a choice.

I had one knitter suggest acrylic yarn. I did a little research. To quote the Wikipedia article, “Production of acrylic fibers is centered in the Far East, declining in Europe and now shut down (except for precursor) in the U.S.” Centered in the Far East? Can we say “slave labor”? I thought we could. I may like nonhumans better than humans, but that doesn’t mean I’m for abusing humans, especially not economically and politically disadvantaged ones by economically and politically spoiled ones.

I went to the local yarn store, to see what was in stock. The only nonanimal fiber was Brazilian cotton.

This time I did buy local but exploited the rainforest. I’m not giving up, though. The advantage to doing socks is that they take small amounts of yarn, and I can try some of the hemp and linen and so on available on the internet, and when I find something I like, order a color card and go to the local store and ask them to buy it for me as a special order rather than going to the internet stores.

I should mention that there is one animal fiber I am willing to use: Sunny fluff. Dog hair is called “chiengora,” and I am collecting Sunny fluff when I brush him or get him trimmed so that someday I can find a spinner to spin it for me and I can make something from it to always remember my pretty golden boy by. I know past doubt that he is not viewed simply as a fiber production unit, and is not abused, even if he doesn’t get as many WALKIES!!! as he would like. (He did get some today, so all you Sunny fans need not worry that he is losing out to the knitting craze!) I can’t be sure how other nonhumans are treated by their caretakers, however, and as I said, having the nonhumans specifically for the purpose of selling their hair is ethically problematical inherently. So Sunny is it, but only because the hair comes off him anyway while he’s here for more important reasons: the ever elusive UCKY-WET DOGGIE KISSES!

Considering the size of their brains, it is really quite difficult to trick a woofus.

Oh, sure, confusion isn’t a challenge: I once baffled Sunny for more than five minutes simply by switching a toy from my right (dominant) hand to my left one, with which I’d never played tug before, but having learned that monkeys are sneaky enough to have two hands, Sunny never forgot it. Did Mommy have something in her right hand and it proves to no longer be there? Sunny’s first guess is now that it is in the left hand.

It didn’t take Sunny long at all to learn that he couldn’t play fetch with the children of his original family because they’d only pretend to throw the stick. It took only two fake throws to teach him only to start running if he saw the stick leave a hand, and it took only one fake-out after a legitimate throw for Sunny to give up on them altogether. It infuriated the kids, but Sunny would only show interest when I was the one who said, “Hey, look, Sunny! A stick!” I have never not thrown the Object of Woofiness, although I am well known for throwing it in some unexpected direction.

But if it’s hard to fool a woofus to begin with, you haven’t a prayer when what you are trying to fool is the Nose. As I have discussed before, woofi know to trust their noses before all else, and no sensible monkey would bet against it either. So naturally that’s just what I did.

My new downstairs neighbor (new since July, when Meatman left) I shall simply have to call Biscuitwoman. She gives Sunny doggie biscuits, the colored crunchy biscuit bone type. From me, he’s always licked these things and left them lying about the place. From Biscuitwoman, he makes a woofy fool of himself and crunches them up happily.

The drama, as with so many woofy things, unfolds virtually the same every time. On seeing that I have picked up the leash and headed for our front door, Sunny starts bouncing and whimpering. I attach Sunny’s leash and open the apartment door. He charges out and down the stairs while I sit on our doorstep and change to my outside shoes. (I hope that in the house, when I buy it, to keep the floors clean enough to skip shoes, but that’s not happening here, so I just have two sets of shoes.) Biscuitwoman comes to her door, says, “I heard you making a fuss up there!” and gives him a biscuit.

Usually before I have my shoes on and am downstairs, I hear Biscuitwoman say, “No, you have to eat that one first!” Sunny nearly always takes whatever treat he has been given away a short distance, puts it down, and then comes back to the treat giver. I am not sure whether the purpose is just to get another treat or to get a “better” treat because most people will respond by either giving him another one or saying, “Oh, you didn’t like that? How about this?” and then gives him something else, usually higher in meat content. Maybe he is content with either response, since it gets him two treats. Unfortunately I usually spoil his plan by telling the treat giver that it is Sunny’s favorite mooching strategy and not to give him another until he’s at least eaten the first one. Biscuitwoman has by now become very accustomed to this behavior, hence her response. Sunny is a match for her if I’m still distracted with my shoes: he wanders around with the biscuit in his mouth until he has Biscuitwoman confused (it’s hard to tell whether he’s carrying it or not with his big soft mouth), he puts it down, and then goes back to her, and sometimes she’s fooled into giving him another biscuit before he’s eaten his first one. Eventually, however, Biscuitwoman and I get firm about it: eat the first biscuit. While he does, Biscuitwoman gives me one or several “for later.” Sunny always runs back to her to beg for a second biscuit; sometimes he gets it and sometimes she just says, “Your mom has it!”

As you can imagine, Biscuitwoman is one of Sunny’s favorite people. He knows her footstep in the lobby and will cry to go to her if she’s coming in from outside. He will fiercely bark at any interloper foolhardy enough to knock at the door of his Giver of Biscuits; he will protect her from all comers if I will only open the door so that he might charge to her defense. Nowadays I never know if a passionate plea to go Out is because he needs Out or because he wants biscuits. After all, just because he stops at Biscuitwoman’s door doesn’t mean he doesn’t need Out; it’s on his way, and he might as well mooch a treat if the mooching is good, right?

The more difficult problem is what to do with all those biscuits that are supposed to be “for later.” It’s proving to be very difficult to keep them hidden for later. I tried keeping them in a pocket, but it was the one Sunny sits next to if he sits next to me while I work, and he was soon crying and poking at it. Switching them to the opposite pocket didn’t improve matters for long. I tried putting them on a shelf, with some knitting supplies. While his location and announcement of their presence on the shelf (extending his nose as near to the high-up biscuits as it could go and whiffling the air in an exaggerated fashion, which is Spaniel for “Gimme those cookies, Mommy!”) was about par for a woofus, it was truly impressive how he reacted, a couple days later, when I took the ball of yarn down and started to knit with it. It took quite some time for him to satisfy himself that no, the ball wasn’t a biscuit, although it was cruelly masquerading as one.

I tried the beside box, which puts me and my cup of cocoa between him and the biscuits. Didn’t even work ten minutes. Currently there are three biscuits sitting on a different shelf, and Sunny was, until only a short time ago, telling me about how they were up there so I should give them to him.

Why isn’t he still asking? Well, he was pretty persistent about it, but I started working on this entry and therefore ignored him much better than when I was working on the September numbers. (Sorry, Bianca! ^_^;;;) And I have had an idea, which might add interest to long, boring woofus days.

The biggest problem faced by nearly every woofus is boredom. Their monkeys busy with other matters, the woofi find themselves expected to Do Nothing. There’s pretty much nothing harder to do than Nothing, for any critter evolved beyond reptilian patience. Yeah, dogs catch a lot of extra naps, but there’s only so much sleep a woofus can get. This is the genesis of the vast majority of “bad” woofy behavior (which really should be BAD, for “Being A Dog”), the desperate attempt to stave off boredom while the monkeys are Doing Something Supposedly Important. Sunny’s attempt is combined with separation anxiety, from which he has suffered since I was in the hospital a little more than a year ago. When I am away from home, he assaults the front door. I have trained him not to make a fuss so long as he can hear me: if he cries I either go further away or I don’t come closer until at least thirty seconds after he stops. I cannot, not being present, stop him from assaulting the door.

Helen suggested that I get a dog whistle and give it to Biscuitwoman and ask her to blow on it when she hears Sunny banging against the door. It occurs to me now that I might combine this with the extra-biscuit-hiding problem. First, don’t hide the biscuits; put them on a shelf and let him cry and beg and ignore his demands. He does get tired of that after a while. Then, when he is not looking (perhaps he’s busy napping or sitting Mouse Patrol or polishing off a bowl of woofy kibble or maybe just while I’m moving about, getting ready to go), hide the biscuits around the place. Then when the whistle Biscuitwoman has tells him that he should leave the door alone, maybe his nose will tell him that he could be using his time and energy to much better purpose by hunting down the hidden biscuits. Also, if he’s just plain dying of woofy boredom, he might have a wander around and see what goodies he can turn up. Of course that will teach him to eat food he finds, but it’s very hard to discourage a dog from doing that anyway. I figure (as do most canines) that if you are stupid enough to leave your food unattended and where a woofus can get it, you deserve to have it eaten by whatever woofi are in the area, so what’s with all the the yelling and hitting? Punishing the woofus for Poor Monkey Planning, are we? Ha! You deserve to go hungry, not the woofus!

Perhaps I should take Sunny for a trip out to the more distant but nonchain pet supply place this weekend to get a dog whistle and some more treats to hide. I could get some really good ones—maybe that freeze-dried liver he loves so much that makes his breath smell so awful!—for the more difficult and sneaky locations. We’ll see. It rather depends upon whether I get September’s numbers done before the end of the week. On that note, I’ll get back to work, and tell you later how the Hopefully Not Poor Monkey Planning went.

It’s not easy to offend a woofus who has a permanently sunny disposition, but it can be done.

1. Spend a couple weeks working. No frolics, even when the chipmunk is left in plain sight, simply begging to be waved in a woofus face. No WALKIES!!! except to home-buying class. Make sure that the whole time is working an unnatural schedule in which sleep is from the wee hours of the morning to early afternoon, ignoring prime woofus frolic time!

2. Make it rain for one entire day. It is well known, of course, that rain is a monkey-controlled phenomenon, done specifically for the annoyance of woofi, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I do mean rain, not misting or sprinkling, and for one entire day, all twenty-four hours.

3. Get up late, even for a monkey. What takes a mommy so long to wake up? Sunny wakes up and he’s up!

4. Tantalize with short WALKIES!!! to a nice but frequently visited place. Mind you, the UPS Store is wonderful, but the woman actually made Sunny sit before he got his cookie! And then Mommy let her take his picture! He thought mommies were supposed to protect woofi.

5. Watch videos and KNIT! OK, so she’s a Vampire Slayer, she does not have eyelashes to compare with Sunny, and what’s with that knitting? It interferes with tummy rubs.

6. Bake something in the oven. I’m still trying to decide if it’s an indication of his desire for the food being baked or if he’s trying to alert me to carbon monoxide, but the little guy goes absolutely nuts each and every time I bake. Pester, pester, pester. Whimper. It’s making my determination to perfect my tofu baking skills and thereby control my passion for baked tofu cubes very difficult indeed. Whatever the motivation for his pestiness, Sunny doesn’t like baking.

7. Give only a small piece of what was baked in the oven. Regardless of carbon monoxide and after the smell of food filling the house, it’s positively mean of Mommy to eat most of the food herself. The rule should be at least halvesies!

8. Pull off a flea. Hey, to pull off that flea I had to tug on Sunny’s hair, and possibly pull a couple hairs out, and that’s worse than the flea!

9. Dose for fleas. Sunny has a whole day until he needs to be dosed with that smelly stuff that makes him feel goopy and sticks to his fur. If Mommy wants him to have goopy fur, Sunny has much better alternatives than Advantix.

10. Watch more videos and knit more! Again with the non-woofus-centered activities! Sunny suspects that thing I’m working on is not intended for woofy use.

11. Working! What’s with the working again? Isn’t this one of those days off where the woofus takes his rightful place as center of the universe? What’s going on here?

12. TRYING TO TAKE A PHOTO OF THE WOOFUS OVER THE TOP OF THE COMPUTER WHILE WORKING! Sunny finally gets my attention to waver from my work by parking on my legs and staring at me over the laptop screen, and I have to ruin the moment with that hateful camera trying to capture his woofy annoyance! The absolute monkey NERVE!

At that point your sunny-dispositioned woofus should be so thoroughly offended that he stalks off to pout in the living room before you get any further flaky monkey notions, like snoot kisses.

My apologies it has been so long since my last blog entry. I am an Aspie on a mission: a mission to find a home for me and my woofus that does not have so very many stairs associated with it and that is better than slum conditions. (No, really, I do live in slum housing.) Having discovered that only 17% of the rentals in this area are open to woofi, I concluded that it was time to buy a home.

Not that I hadn’t wanted one before, but things are getting more urgent. Sunny is now seven years old. I’m now forty-two. We need a place that doesn’t exhaust us just walking up to it from the sidewalk. We need a place that is accessible to all the places that I can’t take us by car because I can’t ever drive one, my visual reaction time being what it is. A home has always been out of our reach because of my financial stupidity and my persistent Dreaming of Big Expensive Dreams (like 3D graphics).

Fortunately for Sunny and me, I work for Bianca. I told her that I couldn’t buy a house because I am in too much debt, and she offered to pay off my debts. Is that sweet or what? Unfortunately the government would tax me on whatever she paid off, even if I never touched the money, so instead we put together a loan on a long term and at low interest that a mortgage officer called “a sweet deal” when I told him about it. Magically, my monthly debt payments are reduced to less than 5 percent of my monthly income. Interesting fact: the mortgage lenders don’t care how deep you are in debt so long as your payments don’t come to more than 5 percent of your monthly income. Unsolicited advice: even if you’re not interested in home-buying, go to one of the classes just to learn what they have to tell you about credit. Your credit rating in American society is essentially your value as a being, so you need to know about it, and it’s not simple!

I am interested in buying a home, so I have enrolled in a home-buying course for its actual purpose. Sunny is permitted to come along to class, and he’s loving it. I was afraid he was going to lick the toes of one of my classmates who was wearing sandals—I know he thought about it because he gave her toes a good sniff and a long stare before passing on. He loves wandering around and saying hi to the other students. It’s now the big day in his week.

My dream house just happens to be on the market: it’s right next to the grocery stores and the pharmacy and the credit union, and has a lovely tree out front, so I have been ogling it for years as I passed on my way to the grocery stores and the pharmacy and the credit union. I learned at an open house how expensive it was. I didn’t think I could afford it, but then I’m not a mortgage officer, so I thought I should at least look into it. I went to the mortgage officer at my credit union, and as I expected, the Dream House was out of reach. But then he indicated the form in front of me. “Is that the form for the first-time home buyers IDA?”

This IDA is a marvelous thing. If you meet the income restrictions, you can save up to $1666 in between one and three years and get back $5K for your house down-payment. Naturally I am going to apply. So I said yes, that is what the form is.

“I don’t make the decision on who gets in that program, but they like to limit it to people who actually will be in a position to buy a home within three years.”

Ouch. I could live with the Dream Home being out of my league, but no house at all? After all Bianca’s generosity and even attending classes and open houses with humans and going to have to do more of that and still no house? And to be told about it in that backhanded, snooty way, instead of just saying “I don’t think you’ll make it within the time alotted by the program”? That really hurt.

I complained about the Mortgage Officer to Joh, who had the practical suggestion that I ask the instructor of my home-buying class instructor what she thought. My instructor looked at the numbers. She suggested I get a condo as a starter home, although I’d have to go through another program because hers is limited to buyers within the city and all the condos are outside of it. I was devastated. I’d rented one of those condos one year about a decade and a half ago, and hated it. It was too far from everything. Grocery shopping, laundry, everything was a pain. Plus there wasn’t much in the way of WALKIES!!! locations. It would, however, get me out of the Osgood Estates and into real housing fairly quickly. It also bid fair to have me stuck there permanently. Between a condo mortgage, condo fees, and the higher transportation fees of having to rely on buses and cabs when I generally rely on my feet, I’d be lucky to save anything.

So the day after our talk, I wrote my instructor an e-mail. I pointed out the downsides of the condo plan. I pointed out how much I could save by staying in my slum housing for the time being. With the IDA, I could put together a 5% deposit in less than two years on the least expensive houses avialable in the city that aren’t fixer uppers. (I have no interest in making my home my hobby. My home is supposed to be the locus for my hobbies, not the hobbies themselves.) Of course, with the mortgage officer’s attitude the IDA looked iffy, but I had written the director of the IDA program a letter explaining why I had to live in the city and really needed the IDA to make the whole package work.

To my amazement, my instructor was so impressed by my logic and my thinking things out that she wrote a letter to the IDA director and the mortgage officer, supporting my IDA application! She told them she couldn’t promise that an appropriate house would be available for me to buy within the time of the program, but she thought I had a good plan and was very determined. So I might get into the IDA program after all!

That still puts a lot of months ahead of me and the woofus. Months of stairs. Months of fighting with the landlord about the heat being broken. (We do that about every three weeks through the heating season because that’s about how often it breaks. It breaks, I complain for at least four days while he insists it’s because I have let the radiators get dusty while I insist that the pipe coming into the apartment is cold, so it doesn’t matter if the radiators are dusty or not. Finally the plumber comes, patch-fixes it, it works for about two weeks, and the cycle repeats.) Months of paring down expenses as far as we can so that we can save the money for the down-payment. For instance, instead of taking Sunny to the groomer for his three-month trim, I’m going to trim him myself. It takes days because he eventually starts licking to keep me from trimming, which puts him in danger of having his tongue trimmed and I have to stop for that day and try again the next. He looks silly because I’m a lousy trimmer and he goes around with a ridiculously uneven job until I’m done: his tail and one foot will be fine, but his other feet will be bushy and his tush will look like he’s wearing panties with ruffles on the seat. Of course, he’s a woofus, and he doesn’t care how he looks. Thank goodness he’s not a bunny because bunnies know when they look ridiculous and take it badly. Still, I don’t like it when people stare at Sunny not in a good way.

But maybe there will at least be a purpose to all those months in the end.

Yesterday after I posted, I took Sunny outside and discovered it wasn’t as hot as I thought it was. The rain had cooled things down a bit.

So I took the woofus for birthday WALKIES!!! It was so humid that it felt like we were swimming and when we got back my clothes were as wet as if we had been, but Sunny loved it.

I love the little critter, but his taste is more than a little questionable! It was his birthday, though, not mine.