Small Deaths #8 : Behold a Survivor!

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

A quickly snapped shot of a live green mouse.

As evidenced by its missing ear and maimed forehead, this mouse has had a run in or two with our dog, but has thus far lived to tell the tale.

Our Ferocious Child

There are several ongoing cold-wars being fought around my house at any given time, most of them involving our dog Sadie versus various populations of woodland creatures. Chiefly she has it in for the local deer, who frequently mill about in our yard, peacefully eating acorns just to spite her. However, Sadie's willing to extend her ire toward squirrels and birds, too. She even knows each animal group by name. If we say, "Is there a deer?" Sadie will rush to the front window and peer down the yard. If we say "Is there a bird?" she'll do the same thing, only looking up into the trees. For squirrels she does both. If she sees any of the above creatures, she will bark ferociously and dash back and forth between the windows in search of a better vantage point for barking. If one of us is nearby, she will also make a third stop at the front door, hoping we'll crack it open for her and let her blaze out into the yard, where she will chase after whichever creature she sees until it A) escapes up a tree; or B) travels past her shock-collar boundary. (The funny thing is that 95 percent of the time we don't even make her wear the shock collar, cause we keep forgetting to take it off of her when we drive anywhere. Yet, still she respects her boundaries.)

However, there's another animal type that Sadie doesn't quite know what to do about: other dogs. Unlike deer, birds and squirrels, who flee from Sadie, giving her something fun to chase, dogs are wildcards and may decide to stand their ground. Having never been in a fight, Sadie's not sure how to deal with dogs that are unphased by her terrifying, fluffy presence.

Take, for instance, her boyfriend. This is a neighborhood dog who wanders around freely at night and typically stops by our house at some point in its trek through the area. While I haven't gotten a great look at him, he's a "Terrierish" sort of small to medium sized dog and from his behavior does not come off as being at all aggressive. The first time I saw him was when he happened to sneak up into the yard while we were working in the garage one night and startled Sadie by suddenly being in a place where she had not previously been aware another dog was at. She didn't utter a sound. Another time was in the middle of the night while I was out letting the dog go "potty" and he came bounding from the woods with great energy, making a direct line for Sadie. I wasn't exactly concerned, cause she outweighs him by twice. And to her credit, she didn't run, but she certainly seemed confused as to what to do about him when he halted in front of her and sniffed her about the nose. Then, he turned and dashed off down the driveway with nary a problem.

Since then, he's been back frequently. The closest they've ever come to fighting was when he tried to sniff Sadie's ass and she jumped around and growled at him. Normally, though, Sadie's reaction to his presence is to pretend he isn't there at all. If he's not actively sniffing her, she will ignore him and, instead, sniff areas of the yard he had occupied only moments before. It's as if she's far more interested in having sniffed evidence of another dog that had been in the yard in the past rather than deal with the dog that is right there in the present. The best example of this was a couple nights ago, when she began whining at the back door to get out after hearing our neighbor's fenced-in dogs barking at something. I opened the door, she dashed into the yard and then began running full out toward what turned out to be her boyfriend. As soon as she realized he was a dog and not a deer, she immediately put on the brakes and then trotted a little further down the yard to sniff, as though the dog wasn't there at all. It could only have been funnier if she'd looked back over her shoulder to see if I'd seen her seeing the dog.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want her to get in a fight no matter how well I think she could defend herself. I just find her "dog-blinders" very amusing.

It is, however, more evidence that our dog is in need of more socialization. Or, if my wife has her way, a doggie sibling.

Small Deaths #7: Scavenger Caught!

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

Often times scavengers take advantage of a recent kill for a quick meal.

(Which is only fitting, in this case, as it was Avie's toy to begin with.)

Note its irritation at being captured on film.

The scavenger hides, blending seamlessly into its surroundings, awaiting the moment when it can return to the carcass.

Small Deaths #6 : Punk Cow 4.0 Even Deader Still

(An ongoing pictorial series chronicling the poor, small, stuffed animals my dog Sadie has murdered during the course of her life. Not for the faint of heart.)

We only thought Punk Cow 4.0 was dead before.

Alien Wang Shroom

We've had a great deal of rainy weather round the Borderland for most of the summer. So much so that for several weeks we had a fairly large crop of mushrooms growing throughout our immediate back yard and down the wooded backside of our property. With such a large variety of fungus available, the wife and I began to wonder if any of them were edible. Granted, not all of them looked or smelled appetizing, but there were several varieties that smelled good enough that we suspected they might taste delicious if sautéed in a little butter. We were not, however, going to take any chances, particularly when there are some poisonous mushrooms that can destroy your liver and kidneys.

We did a little research online into the sort of mushrooms native to our area, but were never entirely happy with the results we found. Finally, we decided to spend some money on the task and purchased Mushrooms of West Virginia and the Central Appalachians, by William Roody. It's a nice thick volume with color pictures of every featured variety, categorized by appearance and type. Of course, no sooner had the book arrived then two weeks of solid dry weather set in and all the mushrooms melted into puddles of blackness.

Last night it came a rain which lasted until mid morning today. This afternoon, I gathered up a basket and went out to see what might have come up. Not far behind our wood pile, I saw something white and stalky poking out of the leaves. On closer inspection, I could see that it was a mushroom unlike any I've seen around here before, as this one had a slimy, dark green cap. I pulled it from the ground and it came away easily, but I could see that there was something more left beneath the leaves. Sure enough, there was a fleshy, partially transparent egg-like body there--not entirely dissimilar from the eggs in the ALIEN movies. I carefully gathered it up and stuck the stalk of the mushroom back within it. To my horrified fascination, I discovered that what I had there in my hand was the most phallic mushroom I've ever seen. It looked exactly as if when God was designing it he basically said, yep, gonna make this one look exactly like a wang, no two ways about it. They're gonna take one look and say, `that, sir, looks like a wang, all right.' As far as fungus wangs go, however, this was possibly the nastiest, most alien-looking wang to be found outside of certain substrata of anime. And, whoo, did it stink. No, let me rephrase that: it was Mr. Stankyesque in the foetid intensity of its stench. Naturally, I didn't fully realize this until I'd carried it into the house to show the wife, contaminating pretty much the premises in the process.

Using my new guide book, I was able to successfully classify this alien wang-shroom and found that its data could not be more appropriate in nearly every way.

Latin name: Dictyophora duplicata
Synonym: Phallus duplicatus (insert Harry Potter spell-casting joke here)
Common Name: Netted Stinkhorn; Wood Witch
Order: Phallales
Family: Phallaceae

Astoundingly, it is edible, but only in the "egg stage" (which goes to prove that even Bill Roody knows an ALIENS reference when he sees one). Once the mushroom is, um, erect, however, there's just nothing less appetizing, as the slimy green cap and overall stench attracts bugs to it, which pick up reproductive spores from the slime and spread them wherever they go. In fact, between the time I left the thing on the deck rail, went and found more mushrooms and came back to classify them, the wang shroom was pretty much covered in flies. I, then, didn't help matters by trying to hurl the offensive thing into the woods, doing so by throwing it holding only the relatively slime-free stalk. Trouble is, that stalk isn't nearly as solid as you might expect and the whole thing exploded upon my attempt, sending a shower of slime everywhere. Which probably means, we'll have more of them springing up in the future.

Our gifted child

A few evenings ago, the wife and I were sitting on the couch enjoying some tube. Our dog, Sadie, had evidently not received as much attention as she wanted in the form of play time, so she rushed through the open back door and ran to find her stick.

The dog has had many sticks during her year and a half of life, many of them bordering on logs as she has grown to her current above average dog-size. Her current stick is actually part of a branch from a tree the wife and I had to chop down one day, which is nearly three feet long and sporting two sub-branches that make it form something resembling the letter F when viewed from the correct angle. She loves it, probably because it's big and unwieldy, offering her a variety of structures on which to chew, yet is still quite portable unlike some of her previous sticks/logs.


So, Sadie rushed out to find her stick, located it, gnawed on it viciously for a little while, then decided that if she brought it inside and showed it to Ma and Pa one of them might be enticed to follow her outside to play and allow her the opportunity to play keepaway from us with said stick. That decided, she raced back toward the house with the stick held horizontally in her mouth and attempted to run through the open back door with it. And because our back door is a bit wider than average, she might even have cleared it had our back screen door not been slid about four inches from being fully open. One end of the stick hit the screen and the other hit the door frame and the dog came to a sudden and violent halt, a comical act for which the wife and I had front row seats on the couch.

Before bursting into uncontrollable laughter, we first paused to make sure the dog hadn't just brained herself. She immediately looked a little surprised, sat down and dropped the stick. Then her expression shifted into a cartoon bluebirds flying about the head dazed sort of look, but as she saw us rising to examine her she walked into the house easily enough and seemed to be little worse for wear. We checked her teeth and mouth for cuts, but all looked fine. Soon she was back to her usual self, though she gave the stick a wide berth for a few days.

Cut to last night. The wife, being on call, came home late, so it was already dark. The dog, who'd been waiting patiently impatiently for Ma's usual evening arrival for hours, went nuts and began happily mouthing (we call it biting) her Ma and jumping around excitedly slashing everyone with her claws. (It's really the cutest thing you've ever seen, provided you're wearing the proper protective gear.) When she gets into one of those moods both she and we know the only thing that can be done about it is for her to take some of her pent up excitement out on one of her toys. And in these cases, we simply say "Where's your toy?" or "You'd better go find a toy" at which point she dashes off, finds one and then dashes back to show us how good she is at mauling it. All of her toys were outside at that point, so I opened the screen door and she dashed out to go find one. Unfortunately, I closed the screen door behind her and when she shortly returned with one of her toys she plowed headfirst into the screen door, knocking it off its tracks and bending part of it into the interior of the house.

I was standing right there when she did it and happened to look down at witness the whole thing. It was one of those slow motion moments in which I remember thinking, Here she comes. She'd better slow down. She's going to stop. Any second now she'll... *SLAM* What an EFFing moron.

Sadie stood still for a moment looking pretty surprised. Her expression was one part dazed and one part concern that she might be in trouble for breaking the door. I pulled the door a little further into the house and told her to come in, which she did. Again we checked her out and she seemed okay, not to mention relieved that she wasn't in trouble.

I've now reattached the door, the dog watching me all the while. It too is okay, though there's kind of a double crimp in one side of it from the two recent impacts.