Dad:Â What are all the packages?
Me: Socks. I finished my 12 part sock bracket and the Thorlo Unisex Wool padded hiker and Wigwam Merino Wool comfort hiker socks won. I guess it was more efficient to have four smaller boxes or they came from different sources.
Dad:Â I wish you had told me.
Me: About my socks?
Dad: Yes, I just purchased 12 pair of crappy Hanes when I realized that life was too short to wear bad socks.
Me:Â You can always give the socks to Max [our dog, a prodigious thief of socks. -Ed.], he’d love you forever if you did.
Dad: He’s a dog, he already does.
Me: But now he’d love you forever, and have a sock to show for it.
Tag: Max
Thumping Mystery
A housemate broke his leg on vacation which is now in a cast. This has led to him receiving the moniker of “thumper” based on the noise created as he tries to remain ambulatory. But there’s was a bit of a mystery; sometimes instead of regular thumping, there was a few thumps followed by a long pause followed by a thump late at night. The mystery was resolved today when I went to bed late and witnessed the housemate trying to convince Max to move out of the hallway before he gave up, wound up, and jumped over him.
Good dog.
Max Meets the Roomba
Long ago, someone suggested to me that nature would one day rise up and crush man. He wasn’t talking about this in the sense that we’d be undone by our own destruction of the environmental balance but in a literal sense that apes, dogs, and groundhogs would begin attacking people.  Quaint but unlikely and I propose the simple counter than I’ve never met an animal that could suffer a vacuum cleaner for more than 10 seconds. I purchased a Roomba as the second robot of my birthday and training max to endure the Roomba without much barking has been, tough.  These were my steps:
- See if Max would associate his love of freshly vacuumed surfaces (no success)
- Place treats on the Roomba while off (success!)
- Place treats on the Roomba while it was beeping (success!)
- Place treats on the Roomba while it was doing lines back and forth controlled by a remote (success!)
- Place treats on the Roomba while it was running normally (barking like we were in the end times)
If I had to guess, I think Max finds the turn mechanism of the Roomba menacing or maybe he thinks the Roomba is having a seizure when it wails into the same section of the wall over and over. Either way, if there is an animal uprising, I’m confident the pseudorandomly directed casters of the blue gremlin will save me.
Getting to the Bottom of Dog Health
My dog Max had two tumors removed from his haunches three years ago and we’ve been checking for returns regularly. Over the last year my dad’s been noting the growth of a large… something near where Max’s legs meet his body.  We took him to the vet and my dad asked me to interpret the results:
Dad: Doctor said Max had “excess fat in his subcutaneous tissue”. What do we do about it?
Me: Feed him less and have him get more exercise.
Dad: What’s that going to do about a tumor?
Me: It’s not a tumor.
Dad: Certainly sounds like it.
Me: Dad, the vet’s telling us that Max has a fat ass.
Dad: Oh.
Rediscovering Snow
The cat has a nonchalant attitude towards snow. He recognizes that it’s cold and to be avoided but seems to use his tail as a periscope in the deep stuff. My dog on the other hand treats the stuff as would the caveman materials scientist. He will pee in it and marvel as how he can carve a path through it. It’s the only time I’ve seen a dog watch itself pee. He seems to realize snows lightness but hops from place to place not like a kangaroo but like a blind person on a pogo stick. There are divets separated by gaps which form canine crop circles whirling across the yard near his favorite bark-at-nothing-in-particular spot. Most impressive is how he periodically stares at the snowscape, becomes one with the Matrix essence of it and lunges for something at the level of the actual ground. This process repeats itself maybe ten times and then he moves on to whirling dervish mode before resuming his nasal spearfishing.  Most impressively, he’s learned to wait on the walk mat to have the snow removed. If only he could repeat this trick when covered in water, mud, kitty litter, or groundhog fur.
Cot-Tent Test
In anticipation of Canada I got a Cot-Tent. Recently I’ve done poorly sleeping on very hard surfaces recently and I somewhat miss floors, so I opted for the cot tent. I set it up in my room to make sure it would work and it proved suitable with one exception: My dog, Max, doesn’t know what to do about it. Normally, he licks my face if he needs to go outside at night and this arrangement required some ingenuity from him. He came into my room at about 4 AM as I was awakened by the door knob hitting the wall (his normal entrance theme). He walked over to right next to the cot tent and stood still for a few seconds until he start poking nose into it looking for an opening. He found the one at my feet which was open and went to the other side where my head was which was closed. Losing no time his nose started lunging at the zipper opening until he separated the two zippers enough to get his nose in and wedge the flap over. I thought I had pulled one over on him as during this process I’d rotated in place and now my feet were where my head was. He now started licking my feet. Dog logic: The head is at the opposite end of the feet, even if that’s where the feet are.
Cake Funeral
At 2:00 AM, Monday, September 14, 2009 a blueberry cake died. It started off as a good cake, straight muffin mixed and true. The carrot cake recipe was pushed into service with heavy cream replacing yogurt and shortening for butter to make ends meet. Instead of carrots of most carrot cakes, this used blueberries, not the freshest but still a blueberry to be proud of. The batter was poured into a cake pan and the rest has been determined by forensic investigation:
- 1:12 – Cake batter enters oven, weighted down heavy with blueberries
- 1:27-The rise in interrupted by the opening of the door to the oven, causing a gust of cold air to blast the top of the cake.
- 1:30 – The top of the cake solidifies after exposure to cold air preventing the batter from rising properly.
- 1:38 – The sealed cake top breaks off from the rise of the rest of cake and makes a run for the bottom of the pan.
- 1:45 – Cake hits boiling point, berries boil and burst, releasing wave of moisture.
- 1:50 – Cake having just been hit by wave of blueberry burst-induced water vapor beings sagging as foam breaks due to new weight at the top.
- 1:59 – Cake top has descended, creating an almost perfect spongy square center like some sort of quadrilateral donut.
- 2:00 – Cake frosting is applied, begins to melt into the central compression where upon the center finally falls into madness.
- 2:05 – Cake death recorded, given to dog.
- 2:10 – Dog throws up outside.
- 2:12 – Cat wants in, confused by dog throwing up outside.
- 2:14 – Cat salvages cake by spending a solid 10 minutes licking the cream cheese package.
Time to wake up late, hit the bakery, find something nice, slip it into my cake tin and make it look shitty so people think I made it. I’ve only done this once before, I think people could tell, but they were nice and lied to me.
Max Photoshop
Teejay took a nice picture of Max that currently hangs in my “office” at work.
A TI member, Mr. Hamster, thought he could make it better. I think he has:
And
Last Mouse Standing
We’ve been going through another mouse influx and after 28 tiny executions I thought we were done. The rodent slayings slowed to a trickle with today’s coming after two days of silence among the four traps placed. I popped open the cabinet and grabbed the trap containing the last scion of the Robinson’s mus line. I felt bad for a minute thinking the little bastard had died alone after we picked off his family one by one terrorized by hunger after clearing out the food cabinets until I heard a rustling behind me. I turned to a see a mouse in my dog Max’s food bowl. He jammed a few pieces of kibble into his mouth and jumped back through a hole in the kick space.
Until I find a way to have Max eat around a mousetrap it appears I’m limited to killing the dumb ones. War is hell.
Adapting to One's Environment
A tenant had a friend that stayed for the night who wasn’t probably used to other people in her near acquaintance. The door to my brother’s former room opened and the guest began petting my dog, Max and uttering traditional dog baby talk. She suddenly stopped, and mildly stunned faced panned through the door gap to look up and see me sitting at my desk mercing bitchs. The door closed quickly. Moments later, the door opened and she walked to the rest room wearing a grey t-shirt held to her knees with a force of determination that’d make most bull riders jealous. Normally I have to open my mouth to make people feel awkward.