NoodleDog

Who are we kidding here? I’m a bad blogger. I see other sites that have empty pages, and am just about to go “tsk”, but then remember that my last entry was in FRICKING MAY. I wrote part of an entry before I went on vacation in July, but never got the time to finish it and then post it, so here we are in mid-August, with no updates.

You are all asking “Has she died? Did she get fired and lose her home and have to live in a box with no electricity or internet access for the past few months? Did a giant bird come down out of the sky and fly off with her and the dogs and cats? Surely we would have heard something on the news about that, if that was the case…”

Oh, I’m alive, alright. Not carried off by a bird. Not living in a box, either.

Back in May, as you remember, we had just rounded the corner from horrible, numbing cold to “Wow, you can go outside without dying from exposure” to “Why are you flipping that switch on the thermost… woah. Please don’t do that. You are putting COLD AIR into the house on purpose?? But it just got warm!!” June brought us rain, again, and a lot of property managers seized up with terror at the prospect of another flooding season in Calgary, where we usually don’t get that much rain. Bunnies, having shed their white coats in favour of dappled brown, were starkly obvious sitting in fields of lush, green grass, and easily picked-off by passing coyotes.

Back in May, as well, we had “trailer woes” that I cleverly described so as to throw our friends off the track… We had actually found the perfect trailer on a dealership lot that we bought and had taken out the weekend after I wrote my last entry. We showed up at our friends’ campsite to surprise them, and a good time was had by all. The trailer was great, really – a 25-foot travel trailer with the bedroom in the back, living room/kitchen in the front. It was fantastic.

July brought us nicer weather, so I could sit outside on our patio (when I wasn’t working) and eat dinner, enjoy the days, sip cool drinks. I missed telling you the stories about fostering puppies with my animal rescue group back in June. They called me up one day and said “We’re bringing in puppies from Louisiana! You should see them!! They’re SOOOOO CUTE!!! You wanna foster three of them overnight until we can get them to their foster home the next day?” Man, who would pass up the opportunity to play with three adorable, six-week old collie-cross puppies? Not me.

Only, see, the crazy lady in Louisiana sent us ELEVEN DOGS instead of FIVE. So there were a lot more puppies than we had thought there would be, and not so many foster homes for them all. Rob and I ended up with FIVE puppies instead of three. And their foster homes “fell through” the next day, so we had ‘em for a week. Oh, they were cute alright. Too cute. Little devils. We had three collie cross puppies (Rupret, Francine & Trevor), one bloodhound (Hubert) and one we thought might be a coonhound mix (Millie). Hubert had a cough, which Millie caught, as did one of the collie puppies (Rupret). It was bad enough that they were taken in to the vet for medication, and one night, it was so bad I had to actually get up, go to the store at 4a and get them cough syrup. The only kind we had in the house had acetaminophen in it, which you can’t give to dogs. Poor puppies! And poor us. Puppies are so cute that, short-term, you don’t mind the occasional accident, but five of them pee all over everything, everywhere, and poop wherever they feel like. Luckily, when we had them, it was nice enough weather that they got to be outside most of the time.

The three collie pups went to another foster home at the end of the week, and Hubert got adopted out pretty quickly three days later. Millie… Well, Millie is another story. She has to be the cutest puppy of them all. Hubert was cute, don’t get me wrong, but Millie? She is absolutely adorable. She has a sharp little brown muzzle with a black button nose, and two bright, brown eyes, and long, soft ears. She is made of sunshine, butterflies, joy and mischief. She is an absolute delight.

… See where I’m going with this???

Anyway, Millie didn’t get adopted for whatever reason there is in the universe. We had an application come in on her, but it never got passed on to me to try to call the people, and I’m not sure what the status is or what happened to it, ultimately. Millie is about four months old, now, and we figure she’s a beagle cross, possibly with a coonhound, or maybe not, but I don’t care. She’s perfect.

Rob still says no more dogs, and that we can’t keep her. So that’s where we stand with that for now. I’m trying not to ask him too much if we can keep her because it’s frustrating to us both.

We also planned our vacation for July. We were going to leave mid-July, but there were some changes with Rob’s job, in that his department was classified “surplus” and moved to the East (Toronto, Onterrible), and the only provision his company made for him to stay with them was to offer him a job as a customer service agent (read: phone rep), which he decided wasn’t for him. In order to accommodate his last rush for dental work while he still had benefits, we delayed leaving on vacation until the last week of July.

We packed up our brand new trailer with all sorts of stuff, packed the dogs in the back of our Suburban, and headed off across the country. Our plan was to travel to my grandmother’s farm in Quebec, stopping overnight at my brother’s place in Indiana on the way there, but on the way back, we’d stay with him for a few days and help him get his house ready for sale. The trip out went well, I’d say – we made most of our timelines. We started out Thursday, July 20th after work, and made our way in to Saskatchewan. We stayed in Moosejaw overnight at the Wal Mart parking lot there. On Friday, we crossed the border. That was interesting, because when we pulled up, there were a bunch of cars, but some guy directed me to get into this shorter line because we were an RV!! This was good, because the Suburban tended to overheat if you stopped without ramping it down. The border crossing at Portal on the U.S. side had this big, strange new machine with all these radiation warning stickers. I casually asked the border guy what the machine was, and all he said was “I can’t talk about it”. They were very unconcerned with our dogs, but had a keen interest in the trailer, and I think the machine was an x-ray machine, which they ran by our trailer. I think they were checking to make sure we weren’t importing any illegal aliens or something. They were a little worried about us sneaking meat into the country, but we knew better and didn’t even try.

That Friday, we drove through North Dakota, in to St. Paul, Minnesota. We got in to St. Paul around 11p, but I was driving and was awake, so I figured we could just drive through the night to make it to my brother’s place the next day. I took the shift and woke Rob up around 6a, just as we were getting to Madison, Wisconsin. He drove into Chicago, and I called The Mac to get directions, and we picked our way around Chicago and on towards South Bend.

Not having slept more than an hour or so by the time we got to The Mac’s place, I was pretty tired. We rolled in around 11a (with the hour’s time change, of course), and went shopping for groceries and beer, and then I got to have a nap. I experience a strange sort of euphoria in grocery stores regularly, but when I’m that exhausted, it’s exaggerated, and I’m sure the shoppers that day thought I was completely stoned.

We had a nice afternoon with The Mac. Our crew of dogs got to meet Snowball, and we had to watch them carefully. Snowy is an alpha female, of course, and is usually quite a sweetheart, but one out of every, say, seven dogs, she decides is worthy to kill. She had met the Noodledog years ago as a puppy and is good friends with him, and she met Cooter when The Mac was here for Christmas a couple of years back after Rob and I met. She had some minor scuffles with Cooter then because he was such a rambunctious puppy, but they were alright… It was Beau I was most worried about because he can be such a little shit. He’s dominant at the best of times, and a jackass about it at the worst of times, and very food-protective. Millie would, of course, be fine with Snowy, being a puppy, and Snowy loves all puppies.

We introduced them all individually first to Snowy, and then let them have a play session in the yard when she accepted them all. It was going just great until she identified Cooter as a troublemaker. Cooter is far from a troublemaker, but when he’s playing ball (or stick, or throw-pretty-much-anything), he gets really focused, and tends to run into other dogs or things in the way. They were playing, and while his focus is on the ball or stick, Snowball’s aim is to make the game more of a keep-away situation. He ran into Snowball once, and that was it, she knocked him over and there was some snapping. Again, nothing serious, but she was on the alert for trouble.

Then… well, as I said, Beau can be a shit about things, and he stirred it up and I don’t know what he must have said to Snowy, but she didn’t take it well, and it was on. She flipped him over onto his back like a little clam, and stood over him pinning him down. Man, was he mad!! He growled and snarled and you would have thought he was the biggest dog in the world (he’s about a third of Snowy’s size). Since she wasn’t doing anything to him, I actually laughed, because it’s about time Beau gets put in his place, but Rob and Jon broke it up, and as they were separating the two of them, Beau took a parting shot and nicked Snowy’s lip (no damage, just a nick), but then she went to take him out at the throat. Luckily the guys were there to manage the situation. Beau can be such an idiot about things.

Anyway, all was well for the rest of the afternoon and evening, and we sat up watching The Dog Whisperer and hanging out with Jon and some friends. We left the next morning for Toronto, and the drive went well except when we got to the border. That bridge through Detroit to Windsor is insane. The Suburban was overheating big-time, so Rob popped the hood to allow more air to circulate to cool the thing.

Sure enough, we get through the total disorder and we’re on our way across the bridge, and WHOOP! The hood pops right up in front of us!! Aaaaa!! We’re driving!! We can’t see!! WE COULD DIE!!! We have to pull over, right there on the damn bridge, and put the hood back down. Heh.

Ontario is big. I don’t know if you’ve looked at a map lately, but that province is huge. We wound our way along the 401 to the Toronto area, and then headed to Aurora to visit my friend, Bec, and her family. We got there just in time for dinner – a fantastic barbecue – and had another great evening relaxing. It was fantastic. I sure miss Bec & Kevin, so it was really nice to see them, and their little girl, Gillian, was hilarious to watch playing with the dogs. Millie really liked her, because Gillian would run around screaming, and Millie thought that would be the best game in the whole world! You get to run!! And play!! And there’s screaming?! What more could you ask for? Gillian threw a ball for the dogs and made some friends for life.

We were off again the next morning to make our way to the farm. Again, Ontario is big. We got to Montreal around 3:30p, and were at the farm by around 6p. We had to stop in Magog, the town nearby, first to dump the trailer’s waste. We had a little dinner at the farm and sat around chatting. We were able to show my grandmother the trailer, and I think she liked it!! She got to meet the dogs, and then we headed up to the edge of the woods (about a quarter mile away from the house) to set up our trailer, where we’d camp out for the trip.

We got a perfect spot, and Rob set up the trailer to be level, and we got everything ready for our stay. Just as I was sitting down to relax in the living room with a drink, Rob called from the bedroom “Get Millie!! She has something!!” and Millie came streaking out of the living room and over to the couch to hide with something. I grabbed her and took what she had and called “She has your little white box!!” Rob said “I think that’s for you…” and opened it up for me, and asked me to marry him. BEST. PROPOSAL. EVER!!!

I said yes, just so you know.

It was a good evening. We sat up celebrating and had a very nice bottle of red wine that Rob had been saving for a special occasion. I didn’t even get a headache from it the next day, which was a huge bonus. We’d go in to the farmhouse during the day to visit with my grandmother and have lunch, and then in the afternoons, we’d try and give her a break so she could have a nap. We usually went in to Magog to get groceries or hack around. We did have to go in to Magog to talk to the Social Services agent about my grandmother’s care… Part of the reason for the trip was to try and see if there is a way of providing some level of home care for her. She’s 94 years old and alone in the house all day. My uncle, who is in his 70’s, comes by for lunch some days, but for the most part, my grandmother is just on her own throughout the day, and she does have some cognitive degeneration and forgets things. Like one day, we came to the house for lunch, and she was on the porch, visibly very upset about something… She had put lunch on to cook, forgot about it and went onto the verandah and fell asleep. Everything burned, and she was so distraught, it was heartbreaking.

I did get a chance to talk to the Social Services Agent, whose name happened to be Ricky, so all I could think of was Trailer Park Boys when we were talking!! He didn’t speak much English, so I had to polish off my French, and somehow we communicated enough to figure out that her situation does require home care, and she needs to be assessed by their department to try and figure out what she needs. She shouldn’t be alone. There are stairs she has to go up and down, and she’s not all that mobile any more due to her having Paget’s Disease, which is a disease similar to osteoporosis, but means that her bones overgrow far more quickly than they should, so they grow very weakly and are subject to very easy breaks. She has also had several strokes and falls, and is “at risk”.

My aunt and uncle who usually look after things for her are in complete denial that there is a problem, and my mother is worried about things to the point where it’s causing a lot of stress, so I said I would go out to the farm and get things in order. I did encounter heavy resistance from my aunt, and some resistance from my uncle, on the issue, but went ahead anyway and called Social Services. If the family will not take steps to ensure my grandmother is cared-for, there is a risk that Social Services will take guardianship away from them and declare her a ward of the state, and put her in a home.

Well, so be it. She has to be looked-after. I think, though, with Social Services giving us the option to provide home care, we should be able to manage that. My aunt who is resisting is so fucking tight with the money that it’s actually unbelievable. You can’t deny health care to your family because you’re expecting some sort of inheritance. Yeesh.

Anyway, the wheels are in motion. It might take a couple more months for it to be finally all sorted-out, but at least things are changing.

We spent as long as we could there, and then made our way back to Indiana to help The Mac paint the house and get it ready for sale since he now has a teaching position in Atlanta this year. We did pretty well, leaving Friday evening and getting to South Bend the next morning. The border crossing, again, was no trouble whatsoever, and they didn’t care at all about the dogs, and barely glanced at their vet certificates. We drove through Syracuse and Cleveland, having picked up the I-90, and followed that pretty much right back to Jon’s place.

A couple of days before we got back to Jon’s place, he had been out for his afternoon walk with Snowy. Halfway through, a big lightening storm hit, and there was a strike about 20 feet from where they were standing. It knocked The Mac over, and was kind of a shock, but he picked himself up and they continued on. I guess they got home, Snowy ate her dinner, but then threw it all back up and collapsed, unable to move!! Panic! He got her to the vet, and her eardrum had burst from the lightning strike. Poor Snowy! She couldn’t walk, and had to take Dramamine and some other medications, and had a hard time for a few days. She was just at the point where she was starting to walk again when we got there, so we didn’t expose her to the other dogs until the last day we were there.

We spent a few days painting and working on things. Rob was the miracle-worker, getting all of the little troublesome things fixed, like the toilet (which ran all the time and had a broken part, so he replaced it entirely!), and Jon’s Jeep. We painted all the trim in his dining room a brilliant white and put in nice curtains, and painted the trim and walls in the living room, and just the walls in the hallway, bedroom and office. We painted the living room and hallway a buttery cream colour, the office a very comfortable green, and his bedroom a light shade of chocolate, so the place looked really good when we were done.

The heat in Indiana was amazing. I loved it, of course, but Rob was dying. He didn’t go outside much (as little as possible), and they had the air conditioner running in the house. We were able to plug in the trailer at Jon’s place, so we had electricity to run the air conditioner in the trailer, so Rob was able to sleep at night. I enjoyed the warmth. The humidity was also very high, which contributed to the impact. Poor Rob – he had thought the farm in Quebec was warm (it was pretty hot there, too, but not quite as humid as in Indiana).

We also went shopping in Michigan City at the outlet mall for a day. That was fun – we went in to nearly all the stores and found great things to get. Jon got a pair of sunglasses for $5 that were reduced from $45, so he was happy with that. Rob got some much needed clothing, and so did I, and we had a pretty good time overall. The Mac also had a big going-away barbecue for his friends and professors, so we helped get ready for that and cook some of the food. A lot of people showed up with stuff, so that was really nice. We bought The Mac a couple of portable awnings since the only day that had rain forecast was, of course, the day of his barbecue. The awnings are great – they fold out like camping chairs, and pack up the same way.

The barbecue was a great success, and we stayed up way too late around the fire (that we had in a portable fire pit The Mac borrowed from his friend Siirie). We got to meet lots of Jon’s friends, and that was really nice to see. I’m glad they took such good care of my brother while he was in South Bend.

The next day, of course, we were due to head home, so we started off at the crack of noon, fighting dehydration and fatigue. We made it as far as Newton, Iowa, where we camped at a pretty nice campground. We were able to take the dogs for a walk that evening, and have a bit of a fire, and relax a little. The next day was a grueling run to Deadwood, South Dakota. It happened to be the Saturday before the huge motorcycle rally in Sturgis, where they get about half a million bikers all coming in to congregate. Sturgis is pretty much just across the interstate from where Deadwood is, so we had a hard time securing a space at a campsite.

When we got in to Deadwood, it was around 10p, so it was dark out. The bikers were out in force, lining the streets of the little town two deep on each side of the street. It was an amazing sight to see, and we wound our way out to the campsite. It was a bit worrisome because we had an electrical problem with our lights that knocked out the interior lighting, so it was hard to see what speed I was at (not very fast) or what was going on. The Suburban was also overheating having to go up so many long hills, so it was a huge relief when we finally got to the campsite.

We parked and walked the dogs and marveled at the amount of money that was sitting in that campsite. Huge diesel-pushing motorhome busses and trailers and toyhaulers and rigs and the bikes… so many bikes. There must have been billions of dollars worth of equipment at that rally.

We couldn’t have a fire that evening because there was a fire ban on in South Dakota. It was pretty dry out. It was also a lot colder at the elevation we were at than I had gotten used to. We called it a night and went to bed at as reasonable an hour as possible, and then got up and headed out the next day.

We had looked at the map, trying to cut some time out of our travel because the days were so long. We found a secondary road that would cut out a bunch of time, and would probably be less trafficked by the bikers on their rally, so we took it and headed up into Wyoming and then into Montana. An hour after we crossed into Montana, in the Southernmost part of the State, we had an accident.

Rob was passing a semi on the single-lane highway. The way was clear and free for quite a ways, and we were on a dotted yellow. He passed the rig, but a couple of bikers came up very fast in the other direction, so he had to cut back over into our lane, and it was a little too quick. We caught a shear off the semi, and a crosswind from the downhill slope, and the road was rutted enough to cause the trailer to start to swing. It swayed further and further, and fishtailed enough that he figured if he kept on, we’d probably roll. He had tried braking, and tried powering through it, but nothing had worked, so he said “we’re going in to the ditch.” I said “OK!” and there we went. It wasn’t a bad ditch, all things considered, and the trailer stopped us like a big anchor. It caught the front left corner on the side when we came into the ditch, crushing that and tearing the left side off the frame.

There was a huge cloud of dust that came over the Suburban, and we were all fine. Rob and I had no injuries, and I checked the dogs quickly to see if they were OK, which they were. I called the Triple A people (because I have Alberta Motor Association coverage which I had upgraded for the trailer) and ordered a tow. Rob surveyed the damage, and then called his insurance company. We kind of forgot to call the police, but they got called somehow anyway, and this Sheriff arrived not too long after. I had started to pick up some of our stuff that was lying along the side of the highway. The Sheriff was kind of surly, but it was alright because after he had done his initial survey of the scene and made his snide comments, a Montana State Highway Patrol car pulled up and told him that we were in the SHP jurisdiction, and he’d take over from there.

They asked a lot of questions as to what had happened, and were satisfied that it wasn’t Rob’s fault, necessarily. The trooper explained that he had to give Rob a ticket because Montana doesn’t believe in accidents very easily, so he cited Rob for “driving too fast for the road conditions” – basically not knowing that the road conditions were the way they were wasn’t really a crime or anything. It’s just that we were going too quickly for the wind shears and crosswinds and the ruts in the road. Our skid pattern was 1,160 feet, and he could see that Rob had tried to control it.

The way things worked out was kind of funny… Two bikers came up heading the same direction as we were, and stopped when they saw the Sheriff out. They owned the towing shop that the AMA had called for me from Broadus. Because they were out riding and didn’t answer, the AMA had called another shop from about 80 miles away, which we had to call and cancel, and the wreckers from Broadus helped get everything going. They strapped the trailer together as best they could, and towed it in to their shop. We went to Broadus with the trooper to get money to pay the ticket (because they take cash!), and see where the trailer would end up. We talked to the guy who owned the wrecker shop and he offered some small storage space to us overnight so we could leave some of the more valuable things out of the trailer. We packed up what we could from the wreck and headed off to Miles City (about 50 miles away) to spend the night and get some supplies from Wal Mart. We bought roof rack containers and a hitch rack and the next day, went back to Broadus to salvage as much as we could out of the wreck.

It took pretty much all day. We made it to Billings that evening with our salvage and the dogs squished into the seat area, much to Cooter’s dismay, because he hates to be smooshed against anyone in case they touch his feet. The dogs were amazingly good throughout all of this, and behaved very well under the circumstances. We spent the night in a hotel with a pool in Billings, and that was alright.

The next day, we made it as far as Great Falls, but were both pretty tired out by the time we stopped. We found another hotel with a pool and swam around a little and relaxed as much as we could. The day after took us home.

So the end of the vacation was a bit tough, and we were late by a couple of days, but that was OK. I’m working things out with the insurance company now to see if we can get our settlement in time to get an identical replacement for the trailer.
And that, my friends, is my story!!