Inside the Little Plastic Castle

It’s been three weeks since Shadow’s freedom day, after eight weeks of crate rest to ensure no stray heartworms clogged up his blood supply.

I’d hoped that on 15 April he’d spurt out the back door and explore every blade of grass and clump of dirt in our back yard. Instead, he’s deliberately lowering his DEFCON level in response to gentle encouragement and constant treats.

Recent achievements:

• Leaving his crate and curling up in his own bed at the foot of ours. (He loves his crate; we only close the door when we leave him in the house)
• Responding to my Shadow, come! by moving to me and sitting within easy reach of my treat-filled fingers.
• Walking on our nearby bike path, which offers humans of all ages, other dogs, bicycles, ebikes, emotos, skateboards, power scooters — in general a hell of a lot of stimulation.
• Walking briskly without stopping to sniff, attached to my powerchair (MyGuy transfers the connection from his lead to mine after we’ve left the house, because the ramp exit is super narrow.)
• Permitting me to scratch his butt while MyGuy fondles his ears.
• Meeting two of the gentler neighborhod dogs — just nose to nose; hasn’t done the full tip-to-tail sniff
• Very politely greeting visitors, sniffing their fingers and returning to his crate.

Slow but steady, in the correct direction.

My favorite Apple-oriented publication celebrates 36 years and 1800 issues this month. Their well-moderated forum talk.tidbits.com provides excellent tech support for thorny issues. This week I learned about a super-cool article for us old graphic geeks:

How a poster that morphed Hokusai’s Great Wave into The Wave of the Future, showing its original woodblock changing into bitmaps then raytracing was actually created by hand, because in 1981 it would have been too expensive to do it digitally.

Short update on our new dog Shadow, who’s getting really really bored. He’s starting to move quickly around corners — there’s an energetic pup in there who has been healing all this time. Hasn’t tried zooming yet, and we’ll be screwed if he takes off inside. I hope that if he has the urge to zoom it’s proof he’s well.

He came with an (ugly) collar, and MyGuy found a very spiffy hot red collar with retroflective threads, a sliding D-ring that can be opposite where the tags depend, and white reflector. But because he’s so wary of things happening on top of him, we’ve needed to making snapping on the leash less traumatic.

Today I’ve gone through this routine four times:

• get a handful of treats, shake the container
• call his name
• treat 1 when I can reach my hand to his mouth
• pull back my hand and come! plus kiss-kiss to get him closer, with a treat for each stop along the way.
• when I can readily reach the D-ring, I snap on the leash and dispense 2 treats
• I rotate the collar around his neck clockwise and counter-clockwise a few times.
• another treat
• unsnap the lead
• 2 more treats
• speak all done! & ASLsign FINISH

MyGuy’s leash always leads somewhere very high-value: today he's been taken around the block twice and for three backyard excursions.

Eleven days left until FREEDOM where he can run in the back yard.

We were delighted by Shadow’s response to his first visitors last night. We kept him crated until they’d seated themselves ready to watch the first two eps of Slings & Arrows. He made not a peep when they arrived nor during our typically uproarious dinner. Once we let him out of the crate, he observed them closely. One guest had recently enjoyed a hot-and-sour sauce on her egg roll. She invited him closer and he licked her hands! He permitted the other to pet his back. He curled up in his bed (immediately below the TV) and peacefully admired the assembled multitude.

Early this AM MyGuy placed one of Shadow’s beds on my side of our bed. Around 6AM he tip tip tap tipped into the bedroom and curled up in it, keeping me company for 45 minutes.

He was in the breezeway with MyGuy 20 minutes ago, having just come back from his evening constitutional. Just as his lead was unhooked, the leonine March wind blew open the door to the backyard. Shadow was out like a shot. MyGuy called him back, but he kept backing up. At last, MyGuy leaned on the garage holding the door open, and Shadow scooted right back in to the breezeway.

The wisdom around rescues is a rule of 3: 3 days to decompress, 3 weeks to learn routines, and 3 months to feel fully at home. We’re on track.

(Got to get some Shadow icons!)

While he was quite surprised to walk out for his morning on-leash ablutions into heavy snow above his knees, he's really starting to relax.

This morning I reached down to stroke his back and he didn't flinch.

Just now I was resting on the floor by his bed, petting his back. I started to scritch the scruff of his neck, and he relaxed even more, his dark eyes shining up at MyGuy behind the camera. (I'm reclining on my tripled-up exercise pad just behind him, shockingly without glasses.)

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Only 28 days of enforced rest to go!

A dozen days ago we brought home Shadow from Underdog Pet Rescue (where we found Bella ten years ago).

Shadow’s had a hard life: not only was he abandoned by his family to live in the street, he got heartworm. Underdog has been treating him, and we have to continue to enforce rest for another 5 weeks. We must walk him on leash even for quick potty trips in the back yard.

He's a skinny minnie — around 40 pounds. He's got super-sleek short shiny black fur — unlike our previous dogs, he's single-coated. He's got maybe 47 white hairs at various spots around his body. There’s a clumpy stripe of white on his chest, but he hasn’t felt comfortable enough to show us his belly yet. Between his ears he’s got the wide head of a pitty, but his nose is long and thin.

We're looking forward to buoying Shadow with the love he needs, and grateful that retirement offers the time. For the first few days his muscles were always tense, and when we moved a hand anywhere within ten feet he'd flinch. He's beginning to unclench, and we've even seen his tail wag a couple times. While we're all bored without romping and long walks, it's a good time to shower him with stinky treats for learning his name and beginning to trust us. He walks pretty well on lead and already knows leave it, ignoring a treat sitting in the middle of my flat palm 6 inches from his nose.

His triangular ears have floppy tips — the left one is always down. His back has two shaved bare squares where the vets injected the second and third doses of arsenic to kill the heartworm parasites. His soulful eyes were so tight in the first week we saw nothing but deep brown iris. Today when Shadow and I were hiding from The Evil Vacuum Cleaner in my bedroom, I finally saw some white in his gaze.

( click for pics )

HGModernism, aka Hendry, offers a soothing yet informative 30 minutes on the theme

I found even rarer bird facts

( or stream it here )

Hendry shows illustrations and video of the birds under discussion, sitting in a well-appointed room with fascinating wallpaper, all while holding a tea cup that's as big as a plant pot. They appear to have four white devil horns thanks to the impressive antler mounted behind Hendry’s head.

Hendry is clearly a firm believer in factual content: corrections appear in the first comment; citations are in the description as well as all the links in a Github Gist. They have 28 other YT videos on divers topics plus more on Patreon.

Access

• Accurate captions, except from 9:20 to 10:23, where Hendry sped up audio to get full value after splashing out $10 for the research paper defining the correct Latin gender nomenclature — Strigops habroptilus — NZ kākāpō.
• The first link here and the listed video on YouTube go to the version where there’s an operatic music bed during the research paper recitation. My “stream here” is the no-music edition Hendry provides for “for my fellow auditory processing disorder strugglers”
• No image descriptions
• No flashing lights but lots of picture-in-picture video of birds.

via “We’re Here,” John & Hank Green’s good-news-and-links for Nerdfighteria every Friday

I love some green veg at lunch. Commercial frozen green veg are hard as rocks and nastily overcooked. Here’s how I bulk prep fresh swiss chard for my lunches

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Since we met in 1977, MyGuy has always eaten the spongy white stuff which dwells between an orange and its skin (whether he picks it off the whole peeled orange or nibbles it away from the cut-open peel).

Yesterday I tried it. It's delicious! Michigan State University claims it also has as much vitamin C as the fruit.

What else am I missing?

I've observed hockey RPF fandom from an immeasurable distance, and I still got a kick out of this post:

https://marina.dreamwidth.org/1576715.html

marina was in hockey fandom, spent her childhood in Ukraine, knows much about filing serial numbers, and has definite opinions about vodka.

I'm reading reading reading.

Hi!