Listics

…for the sympathy and kind thoughts offered to Beth and me on the demise of our sweet dog Maggie. Your friendship and support are meaningful and welcome.

A Good Dog - May, 1987 - January, 2024

Tomorrow may be the day that I have Maggie put down. She’s 16 years and seven months old. In Berkeley Paul and Dodie had a Queensland Heeler named Dunny. They exercised Dunny by driving around the block while he chased the car. They mated Dunny to an Australian Shepherd named Opus and out of that mating came our sweet Magnum Opus, Maggie for short.

Maggie never liked riding in the car. For the first few years we could count on her to toss her cookies in the back seat whenever we went anywhere. Luckily we had a garbage dog, Sutro (a beagle Queensland heeler mix). Sutro could be counted on to clean up Maggie’s mess. Sutro had the brains of the Heeler and the biddableness of the beagle. She knew what she wanted, she acknowledged what we wanted, and how nice for all concerned if these things were congruent.

Over the years Maggie grew to enjoy travel… unlike corporate types she understood that it wasn’t about the journey, it was the destination. She’d get in the car in Berkeley, suffer in silence for some length of time, then get out of the car in the mountains and flip snow in the air with her nose. She also enjoyed the beach. Dogs don’t have nice habits. That’s how it is. Don’t get me started about dogs and the cat box. Anyway, every dog I’ve ever known has enjoyed a nice roll in something organic and smelly and dead. Or in raccoon poop. Or in the manure pile. Dogs don’t take time to smell the roses. They’re simply more bucolic than pastoral. But Maggie holds our family record for best roll in a dead thing.

We were at the ranger station near the marine mammal center at the Point Reyes Seashore entrance beyond Bolinas. We heard on the ranger’s radio that there was a dead blue whale on the tide and it looked like it would come ashore at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. How many dead bluie whales do you see in this life? We called the dogs to the car and headed down to Ocean Beach. It was sure enough there, and it had been dead for some time. So while the corpse was huge, it was also sort of… well, it was decomposing. These huge hunks of whale blubber were washed up on the beach for a long way in both directions. It was dog heaven. Major Maggie rollage occurred. The car smelled for days after that.

Maggie is one of those beasts that reminds you that Dog is goD spelled backwards. She has ever been my faithful companion. We’ve cared for her over the past year like the family member she is. An aspirin and a dose of phenylpropanolamine every morning and evening. She started out taking these pills disguised in little pieces of hot dogs. She’s graduated to the deli counter. Now she gets them in rolls of sliced ham. In fact, until today, when we boiled her up a pot roast, the ham and some slices of sausages were the only food she was eating. right now it seems like she enjoys a few bites of roast beef from time to time, which gives me a crazy hope that I can put some meat back on her bones by feeding her pot roast. Won’t happen. She’s too weak to climb the stairs, up or down. I carry her up at night and then carry her down in the morning to let her out.

The last few nights she’s been so confused that when she got up to change resting positions she walked into the side of our bed and kept trying to move forward, unaware that she’d encountered an obstacle. In other words, there are now mechanical wind-up toys with more logic power than she sometimes demonstrates.

I could wait a few more days. I could wait until she was clearly in pain. But she wouldn’t have survived this long without my care and it’s my responsibility to discern what the right thing is and do it for her. This weekend, it seems like the right thing is to take her to the vet tomorrow morning and have her put down.

INFP or INTJ??? I get one result when taking the Bloginality short-cut Meyers-Briggs, my wife suggests a different possibility.

Mushing my bloginality with a quickie assessment of my True Colors I get a picture that corresponds just a little more closely with Beth’s assessment than my own. True Colors pulls the middle two indicators out of the Meyers Briggs and assigns a color. The quickie quiz I’ve linked to gins up a numeric value for each color based on your response to five questions. My numeric scores were 12, 12, 12, 14. Based on this the color assigned corresponded to the 14, but the other three colors were equal.

NF - Blue
SF - Orange
ST - Gold
NT - Green

As of right now, following several minutes of intensive personality assessment, I’d have to say I am probably an:

I _ T _

Would that be an INTJ, an ISTJ, an ISTF, or an INTF? And if one tends to converge, does that make one well integrated, or gray and formless, or something else?

New Years Day provides an opportunity for introspection. It’s a chance to set goals and assess progress. There’s no reason this can’t be done annually on March 27, but it seems more convenient to do it at the beginning of the calendar year.

I reviewed my 2024 rezzies, and I’m satisfied that I accomplished some and made progress on others and basically added a few paving stones on the Road to Hell. One of the problems I see with last year’s list is that not all of them were specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, or timely. “Timely?” I think somebody threw that in to force the acronym… how memorable would “SMAR Goals” be, I gotta aks you. Anyway, here they are for this year…

1. Lose weight and get fit. Keep the weight off and continue to improve the fitness. Weigh 185 by May 1, and be able to run up to the North fence and back in ten minutes by July 31.
2. Keep writing. Circulate a book proposal this quarter, do another six Sandhill Interviews this year, work on the novel, discipline myself to four essays of substance with little or no smart-ass tongue-in-cheek stuff.
3. Build a deck off the Lake Room on the East lawn.
4. Finish the landscaping that was on last year’s list.
5. Improve the orchard… plant the two apple trees that are waiting down by the shed, get two new cherry trees and a new Sungold and Moongold apricot. Improve the deer proofing.
6. Start a small kitchen garden in late April this year. Start some of the seeds germinating later this month.
7. Refresh the Sandhill book of business. Review current contract and focus on new opportunities for FY 05.
8. Explore lectureships in the UW system and at MATC.
9. Travel. Honduras Bay Islands? Europe? Cuba?

What makes a New Year Resolution different from a bullet point on a things to do list? Does it have to do with aspirations? Needs? I failed miserably at cleaning my office every month. I’m still as much a procrastinator as ever when it comes to those housekeeping tasks. Would it make sense to resolve not to procrastinate, or would I just put that off too?

• I resolve to do the little things as they come up and not to put them off until their very mass makes them a big thing and unachievable.

So what do I have? Writing, travel, work, house and garden… I’ve left off relationships somehow. How do you quantify or set objectives in those areas? “I resolve not to be as off-putting and downright mean as I have been in the past?” “I resolve to make one new friend a month?” I think this item has more to do with community, business, politics, and the social fabric.

• I resolve to reach out to others, to ask for help and support when I need it and to offer help and support when others may need it.
• I resolve to extend my friendships into new areas and not let my fears wall me off from communicating clearly and warmly with those around me.
• I resolve to support those causes that seem to me to be right and just and true; and not let my support for those causes wall me off from other people who may not feel as passionately as I do about them.

You’ll notice my old tuba and my new Canon EOS 300D are not on this list. Why wouldn’t I resolve to practice the horn daily and to get facile and artismic with my new camera? In the former case, it’s a matter of time and balance and desire. In the latter case, I think it’s an assumption that I’ll be playing hard with the new camera. I’m fortunate to have a life so elaborate and complex that not all my opportunities can be easily reduced to a list. What great books would I resolve to read this year were I to focus on the question? What trash novels would they squeeze off my reading list?

How about cleaning out the barn? Where should that fall on the list? “A place for everything and everything in its place” is such an admirable sounding formula. Realistically, do I have room for it on my list? Not this year. “Win the lottery” has an appeal, but I think it’s better to focus on things I might be able to control.

I have skipped the resolution thing more often than I’ve addressed it. Over the years I’ve achieved some few small resolution sounding goals. I quit smoking and drinking… not in that order and not as the result of any “New Year Resolution.” But probably in the years leading up to those decisions, I would have had them on my list, if I had made a list. Before I close this post I want to acknowldge a category form last year’s list and set a direction for this year as well…

• Better Blogging! More track-backs, fewer comments. More truth, less self conscious bullshit. Less link-rot!

I took the test. It came out wrong. I self selected “Grumpy.” Maybe I’m not always Grumpy. Maybe I’m sometimes Dopey. Or Sneezy. Or Bashful. Or Doc. Or Happy. Or Sleepy.

In truth I have a lot of Dopey in me. But then, sometimes I’m almost Sneezy. There are days you’ll find me Happy. I’m seldom Bashful anymore, but it wasn’t that long ago that this dwarf hobbled me a bit. Doc? There’s really only room for one Doc. But I’m often Sleepy, and that’s for sure. I don’t think we need feel bound by only one inner-Dwarf. In fact, I sometimes wonder if I don’t have a little Snow White in there somewhere too.

Here’s a Sandhill year in review list o’ links…

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“Passing off what-might-be-true as fiction seems a better vocation to me than passing off what-is-quite-possibly-fiction as truth.” Ken Kesey

We’re having a garage sale. Everything must go! If you just bounced in from the old place, don’t bother hitting your “back” button. That just leads to frustration. Rather, here’s a link to the moldy-oldy stuff over in bugland. Click here to return to Sandhill Tech’s old Radio site. Feel free to rummage around and if you find a particularly attractive item that you just can’t do without, make me an offer! You can get anything you want – excepting AKMA.