The Affair Your Minister's Wife Had With Her Dog Trainer

I don't have anything to say today.  I was uberbusy.  It was nice walking with Rachel and her dog, but should I keep doing this when I'm already behind?  Yes.  I need the walks.  I need the conversation.  I haven't been bored lately, though I'm trying to catch up with almost everything.  Walking the dog takes time.  Well, I've needed to take this time.  I need the exercise.  Yesterday, I walked five miles with Teddy and RunKeeper said I burned 1130 calories.  Wow, that's half the calories I should be eating for one day.  Here's what you should know - I don't, I won't count calories.  I might keep track of carbohydrates on a good day.  The exercise is supposed to even out my sugar levels.  I haven't been able to feel a distinct difference, but it definitely has a good effect on my mood.  But maybe that's Rachel though.  She's funny.  Even when she's aggravated about something, she's funny.  Today, we were talking about how drugs are a deal-breaker, how we don't want our kids around anyone involved in drugs. 

So here's another thing you should know about me.  I love gossip.  I really do.  I try not to love gossip, but I can't help myself.  I've set up some rules so that I can gossip comfortably and others so that I can listen to gossip eagerly. 

I don't want you to tell me that the dad who volunteers in Nick's classroom has tried to seduce another mom that I know.  I don't want to hear anything juicy about someone I know that you heard from someone else's lips, anything that's really conjecture.  I don't want to hear anything, not one word that isn't nice, about a kid, especially a kid I know.  It's hard enough for kids, let alone if some parent is looking askance at them about something they might not even have done. Will I change my mind about that when they all get to be teenagers?  I doubt it.  I want to make up my own mind about Nick's friends and his enemies.  We'll see if I can stay true to that one.  I hope so.  It's hard for kids.

On the flip side, I'll tell you dirt about my friend and her lover if I suspect that you'll never meet her.  Old stories are perfect gossip.  They grow in stature and extravagance and who's to say where those people are now? I might tell you something about my family, but I try not to enact revenge on them, even from a distance.  I swear that my poor sister can sense if I've been saying anything bad about anyone in my family.  She really can.  And I think it hurts too.  The bad news about you is that I might write about you.  I write about everyone I know.  I just don't publish much. 

I do want to hear about your in-laws, your cousins, your best friend's dog's trainer. These people are like characters in a story. There's an element of fiction to them. I want to hear about how you stood your ground to protect your kids against drug users or dogs that bite. I want to hear about your minister's wife. I really do. And if I don't know these people, sex, drugs, alcohol, and dangerous liaisons are all very interesting. Just as long as I don't have to sit across a table from them while I help some kid learn his multiplication tables. It is so uncomfortable when good stories get interrupted by reality. 

Thank you for listening, jb

Calculating

I can see the boys playing outside in the driveway.  I like watching them when they aren't thinking about me watching.  Watching people is interesting, but it isn't staring when they're your own.  (Yes, I count Adrian as my own, loaned maybe, but my own.)  Think of the hours I've spent staring at those faces?  I can't even figure how many hours it would be.

I like to calculate things.  My favorite app right now, RunKeeper, told me that I walked 5.13 miles with Teddy today.  The only drawback to it is when I forget to turn it on at the beginning of a walk or off at the end and that's just user error.  To tell you the truth, I'd like to see my weekly totals for walking and my all-time distance.  Why? 

Remember that I said I like to calculate things?  So, if I used to walk with Indiana at least two hours a day three times a week, I could use RunKeeper to guess how much I walked during her fifteen year life.  Today, I walked about five miles in two and a half hours.  I kept getting waylaid by chatty people.  So if you extrapolate that and say that I might have walked about twelve miles a week with her on the conservative side, that could add up to 6,000 miles if I give myself a two week vacation every year and just count her productive years before she turned eleven.  That's a lot of miles!  Does Google Earth show distances?  No, but Google Maps does.  It's 3,160 miles to Portland, Maine.  So with Indiana, I could have walked to Maine and almost all the way home during her lifetime.  That's pretty good.

I want to walk around the world by the time I'm done, figuratively at least.  How far is that?  Google says that it's 24,900 miles.  I'd only have to have two other dogs that need walking after Teddy and I walk to Portland, Maine and back during his lifetime.  I don't think I'm going to make that.  Bummer!

When I was potty training Nick, I calculated that if I changed his diaper just half of the time (conservatively), I changed about 5,000 diapers.  That figure has stayed in my mind all these years.  Every single parent that is shouldering his or her load has changed five thousand diapers!  Can you picture that?  In just one small town, that's a BIG pile of diapers.  No wonder we should be using those diaper services!

There are all kinds of things I'd like to know:

What percentage of my time do I spend in my car?

How many decaf mochas will I drink using my new Krups espresso machine?  Did you ever figure those things?  When I made my first quilt on my new sewing machine, it was a $1500 quilt.  Now that I've made about 20 quilts using it, my machine only adds about $75 to the cost of each quilt.  That doesn't include all the costumes and hems I've used it for as well  Besides, my sewing machine is still humming along so that number just keeps going down and down. 

After I've spent $130 on that well-made pair of shoes that might last for eight years, how does it compare to buying the $27 pair that wore out after a couple of seasons?  No contest.  As with furniture, I buy the most expensive shoes I can afford.  Okay, I don't buy designer shoes.  That would mess up the calculation. 

How many strawberries have I eaten?

How many years have I slept?  I'd like to add some time to that total. 

How much will I pay for my house once I'm done paying for my house?  On second thought, I may not want to know the answer to that.  I did that once, figured out how much I paid for the silk sweater I loved that was half price.  Then I added in the floating interest from my credit card at 17%. I had paid 175% of the original price of that sweater.  That was when I decided to pay off my credit cards each month, twenty-eight years ago.  Think of how much money I've saved on sweaters since then!

How many peanut butter sandwiches will I make?

How many times will I hear, "Hey Mom, watch this!"

How many times will I listen for the bus on the road? 

How many hugs and kisses have I given?  I'll never know, but it's something of an investment isn't it? 

Thank you for listening, jb 

Talking to Strangers

I love Saturdays.  This afternoon, I took Teddy out to the Three Forks Off Leash Dog Park in Snoqualmie after he chewed up the yellow pages in the truck while waiting for us to get back from Nick's snowboard lesson.  He had found some napkins, an old food wrapper, and a bubble wrap envelope too.  Shredded.  All of it.  The thick book of yellow pages was the most telling.  He had never eaten a book before. 

Don't worry.  He didn't actually eat it.  He just tore it into little bits, a message really, in case we couldn't see his displeasure at our languid return to the truck.  The yellow pages was years out of date.  He'd had to crawl under the seat and pull it out.  I'd even forgotten it was there.  Who even uses three-dimensional phone books anymore anyway?  I just use my iPhone. 

Have I ever told you how much I love my iPhone?  I sometimes use it as a phone, but more often, I text, check definitions for Scrabble on Safari, play Scrabble, Facebook, check Weather Channel weather by location so I can see what the weather is like at the pass, Google Earth for places I want to see before I die, check bids on eBay, get directions, monitor my walks on Runkeeper, monitor my sleep on Zeo, and entertain my boys with a myriad of free games.  Information is at my fingertips.  Did you know that you can see Egypt's pyramids from the satellite images on Google Earth?  Maybe I should look for Notre Dame too (not the university - I've visited the university).  So you see how I could forget that there is a thick yellow pages book under my front seat?  I hadn't needed it in quite a while. 

The remaining job of those yellow pages in this incarnation (I did recycle it) was to soothe a restless puppy.  Sometimes I forget that Teddy is still a pup.  He's a good-natured dog.  He likes his walks, but he can skip a day here and there if he had a decent walk the day before.  He likes to play tug of war and expends some energy that way, though he gets upset if we try to play in the kitchen.  The floor in the kitchen is vinyl and he can't get a good grip with his feet.  The way he shuffles his back legs and whines, sounding very much like an eleven-year-old boy is very funny.  Sometimes, when we're behind with walks, we throw his toys down the stairs for him to retrieve.  Those are only temporary solutions to his excess energy.  Even the cats get to looking at me, asking silently if I'll take him away and later bring home the much quieter, more tired dog that they prefer. 

So today, since I was tired and he was still energetic after shredding everything but my backpack in the truck, I took him to the off-leash dog park.  It was perfect.  The late afternoon sun was golden across new grass, only leaving us momentarily behind dark clouds to remind me to look up at the sky.  I quickly joined a crowd of people standing in the middle of the field.  This park doesn't encourage you to walk the way Marymoor does with its network of trails.  This park is simply a large green field of grass with Mt Si as a backdrop.  People tend to stand in a row facing the mountain.  By the time I got there, it was already turning a dusty purple in the light.  Why do mountains turn purple at sunset?  It doesn't seem to matter what they're covered with, rock or green trees, they still do that. 

I had joined a friendly group, a woman with an Australian Kelpie mix, a couple with a sweet Pit Bull, another couple with a four-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog, a woman with a Shar Pei mutt with no wrinkles, and another couple with a pair of herding mutts that looked like littermates.  The dogs took just minutes to size up us newcomers, Teddy being perceived as no threat at all, but the herding mutts forming a pack against the existing one for a bit until they ironed out who was alpha.  The Pit Bull just wanted cookies from my pocket.  She was already worn out from being there a while.  The Mountain dog pup wanted to be petted, but Teddy swooped past to make sure she knew I was his person and she shouldn't get too attached.  There was no aggression, just a shoulder bump and a loop around.  The Kelpie didn't like when one of the men ran and he backed up against his owner barked his protection orders.   His owner said that she this dog had been abused and he was making great strides.  Oh, the damage that people sometimes do.  It's so hard to undo.  I knew what she meant because I used to have a cat who squatted and peed in fear when you jangled your keys or picked up a rolled newspaper. 

I love that I can join a group of total strangers and begin and then end a relaxed conversation.  Like Teddy, I seemed to fit right in, though some of the other people seemed to know each other.  Later, I found out that they only know each other though their dogs. Everyone was relaxed and having fun.  Even the guy who'd been barked at was feinting a run now and then just to press the Kelpie's buttons, but not too much.  We all laughed as we watched the dogs race and tumble and dodge.
When everyone left, I wasn't ready to go, but somehow didn't want to be left standing there by myself, though I could have used some time to actually walk.  Teddy was tired out and, though I'd gotten little exercise, so was I.  As I walked back to the car, I noticed streaks of clouds that washed over my head in what looked like rows of waves.  They were fanned out from the perception of perspective.  If someone had painted a picture like this, it would have felt contrived, like the ivy-covered cottages of Kincaid, a little too sweet.  But this was my own sky, not a photo or a painting.  I stood, after everyone had left, and waited for the pink to turn to gray, before I left to come home.  Teddy waited patiently at my side, his look telling me we could go since all of his friends had gone. 

When I walked in the door, the cats were happy to see I'd transformed the dog yet again.  It was a good Saturday. 

Thank you for listening, jb