March 307th.

While 2020 can indeed fuck right off, I'll call it done when I feel safe hanging out inside a coffee shop for an hour, or if I ever see my violin teacher in person again (he's doing Zoom lessons from Puerto Vallarta).

We had a mellow Christmas here, as always. On Christmas Eve I was wondering why it didn't feel particularly Christmasy, and I realized that the distinguishing feature of my Christmasy feeling is of gathering around and spending quiet time...at home. Not exactly an unusual feeling for 2020. Next year, perhaps we'll spend Christmas someplace else.

I finished a paltry 52 books in 2020, even if 10 of them were the 3.2 million words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Compare to 59 in 2019, and 97 in 2018. 2020 was a year for watching TV, of course, and I spent a lot of time playing my flotilla of musical instruments. I bought myself a lovely 5-string violin, which is sort of oriented towards folk music, but it humors me as I learned a piece by Couperin to start learning ornamentation, and a concerto by Vivaldi to start playing in the higher hand positions instead of just up by the head of the violin. I had never heard of Couperin, but I wanted to play this first Québecois tune with all the ornaments to make it sound right, and since Couperin wrote Baroque music you could describe frankly as "frilly" or "froofy," it's got ornaments every few notes (of which the grace-note is only the easiest and most familiar) and good for learning.

(Voices of Music is local here to the Bay Area, actually, and has dozens and dozens of these amazing videos, though I've yet to make it to a concert. They're doing "historically-informed performance," which is why the cello has 5 strings and no endpin, the violins have decorations on the fingerboards, and the whole ensemble is tuned a half-step down from the American standard A=440 Hz, which would be [looks it up] A=413.5 Hz.)

The dog groomer noticed a funky growth bleeding in between a couple of her two front toes, so somedog got to go to the vet. There turned out to be two of them, and the first had a bigger base than expected, so instead of just "skin glue" (medical-grade Superglue) she got a few sutures, and 10 days in a cone. It's her first cone since she was spayed maybe 5 years ago, and the pathos levels have been high.

She's not in pain, but in this time of trial, she gains even more succor from her true god, the heater vent. With a truly doggy grasp of cause and effect, she will sit in that spot multiple times per day until May or so, trying to get the heat to come on.

One thing that's been really striking is that without her customary cat-like grooming, she really does have a lot of crusty oozing around the eyes, that she takes care of herself; and without licking herself with her unstoppably disgusting breath, she smells better.

Except for one week over the summer when businesses boarded up their windows–the gun shop up the road decided to just leave theirs boarded–we've been free of the civil unrest of the larger cities nearby. You never know, though, and as I'm big on self-defense, I did some digging into projectile weapons.

(I have knives, and I know how to use them, but knife fighting is dangerous, and your only reasonable goal is to kill the other guy, and win or lose, you should expect to get cut up a bit. I definitely don't want to get cut up, and I definitely don't want to kill anybody, so I looked for other options.)

I don't really want a firearm in the house, even though less-lethal shotgun rounds are myriad: among other things, you need to practice with whatever device you get, which is a pain in the ass in normal times, and more so now.

From watching this veterinarian firearms aficionado testing less-lethal options with/on a friend, I learned about PepperBall, which is a paintball "marker" (the paintball industry wisely and studiously avoids saying "gun") where the balls are filled with OC (oleocapsaicin–pepper spray) instead of paint. In one of those unreasonable intersections of regulation that liberal states like California stumble through in the process of trying to do the right thing, chemical irritant projectiles are illegal outside of law enforcement. So guns are legal, but OC projectiles, which you might use to avoid killing people, are not.

(As an aside, California did a clever thing and instituted background checks for ammunition, mostly identical to the background checks required for guns. This means mail-order ammunition has to be sent to a licensed dealer, just like guns, instead of to your house. And many mail-order businesses around the country have just decided it's not worth the hassle, and don't ship to California any more. They also made it a felony to circumvent the system by shopping in our libertarian neighbor Nevada and bringing it back here. I assume catching people doing this is like shooting fish in a barrel for cops, just looking for California plates at gun shops and following them over the border. 

It's incredibly obnoxious if you're just a normal human who wants to buy ammunition, since this exacerbates the long-running ammunition shortage; but I appreciate the creativity, because the Second Amendment says nothing about a right to buy and own bullets...among other things, when the Second Amendment was written, people were still making their own musket balls at home.)

Given all those constraints, I finally found these guys, who take a paintball marker which is the platform for the Pepperball™ "launcher" (Pepperball™ also avoids "gun"), and work them up into something that is no doubt considerably more painful: the video shows a different model shooting through a cookie sheet. They're in Maine, with delightful accents to match. And I can practice in the Terrible Garage, for as long as it stands.

That's not even everything that happened this year. I don't know when March 2020 ends, but we all hope it's soon.

never a dull moment.

There are finally people working on the house! Underneath the terrifying loose pseudo-insulation and rat biowaste--the cleaning company disinfected it after vacuuming--we actually have a considerable attic up there. Snazzy steps pulling down into the hallway replace the previous 3'x3' "access" that required carefully placing a stepladder underneath it and levering yourself up and through.

The attic guys had put proper insulation down, but luckily they didn't glue it or anything, because there turned out to be a lot more knob-and-tube wiring than expected, so what was thought to be some re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans turned out to be quite a lot of re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans. The new ceiling fans, while not artistic, do look nicer, and more importantly do not shake alarmingly. No household appliance should be a memento mori.

The guys have been laying plywood on top of the ceiling beams, so we can store stuff up there; specifically, we will need to empty the garage so it can be destroyed and replaced. This was going well enough until one of them put his foot through the kitchen ceiling (he's fine), and that itself wasn't so bad until in their work to fix that they didn't put up enough plastic sheeting, giving the entire kitchen, and much of the flooring elsewhere, a layer of sheetrock dust. Anna did a deep cleaning, and then had stern words for the contractor: putting a foot through the ceiling is an understandable accident, but trashing the kitchen is not. Anna's stern words are quite stern; I would feel sorry for them, except that they fucked up.

We did a couple days of having Leela confined to the office and backyard, but it was endless barking, so we've been bringing her to the kennel for the day. They call it "All-Day Play," which I'm sure it is for some dogs, but Leela is complicated and mostly hangs out alone or with the humans. She hates going, though not as much as she hates the groomer (she unreservedly loves going to the vet). Something in her little doggy brain re-lives her actual abandonments every time we drop her somewhere, even as she grows more secure and confident with passing years. This has reached its apotheosis this month, as she is routinely "removed" from the general population into a different room, not for behavior problems as would be usual, but because she figured out that each time other dogs are being brought in or taken out is an opportunity for her to escape. (This is a beagle specialty.)

There's a double gate with a sort of airlock-like area in between, which they call the "bubble," just for this purpose; they can't really stop her, so they just stick her in solitary at the rush hours. I happened to see it firsthand on Friday, as I was taking a break from a conference to handle parenting stuff by telephone and decided to look at the video stream for the Small Dogs room. I spotted her meandering in from outside, and then a dog was getting taken out, and I watched her work her way into the press of dogs pushing up against the door, and then...go under them. Her Jack Russell heritage gives her a deep chest, but also a fantastic flexibility, presumably for those times when the rats won't come out of their burrows and you have to dive in after them. She can flatten herself a bit more than your less specialized dog, but what she can really do is flatten herself and then move, in a sort of commando-crawl. She's shorter than any full Jack Russell variant would be, so she goes over to the crowd of dogs, drops herself 3-4 inches, and slinks out under them.

She is also quite gifted at staying in human blind spots, so much so that I'm rarely surprised any more when we're walking off-leash and I look back to find her, only to discover that when I turned to look backward, she went around my other side.

Luckily she's quite charming, and the kennel folks seem to find her a fun change of pace.

that makes sense.

Our dog has many mysteries, but the biggest has been her many cat-like behaviors. She grooms fastidiously, complete with licking her paw and cleaning her face. (It dawned on me at some point that if she takes her disgusting dog-breath and transfers it to her fur, that goes a long way to explaining the "Time To Wash The Dog" smell.) She head-butts into you as a form of affection. And she purrs, or at least has a solid go at it, with no help from her anatomy. It comes out as a very high-pitched whistling sound.

There are other mysteries, like how she could have been properly socialized as a puppy and then somehow abandoned without being microchipped, but our houseguest came up with the theory, based on her experience of mixed dog/cat households:

The dog was raised by cats.

When my niece was a baby, I watched her crawl around the floor saying "rarrr rarr rarrar rarr," which didn't make any sense until I saw her family's two Springer Spaniels making growly play noises around her, and of course they were the things down at her height, and she made her best approximation of friendly dog-noises.

There's a lesson in there about what we grow up with, versus what we grow up into.

I assume the dog was raised by particularly kind cats, since she's now very excited to go pull their tails off, because obviously they're giant rats. No animal does that who understands that cats are made of fast-acting, pointy pain.

all dog, all the time.

For various reasons, just as Anna is the primary parent for J, I'm the primary parent for Leela, which mostly means I'm the Feeder, the Trainer, and the Scary Gender. All at once! She tracks my movements a lot, partly because we're pals, but--and this is inseparable where training is concerned--I give her food. I'm not sure if she's always hungry, but the shelter says she spent time as a stray, so it may just be a survival-mode "eat everything you can while it's available" thing. She tracks my movements pretty carefully, when not doing her Beagleshark patrols, back and forth across the house looking for food dropped on the floor.

J is adapting to her, and she to him. She licked his hand this morning, and he was so grossed out he had to leave the morning snuggle to wash it; on the other hand, this morning I coined the name "Beagleshark," which made him laugh, and then he was singing "Beagle, Beagle, Beagle, Beagle" in the bathroom, an honor reserved for things he likes. And he started out the day saying "Hi" when she was 10 feet away from him, and now says "Hi, Leela" when she's more like 5 feet. And, while it's difficult to gauge these things in doggy brains, she seems to have stopped sniffing at his feet, which he doesn't like.

I'm getting the hang of dog training, at least for a relatively uncomplicated case like Leela: she's pretty bright, and if she's not exactly eager to please, her apprehension makes her attentive, which is useful enough. She knows her name well enough that today I actually interrupted her progress toward exploring a new room. We've been doing some "Sit," and experimenting with "Up" and "Down": I used "Down" to get her off a bench at the dog park, and realized that if she can learn those as "move up/down one level from where you are" that they then have applications beyond getting her on or off the furniture.

It's a good time to be on leave from work.

I'm still worried about her getting bored and seeming to be unable to really have fun: as much for her happiness as the fact she can't be left unsupervised, lest she destroy things. A friend pointed out it will take some weeks for her to really settle in to this being home, and that seems very wise.

She is very much like everyone else in the household: traumatized, dealing with it as best she can, and healing. Last night we watched the first-ever episode of Doctor Who, and when men (not women) started talking on-screen, she got all rigid and started growling and barking. (She has the cutest growl, which you might expect from a dog with a head the size of a Little League baseball.) I took her to the back of the room and soothed her as best I could, and she never really relaxed, but she did stop shaking and barking.

Tonight, we watched the second episode, and voilá! Not only no growling, but the TV barely got her attention.

It's nice to provide a safe space.

so this happened.

This is Leela. We adopted her from Pets In Need on Monday night. She's supposedly 2 years old, she's definitely 13 pounds, and she looks like either a Beagle or a Jack Russell Terrier, depending on the angle. (If you get to hear her mournful wailing of sadness, it is clear she is part Beagle.)

We've been talking about this for months, and I've met some dogs, but finding Leela herself was rather sudden, so we're a bit overwhelmed today. While she is not not-mellow, exactly, she does turn out to have more energy than she displayed in the shelter, and no well-established toy or chewing habits, which wasn't one thing or another until she chewed through the cable (luckily not the 120VAC side) of Anna's MacBook Pro power supply. So she can't be unsupervised even in the dining room/living room area that we've gated off from the bathrooms: she clearly gets bored, but she also doesn't like to play, and there's no great signal that she's bored. Maybe we get a Pack 'n Play for dogs and confine her to a smaller area when we need to. It's a little stressful right now.

She was clearly abused at some point: she often shrinks from me putting her harness on or picking her up (which has to happen all the time because she won't jump in or out of the car right now), and she'll shrink from anyone who looms over her too closely. Last night she was growling whenever the stereo played something too much like talking; tonight we were watching the first-ever episode of Doctor Who, and she got rock-stiff and growled and barked, and could barely be induced not to. The 3 of us here know something about being wounded and being triggered, so we have a lot of empathy for her. We trust she will have empathy for us, once we're all less focused on freaking out.

This is all new to me. I knew my parents' dog, but really I got to know him after Mom had socialized him properly, got him to stop jumping on people, got him to respond to his name if he felt like it. Before I can train Leela in basic-sounding things like "sit," I have to teach her her name, because a dog can't listen to you if you don't get her attention first. Luckily we started obedience classes last night, and the instructor covered it (besides Leela, a couple of the 5-month olds were none too responsive to their names either). Leela is beyond food-motivated, so we worked on it at the park today, and eventually she got it pretty well. At home I built on that and mostly taught her "down" as applied to putting her front legs on the couch. She wasn't even crabby that I don't give her a treat when I call her name. (She may not remember, exactly? Doggy brains are not like our brains.)

Anyway. Lots of stuff like that. It's a shock to the system.

Though it is certainly the fuzziest, snuggliest shock to the system I've ever had.