Mar 11 2008
Pepe often covers his bowl of food so he can eat it later when he doesn’t feel nauseated. He does this by using his nose to move sand over his food. Since we are in short supply of sand in our kitchen, the dishtowel that we put his bowl on has to do. And it does.
Now he only needs to find a solution to that pesky creature called Poupoune, who keeps eating his food the moment Pepe leaves the kitchen. Even when he covered it.
Mar 5 2008
My camera, after almost 7 years, gave up the ghost. It fails intermittently, sometimes with beautiful results but this wasn’t exactly the photo I wanted to make.
We were at the yearly Nuit Blanche, an all-night event during which a lot of places like museums, cinemas and other venues are opened for free until 05h00. There are also many special events like almost free wine tasting (one glass Chianti for me, water for Alison) and this dance show by students of the UQAM.
It was very busy and for almost all events there were big lines of people waiting. We are not so big on waiting so we just left the lines as they were and went only to a small number of events but walked a lot through the snow. Unfortunately I had made a terrible shoe choice, having spent mostly indoors for a week working on a computer application. So my low sneakers were soaked quite fast by the puddles of melting snow.
The spectators for the dance performance were located in a courtyard and most of the dancing took place behind the windows of the university building surrounded the courtyard. Very nice, even though I was standing in deep snow with soaked shoes.
The dance show appeared to both of us as a homage to the dancing lady that was on display a couple of blocks away from the dance show venue. It was a perpetually projection of the silhouette of a naked dancing woman, as an advertisement for a strip club. That building is recently razed, and the seedy projection will be missed by many.
We didn’t stay that long, after 23h00 Alison was tired and wanted to go home. I begrudgingly complied.
A new camera is ordered, my birthday present. Alison bought it at Amazon in the US where it was almost half the price of a very discounted model at Future Shop. Plus free shipping and no taxes. I’ll pick it up at a forwarding service just over the US-Canadian border.
No, I didn’t go for the DP1, but for a Panasonic Lumix with a 10x Leica zoom lens. It will be a huge improvement compared to my current Canon camera with 3 seconds shutter lag and 1 inch screen. You’ll see the results here soon, I hope you will notice the improvement.
Feb 23 2008
What a difference a day or two makes. Yesterday I brought Pepe to the vet, who was very concerned and wanted me to take him to the animal hospital (the same place where I spent 1500 dollar for Poupoune a couple of years ago) to stay on an IV for the weekend to get some fluids and nutrients into him. She feared he had an ulcer and wanted to do lots of tests to come to a diagnose. I decided to only treat his symptoms, so she gave him an antacid and some subcutaneous saline. After paying 100 bucks I went home, with him wrapped in a blanket under my coat in the softly falling snow.
He slept all day, but then ate a little bit, and didn’t vomit. By the time Alison came home from the airport after midnight he was already feeling much better. He greeted her with his signature dance and she was very happy to see him alive. Today he’s even feeling better and eats and drinks, although not in very big quantities. But he is still frail. He lost almost a pound in body weight mostly of a lack of fluids. That is not healthy and we really have to fatten him up over the next weeks. He is very low on reserves.
I suspect him from pulling these stunts just to make us bond stronger to him. That and to be on the front-page of loglog every day.
I still need to record his dance for posterity; fortunately it seems he gave me a chance to do it. Now I only have to make him dance on camera. So far when I point the camera at him he immediately stops dancing and just stares at me and barks. His bark is just loud and annoying and not nearly as cute as him dancing in circles.
Feb 21 2008
I might have been way too optimistic about Pepe’s longevity. He has hardly eaten during the last few days, and when he eats he starts to vomit soon thereafter. He sleeps all day, and when not he’s very frail and trembles a lot. He still wags his tail though, so there is some liveness in him, but he’s definitely not feeling well.
I just found a big puddle of watery vomit with blood in it.
Not good. Tomorrow to the vet, I hope she can keep him alive until the weekend when Alison comes back from a business-trip out West.
Feb 18 2008
Pepe is ill. His kidneys don’t work very well, he’s drinking and peeing a lot, and he slowly loses weight. Getting the diagnose of kidney failure took a while because the vet wanted to check his blood and urine a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t a temporary illness that could be cured with some anti-biotic. She prescribed him antibiotics for a month ówhich made him feel nauseated causing even more weight lossó but it didn’t help.
So he is going to die. Not in a couple of months, but probably in a year of two. There is no cure but we can stretch his life a little, and improve his quality of life by giving him magical kidney powder. In order to make sure the medication is not having bad side-effects he also needs blood-tests every 3 months.
All this is not going to break the bank (it’ll cost slightly more than dollar a day) but during the last few months we thought long and hard what our limits are. Not only financial, but also moral. Should one really spend thousands of dollars to prolong the life of a dog (who had a good 12 years on earth) while for the same amount of money you could keep some people alive? It starts with a few dollars but since you have started, when and where do you stop? We’ve decided to treat him until the treatment stops working or until he has pain and isn’t happy anymore. But no big interventions.
Just thinking about our boundaries makes us feel guilty. Who are we to decide about life and death? But in reality we do. Our pets won’t survive without us. They need us for food and shelter and in return they keep us company and give us affection. But all these questions and doubts come up with Pepe, a dog we don’t have such a tight bond with compared to Poupoune. If Poupoune was ill we probably would go much further in extending her life.
Sure, Pepe is always good humoured, dances adorably (although not on camera) when he is excited and is very snugly and likes to be under your sweater and peep out his head like a joey. He sleeps 20 hours a day, preferably under a blanket, can’t go out for walks in the winter, sometimes poops and pees in places he’s not supposed to and, above all, he is not very bright.
Even though he’s ill he still does all of that. He’s not suffering as far as we can tell, and we give him special canned dog food specially formulated for dogs with kidney failure. Unfortunately Poupoune is very jealous he’s getting special treatment and she’s even grumpier than before.
Feb 16 2008
Via illicit channels I stumbled upon a yet unreleased movie about the thesis subject of a fellow web-logger. I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD-ROM and gave it to her. And since I had it on my hard drive I decided to watch it.
“Noise” is about a man (Tim Robbins) who can’t stand the noise in New York, especially the blaring car alarms, and he decides to do something about it. I won’t give away the whole plot here, but it involves breaking car windows and cutting battery cables.
Now is this a subject that lies close to my heart. During my last years in the Netherlands I was kind of obsessed with cars. I didn’t mind their noise that much, but I couldn’t stand them driving through red lights, not giving priority to pedestrians and bicycles on crosswalks and generally breaking traffic rules. So I actually had more of a gripe with their drivers than with the cars themselves. But since they were hiding in the sacred cows it was easier to hate cars, period. This all originated to a few incidents I had where I told (or gestured) some cars that they shouldn’t drive over my toes and was subsequently assaulted and beaten up by the driver. And this, instead of making me more timid and restrained, made me even more vocal and focussed on car’s errors. I once threw my bike in front of a car to stop it from entering the one-way street I lived in from the wrong direction (this happened a lot because it was a huge shortcut between two main streets). And I could get totally worked up when I saw cars jumping red lights, even when they were far away from me. I was a totally self-righteous asshole, stopping for every red pedrestian stop light, even in the middle of the night when there was no traffic at all. If I followed the rules I could critique everybody else who didn’t.
This happened only when I was riding my bike or was a pedestrian. When I drove a car myself I could stand traffic violations much better. So for a while I drove to my studio, even though that actually took more time and was a hassle with parking.
During the worst period I couldn’t even watch out of my window, in fear of getting totally worked up over cars running in the wrong direction. There were days I couldn’t leave the house. I suffered from a special case of agoraphobia. During the nights I was plotting evil plans involving setting cars ablaze that were parked illegally and acquiring a rocket launcher to, as in Doom, blow cars into pieces. Just the thought that I couldn’t afford being apprehended because it would affect my immigration process, withheld me from actually doing these things in reality.
When I was visiting Montréal I had none of these symptoms, probably because I didn’t have to “defend” my territory, because I was a visitor. But even now, when I’m not a visitor anymore, I only rarely have the urge to fight cars. I even jaywalk sometimes!
Anyway, the movie wasn’t a masterpiece but watching it brought back a lot of not so nice memories. Not so much that I started to hyperventilate, but enough to cause a slightly elevated heartbeat. But I was also relieved that this period was over, that I was “normal” again.
When we paused the movie we heard the neighbours dogs barking very loudly and we started to laugh about the coincidence.
It became even more hilarious when two of our tenants came down and rang our doorbell complaining about our dogs. I pointed them to the neighbours house and had to close the door fast because I couldn’t hold in my laughter.
Feb 14 2008
Just got a call from Bell. Not an actual person but one of those automated calling machines. The voice tells me it has a message about my phone number, and to please call this toll-free number to talk to us. Bell wants to sell us something? We’re not spending enough time on the phone? We’re using Jajah too much?
So I called said number. Turns out that someone stole our phone number. And since it is an unlisted number they were giving us the option to get a new unlisted number, free of charge. Of course they wouldn’t pay for new stationary, messages to notice all our friends, relatives and other contacts and all the time it would cost.
So I declined.
After I hung up I did a search on Google for this story and found out that we weren’t the only “victim”, but that someone got hold of 3.4 million telephone numbers, 5% of which are unlisted. That’s a lot of new phone numbers to give away, more numbers than are currently “free” in our area code. So the likelihood we get an unlisted number that was recently used by someone else is very high. And then you get all these people calling and asking for Jean-Marie, Claude or Sophie. No thanks. I previously had that with my cell phone which is of course far worse because it costs me 40 cents each time I pick up the phone.
I’m not too worried about the fact that our number is now in the wild. We mainly have an unlisted (strangely enough it cost money to have an unlisted phone number; you’d think that it would cost less because they don’t have to list it) phone number because we don’t get as much unsolicited direct marketing calls around supper time. If they will increase now, I can finally play out this anti-telemarketing script.
Mar 15 2008
Bin
Poupoune is surprised to find the 1 metre high bins in the park reduced to ‘holes in the ground’ she only knows from her visits to the hair dresser.
[Made with the new camera, but I’m not blown away by the ‘snow’ preset. O wait, I had another setting wrong. Too many options…]
By mare • dogs, english, montréal, weather •