Bonnie

The Big Finn didn't know that I have a dog. Let's remedy that with an introduction. You can't watch the game if you don't know all the players.



This is Bonnie. We also call her Bonbon, Little Girl, Schmoops and when she's bad we call her Fräulein (Nicht so, Fräulein!). She's a mixed breed...something or other.

I've always had pets and when I moved to Germany that need to have a pet didn't change. My MIL had a little spitz named Tina but she didn't feel like my pet. Plus Tina was freakishly attached to my MIL.

In 2001 I finally talked B into getting a dog of our own. We wanted one from an animal shelter but small, apartment-sized dogs aren't always easy to come by. Aunt Annoying saw a photo of Bonnie in her local newspaper saying she was up for adoption at a shelter in a nearby town and told us about it and we immediately called for them to hold her until we could get there.

Bonnie was a street dog. She'd been running free in a neighboring village for about three months in the dead of winter before she was picked up and taken to the shelter. She was just the right size for us and all we needed to do was get her, pay her bail and sign some papers.

When my MIL and I got to the animal shelter we saw her in the same open area with much bigger dogs. She was painfully thin, filthy dirty and frankly, not too attractive. She was still quite young - probably just under a year old - and her fur and little Schnauzery beard hadn't filled out yet. And she hardly had a tail. Tail docking and ear clipping isn't normally ever done by vets in Germany so it meant that someone had done it at home themselves or perhaps her tail had become caught somewhere and had been torn off. Either way, it had to be painful and to this day Bonnie is extremely suspicious of anyone coming at her with a comb or scissors or a syringe.

She wasn't very attractive - not my idea of a cuddly pet - but one look into her eyes told me I'd found my dog.

From the beginning Bonnie's been both a joy and a pain in the neck. At first she wasn't too crazy about Tina but Bonnie learned to tolerate her once she figured out that Tina wasn't going anywhere. I figured that being a street dog would make her hard to housebreak but somehow she came to us housebroken. To this day the only time she's ever made a mess inside was when she was terribly sick and simply couldn't help it. Bonnie's a bit of a barker too. She's rather territorial and when she hears another dog bark she can't help but answer. Luckily in our new apartment building she's the only dog so the barking has lessened considerably. Bonnie hates to be bathed - the one time I attempted it she nearly bit my arm off - but we have a fearless groomer who gets her reasonably clean...except under her chin. You can only get so close to those snapping teeth. Pulling ticks off of her has to be done by stealth and taking her to the vet is a nightmare. It's nearly impossible to get a muzzle on her and the vet usually needs two assistants to give Bonnie her shots.

But Bonnie is wonderfully faithful. She's not always very friendly to other dogs but what dogs she does like she adores and she's really crazy about people. Pet her once and she'll remember you always. Give her a treat and she's practically yours.

She's got a few quirks as well. Maybe it's from her days of living on the streets eating anything she could manage to find but she's bad for eating paper. White paper. A stray tissue is like a gourmet meal to her. She's not terribly fond of meat except for poultry - feeding her dog food with beef or liver or lamb is a waste of time. She won't beg for your dinner but if you're eating a piece of cake she wants her share. And what she's really crazy for is rice, pasta, and vegetables like peas or carrots or green beans. I've seen her snub a piece of bratwurst and nearly knock you down to get your green beans.

Bonnie loves to watch TV. She'll sit on the sofa next to you and watch it like she understands it all. We figure that she believes it's a window because sometimes when something rushes by on the screen she'll run to the real window to see if she can see it again. However, having a TV addict dog isn't always so good. She hates to see other dogs on TV and will bark her head off and sometimes there are commercials that she hates for whatever reason - usually she hates the music or there's a dog in the commercial. She could be in another room but if she hears the commercial on TV, she starts to bark.

Over the years Bonnie became a shared pet. It started when my MIL had a summer house with a large fenced yard. My MIL would spend six months of the year there and she'd occasionally take Bonnie for the weekend so she could play all day in the yard. The next year she spent more of the summer there. And when fall came, Tina died.

We never thought that Bonnie would take it so hard - they often ignored one another all day long - but Bonnie missed Tina so much that my MIL had to put pictures of Tina in places where Bonnie couldn't see them because else she'd sit in front of them and whine. My MIL took Tina's death very hard as well. She was used to having someone with her in the mornings and late evenings and having a little dog around kept her from feeling lonesome. At that time we lived in the same apartment building as her and after a few weeks I suggested that Bonnie stay with my MIL overnights and be with us during the day. It worked out wonderfully. My MIL had someone with her and I didn't have to be the one to get up at dawn to walk the dog.

My MIL now lives a few blocks from us but our system still works. Bonnie's over there in the mornings, she comes over to us around noon and my MIL picks her back up in the late afternoon. Bonnie's virtually never alone - we have her during the day when my MIL is often out shopping or hanging out with her friends, and then my MIL has her again in the evenings when she'd normally be lonesome without a little buddy there with her. It also affords my MIL the opportunity to travel. When Tina was alive my MIL could barely go anywhere for more than a few hours because Tina cried constantly but it's completely different with Bonnie. As long as she's with one of us, she's home.



And you know over the years she's gotten much, much cuter.

You're Off The Hook - Somewhat

Much to your everlasting relief chagrin, I don't have much in the way of knitting talk this week. I'm still knitting on Paula's second sock and I told Poppy the other day that I'm suffering from S.S.S. but in this case it means Second Sock Slowdown. I knit like gangbusters (I like it when I can slip in an old fogy term like "gangbusters") on the first sock and then take twice as much time to finish the second sock as it took me to do the first. This may be why I like to knit for others rather than knit for myself because if the sock is for someone else I feel at least a little pressure to get it finished.

The photos I've seen of socks done in Opal Hundertwasser yarn I have shows an example of a sock with vertical stripes. I think this particular yarn looks so interesting with vertical striping that I found the English translation of the German pattern for this particular sock. It's knitted flat, sewn together with a seam at the back and then put on dpns to make the toe. Poppy mentioned to me that a seam may be uncomfortable and I'm inclined to agree with her but I still may give it a whirl just to see what it's like. Maybe I can sew it super flat. Or what if I made the first row on waste yarn and then when it's time to sew the seam, pull out the waste yarn to make live stitches and then just Kitchener stitch it closed and thereby avoiding a seam? Any thoughts from you other knitters? Any thoughts from you non-knitters? I'm just begging for comment love, aren't I?

Yarn talk is officially over. You can uncover your eyes now.

While having a nap this afternoon I had a dream where I could see my ex-husband standing with some other people on the other side of a road. I don't remember much about the dream except I had shoulder length strawberry blond hair that was in tiny, tiny curls and in the dream I went home after having seen my ex and wanted to go back to talk to him. I wasn't married to him in the dream but as I remember it, I wasn't married to B either. And I think my mother lived with me.

It bugs the shit out of me when I dream about my ex-husband. When we were married I virtually never dreamed about him. In my dreams I very seldom dream about anyone I know in real life (I'm either in dreams with strangers or the people I know in dreams don't exist in real life) but since we divorced I occasionally dream about my ex - once every few months sometimes. In the dream I was thinking of when I last saw my ex, thinking it was sometime in 2001 or 2003 but in reality I haven't seen nor heard from him since I last saw him in the clerk of the court's office while we signed our divorce decree nearly ten years ago. That's what irks me. I thought I was shed of him and he invades my dreams. He probably wants me to fetch him a glass of iced tea or bring him his supper so he can eat it in front of the TV.

And what really bugged me was waking up and thinking "When was the last time I saw him? Did I see him in 2001?". It pissed me off so much to think of my ex after having woke up from a nap that it ruined my whole post-nap groove.

After my ruined nap groove I took my dog, Bonnie, out for a walk. We were a few blocks from my apartment building and were walking along a grassy area and Bonnie needed to poop. Actually Bonnie wasn't feeling too well and she had diarrhea. Not just regular diarrhea but something akin to water. Now let me say that I am very good about picking up after my dog. I don't go anywhere without a plastic freezer bag in my pocket - cause I don't just want plastic between my hand and dog poop but want thick plastic between my hand and dog poop. However this instance a plastic bag wasn't going to clean anything up. Nothing short of holding a paper cup under my dog's rear while she proceeded to evacuate her bowels would have helped so we walked away. I didn't pick anything up because there wasn't anything to pick up. You could hardly see where specifically landed. And just about that time an old woman, who evidently saw my squatting dog, hollered out of her apartment window from a good 20 yards away "You need to clean up after that dog! You there! Clean up after your dog!". I whirled around and hollered back "I can't!" and was told by the old woman that I needed to bring things with me to clean up after my dog.

Jeez, that irked me. Maybe it wouldn't have irked me so much if my post-nap groove hadn't been ruined but there it was. That's when I whipped the plastic bag out of my back pocket, waved it in her direction and shouted back "I have something! My dog has diarrhea like water! It can't be picked up".

You could read the visible "Ewwwww!" on the faces of those standing at the bus stop who were witnessing the confrontation.

I'd be temped to blame this on it being a stereotypical anal retentive German obsessed with cleanliness who was shouting out her window to me but that wouldn't be completely true. I really blame it on city living. Living in a city puts you in much closer contact with busybodies who love to dictate to others how they should live than what you'd find in a small town or suburbs. Every urban area has it's people who lack a life of their own and have nothing better to do than look out their windows in hopes of catching someone not holding their mouth just right. Bombay, Cape Town, London, Beijing, Brooklyn, Cairo - every one of them has someone hanging out a window ready to pounce on the unsuspecting person walking their diarrhea stricken dog.

And for good measure I'll blame my ex-husband as well.