We were so looking forward to August. The hope being that some assemblance of the normal order would be returned, and that a blanket of calm would settle over the B-Bar-Lazy-B. Since I am the crappiest blogger known to the entire cyber-universe, I’ll have to give you some background before we get into the details of how August hasn’t yet delivered on the promise we thought it held back in Mid-July…

From late June through July we were dog-sitting Maya’s parent’s dog while they were on an extended vacation. Before we embarked on this little adventure, my greatest concern was how Jake would climatize to the cats, since he didn’t really have any direct experience with them. Hold on…

Let me introduce Jake…Jake is a yellow lab, I think he is about 8 years old, and has the longest nose in the world…

Miles and Miles of Nose

Well, ok, so maybe it isn’t the longest nose in the world, but if you live with Huxley for a while, most dogs begin to look like their noses are inappropriately long, Witness exhibit B, Huxley’s comparatively truncated snout…

A comfortably proportioned snout

Anyway…Huxley and Jake have played together pretty regularly (although always quite rambunctiously) both at Maya’s folk’s place and here at the house on occassion, so the least of our concerns was how Huxley and Jake would interact (particularly given our good luck at dog sitting other dogs in the past, etc.).

As one should come to expect, my expectations were wholly inaccurate. Jake on the whole couldn’t care less about the cats. He even seemed a bit shy and confused by them. He almost failed to notice the chickens for the entire month and a half. Jake’s sole concerns in the world are food, people, tennis balls, sticks, and of course, water. There is absolutely nothing else going on behind his stare besides a continuous inventory of the presence or absence of these five objects of his desire. His entire being is tied to these five concerns, and he can’t help but excitedly acknowledge the introduction of any one of them with fierce tail waging and some disconcerting bouncing. (Maybe there is one other thing on his mind…his bed…which he humps…which is also disconcerting and not the topic of this post, but worth mentioning nonetheless).

Our problem, surprisingly, throughout the month of July was our own sweet boy, Huxley. And the problem, he was not very sweet. After a few days, the novelty of the visitor wore thin, and the “bad Huxley” traits started to come out. These “bad Huxley” traits are few and far between, but at 104lbs, 98 of which are muscle, and 80 of those are located squarely on the top of his head to operate his jaws, any bad traits are a cause for concern. Huxley is intense. He is intensely protective and on occassion intensely possesive (we know this and prior to Jake’s arrival we removed all of the toys, bones and sticks that usually lay around the yard awaiting Huxley’s whim).

The first incident occurred while Maya was scruffing Huxley’s belly in the yard, and Jake bounded over to get a piece of the action. Maya is central to Huxley’s possessiveness tendencies, and there was an erruption that culminated in trip to the Vet to get a single staple put in a gash in Jake’s long pointy head. Maya suffered some scrapes and torn trousers in her effort to remove Huxley from Jake. Ok, historically, there was one other incident between Jake and Huxley involving a toy, so this second incident gave pause, but not panic. We proceeded by being very mindful of how and when attentions were lavished and just put a lot of effort into keeping everything very mellow around the B-Bar-Lazy-B.

I think we made it about another week, until the evening I decided I should bring the second dog bed out to the living room right before dinner so that we could all settle in for the evening. I thought I could accomplish this fairly smoothly despite both boys being in the living room at the time since Huxley was already settled on the bed that is permanently present in the living room and Jake was pretty well settled on the floor at the outset. I was wrong. Both boys took an immediate co-interest in the newly introduced bed, and our efforts to distract them in opposite directions seemed to incite conflict. Once Huxley has a grip, the only hope is for Maya to shove her hand in his mouth and break his grip whilst I’m pulling and then holding Huxley away from the site of conflict. The unfortunate consequence of Maya being so quick to shove her hand in Huxley’s mouth, is she sustains the injuries, while I generally walk away shaken but unscathed (I can’t even begin to go into how much I hate a dog conflict, but suffice to say this concern was central to my reluctance to get a dog in the first place). Maya suffered several puncture wounds to here index finger and serious bruising under her thumbnail (which now matches the other thumbnail which was bruised some time ago during the aforementioned initial conflict over a toy which occurred before Jake was actually staying with us).

Maya really needs her hands to do her job. Since the definition of insanity is trying the same things over and over again expecting different results, and with part of our livelihood now at stake, we had to take action. For the remainder of July we had to implement emergency dog separation measures. Thankfully the weather favored our efforts throughout the ordeal, and the lay out of our house accommodated keeping one dog upstairs with me while the other roamed free or stayed downstairs in Maya’s office with frequent trade offs throughout the day. If we didn’t both work from home now, this would have been a lot worse, but the continuity of our presence, and a little help from instant messaging technology, enabled us to rapidly develop policies, systems, and procedures appropriate to the task of regular dog rotation. Our strategy hinged heavily on utilization of the Blue Room as a sort of doggie air lock for performing rotations upstairs and down, inside and outside. Communication also plays as an essential component of any effective set of policies, systems and procedures for a management task as daunting as total dog separation. So, for the remainder of July the B-Bar-Lazy-B sounded not unlike a naval vessel from days of old. Aside from IM, we leveraged call and response to coordinate dog movement for locale to locale. Hence the title of this entry. At the completion of each dog movement, the party responsible for the dog in motion would call out to the party responsible for the dog at rest (usually waiting in or near the Blue Room with the dog at rest momentarily sequestered therein) to finalize the pooch transfer activity.

Let me walk you through the process of a relatively simple move, though more complicated moves were enacted in a similar fashion, just to clarify exactly how eagerly we were awaiting August. If Jake needed to move from my office upstairs to outside while Huxley was in a “free roam” period wherein the back door was open and the child gate at the foot of the stairs was closed, initiation of the movement would be either called out (if Maya was in the kitchen for example) or IM’d from upstairs to down (if Maya was in her office for example).

So, maybe I would yell “Should we do a switch?!”

Maya would respond “Sure it has been a while since Jake has been out!”

Then I would yell “Ok! Let’s do it!”

Maya would yell back “Ok! I’m taking Hux into the Blue Room!”

I would respond “Ok!”

As Maya took Hux into the Blue Room, she would call out “Ok, We’re In!”

At that point I would know I could safely open the gate and guide Jake to the out of doors, as I closed the door behind me I would call out “Ok, We’re Out!”

That final call indicated that Maya and Hux could emerge without incident from the Blue Room, and ordinary activities could resume until the next sequence of calls and moves was initiated.

This process dominated the month of July. Jake is an absolutely sweetheart, but when the sun rose on August 5th with the termination of this procedural sequence (Jake had gone home on the night of August 4th after Maya’s folk’s got back in town), a definite sense of relief gracefully settled across the entire eighth of an acre we call home. It did take a while to shake the habit of calling out to each other during each of our movements through the house. On several occassions I had to stop myself from closing the gate at the foot of the stairs and yelling out “We’re up!”

Unfortunately, the obliteration of the promise of a peaceful August came upon us that night with a midnight run to the 24 hour emergency Vet. But, I guess I’ll save that story for the next entry…suffice it to say we are all still here, so that is the good news. Our dear old man Hemingway isn’t seeing out of one eye and might be facing numbered days however, and that lays a thick viel of sorrow over the entire month. And then, just to keep us on our toes, someone decided to run into Maya’s car in the middle of the night sometime and drive off leaving it sans 1 side view mirror with a flat tire, a bent rim, and untold damage to the front end suspension, drive train, and who know what else. The precision with which they had to have scraped by her car to catch the mirror and the front tire without really denting the body is difficult to conceptualize, but alas, somehow they accomplished just such a feat and we still need to figure out how serious the damage is.