I also remember sitting on the couch with Lauren some time later reading an alphabet book to Meghan. We were the picture of family togetherness. Meghan would stare lovingly as I’d turn the page and read the words with happy Daddy abandon. (more…)
Category: Books
Cozy Tales: 31. The Trash
One fine Thursday not long after the spoon incident, Lauren put Meghan to bed as she did every night. From the time we brought Meghan home, putting her in her crib was a pretty simple affair because she was a good baby who would sleep soundly soon after bedtime. Though there was plenty of pre-bedtime reading and changing and such, bedtime proper was perhaps a ten minute task. Upon her return to the dining room, Lauren found the trash can tipped over and the elegant miss Daisy sitting on the floor chewing on the carcass that had previously been our chicken dinner.
Thanks to our obsessive research regarding all things dog, we knew that cooked chicken is dangerous for dogs if it contains bones. While a raw chicken wouldn’t bother them, the bones get brittle when cooked and cooked chicken bones, when chewed by a dog, can splinter making shards that can cut them up internally. This was a situation that we calmly categorized as not good. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 30. The Spoon
Lauren was sitting outside on the deck enjoying the summer breeze while Meghan played with the latest high-tech toy: a pot and some wooden spoons. As Meghan happily sat on the deck banging the pot with her spoons, the dogs lay lazily about, content to be with their family on such a fine day. Meghan didn’t seem to care that her drum set wasn’t being advertised non-stop on the TV, nor did she mind that these were last year’s spoons. She was as happy as a kid could be, making noise and having fun.
Young children are naturally very good at some things. Banging pots with a wooden spoon is one of them. Making poopy diapers is another, and let me tell you, when it came to this particular skill, the kid was a pro. Noticing that the pro had scored again, Lauren scooped Meghan up and headed inside to clean her up. The dogs evidently decided that they’d sniffed enough diapers for one day and remained contentedly in the sun. If a loaded diaper wasn’t reason enough to disrupt a snooze of this caliber, nothing was. Or so we thought. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 29. Newf Net
When we first decided to get a Newfoundland dog, we scoured the bookstores and quickly discovered that there were precious few quality books on the breed. The Internet was just starting to take off and the dot com boom was in full swing so we focused our energies trying to find quality information on-line. Our Internet searches uncovered an email list called Newf-L which was short for the Newfoundland Mailing List.
An Internet mailing list allowed one person to send email to “the list” by sending to a single email address. The email address was a server which then resent the email to everyone that had subscribed to the list. Forums were still in their infancy, and blogs did not yet exist because this was the still the dark ages of the late 90’s when people used dial-up modems. Back then, email lists were still a pretty common means of information sharing for on-line communities. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 28. Meghan
As the pregnancy developed, Lauren took the idea of eating for two to heart, all the while telling everyone that the idea was a myth. Lauren had naturally researched pregnancy to the extreme, so she knew what she was doing, and we just figured that nature would take its course as it had for millions of years before we got involved.
In Lauren’s ninth month of pregnancy we went in for one of the many ultrasounds to check the baby’s health. Lauren’s OBGyn was very smart, very type-A, and very young. We had long ago nick-named him Doogie after Doogie Howser from the TV show of the same name. Doogie took one look at Lauren and told her that he wanted to induce her. Lauren flat-out refused, insisting that nature should take its course and that nothing should impede the beauty of the process or some damn thing. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 27. The Table Incident
We used to have a coffee table in the family room that was a two tier affair. The bottom was just a shelf while the top was comprised of three square panes of glass separated by wood with four pillars in the corners. We’d had the table for years and it had become the centerpiece of our family room, around which our lives continued to unfold.
One night while watching television, Lauren was lying on the long couch perpendicular to the TV while I sat on the love seat. Cozy sat on the floor near me and Daisy had mashed herself in the space between Lauren’s couch and the coffee table. The dogs loved to be in this space that seemed too small for them which we figured had something to do with their den instinct. Regardless of why they liked those spots, they were always there making it difficult for people to get off and on the couch. Lauren, eight months pregnant with Meghan, had an even tougher time when the dogs chose to lie there, which was all the damn time.
For reasons that escape me now, I decided to sit on the coffee table so I could get closer to Lauren. Maybe we were talking, or maybe I felt the need to give her some smooches. Whatever the reason, it was overshadowed by the events that were about to unfold. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 26. The Cozy Hole
Cozy liked to dig. She was a dog after all, so that shouldn’t have been a surprise, but what surprised us was the size of the holes. While we expected digging, we had not reasoned through the fact that big dogs meant big holes.
The reasons for Cozy’s excavations were also not obvious to us. She would be outside in the yard and suddenly just start to dig and within minutes there would be a hole large enough to cripple a horse. Luckily we didn’t have any wild horses passing through our yard, but still, the holes were a menace to navigation for those of us who did traverse the yard.
For Cozy, digging was an obsession. While digging, nothing mattered to Cozy but the hole, and by God, the hole in question wasn’t wide nor deep enough. We would often find her outside in a hole-digging trance, her entire head beneath the surface of the Earth as she sniffed out the next stage in her tunnel. When I’d yell her name from the deck she would stop, pull her head from the hole, look up at me with a far-away look in her eyes, then stick her head back in the hole and resume the task at hand. Cozy was an artist driven mad by a singular vision who happened to use our yard as her canvas. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 25. Remote Control
Back before the days of wedded bliss, having dogs, or even the existence of DVD players, I had come into some money and bought a very nice 27” JVC TV and a matching VCR. Each of these items had cost me over $800 and at the time were about the most expensive things I had ever bought. By the time we had Cozy and Daisy living with us, these devices were each probably eight years old, but since High Definition television was still many years away, they were both still used daily. Used, I might add, with a certain amount of nerdy pride since they were still pretty great devices.
The VCR was a top of the line model (circa 1989) that had a wonderful remote control including a large LCD screen that kept the time so you could program the VCR when the power failed. The remote had two levels of buttons with a very cool plastic door that would open to reveal an additional level of controls. It was a masterful piece of geek technology that I really enjoyed using. It was a remote among remotes. It was sublime. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 24. Daisy the Critic
One fine night Lauren and I decided to sit and watch a movie. Lauren was five months pregnant with our first baby, and we were trying to enjoy as much “us” time as possible before our lives were turned upside down.
As we settled in to watch the movie, we heard an odd sound from behind the coffee table. I got up to investigate, naturally expecting giant spiders or robotic invaders, only to discover Daisy sitting with a newspaper on her paws. I kept a pile of old newspapers by the fireplace to help start fires in the winter, and apparently Daisy had something else on her mind regarding the fair use of these papers. She had pulled one off of the pile and was sitting there methodically tearing the newspaper to shreds.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Daisy never got into trouble, she never did anything wrong, and she was always the consummate lady. She always seemed to look down her nose at Cozy’s shenanigans, and here she was being naughty out in the open. The Duchess, it would appear, had a wild side. (more…)
Cozy Tales: 23. Newf Cam
Being the computer geek that I am, I decided in 1999 to build myself a monitoring system to watch the dogs from work. Back then you couldn’t buy wireless network cameras on Amazon. Hell, back then wireless didn’t exist yet and very few stores had websites. Also, Amazon was barely a thing.
Working at a local Internet Service Provider when local ISPs could still thrive, I was learning the ins and outs of Internet network devices, and in order to manage and maintain the ISPs network, I had a scorching 128k ISDN connection to my home. You have to remember that everyone else was still using modems, and they were slow. The modems at the time were mostly 28.8k models, with 56.6k being the absolute cutting edge. DSL and cable Internet feeds were still in their infancy so having a dedicated 128k connection to my house was a very big deal at the time. No one out-nerds me! (more…)