Dear Abby?

The other day my daughter remarked plaintively, “I miss your blog.” I almost gave in and told her about this one—she does indeed have me wrapped around her little finger—but I resisted the impulse. I had to remind myself why I shut down the original one and went into the Blogger Protection Program. When I want to read her blog, I am always careful to log in under my old user name so it appears to be coming from my original blog.

With this blog, I can express my reality, free from my children’s editing or now ex-daughter-in-law’s censorship. I can say what I like without fear of hurting someone’s feelings or being accused of “misremembering” events.

What I gained in freedom I lost in readership. Before, my blog was read more widely because of the crowd I was running with. I envy my daughter’s long list of commenters. If I told you her address, though, she could find me using the Stat Counter tracking program. She’s not searching for me or anything, this blog would just show up in the “coming from” section. Here is where she can be found, though: forthelongrun dot blogspot dot com.

If I told her about this blog, she would of course mention it to her friends who may or may not read it, but her brothers and aunt and uncle would also find it, and I’d be back where I started, worried about censorship.

Here is an example I something I want to say that I would not want them to know about:

Grandson Max’s dad Shane lives with us. He’s been back in our house for over a year and is likely to stay another year until his alimony commitments have been met. He might be able to afford his own place once that is done. His current girlfriend gave me a DVD for Christmas: a bootleg copy of “I Am Legend”, a movie I planned to see or rent at some point. I put off watching it, and she asked me if I’d seen it yet, and I had to say no and then I finally dropped it into the DVD player.

I wasn’t that comfortable with the idea of a bootleg DVD anyway, and wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but after a few moments it was clear that someone had sat in the movie theater and simply videotaped the entire film and burned it to a DVD. You could see the people in front of him moving around---it was just so strange. I stopped it after a minute or so. The whole idea just made me queasy. The guy stole the movie. I don’t want anything to do with stolen property.

Do I say anything to Shane or his girlfriend? How can I say anything without appearing judgmental or disapproving or ungrateful? I’d like to prevent any more stolen movies from showing up at my house, but how do I do that without damaging our relationship to her or her relationship to Shane? What do I say the next time she asks about it?

I suppose there are other things I should be doing

t’s going into the single digits here today and tomorrow. I’m off on MLK day, but it’s the sort of day you’d like to go to work just to stay warm.

Yesterday was Kathy's mom's birthday. Kathy and her sisters were on the phone talking about her. They reminisced about past birthday celebrations, including the pajama party at the Embassy Suites for her 90th. Kathy and I went out to the cemetery where Kathy placed a single rose and a few M&M’s on the grave, since her mother liked both those things.

The director was in a meeting in Atlanta for most of last week. I was not in charge, except for Friday morning. There are so few people now in the office, with the ones who quit, a couple out sick and one on vacation, that on Friday there were only three people counting me who were working. Fortunately it was a slow day. Unfortunately, I get all the questions because there is no one else around to answer them.

This weekend I spent about eight hours working on a DVD project for the Education majors. We want to show them what to expect during the big interview event that we will have in April. I went through all the raw footage and wrote down the time codes for all the bits and pieces I wanted for the final production. Next, I want to work on the new site map for the web site for my professional organization. It’s something we were supposed to do two years ago and finally I said I would do it. I sent a draft to the web person at our management company and she liked it. I felt pretty good, considering I’d never done such a thing before.

Oh—I should also work on the third edition of my textbook, but maybe I’ll find some time during the holiday on Monday. I talked to the publisher the other day and they are happy with what I’m doing, and they are sending me another royalty check in March, so I am happy with what they are doing. We actually had to reprint the second edition to cover the spring and summer semesters, so I was very pleased about that.

The other night Max made S’mores for us, standing at the stove with one hand on his hip and the other expertly cooking the marshmallows in the flames on the stove. This weekend the temperature dropped into the single digits. Kathy asked Max if he was warm enough in his jammies, and he responded, “I’m as warm as a kangaroo in a pouch!” On Saturday, he and Shane went to the zoo. It was nice and toasty in the Rainforest exhibit, which is always about 85 degrees and steamy. They bought a battery operated tarantula that moves in a lifelike way. Max delighted in terrorizing Nana with it all afternoon.

Kodiak

Kodiak is gone

We had to put Kodiak to sleep a couple of weeks ago. There were reasons to do it and reasons not to, but we felt it would be best for all. He was incontinent, peeing and pooping in the house when you least expected it. His hindquarters were getting weaker, and he was falling a lot. He could not cross the kitchen linoleum without his legs collapsing under him. Kathy was afraid he was going to break a hip falling down the stairs.

He loved sleeping in our room, so we always left the door cracked so he could get in. We could hear him carefully making his way up the staircase once the lights were out. In the morning he would come up alongside my side of the bed, and rest his chin on the rail of the waterbed and look at me. Sometimes he’d nudge me with his snout to encourage me to get up and feed him. Then he would pick his way down the stairs—always a dicey situation, since he had tumbled down several times in the past.

At 95 pounds and four feet long from the tip of his nose to his butt, he was a big dog. Little kids were consistently amazed by the sight of him—not scared, just astounded. He was patient with them, never nipping or growling at them as they crowded around him to pet him.

He was a scrounger, ceaselessly seeking nutritional supplements, whether on kitchen counters, sidewalk treelawns or frozen snow banks. He would snuffle into a pile of snow in search of a perceived treat, triumphantly coming out with a comical snow covered snout and some disgusting bit of garbage as his prize. Even on his last walk, he snagged a treat when he gobbled up an old pecan cup pastry that had been sitting on the sidewalk for about a week. I had successfully kept him from wolfing it down on previous outings, but this time I forgot it was there. He hadn’t, though.

Being part Lab and part Great Dane, he had bits of both personalities in him as he was friendly and brave and seemed to bond with me. He had what I later learned was a Great Dane trait—leaning against your legs, being possessive? I’m not sure. Endearing, that’s for sure.

Thunderstorms unnerved him, though. Just a falling barometer would send him cowering into the kitchen, huddling at our feet for protection. At first we wondered what he was doing in the kitchen, since he knew he was not allowed in there, and then we realized that a weather front was coming through. Who needed the weather channel when you had Kodiak? Somedays we would find him in the basement, where he sought shelter from the booming thunder outside.

We look around now and see all the accommodations made for him.

For the three years that he had lived with us, we had to keep the kitchen garbage can in the downstairs bathroom in order to keep him from getting into it. We had a child gate set up in the passageway between the kitchen and dining room to create a space for his food and water bowls. There was a dog bed in the family room and one in the living room to accommodate his penchant for wandering from room to room during the day. We had just bought an eighty dollar egg crate bed for him a few months ago. The idea was to make him more comfortable. His idea of comfort, though, was to simply step up onto the family room couch and sprawl out. If you wanted to share the couch with him, he would put his massive head in your lap and go to sleep like a giant cat.

I would walk him twice a day through rain, snow, heat, cold—no matter what. He loved a good snowstorm, plunging into the frigid wind with great energy as snow flakes swirled around us. The only weather that really got him down was a steamy hot summer day. He would plod wearily along, gamely making his way, as I guiltily looked for a way to shorten our regular mile course.

He was a wonderful dog. We’ll miss him.

Back to work

I went back to work this past week—a short three day week that seemed longer somehow than a regular week. I was large and in-charge, since the other managers were on vacation. Fortunately, nothing managerial happened the whole time. Many people were out, so it was just us skeletons there. It was so quiet I actually got some things done, working on the third edition of my textbook and the second edition of a DVD we did for the teacher job fair last year. I am reading the textbook over word by word, and I still like most of what I have there, so it gets harder to find things to change for each edition. The DVD will be much cooler than the first edition, since we plan to sprinkle interviews with recruiters and students throughout. Before it was just me as a talking head and some video of the different segments of the teacher job fair.

Good news—I have just about caught up on my pile of New Yorker magazines! All it took was about two weeks off of work. I read several articles about Iraq that helped my understanding of the whole thing, as well as some wonderful fiction and opinion pieces. I was on the web the other day and pulled the trigger on another year’s subscription. Let’s see if I do a better job of keeping up this time.

Max was at our house this weekend. On Saturday he and Shane were making cookies. Kathy remarked that it was a good thing, too, since Da (me) was a cookie monster. I told Max that he looked like a cookie and so I would eat him. He went to great lengths to show that he was not, in fact, a cookie. “Look, he said, holding out his arm, “A cookie is flat and I’m not flat!” I responded that maybe he was one of those gingerbread men. He said, “Put your hand here”, indicating his chest, “A cookie doesn’t have a heart that beats! Look, I have veins!” I had to agree that he was a boy after all, and not a tasty treat. He and Shane worked on the Lego “Mission to Mars” construction project. It is very complicated and very cleverly designed—nothing a five year old could do alone. I hope it stays together for a while. He and I watched a DVD of an old TV cartoon show—“Pinky and The Brain”. He was very intent on the show and didn’t say anything until it was almost over—laughing at a joke that I thought he wouldn’t get. For the cognoscenti, it was the episode where they build a “chia Earth”—that’s the line that broke Max up, flashing a great big gap-toothed grin (as he is missing three teeth across the front.)

New Year’s Eve was a bustling event, since everyone came to our house: Lois and Greg, Priscilla and John, their daughter Lisa and her boyfriend Brian (who for some reason is known as “Lambie-sheepie”) and the his mother Chris (who was at loose ends with nowhere else to go), their son Matt and his girlfriend Meghan, who is cute and smart and likes horses. By 10pm, everyone was still here and it looked like they were here for the duration. We were boring ourselves talking about basement flooding and household stuff, so I asked if anyone would like to play Scrabble. Lois enthusiastically jumped in, but several others said, no, that’s boring. We got four of us together and we started playing. I figured that the people who didn’t want to play would just sit in the living room and continue boring themselves. Wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t want to play but they came over to kibbitz, tormenting poor Meghan with their ideas for words. The rest of us told them to leave her alone and let her play. The boyfriend’s mother sat behind me and started poking me, so I turned around and said icily, ‘I know what I’m doing.” That shut her up but she still hung on my shoulder for the entire game.

I did win with a crushing triple word score, he says modestly.

At midnight we all went out on the porch and shot off those little champagne bottle poppers. Then our guests made their way home, full of the prospect of a new year and another chance to put things right.