Excused Lame

Soyara’s A Shade of Difference

May 28, 2000 – March 19, 2008

We lost Rufus last night.

Ordinarily a house dog, Rufus was moved back out to the kennel because of the puppies and bitches in season as well as heavy recent rains leading to flooding in the basement.

Last night I went out to the kennel to change water and fill feeders. I found Rufus covered in mud, whimpering and unable to walk. We got him inside, cleaned him up and took him to the vet. There we found he had a catastrophic separation of his hip, with ruptured ligaments. Probably he was fence-fighting with another one of the boys in another pen, slipped in the mud and injured himself.

We have known for quite a while that Rufus was living on borrowed time. He had a tumor on his spine that was causing issues with his movement and which ended his show career one major short of his championship. This may have had something to do with his injury; perhaps because of it he wasn’t able to recover his balance when he started sliding.

Surgery was a possibility, but the vet said that with the extent of the injury, his existing issues and his age the prognosis for a successful recovery were very poor. Rufus slipped from this world quietly, hearing soothing voices and feeling gentle strokes.

Rest well, big guy.

Sixteen inches of global warming, starting yesterday morning and still going on. F’r Heaven’s sake, it’s March! Enough already!

The little ones are flourishing and developing some impish personalities. They’ve been weaned and are now eating what we call “puppy paste,” a combination of soaked puppy kibble, a little canned meat, Esbilac and baby rice slurried in hot water. It’s made up in a large shallow pan so the pups can all eat together.

Every evening the puppy pen has to be cleaned up, disinfected and fresh newspaper put down. While I’m doing this, the babies have the run of the rest of the sun room, supervised by my lovely bride. They tear about, wrestle and knock each other over, play tug-of-war with toys and generally run wild. Eventually they wind down, go back into the pen and go to sleep, looking angelic. A puppy’s day is done.

We think we’ve settled on names for them, both call names and ones for AKC registration.

Dutch (Soyara’s The Flying Dutchman)

Ilya (Soyara’s Ilya Murometz)

Carmen (Soyara’s Carmen Fantasy)

Aida (Soyara’s Celeste Aida)

Commie thug Fidel Castro has resigned the presidency of Cuba, leaving only Hugo Chavez for lefties and Hollywood rich folks to fawn over.

The press make much over his “outlasting” every U.S. President since Eisenhower. Over at the Weekly Standard blog, Brian Faughnan points out that West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd has it all over the soon-we-hope-to-be-late Maximum Leader in the outlasting category. Byrd has been a Senator since 1959 and has been in Congress since 1953, a length of tenure exceeded so far only by Arizona’s Carl T. Hayden, who served his state in the House and Senate from February 9, 1912 to January 3, 1969.

Faughnan has a moment of forgetfulness when he says he believes Byrd is the only one to outlast Fidel’s regime. Add to the list “The Truck,” Representative John D. Dingell, Jr., elected December 13, 1955 to fill the vacancy caused by the death of his father, John D. Dingell, Sr.

In the course of making revision to this little project, I came across the entry in the 62nd Congress for William W. Wedemeyer, who represented Michigan’s 2nd district. The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress says of Wedemeyer, that he “was accidentally drowned” in the harbor at Colón, Panama during an official visit to the Canal Zone. The full truth is less mysterious but sadder.

William Wedemeyer was born in 1873 near Ann Arbor, was educated at the University of Michigan and held official positions in his native Washtenaw County as well as the state of Michigan, also serving as American consul in British Guiana in 1905. Active in the Republican party, he was a member of the state party’s central committee for four years.

Wedemeyer was elected to Congress in 1910, succeeding Charles E. Townsend, who moved to the Senate. With his experience in the Carribean, he sat on the Committee for Territories; the governement of the Canal Zone was of particular interest to him. In the election of 1912, the Democrats swept to power in both the White House and the Capitol. Wedemeyer was one of those who went down to defeat, losing to Democrat Samuel W. Beeks.

During the long lame duck session, a congressional party including Wedemeyer sailed on a junket to Panama to inspect progress on the Panama Canal, then nearing completion. On the voyage Wedemeyer suffered a severe nervous breakdown, violently raving that President Taft had a hand in his electoral reverses. On arriving in Panama, Wedemeyer was committed to a secure room in sanatarium under a suicide watch. Several days later, the delegation departed from Colón on the steamer Panama.

Wedemeyer, accompanied by two male nurses, was with them, his condition not improved. He was consigned to a cabin under watch. His guards, who thought he was asleep, left Wedemeyer’s care to friends while they went to supper. He escaped his cabin and ran up to the deck, where many of the congressional party were taking the evening air. The insane man ran to the railing and, to the horror of those watching, leaped overboard.

The ship stopped and spent two hours searching for him, to no avail. His body was never found.

Of course you know that Westminster Kennel Club show is being held today and tomorrow at Madison Square Garden. For our household, it’s what the Super Bowl is for everyone else. The difference is that we know many of the participants and are familiar with many of the dogs competing.

We’ve done well at Westminster, with Lacey getting an Award of Merit in 2003 and going Best of Breed in 2004. Diva got AOM’s in 2005 and 2007, nearly taking the Breed in 2005.

We didn’t enter anyone this year. Mostly it’s because of the babies being so young and partly because we didn’t have anyone to show except, perhaps, for Alan.

It didn’t mean that we didn’t have, so to speak, a dog in this fight. Lacey’s son Knight, bred by us and owned by Gretchen Thiele and Charles Green, was entered this year and was handled by Nina Fetter. Knight, at 3 years old, is starting to come into his own and we were hoping that maybe an Award of Merit wasn’t out of the question.

Alas, the judge failed to fulfill our desires. Poor Knight showed well (Charles gave us play-by-play over the phone), but didn’t make the cut in the male competition. Best of Breed went to Hunter (Ch. Sunburst Huntsman of Metcha), Best of Opposite Sex to Rose (Ch. Raynbo’s Winter Rose) and AOM’s to Cameo (Ch. Majenkir Raynbo Silver Cameo), Ace (Ch. Auroral’s Across Time Sirius), Jolie (Ch. Chihawk Tahoe Tomb Raider JC) and Tasia (Ch. Majenkir My Fantastasia). Congratulations to all the winners.

The babies now have their eyes open. They’re starting to toddle unsteadily around the whelping box (actually a kid’s paddle pool), growl and tussle (or at least mouth) with their siblings. Faith has been an excellent mother, just like her dam Possum was.

The schedule during any litter’s first two weeks, their most vulnerable period, is for me to go to bed at around 9:00 PM and get up at 2:00 AM to relieve my lovely bride. She has the first week’s day watch and I take over the second.

The purpose of the 24-hour watch is to see that nothing untowards happens, such as Mama rolling over on someone and crushing it, and to make sure that each of the babies has equal time at the milk bar. There’s a heat lamp shining on the whelping box and a portable radiator keeps the place warm for them.

We do our best to stay awake during all this time, but sitting in a comfy chair in the sun room inevitably one or the other of us doze off briefly, in my case between 3:00 and 4:00 AM. When I awoke, my entire body was paralyzed and great effort was needed to get any muscle moving.

Now that the pups eyes and ears are becoming active, we no longer have to spend all our time in the room with the pen or in the adjacent kitchen. For which deliverance we can only say, “Thank God.” We’re still very attentive to both Mama and babies, but at least we can sleep in our own bed during customary hours. I am now only just recovering from the newborns’ schedule.

We still have a long way to go, but every day the little ones grow stronger and more active. In a few weeks they’ll stop being digestive tracts with legs and start being little hellions.

Headline: “Ex-St. Paul teacher is off to workhouse for sex with teen”

Silly me. I thought doing it was what landed you there, not what you did after you landed there.

Madame, the Cattle Baroness, blubs again at a campaign appearance:

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton had an emotional reunion Monday with a colleague from the early days of her legal career as a child advocate.

The moment came as she revisited her law school days while hosting a campaign event at the Yale Child Study Center where she first pursued her interest in child advocacy.

Penn Rhodeen, a New Haven public interest lawyer who worked with Clinton as a student, recalled her showing up on his doorstep wearing purple bellbottoms.

“It was so 1972,” he recalled, praising Clinton for her longtime interest in helping children.

“Here is the abiding truth we know — you have always been a champion for children. Welcome home, dear friend. We are so proud of you,” he said.

Clinton responded emotionally to Rhodeen’s praise, at one point wiping her eyes with her hand.

Just as at her first crying jag, what has set Madame off? Emotional reaction to artistic sublimity? The recognition of death-defying courage? The love of country?

Naah, Madame is sobbing about herself. As always with the Clintons, it’s all about them. Do we really want these people back? It would be like a second appendicitis attack.

Senator Barak Obama’s campaign for the presidency has earned the endorsement of The Fat Rich Kid and America’s Princess, Caroline Kennedy, whose major accomplishment in life – like that of her mother – appears to be limited to marrying a wealthy guy. Mrs. Schlossberg says:

All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama…

Now the comparisons between the two (lightweight senators with little policy experience and an addiction to bomfoggery) have been pointed out by others. Let me add one more.

Senator Obama, it has been pointed out, had an odd habit while an Illinois legislator, of ducking tough votes on issues like partial birth abortion, where the popularity of the measure among Democrats and his constituents may have diverged.

In 1954, the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy came before the Senate. McCarthy was very popular among Kennedy’s Massachusetts constituents and Kennedy found it difficult to square this with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. He joined the vote to establish a select committee to investigate McCarthy but said:

Many times I have voted with Senator McCarthy, for the full appropriation of funds for his committee, for his amendment to reduce our assistance to nations trading with Communists, and on other matters. I have not sought to end his investigations of Communist subversion, nor is the pending measure related either to the desirability or continuation of those investigations.

When the vote on McCarthy’s censure came up on December 2, 1954, Kennedy was the only Democrat who didn’t vote on the measure or, because he was in the hospital, acquire a pair. In short, he ducked the issue, saying to a friend:

You know, when I get downstairs I know exactly what’s going to happen. Those reporters are going to lean over my stretcher. There’s going to be about ninety-five faces bent over me with great concern, and every one of those guys is going to say, “Now, Senator, what about McCarthy?” Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reach back for my back and I’m going to yell, “Owww,” and I’m going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there.

Now all Senator Obama has to do is get an aide to ghost-write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book and the comparison will be complete.

For the last week, I’ve been helping my lovely bride look after our new pups. Miss Faith went into labor a little after midnight on Wednesday. She pooped out from uterine inertia after a short time, so we called the vet for her to go in for a C-section. We had to work to get the little guys going; the act of natural birth forces the fluids from their lungs, so delivery by C-section has its hazards.

There are two boys and two girls. All of them are doing just fine, as is Mama. Until the babies have their eyes open, either my lovely bride or I will be in the room or in the adjacent kitchen, and even then just briefly. The concern is always that the mother might roll over on one of them or one may wander off. Faith has been an excellent mother, lying quieter than I’ve ever seen her and tending her kids carefully.

We’ve moved a computer into the sun room where the whelping box is located, so more regular posting should now resume.

Two boys and two girls, born by C-section at 2:00 this morning. More follows.

Miss Faith is due to deliver any time, so we wait on her pleasure. The X-rays showed 5 or perhaps 6 puppies. The sire is the great Virago.

Bobby Fischer has died in Reykjavik at 64.