It is my contention that most metaphors involving dogs have a very literal vehicle, particularly that sub-class of metaphor, the simile. Just four days at home have reminded me of the truth in the action “to follow around like a little dog”. It is both a pleasure and an obstacle to be accompanied by a pack wherever I go around this small house. There is something marvellously surreal about opening the toilet door into the hall and finding eight attentive and slightly concerned expressions waiting there. (It is the one room into which they are not allowed, you see.)
The puppies have a high tolerance for winter and rough weather and are happiest exploring the daily minor changes of the garden (or, more accurately, tiny mud-paddock with shrubs). Their incursions and excursions lead to many exclamations of “mucky pup!” All this will I hope prepare young Tommo well for his pending relocation to southern Wairarapa, where he will have the deputy rule of a garage bed and a very large lakeside to call his own. Jackie is deeply ensconced in her Sockburn pack and will never leave us, while the search for the right home for Rosie (who most resembles not only her dam but also a small piglet) remains intermittent and not yet fruitful. Meanwhile, Fern has come into season again, which means it is six months since this round of breeding (dogs, not people) began. Sometimes, gestational time flies.
The puppies have the same run of the house and section as the adult dogs but at night are confined to their bed-and-pen, the Poo Palace, which is these days host to considerably less poo than in the past — as it should be at four months old. Adjacent to the table where our computers rest, it is, however, increasingly a receptacle for accidental object drops. If your loose power cord dangles into the Poo Palace, it will not be returned; neither will your charger nor your plastic ephemera. Electronics plugged in are kept high and out of reach; it is the odd jolt to the cable laid idly by that signals its exit from the world of usability and its careful, nay painstaking, segmentation by tiny, high-functioning teeth.
I am never sure why the habit of photographing puppies tails off (as ’twere) as they get older, since they remain no less adorable. It is in part, I suppose, their now total mobility. I have a collection of blurry images that tell the viewer little. Much amusement is at present created by encouraging the pups to climb the front stairs, then watching as Rosie and Jackie descend and Tom is confronted by a (temporary) failure of his confidence with regard to the business of just how to get down again. He paces along the porch boards looking thoughtful, assuming that at some point the solution will reveal itself.
The era of universal bities has happily passed and toes and socks are safe again, although Rosie continues a certain amount of project management in this area on her own. The predictability of elimination is growing and housetraining will soon have to commence. I am one who favours thoroughness rather than haste in this, but it never gets any easier or more fun.
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The days are filled with writing, of a purposive, industrial kind, as well as the usual demands of course materials and curriculum. I feel at times as if all the skills of my erstwhile liberal arts education are being mobilised in a way that’s untypical. Academic arguments typically gain their urgency under the pressure of deadlines functional rather than industrial and have consequences somewhere along the professional/individual borderline, unlike this sweep more institutional.
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Your baby is as tall as an English hothouse cucumber
In a chronological outcome as predictable to you as it is remarkable to me, I am now six months pregnant, and experiencing what might best be described as a personalised redistribution of corporeal largesse as a result. I am tight of calf, lean of back and as rotund and smooth in front as a seal or (my preferred image) a penguin on its nest (even if it is the male penguin that has this role). I have lost the flexibility that previously characterised my Rubenesque form, and can no longer tuck myself into a chair in the corner of a bar or a meeting. No, my preferred posture is now perhaps politely described as lounging, and more accurately as lolling. This is, as friends and semi-well-wishers like to point out, only the start. As our obstetrician explained: at twenty-eight weeks, the average weight of baby is 1000 grams, whereas at thirty-eight weeks it is 3000 grams. I am not afraid of looking ridiculous, but am a bit worried about the ability of my expanding form to hold itself up in the meantime. By day’s end I already long for some sort of bamboo or fibreglass scaffolding on which to trolley my passenger.
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… a spunky little dog that loves to know what is going on, who is going to be there, and generally be the center of anything that is going on.
The puppies are a one-month-old delight today. The only regret I have is the limited amount of time in the day there is to spend with them, narrowed as it is two-fold by my working schedule and their sleeping schedule, each of which is extensive. They are making a good fist — or rather, face-full — of solid food and Tom, physically the most precocious, is already cutting teeth.
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