Posts tagged as:

dogs

At Home, Up North, In Future and In Print

29 September, 2010

in at home,dogs,we are family,writing & research

1. At Home

This is not my baby, nor is it my dog.

Among the variety of things that people made when I was pregnant were remarks concerning the dogs. Some simply asked, reasonably enough, “what are you going to do about them?” Others jumped to statements perhaps deriving from their own housepride, or shuddering at the thought of being in our shoes; “of course you’ll have to get rid of the dogs” came from more than one source.

Now, one does not spend years becoming a crazy dog lady to give up quite that easily, and so it was that I replied first with politeness and later with vehemence (since it is remarkable how people whom you see only occasionally will say exactly the same thing again and again over eight months of pregnancy) that no, the dogs would stay. It was part of my hitherby dragons philosophy for the year’s post-partum latter half: I didn’t quite know how we would manage, but manage we would.

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Motivations and Impediments

6 June, 2009

in at home,O internet,writing & research

One of the reasons I have such energy for writing here at the moment is as a kind of proof-positive against my perpetual fear: that my professional and voluntary roles at Concrete University will drain my energy reserves and leave me unable to do anything except work, eat dinner and go to bed early. The present time of year, in which I am between semesters (we run on a slightly different calendar from the undergraduate university proper) is a time in which such a worry seems to flourish. So there’s a defensive element to my prose, getting as much down as possible so that when the time crunch comes I won’t feel I wasted it when I had it. (The final chapters of my manuscript could benefit from the same kind of fidelity, it must be said.)

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Thoughts on vacuuming: early-winter version

17 May, 2009

in at home,commentatrix,dogs

I group vacuuming into two broad groupings: preventative vacuuming and restorative vacuuming.
I have never done any preventative vacuuming, although I suspect this may be because I am childless.
The source of satisfaction in these two different categories is entirely different. With restorative vacuuming, you can see where you’ve been. With preventative vacuuming, you must imagine the difference.

Living with multiple inside dogs is likely good for the immune system, if you can tolerate it, but even then there are limits.
When I was swabbed for explosives at Auckland airport en route to Tokyo, and told the officer I had nothing on me but dust and dog dander, I was not joking.
The difference between the rooms in the house in which we co-exist with the dogs, and the rooms in which the dogs generally do not go, is extraordinary. Restorative vacuuming temporarily erases the difference.

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Retrievals

14 March, 2009

in dogs,in Aotearoa,O internet

The fall of Dunedin's footbridge

This wonderful image has a context, a history, a poem and an exhibition at Kay’s post Locomotives and Locomotion, and I hope neither she nor its creator will mind my reproducing it here.

I love stories of this kind, in which place and people and creative endeavour intertwine. Such events generate an aesthetic of their own.

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