Life in Canada

Posts

Dogs Breaking the Ice

April 01, 2013

One important new job for dogs is helping humans with our social interactions according to Jon Katz. He points out that because we are out walking and exercising our dogs, we end up meeting, conversing and sometimes befriending other dog people who otherwise would remain strangers. It’s been true for me. I’ve met many of my neighbours and made some wonderful friends because of a mutual interest in our dogs. Recently a popular academic paper has been promoting the connection between the development of human civilisation and beer drinking. Otherwise shy early humans found the courage to talk and exchange ideas after a few beers, the paper suggests. Lately I've been thinking that maybe dogs have been facilitating human to human interactions for a long time as well. Our neighbourhood is full of dogs and we've met many of them. Initially, I only know the dog’s names; there is Faith, the cute beagle, Josie, a fun loving labrador and Noki, a skinny border collie who can'

Dog droppings on the ski trail

March 27, 2013

At our ski trail system, there is a designated trail where dogs are allowed to run along with the skiers. Along with lots of other "dog people," we ski that trail a lot. Actually, our dog insists! It's a lot easier to live with a dog who gets plenty of exercise. However, one of the less attractive aspects of living with dogs is the issue of cleaning up after them. In town, we use plastic bags that end up in the land fill. I've been reading recently about various options for disposing of the dog poop. Ideally, we should use re-usable bags to transport the poop to our toilet, after which our municipal system would deal with it. In the bush, far from human population, burying it seems like a good way to dispose of poop to minimise the chance of spreading any disease. Of course, in winter it isn't so easy to bury anything. I'm not very squeamish, but finding dog poop all over the trail is pretty disgusting! Now I bring a plastic gardening trowel tha

Gee and Haw: How to teach a dog to turn on cue

March 23, 2013

The old TV show Hee Haw's producer claims the show name was an onomatopoeia for the sound of a braying donkey. I can't stop thinking how well the name honours our relationship with beasts of burden. As most plow horses, cart donkeys and sled dogs know, "gee" means turn right and "haw" means turn left. Both the "eeee" and "awww" sounds can be shouted out loud and clear. Our old dog Cricket was an expert at turning left or right on command when he pulled skiers and bikers. It makes sense that he would be an expert as pulling was his principle business and how we exercised him. Sometimes I would make a mistake at the end of a long run and call for a right, when our house was obviously to the left. Cricket would glance back with an surprised expression on his face. As if to say, "Do you mean the OTHER gee?" We passed under a raucous murder of crows, all of them crowing "HAW, HAW, HAW" in what sounded like a tau

Junk lawnmower make-over

March 20, 2013

Thomas Edison famously said, "to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk!" I always sing along with Muppet Oscar-the-grouch's theme song "I love trash." Last summer one of our neighbors sold his house and made a big mound of everything that didn't move during his yard sale. There was some great stuff in that pile! I tried to exercise restraint, but ended up bringing home three loads using my wife's red, Radio Flyer wagon. Most of my haul was nice sized pieces of high-grade plywood, but there was a vintage Sears electric lawn mower and a stack of heavy, interlocking plastic strips. I recognized those plastic strips from a TV ad that promoted them as a way to firm up a sagging couch or mattress. When I brought all this stuff home, I didn't have a project idea for any of it. Here is a brief accounting of what became of some of this junk. Our small yard produces an amazing amount of small sticks. The usual method to get rid of t

Learning to skijor with an adrenalin-fueled dog

March 19, 2013

When we brought home a stunning dog with shiny black fur and tan highlights, we had no idea what were getting into. His name was Cricket and he came from a house that contained 28 other dogs, all somehow concealed from the landlord. Conditions in that house, according to dog shelter workers who were called in to relocate all the dogs, were the worst they had ever seen. Dried feces covered the floor several inches thick. Every feeding was an exercise in survival skills when an entire bag of dog food was ripped open and fought over. Cricket was named by the person who horded all these dogs, perhaps because of his glossy black fur but more likely because his tail had a noticeable crick. If you have 29 to name, using distinctive physical attributes seems practical. The fights over food must have been awful and even years later, Cricket was never a good eater. When that house was emptied of dogs, only 8 were considered for possible future adoption and the remaining 21 were eutha

Ski waxing mess

March 18, 2013

Ski wax is awful stuff when you find it on the floor around the waxing bench. It makes the floor dangerously slippery and can also make your shoes slippery if you step on it. Because wax is strange stuff, it isn't easy to keep things neat and tidy. Anyone who has scraped excess hot wax from a ski knows that fine wax shavings become electrostatically charged and will cling to your sweater or pants. In my experience, putting newspaper on the floor under the waxing bench to collect the messy wax will collect maybe half of the wax waste. I had all this negative experience in mind when I recently made a dedicated fixture to hold Nordic skis while we wax them. I thought I would try putting a wax collecting tarp as close to the ski as possible. I sewed two sleeves in a narrow scrap of tarp material and then slid a couple of 1x2s slightly longer than our skis to hold the tarp in place. This seems to work great and nearly all the scraped wax ends up in the tarp, where I can use th

Search This Blog