Dogs of War

Esther:

Ben and I don’t consider three teenagers challenging enough, so we also have three dogs with a strong prey drive. As long as you have a fenced-in backyard, dogs with strong prey drives are really no problem.

Except Bernard, our Lab/Boxer, is surprisingly light on his feet. He’ll spring clean over a 3-foot chain link fence just to sniff what’s on the other side.

So we stopped relying solely on the chain link fence and started clipping Bernard to a tie-down when he went outside.

Until he snapped the connector ring on the tie-down and jumped the fence again.

We considered building a privacy fence until we saw Bernard clear the 8-foot privacy fence of a neighbor. So that was out.

It didn’t look like we had any choice but to install an invisible fence. Ben spent the greater part of a day working on that and for the next few weeks we introduced our dogs to it and trained them on its usage.

But then Beasley, our German Shepherd/Basset Hound, learned she could punch past the initial discomfort of the static collar and be free. She taught Bernard how to ignore his own static collar, and he helped her escape with him over the fence. We weren’t sure how she had gotten over the fence as she lacks Bernard’s springiness, but one time she had dislodged a block wedged between fence posts to join Bernard on the other side and together they went on a merry neighborhood rampage. So we didn’t put much past her, either.

Once our canine Bonnie and Clyde had defeated the invisible fence, I began to see Beasley and Bernard as dogs of mythical proportions. Other people had sedate family pets content to stay inside when the front door was activated, while our dogs smashed through the double-stacked pet gates at the very sound of our front door opening. We had managed to find two beasts from some havoc-wreaking pack.

Not to be thwarted, Ben bought a 50-foot tie-down cable rated for 200+ dogs and secured it to the base of a 19-year-old bush. Bernard slipped his collar and jumped the fence.

Ben tried again with a leather and nylon harness.

Bernard jumped the fence with the cable still attached, then left the torn harness in the neighbor’s yard to mock us with its emptiness when we pulled it back over the fence.

At this point it was clear we would have to treat the dogs like prisoners and only allow short, supervised walks in the yard. The very first time one of our daughters was the warden in charge, Bernard promptly sprang the fence and Beasley expertly scrambled up and over to follow.

At wits’ end, Ben replaced the 50-foot cable with a 20-foot one and got Martingale collars for our escapees. Beasley and Bernard are escorted outside one at a time when they need to use the facilities and this is working well to contain them.

But we know they still hear the cry of havoc on the wind, the call to war against squirrels and skunks and outdoor cats, and we remain vigilant.

Ben:

The third dog in our trio of ruffian canines is Jinx. Jinx is a female West Highland White Terrier (Westie). The Westie is a Scottish breed with a white coat and is typically 10-15 pounds in size. Westies are tenacious, energetic, affectionate, playful, and fierce and Jinx possesses all of those traits in abundance. The Westie my parents owned when I was growing up also embodied all those traits.

After I showed Esther videos and articles on Westies, she was sold on the idea -- so much so that she sent me a link to a breeder one morning. By that evening, I’d acquired Jinx and brought her home. The breeder told me that she was a troublemaker and I knew she’d fit right in with our bunch. The entire family immediately fell in love with her.

Almost finished growing, Jinx looks like she’ll top out around the 10-pound range, which is on the smaller end of the spectrum for her breed, but don’t tell Jinx that. She’s a 100-pound dog in a 10-pound body. She loves mixing it up with the other two dogs, and when they wrestle and pounce on each other, Jinx is right in the thick of it. She’s very rough and tumble.

When Jinx isn’t diving into the dog pile to wrestle, she’s burrowing under covers, leaping off the bed, chasing her tail, and attacking empty plastic bottles. I’m also convinced I could contract her out to do demolition on houses being renovated. She chews on furniture, rips up linoleum, gnaws on baseboards, and could probably singlehandedly destroy an entire home if given enough unsupervised time.

Jinx does have one enemy though: dog bowls. They offend her.

Early on, they offended her by having the nerve to be empty. After she finished eating and/or drinking, she’d growl, then flip and chase the bowl around the kitchen. Once the evil bowl is cornered and she can’t push it anymore, she’ll lie on her stomach and bark at it incessantly. Lately though, the dog bowls don’t even have to be empty to piss her off. They just have to exist. If left alone long enough with dog dishes, she’ll grab one side in her mouth, flip it over (emptying the contents all over the floor), and run around with it, barking as she goes. In addition to contracting her out for demolition, I think she could moonlight as a K-9 unit. She attacks things as if they’d insulted her mother.

Jinx is also a superb breakfast companion. She’s better than coffee (or at least as good as). Our morning routine consists of taking Jinx out of her crate and taking turns holding her in the morning. While Jinx is still waking up and her frenetic Westie synapses haven’t begun to fire yet, she’s quite the cuddle bug. We’re treated to sleepy eyes, yawns, and nuzzles. In return she gets to clean our breakfast plates at the table. (Maybe we shouldn’t, but YOU try and say no to those big brown eyes!)

We have a motley crew of dogs. Things go awry on a regular basis and, more often than not, I find myself storming through the neighborhood in pajama pants and fuzzy slippers to resolve the latest issue. They’ve caused us sleepless nights, damaged property, and terrorized the neighborhood (apologies once more to our neighbors), but it’s how we like it. Because when the human world has terrorized you, there’s nothing like curling up with a pile of dogs who love on you regardless if you missed a payment, failed to fill out a form properly, or didn’t return a call.

Weeds Against Humanity

Ben:

Our property spans a quarter acre at most, and, like most properties, the outside requires upkeep: the lawn mowed and edged, the weeds pulled, the gutters and downspouts cleaned out, and, if so desired, some flowers planted. Normally, this upkeep doesn’t require too much time or effort to accomplish. However, a couple years ago I went back to school to finish getting my degree. This meant that things like sleeping, eating properly, watching television, playing games, and especially lawn maintenance went to the wayside.

Two years have passed since I last took proper care of the outside of our home. Last week, finding some free time to try to catch things up, I found that work that used to take an afternoon to complete now took the better part of a week to accomplish. Half of our yard had been overgrown. The weeds and saplings normally pulled with little effort had now grown into small trees and stubborn patches of brush that had to be attacked with hoe and shovel. Some areas will even require professional help to clear out because I lack the tools and experience to do so.

As I surveyed our backyard, which I’ve mostly reclaimed now, the thought occurred to me that there are people very much like the weeds I struggled to remove. Controlling people, especially. Like weeds worming into an unsuspecting lawn, a controlling person will begin worming their way into a person’s life by offering small “favors” or giving modest “gifts” to their victims. Offered freely on the surface, these offerings are quickly followed with requests for the victim to reciprocate. The controller’s requests are harmless and easy to comply with at first but, as time goes on, the favors and gifts outstrip the receiver’s ability to respond in kind. For example, the controller will “loan” a large sum of money when the victim is in a bind that they have no way of paying back immediately. At that point, the controller has achieved their first goal.

The controller has now established an artificial sense of obligation in their victim. The controller then adds “suggestions” to the mix, weighing in on every area of their victim’s life -- what they should eat, what they should wear, and so on. The victim begins to feel the controller’s tightening grasp and experiences the conflict of their own free will clashing with the desires of the person holding the un-repayable debt over their head.

The more time passes, the more insurmountable the problem becomes for the victim. Like the runaway weeds and saplings that have overgrown a home, the controller has dominion over just about every part of the victim’s life, and the only way to get out from underneath it is to call in legal and psychological experts to help disentangle the whole mess.

I’ve used the word “victim” here, but in this scenario the victim is also to blame. Like the gardener who ignores the garden and lets it get taken over by all manner of undesirable flora and fauna, the victim didn’t take care of themselves properly either. Instead of saying “no” early when the stakes were low and it was easy to say, the victim went with the flow, avoiding conflict and pleasing the controller at every turn. They didn’t want to offend anyone or hurt anyone else’s feelings, but forgot that they themselves were people with rights, hopes, dreams, and physical and psychological needs. They forget they could say “no” and that they weren’t responsible for keeping other people happy.

There is a group of people who, sadly, have no say in the matter. They are the minors: the children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews of adults who play the “you owe me” card throughout their lives. They have no choice but to comply. The best we adults can do is to help where we can by encouraging, counseling, and reminding the indentured child-servants of controlling parents that they are, indeed, people and are allowed to say “no,” especially when someone wants something from them they have no right to ask for.

I was recently liberated from a pair of controllers who haunted my life for nearly two decades. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I’m all too happy to say “no” now.

Esther:

I’m not a hobbyist gardener mainly because I don’t like weeding. I try to avoid any task that seems to need more maintenance than its goal (like doing dishes -- if I had my way, we’d only eat off paper plates). So when I was young, I avoided anything that seemed to be too much work. Saying no to pushy people -- either over and over, or once and dealing with the nuclear fallout, whichever their personalities seemed geared toward -- seemed far more work than just giving them what they wanted.

Sure, I’ll wear this. Okay, I’ll apologize for that. Fine, I’ll agree to whatever you want to say is wrong with me.

But some people push just to be pushing. They push because they’ve gotten addicted to spreading past the boundaries of others. And once their species has invaded non-native territories, they seem almost impossible to root out.

We -- those of us who are more likely to be invaded than to try invading -- don’t want to believe this could be anyone’s motivation. They must push because they believe they’re right. Maybe they push because they were once hurt like they’re now hurting us, and if we could get them to see the truth, they’d stop pushing.

I spent so much time and effort on the motivations of these weeds before I realized their motivation for pushing doesn’t matter. Regardless of their reasons for invading me, my response to them should be the same: a gentle, firm push right back at them.

Over and over. As many times as I need to. Pulling out their weeds every single time I see them, as soon as I see them, because they simply don’t belong here.

It seems like a lot of work. But whenever I think it might be too much work, I just remember that not doing that work is saying no to my own right to be a person. And when I keep my person free of weeds, I have room in my life for all the other people who are just people, free and easy to interact with, who aren’t trying to invade me at all.

The Real Threat (Trigger Warning: Religion AND Politics)

• A Note From Ben:
• 
  
• I’ve held off on both politics and religion, but now I simply cannot stay away from either. Too much has happened for me to sit idly by and not make my feelings known. Some of this may seem a little out there for some of you and you can write off some of it as conspiracy theories if you want, but I think I’m onto something here.
• 
  
• First off, I think we’ve all had it with religion being crammed down our throats.
• 
  
• “May the Force be with you.” Geez. Any time anyone does anything, these light-side guys have just got to say it. They can’t help themselves!
• 
  
• I’m running to the exchange to pick up blue space milk: “May the Force be with you…”
• 
  
• I’m emptying a moisture vaporator: “May the Force…”
• 
  
• I’m bullseying womprats: “May the…”
• 
  
• Haven’t you religious nuts got anything better to do than wish the Force upon me? And isn’t the Force in every living thing anyway? You people always tell us the Force flows through us, penetrates us, and binds the freaking galaxy together, so if all that’s true, then the Force is always with us and your little “space blessing” is redundant!
• 
  
• And now, all of a sudden, we’ve got to turn the whole galaxy upside down so we can find “Master” Luke Skywalker. Phht, some “Master.” He let his entire order get slain by his nephew, Ben Solo (a product of a space pirate and a princess with daddy issues), then bugged out while the entire galaxy went to bantha poo-doo.
• 
  
• Things were so much simpler when the Empire was in charge. I mean it! Take a look at the statistics from back then. Crime was at an all-time low, space travel was mostly free of scum and villainy, and, if you didn’t mind the occasional exploding planet, there was plenty of work to be had. In fact, the only ones you had to worry about were malcontent rebels and religious Jedi zealots. Sure, you had to have your identification, there were the work-a-day visits to the detention centers, and there was the occasional disintegration, but, all in all, you knew what to expect on a given day.
• 
  
• All that changed when the second Death Star (I prefer to call it a moon-sized security station) exploded over Endor.
• 
  
• The story goes that the rebellion mounted a desperate assault against all odds and managed to not only overcome the sizable Imperial fleet in orbit, but also destroyed the shield generator on the surface (with the help of the indigenous tribe of mini wookies, of all things), dropping the shields and allowing the rebels to do their thing.
• 
  
• I have it on good authority that a maintenance technician left a tool tray in the laser aspect bay and the thing shot itself all to hell during a weapons test when the beam was misdirected. But to hear the rebels tell it, there was some epic “Battle of Endor” that turned the tide for the rebellion and none other than Luke Skywalker was at the heart of it. The rebels claim that both the Emperor and his apprentice, Lord Vader, were actually on the thing when it blew. They also claim that Luke managed to get aboard said space station, talk his father into killing his long-time ally and mentor Emperor Palpatine, and ultimately escape just in the nick of time.
• 
  
• Of course, the rebels love to say, “Oh, but Luke helped his father turn to the light side!” Yeah, sure, keep telling yourself that if it helps you get to sleep at night. Luke went to the Endor Death Star to wipe out the only other people trained in the Jedi arts in the entire galaxy. He didn't give a nerf-herder’s butt about getting dear old dad to the light; Luke just wanted all that power to himself. And what did Mr. I’m-the-Only-Jedi-in-the-Galaxy do after he got all that power? He tucked tail and hid while the bargain basement Galactic Empire (A.K.A. The First Order) showed up and blew up more stuff.
• 
  
• Let’s say we buy the rebels’ propaganda about Luke and the events leading up to the destruction of the second moon-sized security station -- er, Death Star. We’ve got to then swallow the tall tale that the one, the only, the cult-leader extraordinaire Darth Vader is, in fact, Luke’s dad. All that means is that Luke comes from a dubious family line. So, according to the rebels, Vader’s son is who the galaxy is pinning its hopes on to fix things, right? Then let’s take a closer look at Luke’s dad.
• 
  
• Anakin Skywalker was a special kind of crazy ever since he was a kid. As a child, he schemed gamblers at the podrace tracks; as a teenager he stalked the Queen of Naboo and committed acts of atrocity against the indigenous peoples of Tatooine (They are referred to as “Sand People” but I find that term offensive); finally, as an adult, he killed preschoolers and diplomats, domestically abused his pregnant wife, and finally attempted to kill his own mentor. Later in life, he took up hobbies like killing his adoptive parents, destroying an inhabited planet just to see what would happen, torturing his daughter, finishing off his mentor, torturing a smuggler just because he could, and dismembering the hand of his son. In retrospect, if Luke’s apple falls anywhere in the same planetary system of his family tree, we’re all in the trash compactor.
• 
  
• Speaking of parentage, let’s look at Ben Solo’s. His father was a scoundrel who shot bounty hunters in bar fights, hung out with wookies, and swindled other scoundrels out of everything from their starships down to the shirts on their backs. But that was nothing compared to his mother. The "princess” couldn’t decide who she was attracted to more: her whiny brother or a galactic criminal on the run. Really? You had a galaxy of sentient beings to choose from and that's who your final choices were?
• 
  
• Of course, who could blame her? Leia’s father never acknowledged her and when she did visit him, he did nothing but torture her the whole time she was there. Vader was your stereotypical abusive father so it’s no wonder she was all screwed up in the men department. All this rolled downhill to poor Kylo Ren, the Jedi-Formerly-Known-As-Ben-Solo. Throw in who his uncle is and it’s clear why he’s such a hot mess.
• 
  
• You know, if the rebels -- oh, excuse me, THE RESISTANCE -- had just left well enough alone and let the First Order do their thing, we’d have peaceful space routes again. But they can’t, can they? They’ve got to go gallivanting around the galaxy in their latest X-Wings, talking about finding Luke Skywalker and blowing up perfectly good planet-sized security stations. If they hadn’t gone off and been all like, “We’re gonna stop you dark-side guys,” the Hosnian System wouldn’t have been blown up! Talk about closed-minded. Wow.
• 
  
• But what do I know? I’m just some slug on the outer rim drinking my blue space milk.

Step-love

[This one's just from me (Esther), and without our usual hijinks. But don't worry, we won't make a habit of such serious posts!]


Esther:

When I was dating I was nervous about the possibility of being someone’s stepmom. What if the kid didn’t like me? What if I didn’t like them?

I steeled myself against several scenarios, never imagining that when I did meet my stepdaughter I would meet a daughter I was always meant to have. A personality growing before me that my own complemented startlingly well. Someone I would proudly be best friends with if we met when she was an adult.

It’s a sensitive thing, being a stepmother when the mother has died. On the one hand you don’t have to share your stepchild with her “real” mom. On the other hand you do, all the time, forever. And I’m learning that’s okay.

She never calls me “Mom” and I understand and respect that, even though my heart sings “daughter” every time we’re together. I wear my name when I’m with her and smile when outsiders say her mother would be proud of her. Because, even though I didn’t meet her mother, I think they must be right because of how proud of her I am. As proud of her as I am of the children I birthed. Love doesn’t know the difference between them.

It’s a pang, having no memories of her birth and only a handful of years to make memories with her as pseudo-mother before she’s grown and gone. I try to cram years of advice and motherly tips into our drives around town, try to tell her I love her and love her and love her to make up for all the years I hadn’t loved her yet.

And it’s okay, sharing her love with her first mother, because she has enough love for us both. The other night I handed her something and she said, “Gracias, mi madre.” My heart clenched. Even if in English I am always Esther to her, that one time she called me Mom in Spanish ...

... will fill my tank for the rest of our relationship.