Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

I haven't posted here in several days, mostly because driving back from Chicago and almost immediately heading up to Denver for a three-day dog show pretty much wore us out. Recall that the Chicago trip was mostly unexpected; we sold Carol's mom's house in ten days after expecting it to sit on the market until summer or longer. The dog show was on our calendar for over a year, and we had signed up to do various things there in conjunction with the local bichon frise club. We couldn't just not go, but working a dog show is a lot like working an SF con: intermittently intense, with unpredictable runs of exhausting labor. (Dog hair dryers are inexplicably heavy.) We spent most of this past weekend at home just trying to catch our breath.

This was Carol's first time presenting a dog in the show ring, and Aero's first time being shown. But for all his youth and squirminess, Aero got a fourth-place silver ribbon in the "Best Puppy Dog 6mo-12mo" category, and we're all very happy with his potential as a bichon champion. (The judge told Carol that "Aero is very cute, and just needs to grow up a little." I think that's what my mom used to say about me.)

We also did some volunteering with the national bichon frise rescue group, and placed three bichons with new owners after their original owner became too unwell to care for them. Carol washed, dried, brushed, and trimmed them, and I'm happy to say that they bonded well with their new owners and are off to the far points of the compass, or at least as far as Connecticut.

As tiring as the show was, there were some interesting moments. The people next to the table where Carol was grooming Aero were from Brazil, and I heard a lot of spoken Brazilian Portuguese. It's a cool language, enough like Spanish to sound vaguely familiar, but different enough in intonation to sound weirdly alien. Observing the constant freight traffic adjoining the RV lot showed me that the locos put out hugely more smoke when in reverse than when moving forward. I actually watched a pair of UP Diesel locos pull five or six cars forward a block or so, and then back them up onto a different spur in the freight yard after the yard guy threw a switch. It was the same load. Why more smoke in reverse? Pete? (Pete Albrecht is an expert in Diesel technology.)

We also saw and held two litters of literally 36-hour-old bichon puppies. I've never seen puppies of any breed that young before. They looked like white hamsters, and whereas their eyes were still closed, they had sharp little claws and were able to crawl around in our hands and gum the ends of our little fingers. I have a nice video of one litter that I will upload to YouTube and link to as soon as time and energy allow.

We hope not to be traveling anywhere for a little while. I have a lot to do here; being in Chicago for five weeks put me seriously behind on every single project in my Current Projects rack. Yes indeedy, much to do, and some interesting things to talk about in this space. Let me catch my breath, and I'll get on it.

We're in Denver for a couple of days at 2007's Bichon Frise National Specialty Show, a competitive dog show where it's all bichons, all the time. We went to the National Specialty in Indianapolis two years ago to pick up QBit, skipped it for various reasons last year, and went this years because it was an hour's drive north—and because we now have a show dog.

QBit is gorgeous, but he has some subtle flaws that would make him show badly: He's too stocky and muscular, he "paces" when he walks, and his coat is (oddly enough) thicker and more luxurious than the breed standard setters generally like. (If you've ever tried to run a comb or a brush through a coat like that—ask Carol about it—you'll get an inkling of why the breed standard setters feel the way they do.) Aero, by contrast, is wispy and graceful, with the perfect bichon prance, and a maintainable coat. He's now nine months old and thus old enough to begin competing for championship points in AKC dog shows. Carol has been doing some appenticing with Colorado Springs bichon veteran Jimi Henton, and decided that if Aero was old enough to show, she would show him. Aero is, after all, a great-great grandson of the famous JR, the bichon who won Best In Show at the 2001 Westminster Dog Show. (Dog people will point out rightly that JR now probably has thousands of direct descendants—but it's fun linking Aero to bichon royalty, however distantly.)

We've been helping Jimi get her mobile grooming salon set up out in the parking lot, and Carol's been observing while Jimi washes and grooms other people's bichons. I've been walking QBit and Aero now and then but mostly kicking back, doing some reading, and gathering my thoughts on prospective SF stories. The show ring competition isn't until tomorrow, and today is the day when all the competitors get their hair done.

The hotel is problematic, but it's just like the hotel in Indianapolis where the show was held in 2005: Late Seventies and seriously in need of rehab. Not every hotel wants dog shows, but I guess the owners figure that there's not much that a bunch of 12-pound furballs can do to the place that wasn't already done. One interesting quirk is that the overflow parking lot, where the hotel has put all the RVs (dog show people often travel show-to-show in RVs) is about 35 feet from a small Union Pacific freight yard. Small, but active: This morning I was seeing locos in UP livery pulling small consists of six or eight cars about every fifteen minutes, honking their horns and ringing their bells as they crossed Quebec Street. One had to wonder if anybody other than the dogs got any sleep over there.

I hung out with the RVers for awhile just to do a little trainwatching, and while QBit was stalking around a patch of scrubby grass looking for Just The Right Spot, I watched a guy couple empty freight cars...using a teeny Bobcat front-loader! He ran the little thing up to the rear of an empty hopper car, raised the scoop about chest high, and shoved against the underframe of the hopper. The Bobcat had enough power to get the hopper rolling, and after rolling for fifty or sxty feet met couplers with another hopper with a boom that shook the ground. He got two or three more empty hoppers into the consist using the Bobcat, and the consist was hauled out of the yard earlier this afternoon. So switcher engines, like cabeese, are probably an endangered species.

Not much else to report. Carol is down with Jimi washing and trimming Aero for the show ring. I'm trying to decide whether I can afford to enter NaNoWriMo this November. I have the perfect concept, which has been tucked in the corner of my mind for several years. It's in the cyberbilly subsubgenre (which I invented as counterpoise to cyberpunk) and called Volare, which is Italian for "to fly." Have nothing but the concept so far, and the big question is whether I can limit a novel to 50,000 words. (The Cunning Blood was 140,000 words.) The concept is suitable for a juvenile (no sex and little significant violence) and that's how I'd like it to play out if possible. Think Tom Swift in the 4H Club. I write fast when I'm on fire—the big question, as always, is how to light the fire. Check with me this November and we'll see what happens.

QBit turned two yesterday. We're not sure how this could be, as it means we've been in our "new" house now for almost three years.

Anyway. I took the photo above a couple of days ago. Aero had just taken away QBit's rawhide toy, and QBit had jumped up on the arm of my reading chair to consider his next move. He's been very tolerant of the little guy's bad puppy manners, and plays vigorously when Aero wants to play, yet leaves him alone when he doesn't. They got into it so vigorously the other day (they sounded, from the next room, like they were trying to tear each other's throats out) that Carol separated them, and the they looked at her as if to say, Well, hey, mom, we were just playing...

And a few minutes later they were at it again.

QBit himself is now fully adult, and quirky in a number of ways. Then again, all bichons are quirky, and my guess is that all dogs are quirky, if you pay enough attention to see the quirks. QBit, for example, never shed his puppy coat. He has something bichon fanciers call "the dread cotton coat," and having watched Carol try to comb it, I can see why. It's incredibly thick, far thicker than anything Mr. Byte or Chewy ever had, and if we expect to keep him from matting, we have to keep him cut very short. He loves snow, and rolls in it any chance we give him. Mr. Byte and Chewy hated snow, and Aero is none too fond of it. QBit "paces" (note the little endless loop of a horse pacing) when he walks slowly, and does not have the graceful tippytoes prance that bichons are supposed to have. He is easily the most massively built and muscular bichon we have ever seen: 16.5 pounds without a bit of fat on him, and I'm sure he could pull me on a bike or skates, or any small rollerthing with good ball-bearing wheels.

Yet for all his rowdyness as a puppy, he's calmed down (especially now that he has a little brother to look after) and become a practically perfect companion. He comes when he's called, "goes" where he's supposed to "go" and sleeps quietly at the foot of our bed. He doesn't like to wear a harness, but he's a lot less pouty about it than he used to be.

I guess they're like kids (and we're more like parents than we like to admit): As soon as the first one calms down, you have a second one. We're just hoping the two of them become as inseparable as Mr. Byte and Chewy were all their long lives.

It hardly seems possible, but Aero was six months old the other day. Of course, we didn't get him until he was four months old—and then gave him back to the breeder for another three weeks while we went to Chicago—but he's still our "new puppy" even though he's mostly grown up now. He looks like a much younger puppy when he's with QBit, because he's much smaller than QBit was at this age, and in truth we're hoping he doesn't get a whole lot bigger.

We're still having discussions with him about where to potty. (QBit figured it out a lot sooner.) And he's still nervous about people he doesn't know in a way that the more outgoing QBit never was. Still, he's been a lot of fun, and once we can cure him of those weepy eyes he may be close to show quality—not that we're considering showing him.

QBit is almost perfect. Oh, he has a slightly crooked tooth or two, but for the most part he's show quality, not that we have any desire to do the dog show thing except as spectators. However, he has a minor weirdness that we've never seen in a dog before: He walks like a camel. By that I mean that he moves his legs in unison on each side. Front and back legs go forward together on the left, and then on the right. In most quadripeds, diametric opposite legs move together: Front left and rear right, etc.

It gives him a cute little swagger, and we always figured it was a puppy thing that he'd grow out of. But he's now just a few weeks short of two years old, and he still walks like an Egyptian, at least until he goes fast enough to break into a trot, at which point opposite legs get into sync and he moves like quadripeds generally move. We had almost ceased to notice Qbit's peculiar gait until we got Aero, who moves with the perfect dog-show prance, no matter how fast or slow he's going.

Carol guesses that it's his unusual musculature: QBit, for a bichon, is strong. He may walk funny because he's built like a tank; surely, he's strong enough to pull me in a little red wagon, and it's an experiment I hope to make this summer, even if I have to buy a Radio Flyer to do it. I'll post a short video when I do. I'm tempted to get a couple of 18" ball-bearing spoked wheels and some aluminum tubing and make a 2-wheel dog cart. Now that would get me into the Make Blog!

Carol went down to PetSmart the other day and bought a name tag for our new puppy, because he finally told us his name: Aero.

Not "Arrow." Aero. Because he practically flies into your lap any chance he gets. Because his ears sometimes stick out on each side of his head like the wings of a B-17. (See the photos—particularly the last one—that I presented in my December 10, 2006 entry.) And because—well, because he told us. It's a puppy thing, and anyone who has ever accepted a puppy into his or her home will know precisely what I mean.

There are allusions to Harry Nilsson's charming old Sixties doper fantasy, The Point in that I keep hearing the "Me and My Arrow" song in the back of my head, and seeing Oblio's pointy-nosed mutt tearing around in random patterns. QBit is a very linear dog, even though he was a very hyperactive puppy. Aero has a much more aggressive random number generator, and his hyperactivity is never expended in the same direction for more than a moment.

They both like eating snow, which is good, because there's a lot to go around this year. Qbit is doing a good job of bringing up his adoptive little brother (Aero is actually Dino's child) and is willing to share his rawhide with the little interloper, as shown in the photo above. We've had too much snow to take them out walking much, but for some reason Aero is housebreaking in record time, and for the most part, all is well.