From the Silicon to the Tanana Valley: 2022

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Happy Brrrrrrr-cember!

I have been quiet for a while because life has been pretty mundane. I have finished grading final exams and input grades for another semester, and we are into another brrrrr-tackular winter! A solid week of -30s to -40 temps to greet Christmas! But we are warm, have plenty of firewood, and plenty of warm clothes. We are fortunate and blessed!

Hmmmm... year-end looking back... Did I tell all 14 of my loyal readers that I got promotion and tenure this year? And DL and I have remained healthy and just got our bivalent boosters. (touch wood!)

Today I decided to take a break from reporting the mundanities of our food and lovely walks in the woods (although those remain!) to show you some other dog photos. :) I have been doing a weekly walk with a local dog rescue organization, Sirius Sled Dogs, and wanted to share some photos of my friends. :) I did promise my girls that their own walks would never be shortened due to this. I roll my eyes really hard at those people who go out to Save the World while they neglect their own families. So on rescue walk days, I get up super early and run my girls first, and those are high-mileage days. :)

This all started at the beginning of summer when MS, a friend of mine from work, and I were texting back and forth and she happened to mention that she'd been tracking a large dog rescue operation: A hoarder just outside of town had been shut down by Animal Control, and all of his dogs--purebred Siberians from good, working lines--were at the Fairbanks Animal Control shelter. They had gradually been getting adopted out, and our Animal Shelter has a high adoption rate, but it's NOT a no-kill shelter, and sometimes when numbers get high, animals do get put down. :( MS was very worried because several Sibes were lingering. A few days later a friend of mine who is a musher who takes in rescues mentioned (in what I had not realized was a related incident) that she was expanding her dog yard and needed help spreading mulch. I said, sure! I'd come up the following weekend and shovel mulch! As I was there shoveling (with a small group of volunteers), she said that this new space would be for "those Siberians". I probed and realized that she was springing those same Sibes. These were:

Bertha:

Bo:

Connor:

and Magnus!

Magnus was the oldest, at 8ish, and MS adopted him immediately. Like me, she likes middle-aged dogs. Connor was extremely friendly--almost lab-like--with a big smile and constantly wagging tail, and he got adopted next by a local musher couple who now runs him in a team of all other Alaskan huskies. He is the only Sibe, but a very beloved Sibe! He got renamed Tok. After that, Bo was the next to go. He went to a pet home, but as it turns out, his new home is neighbors with another volunteer, who is a musher, so she takes him out for regular runs with her team. It is so great for him that he gets the best of both worlds! He got renamed Twiggy, and I have photos of him snuggling with his new family on a couch! As for Bertha, MS took her home to "foster" with her old buddy Magnus. She says she is still looking for a permanent home for her, but I think she may be a foster fail. What do you think?

I really suspect she will be a foster fail! Plus, she is kind of shy and introverted, and I suspect nobody else will love her as much as MS and Magnus do.

We also helped place Lucky! Lucky is extremely attentive, people-oriented, and people-pleasing. He was sprung by the Anchorage Animial Control from his original owner for neglect. But now he has an extremely loving home with a young woman grad student who adores him. She and Lucky join us on our rescue walks! Look how he looks at her!

I have to say my favorite placement so far--the one that has given me the most delight--is Timber! Timber is a lot of dog--he's big and goofy and ridiculous and derpy and wants to give hugs, even when his paws are very muddy!

But gosh, he is the sweeeeeeetest boy, and he wants only to love you!

He also gives the gentlest hugs, placing his paws on your shoulders without applying any force, and being oh-so-careful not to punch you in the face, which is more than I can say for a lot of big, overly-ebullient dogs! Sometimes I took him running solo, since he wants so much to play with other dogs at the rescue that he drove me crazy at the group walks.

Gentle boy even waited patiently while I peed. He would never yank me off my feet.

A work colleague of mine expressed interest in "fostering" him. Hahahahaha you already know where this story is going, right? She even ordered him a bright orange vest that said "adopt me", but she and her husband fell in love, and Timber now officially lives with them. And I am sososososo happy for my big derpy friend. He was on death row at the shelter due to overcrowdering, and he was loud and rambunctious and shedding like crazy, and he was known not to run well in a team, so nobody wanted him as a working dog, and he seemed too rambunctious to be a pet. But this young, active couple loves him and takes him running every day, and they say that his indoor behavior is just fine?

Best of all, they love his hugs and let him sleep on top of them. :)

(all watermarked photos courtesy of my friend MSM at The Aurora Chasers)

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Happy Brrrrr-tackular Tuesday!

We woke up this morning to the first BBBBRRRRRRRR of the season!

And so I dug out my double-polar-fleece hat and matching neck gaiter!

Tis the season of long, dark mornings. We have to snuggle while we wait for the sun to come up before we hit the trails!

Snugglin'!

Oh finally a clear shot!

"I wanna clean my seester's snowse!"

Some days the light looks monochromatic.

My curated collection of only the finest Fuzzy Things.

I made a cranberry-apple pie. This won a pie contest once, back in pre-COVID days when my friend CA had one every year.

An Observation I made about pie contests: The winner is almost always a 2-crust, fruit-filled pie. Occasionally a meringue will win (maybe 1 time out of 10), but nothing else. I made a pecan pie one year and topped it with a fudge drizzle, and nobody even tried a single slice!

Mmmmmm crapple pie!

And do you know who helped quality check aaaaaaallll off the apples?

I also made cranberry bread, one to keep and one for a gift.

For this I actually follow a recipe. It's from a 1970's Betty Crocker cookbook that was subtitled, "A new cookbook for a new you!". It featured this newfangled thing called a microwave. I copied my favorite recipes from it when I left my mum's house. My only alterations are (1) I increased the amount of "cranberries" when I moved to Alaska because I now use lingonberries because of course. And (2) I don't use shortening and use butter or liquid veggie oil. In the 70's, people though veggie shortening was "healthier". HAH!

MMMmmmm BOKCHOYSTEMZ!!!

We looooove BOKCHOYSTEMZ!!!

On days when it is not monochromatic, the light is beautiful!

Like a winter wonderland.

And my companions are the best part of all.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Sorta into winter now

How do we define the beginning of winter?

Officially, it's the Solstice, which is a month away yet.

We can say, day of first frost? That'd be late August.

Day of first snow? Nah, depending on precipitation seems too arbitrary.

Day of first skiing? Nope, that also depends on on precipitation.

How about, the day the swampy trails are frozen up and we can go walk them? YAAAAAAAY!

When the bit of Rosie Creek that runs behind our house is frozen, we can both get across to the trail system, and also be sure that the swampy parts are frozen, too! There is enough snow to ski on on the groomed trails on campus, but not enough to cushion our trails here in the 'hood. There is also not enough depth to set a snow hook, so mushers are still not on sleds. They have begun fall training with 4-wheelers though.

Hello, Cricket!

Thistle likes to eat grass! Unlike many dogs, she keeps it down and also seems to digest it just fine. I've never had to pull a dangly strand out of her butt. Ugh!

Oh, yes, another definition of winter: 10 a.m. looks like this!

It had been a rough prior two weeks for us. Thistle poked herself in the eye while out hiking, and it didn't seem to be improving after two days, so I took her to the vet to get it looked at. While there, I mentioned that her appetite had been a bit off. Not enough to make me panic, but enough to make me think it was worth probing, as I remembered Autumn's liver tumor. The vet said, well, the most conservative test we could do would be an X-ray to see what was going on inside. I said, that sounded fine.

The X-ray showed a small tumor on her spleen. Yes, the same kind we had been worried about with Autumn. The vet said that 2/3 of splenic tumors are cancerous and metastatic and spread quickly to the liver, but if we'd caught it early enough, we could just remove her spleen and that could be the end of it. So we scheduled for a sonogram the following week, on my primary vet's surgery day, so if we had indeed caught the tumor early enough we could do the surgery right away. I was to fast her that morning, so that her stomach would be empty, both for better visibility with the sonogram and of course for the potential surgery. But of course I spent the following week very sad and worried. She was acting totally normal, other than of course the very slight appetite loss. She was running and strong and active. I could not believe that she might possibly be brought down by some kind of cancer. It would be fast-acting, if it were so.

The day of the sonogram, I took off from work so after dropping her off in the morning I could hang out with Cricket with my heart in my throat. When the vet called that morning, she said that it did appear to be that we had gotten lucky. Her liver looked clean, and her stomach and intestines all looked clean. Everything looked good except for three golf ball-sized tumors on her spleen. So it appeared that removing her spleen would remove the cancer. So she removed Thistle's spleen.

Did you know that it's not uncommon to live without a spleen? Apparently, in humans, it's commonly removed after a car crash or other traumatic bodily injury; they'd sooner remove it than try to repair it. And I guess your liver takes over its functions of cleaning your blood. In dogs, it's very common for splenic tumors to show no symptoms at all, until one day they burst, the dog is in accute pain, and it's too late to remove the spleen as by then it'll have grown so huge that it'll contain just so high a proportion of the dog's blood that the dog would die of blood loss. What a traumatic thing to experience, to lose an apparently healthy dog so suddenly. I can't be sure that this is what we avoided, but it seems very likely! I am very grateful that I asked the vet to probe this, but as they say in dog manuals, whenever your dog's behavior changes, always investigate as it could mean something very serious.

However, I had not realized how urgent this slight appetite loss could have been! That eye poke may have saved Thistle's life!

That first night was hard. She paced around all night in a post-anasthesia fog. But after that, she settled down, although she was Not Amused by the donut.

Her appetite came back almost immediately!

Is... This... in compliance with your Activity Restrictions, Thistle Girl?

And then the biopsy results came back. The tumor is not the kind we had feared, but it was still a type of cancer. However, none of the other stuff (liver, bloodwork) showed signs of being of the scarier types. It's very possible that this cancer is now gone. Cross your fingers for Queen Thistle!

And also of course for dear Cricket, even though she's hardly had a health issue. She's always been healthy as corn, and I think she's only ever been to the vet for shots and other preventative stuff. I have never cried or fretted over Cricket and she has never caused me worry or anguish, but I hope she knows that she has as big a piece of my heart as all of her sisters have.