Queer by Choice

One year ago today, Susan informed me that she was leaving me. For another woman, whom she would marry less than a month later, with whom she now lives in a house she bought on my street, four houses away from mine. Four houses away from the house that she bought with me only a couple of months before she started intensely flirting with the other woman.

I have some things I want to say about that, to the world in general. Specifically, to anyone who might ever be tempted to do anything even vaguely resembling what she did. I want to stop you from doing that to anyone.

First, I want to clarify specifically what you should not do. And for that discussion, I want to take the focus off everything that happened at the end, because the end was not what created the problem. The end was just what revealed the problem for me to see. I want to focus on what occurred much, much earlier.

I want to talk about abuse. There are many kinds of it. What is the common theme among physical abuse, verbal abuse, financial abuse, and so on? I believe the common theme is that one person aims to forcibly circumscribe the other person's power to control their own life. If you make someone live in fear that you may hit them, you make that person feel afraid to speak freely. If you constantly insult someone and make them question their own worth as a person, you make that person feel unworthy to make decisions to protect themself. If you restrict someone's access to their money, or use their credit cards to spend their money against their wishes, you make that person less financially independent. There are other forms of abuse too, that don't all have clear category labels associated with them, but that we all recognize as abusive behaviors: If you try to control someone by restricting their access to their car keys when they're sober and competent to drive, or you demand that they call you six times a day to keep you constantly apprised of their whereabouts, or you throw a gigantic fit whenever they want to go anywhere without you, or you deliberately alienate them from all their friends and family to cut off their social support network . . . these are all ways of taking away someone's power to control their own life. And that is how we know that they are abusive behaviors.

These are distinguished from mutual agreements that people freely enter into as signs of commitment to one another, which can involve willingly and mutually giving up some freedoms: both members of a couple may agree not to have sex with other people, or not to make large financial purchases without consulting one another in advance, and so on. The borders can get a little tricky occasionally, because if both members of a couple mutually agreed to call each other six times a day to keep each other mutually apprised of their whereabouts, I would be inclined to wonder whether this was really more the idea of one of them than of the other, because I have a hard time believing that both of them could be that ridiculously insecure, but I suppose anything is theoretically possible; and, too, it's theoretically possible for both members of a couple to agree that only one of them has the right to have sex with other people, but here again I would be a little suspicious about quite how mutual that agreement really was. It's possible, though; perhaps there are other factors in the relationship that help to counterbalance that particular imbalance and keep everyone satisfied with the agreement.

In any case, the salient point is freedom of choice: willingly committing to something versus being forced into it. Consent, in other words. And when we talk about consent, we talk about informed consent.

When you get engaged to someone, and move in with them, and buy a house with them, these are all supposed to be commitments freely entered into, with informed consent. You should think carefully about what is at stake for the other person - emotionally, financially, and otherwise - and about what is at stake for you - emotionally, financially, and otherwise - and you should think carefully about whether you can fulfill this commitment. And if you have hesitations or reservations or uncertainties about that commitment, you should inform the other person. Talk about it. Use actual words. Explain exactly where you're at and make sure they understand, and ask them whether they're okay with where you're at and whether they're willing to make this commitment on that basis, with informed consent.

Let me clear: this is necessarily going to be scary, and the more you've failed to be clear about these issues in the past, the scarier it will be. If you've already spent years misleading someone into thinking you're more committed to them than you actually are, then it's very likely that admitting you're having some doubts is going to significantly upset them. It makes sense for you to dread doing that.

But that is what informed consent is about. You have to actually inform them. And yes, they might end up breaking up with you over it. And yes, that might be very upsetting to you, because even though you're having doubts about commitment, you might still prefer to keep this person around until someone you like better comes along. You might in fact find the possibility of being dumped by them extremely horrifying. But you still have to take that risk. You still have to tell them. Because they have a right to make informed decisions about their own relationship. They have a right to know every single thing you know about exactly how committed you are or are not to this relationship. Before they announce their engagement to you, before they move in with you, before they invest their life savings in buying a house to suit your tastes and your needs and a budget based on the assumption that you'll be around. Before they invest years of their life in you. They have a right to know the honest truth about how committed you are to the relationship, because if you withhold that information from them, you are manipulating them into staying with you in every bit as bad a way as if you were throwing a gigantic fit whenever they wanted to go anywhere without you and deliberately alienating them from all their friends and family to cut off their social support network. Arguably an even worse way, because if you were doing those things, it might at least be easier for them to see what you were doing and recognize that they need to escape you.

In short: you should never, ever buy a house with someone under the pretext of monogamous marriage-like commitment if you can't promise not to start secretly flirting with someone else two months later.

That's the first mistake I want to urge everyone reading this to avoid making. Now for the second.

Suppose you've already made some form of the first mistake. Suppose you're in a relationship that you just don't feel very emotionally invested in anymore, and someone else starts flirting with you, and you realize that you're tempted to leave your partner for this new person, and that scares you because your current relationship is longstanding and stable and comfortable in some ways . . . but you just don't feel like you can really talk to your partner anymore, because you've somehow fallen out of the habit of doing so. Because it's just so been easier for you to avoid telling your partner certain things, and maybe you convinced yourself they were just little things, but now they've built up to a substantial wall between the two of you and you're not quite sure how to surmount it. But you're also not quite sure you want to destroy your existing relationship, so you start looking around for ways to try to fix your relationship.

There is only one way to fix your relationship in these circumstances, and I will tell you exactly how to do it:

Tell your partner everything.

I know: that's exactly what you don't want to do. Perhaps you can't imagine that your relationship would ever survive it. And I suppose there's a possibility that it won't. But there's also a pretty good chance that your relationship will survive it, since, well, how many times have you heard about couples breaking up because one member of the couple felt tempted to cheat and resisted the temptation and confessed everything to the other person, only to have the other person break up with them for it? That's not usually the way it works.

But here is what I absolutely promise you that your relationship cannot survive:

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you ask your partner to come watch you coach the basketball games where the other woman has been flirting with you . . . but your partner is working 50 to 60 hours a week and has trouble finding any opportunity to go, and you never provide an honest explanation of exactly why it's so important. So your partner does intend to go at some point but postpones it until near the end of the season, and then the last few games of the season get unexpectedly canceled at the last moment, so then your partner can't go after all.

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you mention that you're having trouble feeling excited about the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon finally make it legal for the two of you to get married. You say that if this had happened years ago it would have been incredibly exciting, but after this many years of frustration and waiting, you already feel thoroughly committed and as good as married already, so it seems kind of too late for the ceremony to have as much meaning as it would have had if it had truly marked the beginning of a new commitment, and mostly right now you're just dreading all the bother of wedding planning. Your partner is understanding about this because she's also frustrated that whatever wedding you can have now will never be the same wedding you could have had if you could have gotten married at the time you actually first wanted to get married, and she's also dreading all the bother of wedding planning, and she accepts your statement about feeling as good as married at its reassuring face value because it matches how she feels and also matches every single thing you've ever said about how you feel. You misinterpret your partner's failure to panic at your declaration that you're having trouble feeling excited about planning a wedding five years late as proof that your partner has fallen out of love with you just like you've fallen out of love with her.

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you try to arrange to go on a romantic camping trip with her. The camping trip gets called off because your partner's employer begs and pleads for her to postpone her vacation time until later because her help is needed to meet an urgent deadline. You tell her wistfully that you're very sad about the camping trip being canceled, and that you feel like both of you have been spending too much time working lately and really need a break from it to spend some time together as a couple. She takes this statement at its face value and believes that there's nothing wrong in your relationship that taking a vacation together won't solve, and she figures that rescheduling her vacation time for a month in the future will still suffice to provide a vacation soon enough.

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you try to fix your relationship by taking your partner back to the place where the two of you went on your first date together, and you wait for the location to strike sudden romantic feelings into your heart again, but nothing really happens, so you just go on saying nothing and pretend you don't feel disappointed.

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you plan a romantic hotel trip with her during her rescheduled vacation time. You go lots of exciting places and see lots of exciting things, and you still don't actually tell her anything at all about what's going on with you.

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you take her to a bridal show to research wedding venues and services, hoping that this will strike a romantic mood into your heart. It doesn't, because, well, listening to sales pitches and contemplating burdensome expenses isn't actually especially romantic. Meanwhile, your partner is very confused about why on earth you wanted to go to this bridal show, because it seems so obviously the complete opposite of anything you'd ever want to go to, and she questions you about it, but you deflect all her questions and reveal nothing.

You don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore, so instead of really talking to your partner, you decide to tell that other woman who's been flirting with you all about the problems in your relationship that you haven't told your partner about and have detailed planning discussions with the other woman about exactly what new things you're going to do in bed with your partner to try to regain some semblance of interest in having sex with your partner again.

And so on.

Don't be stupid about this. There is exactly one way, absolutely only one way, to fix the problem that you don't quite know how to really talk to your partner anymore. Tell her everything.

That is all. Go forth now, and talk to your partners.

A week ago, Susan and I went camping. We used to go camping several times a year, but for the past several years we hadn't felt safe leaving town for more than a few hours because the duplex we were renting was becoming surrounded by unsavory characters who we feared would burglarize it if they saw that we were away for any significant length of time. Now that we own a house of our own where we can feel safe again, we're finally free to go camping again. (Meanwhile, there are now apparently about 20 people living in the 800 square feet of what used to be our half of the duplex - or maybe only 19 now, because the local newspaper reported that one of them was arrested for burglary in December and went to state prison.)

Anyway, we were eager to camp again, and a three-day weekend seemed like the perfect time to do it. It seems a little weird to spend our life savings (more or less) on a fancy house and then go sleep in a tent instead, but, well, we've never claimed not to be weird. This being February, however, we tried our best to pick a campground at a relatively low elevation and somewhat near the ocean so we wouldn't freeze to death. The ocean is quite a long drive from here, though, and we also wanted to be able to start driving immediately after we got off work on Friday and arrive at the campground before dark. And dark arrives early in February, so we figured we only had time to arrive at the eastern edge of the coastal mountain range, not really very near the actual coast at all. Specifically, we decided to camp at Indian Valley Reservoir. This was a drive of about an hour and 45 minutes, as opposed to the three hours and 20 minutes it would take us to arrive at the ocean.

We hoped to camp at Wintun Campground, because it is a single-site campground very isolated from other people, so we could let the dogs off leash all weekend and not worry about them bothering anyone nor about anyone bothering us. However, we recognized that it might already be occupied by the time we arrived, so we made a backup plan: Blue Oak Campground. Both campgrounds are at Indian Valley Reservoir, and they're only seven miles apart - although that's seven miles of twisting dirt roads, so it's a half-hour drive from one campground to the other. The sun was already setting as we neared Wintun Campground, and since we were driving west, each time we rounded a bend in the dirt road, the sun would blind us so badly that Susan kept having to bring her truck to a complete stop until she could figure out where the road was and where the cliff at the edge of the road was. Luckily, there were no other vehicles around, so we had all the time we needed to figure out where the road was. We did get a little lost. Our directions said that Wintun Campground was half a mile down Wintun Access Road, so we drove half a mile down an unmarked road that seemed to be in the right location and then, not finding a campground, decided that the unmarked road must not be Wintun Access Road. We turned back and drove several more miles but couldn't find any other road that could plausibly be Wintun Access Road. So we went back to the unmarked road and drove a little farther down it this time - and there was Wintun Campground! It looked beautiful. Unfortunately, there was already a truck parked and a tent pitched. Reluctantly, we turned around and made our way to Blue Oak Campground instead. The last few rays of sun vanished at just about the moment we arrived there.

Only one of the six campsites at Blue Oak Campground was taken before we arrived. It was taken by two hunters, men about fifty years old or so. They had put up separate tents for each of them, as straight men tend to feel the need to do when they camp together. They had a boat with them, and a dog. Their dog was off leash but obedient enough to stay in its own campsite. Our dogs are not so obedient, so chose a campsite at the far opposite end of the campground from theirs and then tied our dogs' leashes to a tree while we put up our tent and started our campfire. We've had trouble in the past with Boston breaking out of our tent during the night - she persistently bangs her head against the zipper until the zipper splits open - so I had brought along a canvas dog crate as a sort of separate tent just for the dogs. However, Susan insisted that Boston wouldn't be able to break out of the tent we were using on this camping trip. We have two tents, and Susan said that Boston was only able to break out of the large red one, not the little green one we had brought for this trip. I wasn't one bit convinced. But then the two hunters started shooting. From right in their campsite. When it was pitch dark outside! I have no idea what they were shooting at, but whatever it was, I also have no idea how they could possibly see it to shoot at it. Anyway, the shooting scared Susan to the point that whatever small chance I might otherwise have had of persuading her to let the dogs sleep in their own separate tent was clearly gone, and the dogs slept with us.

Blue Oak Campground is owned by the Bureau of Land Management, and it's illegal to shoot within one mile of any campground on BLM land. However, at free campgrounds like this one, there's pretty much never anyone present with the authority to enforce such laws. We were not happy about the illegal shooting, but since the hunters' guns weren't especially loud and they were at the opposite end of the campground from us, we just resigned ourselves to putting up with it. They did stop shooting by 8:00 p.m., which was before we went to bed, so they didn't disrupt our sleep. And Susan was right - Boston didn't break out of the little green tent.



( But the unexpected turns of this camping trip had hardly even begun. )

This is our third annual math-o-lantern. The full equation on this one is 3x + 1 = 13. You can't see the 3, but you can see its ghost in the light shining on the wall.




A group of kids stopped Susan in the street this afternoon, a little before the trick-or-treating started. "You're not going to make us do math again, are you?" one of them asked her. "Yes, I am," Susan replied. The other kids turned to stare at the first kid. "She doesn't actually make you do math, does she?" they demanded. Yes, she does! I grow the pumpkins and carve them; Susan makes the kids do the math. And they actually get excited about it, because they get extra candy if they do the math. Then they go running down the street screaming excitedly that they got the right answer, and other kids come running up the street screaming excitedly that they want to do the math problem too.

Susan says our oldest trick-or-treaters tonight were two who were about 60 years old and had no children with them. There were two of them, sort of together, although they didn't particularly talk to each other, and they approached the door in rapid succession but not quite simultaneously. The man approached first. He was dressed as a hobo, complete with a real grey mustache and chin stubble. "I need more than one piece of candy," he announced, "because I have more than one grandkid." Susan was too flabbergasted by his age to make him do the math problem. He took some candy and wandered off, muttering under his breath, "Yeah, the grandkids are home sick. They have fevers. They're really sick."

Then the woman approached. She had a bluish green sheet draped over one shoulder and pinned around herself like a toga, with a low-cut neckline exposing stretched and wrinkled tattoos across her chest and upper arms. She was carrying a chihuahua under one arm. Susan remained too flabbergasted by the age of these people to make her do the math problem, so the woman just helped herself to some candy and started walking away. Then she turned around and announced in an offended-sounding tone, "Hey, you didn't ask me about my costume. I'm the Statue of Liberty. Can you tell?" She had no crown or torch, just the chihuahua. Susan wondered whether the chihuahua was supposed to be the torch, but she decided not to ask.

We had fewer scary adults unable to solve the math problem this year than in previous years, so I guess basic algebra/pre-algebra is easier for most people than long division or adding fractions (which we used on our pumpkins in 2009 and 2010, respectively). Or maybe it was just that our two scariest adults this year were so scary that Susan didn't even ask them to do the math.

Susan and I seem to have a new cat. We didn't choose him; he chose us. He started hanging around about four weeks ago and insisted on sitting on Susan's lap every time she sat on the bench on the front porch. After a week or so, the weather got really horrible (constant huge rainstorms for weeks), so she opened our garage door about six inches to give him the option of coming in out of the storm. She also gave him some food at that time, and she says that he ate as if he hadn't had any food in weeks. As far as we can tell, he has never voluntarily left our property in the three weeks since then. He only seems to leave the garage for bathroom purposes and to sit on Susan's lap whenever she's on the front porch bench. He appears to spend every single moment of every single day day sleeping on the cat bed we provided for him in the garage, other than when we let him in the house (which requires very close supervision right now, partly because Boston wants to eat him, and partly because he wants to use the fireplace as a litterbox).

We put a collar on him a week ago, and I named him Spider. Susan has been telling people we named him that because he's been hanging out in the garage, which is full of spiders, but do not believe her for one moment, because I am the one who suggested the name, and the real reason I named him Spider is to match Stardust's name, because of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

I gave Spider a Frontline treatment last weekend, although as far as we could tell, he didn't seem to have any fleas. Susan thinks that whoever owned him before has moved away and abandoned him, because that is apparently common in this neighborhood. Anyway, no one has removed the collar that we put on him, so today Susan took him to the vet. The vet checked him for a microchip and did not find one, so we figure he's now officially ours. The vet also verified that Spider does not have FIV or feline leukemia virus or any other evident illnesses. (I had been a bit concerned about his health, because he so rarely leaves his cat bed. He is a young cat and has not yet been neutered - he has an appointment for that a month from now - so it is a little odd for him not to wander the neighborhood.) The vet estimates that he is about one year old, and recommends that we let him be an indoor-outdoor kitty, because he is a bit old at this point to adjust well to being indoor-only. It would probably be inevitable anyway that he would go outdoors, because we have a pet door for the dogs to go out through, and there's no way to stop Spider from also using it if he chooses to. (Stardust is strictly indoor-only, but that's because I trained her to it from the time she was a tiny kitten, and now she's absolutely terrified of the outdoors and howls like she's being murdered if I try to take her out there.)

The vet laughed at Susan for bringing Spider in a bright pink cat carrier that I bought for Stardust, because the bright pink cat carrier is very not Spider's style and also very not Susan's style either. It is clear that our cats are going to be quite gender-stereotypical, with all of Stardust's possessions being fit for a drag queen and all of Spider's possessions needing to be more butch. I think this is acceptable, however, due to the fact that our male dog (Ganymede) is nowhere near as butch as our female dog (Boston). The reason I take so many more pictures of Boston in the garden than of Ganymede is that Boston always follows me into the garden, because she likes to play in the mud and catch weeds in her mouth when I throw them for her. Ganymede, on the other hand, could not catch anything whatsoever even if his life depended on it, and he doesn't like to go in the yard because the yard is muddy and mud is icky and he doesn't want to get any of it on his toes.

Anyway, Spider is extremely friendly and wants to sit on our laps at all times. This is very unlike Stardust, who never wants to sit on anyone's lap and won't even let Susan pet her or touch her at all - despite immense effort on Susan's part to win Stardust's heart through bribery and hand-feeding of lawn grass, which is the only type of food Stardust shows any real excitement about. It is good that Susan will finally have a cat who shows affection for her instead of total disdain, and it is good that both of us will have a cat who is not autistic or a paranoid schizophrenic. (Stardust is definitely at least one of those things and quite possibly both. She is a totally adorable kitty and can be very affectionate with me in her own way, but no one could ever accuse her of being socially or psychologically well-adjusted.)

Spider is smaller than Stardust, and whereas Stardust makes extremely high-pitched squeaks rather than proper meows, Spider makes sort of hoarse meows that are lower-pitched than those of most cats. Neither one of them sounds like a normal cat, although I suppose Spider sounds a little closer to a normal cat than Stardust does. Stardust's initial reaction to Spider was to hiss and growl, while Spider made no response, but now they have made enough progress that they can coexist peacefully on opposite sides of the same room. They have never come right up to each other yet, but Stardust watched Spider climb halfway up her cat tree, and she allowed this and did not growl or hiss to warn him away from it.

Boston, as I mentioned earlier, is still acting like she thinks Spider is food. We have to restrain her anytime Spider moves. But Boston will get over this eventually; she got over it with Stardust. Ganymede does not have much hunting instinct compared to Boston, so he doesn't need to be restrained so firmly; he mostly just needs us to tell him to back off occasionally if he gets too close to Spider.

The past week or so has been extremely busy, and has included two minor life milestones I had never experienced before. The first of those happened on Thursday and Friday, when Susan hired a woman who works as a cafeteria assistant at her school, and the woman's teenage daughter, to clean our place up.

The idea of paying anyone to clean one's home is totally alien to me. I've never done it, my parents have never done it, and as far as I know, no member of my extended family has ever done it. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, the only people who've ever done it are characters in Victorian novels. And it seems especially incongruous to me that hired people came and cleaned up our home for money when our home is such a horridly run-down duplex on one of the very poorest corners of an incredibly poor town, where none of our doorways are quite rectangular and none of our doors quite fit their frames and none of our walls are quite directly upright and our landlady takes months or sometimes even years to fix anything that we ask her to fix.

However, I have to admit that the combination of two indoor-outdoor dogs, one indoor-only cat, and two humans with a flood-prone back yard from which the dogs track in mud incessantly had led to alarming amounts of filth. Specifically, it had led to a situation where, after our house had already been professionally dusted on Thursday, a visible film of dust built up overnight so that when the woman and her teenage daughter returned on Friday to finish up, they re-dusted the same objects that they had dusted the day before. Even the dishes in our cupboards, with all the cupboard doors closed, sometimes manage to build up a visible film of dust between the time we put them into the cupboards and the time we take them out to eat off them. I've never lived anywhere that collected dust even a tenth as fast as this place does, and it does get to be really too much for us to keep up with by ourselves. (I would add "especially since currently we're both employed full time," but that might imply that when I've been unemployed I've managed to clean and dust everything daily, which would not be true at all.)

So Susan hired this woman she works with, who brought her teenage daughter with her and cleaned everything in sight. Susan paid for the entire cleaning bill, because (1) she's the one who is most bothered by the dirt, (2) she's the one who cares most about having indoor-outdoor dogs, and (3) I'm the one who is inconvenienced by having noisy professional vacuuming done while I'm attempting to work from home and waiting for important telephone calls from people in positions of power in my workplace. The latter issue was particularly stressful, and although it ended up working out fine - because the people I was expecting calls from didn't actually call on Thursday or Friday - I'm still rather concerned about the prospect of this becoming an issue again in the future, because Susan wants to keep hiring them to clean the place regularly, and apparently the woman is only available during regular working hours, when I am trying to work.

On the other hand, Susan is the one who got a severe headache from the noxious fumes of all the cleaning products. But she still seems to feel it was well worth it. I have to admit that the professional cleaning significantly exceeded my amateur standards - the professionals successfully removed stains from the bathtub and toilet that Susan and I both could have sworn were unremoveable. We had both scrubbed those stains so many times with so many different cleaning products and never achieved anything close to the results that the professionals achieved. Also, the professionals' rearrangement of our possessions so as to clean underneath them produced some rather delightful results, such as a giant soda tower in our living room (at the entrance to our kitchen) that we are both now feeling inclined to keep there. The Dr. Peppers are Susan's, and the 7Ups are mine; we particularly appreciate the attention given to arranging the colors symmetrically:




The use of my hair ties to construct a makeshift hair tie holder that dangles from a nail on the bathroom wall was also rather creative. (But all credit for the delightful Fairy Soap decor being held in place by the same nail goes to Susan, who is a far better interior decorator than I will ever be.)




Anyway, the professional cleaning was largely a good experience, especially since I didn't have to help paying for it, although I'm still uncomfortable with the way the noise of having it done during my working hours threatens to interfere with my work.

The other milestone was that we bought a new mattress and box spring today. When Susan and I met, I had a 30-year-old twin bed with the same mattress I'd been sleeping on all my life, which had rather throughly exceeded its intended lifespan and had a distinct me-shaped dent in the middle, while Susan had a relatively new, hard-as-a-rock, double-sized mattress and box spring on a queen-sized frame. When I moved in with her, we gave away my twin bed but kept Susan's hard-as-a-rock one. The difference in sizes between the frame and the mattress/box spring set meant that the mattress and box spring tended to slide toward the foot of the frame, causing our pillows to fall into an approximately eight-inch gap between the headboard and the end of the mattress and box spring. We attempted to plug the gap at the foot of the bed so as to keep the mattress up against the headboard, but it never worked terribly well, and also it's just not very comfortable to sleep on a bed that is hard as a rock. Or at least to me it wasn't.

Susan was originally quite averse to the idea of sleeping on anything that wasn't hard as a rock, but since I insisted on a thick, soft air mattress for camping rather than the one-inch-thick foam rubber mattresses that she wanted to use (through which I could feel every contour of every pebble on the ground), she gradually decided that it's okay to sleep on something soft and realized that actually, our hard-as-a-rock bed was giving her hip-aches whenever she slept for ten or twelve hours at a time, in addition to giving me backaches every single night within about four to six hours. But then I became the one who wanted to delay buying a better mattress, not because I didn't want one but because I was unemployed so long and didn't feel like it was a good time to be buying expensive items. Even now, my job is a temporary one that may not last beyond the end of 2010. But at least it's lasted long enough and paid well enough to build my savings account back to levels I'm more comfortable with, so I decided that the clear and urgent need to buy a new mattress should not be delayed any longer. And Susan agreed.

So today we went to a mattress store and asked to see the softest mattress they had. I'm terrible at judging softness by lying down on something for just a few minutes, so I relied mostly on the labels about relative softness, and asked Susan for confirmation. "This is supposed to be the softest one, right?" I asked repeatedly. "Okay then, this is the one I want. I want the softest one. Let's get the softest one!" And Susan obligingly agreed to get it. Technically, it wasn't actually the very softest mattress in the store, I suppose; there was another one that cost twice as much that was supposed to be softer. But we got the softest one in our desired price range. It's a Sealy Posturepedic with a Euro-style top and various foams and such, the details of which are not important at all, because all that matters is that it was the softest one. I am absolutely ready to start sleeping on something that does not feel like a granite countertop or a hardwood floor and start sleeping on something that actually goes squish when I lie down on it. Plus, it's queen-sized! So no more losing our pillows into that irritating eight-inch gap and ending up with our heads dangling off the edge of the mattress. Hooray! The fantastic new mattress is supposed to be delivered tomorrow morning.

So between buying a new mattress for the first time in my life and having a home professionally cleaned for the first time in my life, it has been a big money-spending week in our household. And it's likely to continue being that, because my computer needs some repairs to bring it up to proper working-from-home standards. (The computer will be solely my own expense, not Susan's. The mattress is a shared expense.) But it has been a pretty good week, I think, and I'm optimistic that the big expenses will continue to seem well spent.

Boston spent last night in the veterinary hospital again, and will probably be spending tonight there too. As you may recall, when we took her in a week ago, we never got a diagnosis; they just gave her fluids and anti-nausea medication and sent her home with instructions for us to feed her a bland diet of rice, cottage cheese, and chicken in small portions for the next five days, followed by seven days of gradually transitioning from the bland diet to her regular dog food.

She did fine on the bland diet. At the beginning of the seven-day transition period, we left to spend three days in Los Angeles for Susan's sister Kathy's wedding, but one of Susan's co-workers came over twice a day to feed the dogs and began transitioning Boston toward regular food. As far as we know, Boston was fine throughout the time we were gone. When we came home, she was still fine, although we did notice that she mostly ate the rice, cottage cheese, and chicken portions of her meals, and largely avoided eating the regular dog food mixed in with it. Yesterday, we tried transitioning her back to mostly regular food. She was fine for about four hours after eating, but then she started throwing up. Whereas a week ago she was throwing up horrible stinky stuff, this time she was throwing up almost pure water, and more frequently than before. Approximately every ten minutes, she threw up a big puddle of clear water; then she would spend much of the next ten minutes gulping down more water, only to throw it all up again. She also seemed (understandably) lethargic throughout this - until all at once, she zoomed across the room as if something was chasing her, spun around, staggered backward, and started rolling around on the floor and twitching. At that point we took her to the vet.

The vet ran some blood tests and said the weirdest result was that even though she was dehydrated both tonight and last week, her urine was unusually dilute both times. She was even more dehydrated this time, yet her urine was even more dilute. Also, she had abnormally low potassium levels a week ago but abnormally high potassium tonight, which was strange. As for the weird staggering and twitching this time, the vet said she seemed to be having partial seizures, which could indicate poisoning (except that we're pretty sure there's nothing she could have gotten into that would have poisoned her) or that she's developing epilepsy (except that it would be strange for her to inexplicably develop epilepsy at approximately 5 years old, and there would still have to be something else that caused the vomiting) or that her electrolyte imbalance was just thrown way off due to severe dehydration (which seems to be the simplest explanation).

She is supposed to have an ultrasound today that might help narrow down possible diagnoses. For now, it seems like the most likely diagnosis is Addison's disease, and the second most likely is diabetes insipidus. Both would be permanent conditions that she would need to be treated for for the rest of her life. And we have already spent close to $3,000 on these two trips to the veterinary hospital - Susan is offering to pay most of it, and I think I will accept the offer, but it still makes me uncomfortable to be spending money that we can't spare, when I have savings but no income and Susan has income but no savings, and this is just adding to her debt.

Edited to add: The ultrasound results are back! Her adrenal glands are normal, which makes Addison's disease seem less likely (although we're still waiting for the results of a blood test for Addison's disease). There is a thin spot in her stomach lining, which could indicate an ulcer, so I guess that's the most likely diagnosis now (although it could also be a thin spot just from throwing up so much). The treatment for an ulcer would apparently be to keep her on a bland diet indefinitely and retest her periodically to see if the ulcer goes away. They're keeping her hospitalized until tomorrow, to watch for more symptoms and hopefully get a firmer diagnosis.

We're having a problem with our younger dog, Ganymede. Several problems, actually, but one of them is more urgent than the others: He won't let us sleep!

The people we adopted him from said he was one and a half years old and had been treated very badly in his original home. We don't know how exactly he was treated, just that he had belonged to the sister of the guy we adopted him from, and that the sister has a long history of adopting dogs and treating them so badly that the brother takes all the dogs away from her to rescue them. Whatever happened, the result seems to be that Ganymede is the most emotionally needy dog in the whole world; he can't stand not to be in constant physical contact with us, and becomes severely distraught if he's shut into a separate room from either one of us. This applies even if the other one of us is out in the same room as him. If either one of us is in the living room while the other one of us is in the bedroom with the door closed, trying to sleep, Ganymede positions himself at the closed door of the bedroom for as many hours as it takes until the bedroom door is opened. He tends to breathe heavily into the cracks in the door, which sometimes wakes Susan up. (She is more often the one in the bedroom trying to sleep.) When I have been the one in the living room, I have tried calling him away from the door and urging him to sit on the couch with me. He will come when called and sit on the couch for a few minutes, but then he goes back to the bedroom door again.

Because he is still barely two years old, he has a ton of energy. He wakes up around 8:00 a.m. every morning and starts running around, whereas Susan and I would often prefer to sleep until noon on weekends. He runs in and out of the bedroom, over and over, often jumping on and off the bed, or otherwise just shaking himself and rattling his tags noisily. This wakes us up. That would be annoying all by itself if it stopped there, but unfortunately it doesn't. At some point in the morning he becomes impossible enough to sleep through that I get up and shut both dogs out of the bedroom, then go back to bed. Ganymede then stations himself outside the bedroom door, where for the next four hours until one or the other of us gives up trying to sleep and leaves the bedroom, he proceeds to scratch loudly at the door every five minutes, making it absolutely impossible for us to go back to sleep. (The scratching he does when we're both in a separate room from him is significantly worse than the noisy sighing he does when just one of us is in a separate room from him.) Forcible sleep deprivation for an extended period of hours and days is a recognized torture technique, and I am not okay with having our dog practice torture techniques on us.

We are aware that it would be a good idea to walk him more and try to tire him out. This is easier said than done though, and neither one of the dogs behaves very well on the leash either. In any case, the fact that he has too much energy is not the only problem or even the biggest problem; the biggest problem is that he can't deal with being alone for any length of time so that we can sleep.

The easiest solution would be to shut him behind a different door farther away, where we wouldn't hear him scratching. But there are several problems with that. One is that we have a pet door that came with a thin piece of gray plastic to insert for the purpose of shutting the dogs inside or outside when desired; Ganymede barreled right through this thin piece of gray plastic and shattered it, and there does not seem to be any way to order replacements for only that one piece. We have tried blocking the pet door with chairs, which is sufficient to keep Ganymede himself on one side of the door or the other until Boston feels like going through the door; however, Boston is a Houdini-dog who invariably maneuvers her way through the door no matter what we put in front of it. (Ganymede is significantly stronger than Boston, but Boston is cleverer about moving parts in the right directions.) In addition, if Ganymede were shut further away from us, he might choose to make his feelings known through barking instead. Or worse - when we first adopted him, he used to make a horrible high-pitched Malamute howling noise at the top of his lungs anytime we shut a door between us and him. I apparently managed somehow to make it clear enough to him how I loathed this noise that he has not done it at all in many months. That was back before he broke the plastic thing that blocked the pet door, so whenever he did his Malamute howl, I shut him in the backyard until we were ready to be awakened. That seemed to get the message across, but now it isn't so easy to shut him anywhere. I could shut him in the garage I suppose, if the dog food weren't stored out there, but there's no other good place to store the dog food that would keep the dogs from helping themselves to it. We don't really have any closeable doors except the bedroom, the bathroom, and the garage doors.

Here are some less significant but perhaps telling additional problems we are having with him:

• When either one of us comes out of the bedroom after having had the door closed, he rushes to us and repeatedly jumps up on his hind legs to look us in the face. He does not generally touch us when doing this (he used to basically tackle us, but he has figured out at this point that we don't like being tackled); however, it's still rather disconcerting to have his head up at the same height as mine, less than a foot away. I can't figure out how to convey to him that I don't want him up in my face.


• At any time of day, when he decides he wants attention, he climbs onto Susan's lap and just stands there on top of her - not sitting but standing on her. He does not do this to me because I won't tolerate it. Susan finds it irritating (especially because he blocks her view of her book) but also sort of cute, so she generally just reacts by hugging him and being affectionate with him.


• He regularly tries to sort of sort of play-bite us in the way that both dogs do to each other when they play together. Boston play-bites Ganymede regularly but just licks us, so her teeth never, ever, ever make contact with our skin. When Ganymede licks us, he tends to put his entire mouth around our hands so that we can feel his teeth. He is not trying to hurt us at all - and it doesn't hurt at all - but it is not appropriate for his teeth to be making contact with our skin, no matter how painlessly. We have both been trying to correct this behavior, and he seems to be improving somewhat, but he still seems to make contact between his teeth and our hands multiple times per day. It's not that he's necessarily doing it intentionally or is even necessarily aware that he's doing it, but he's not careful enough to avoid it like Boston is.


• He knows the letter of the "sit" and "down" commands, but he doesn't know the spirit of them. He consistently performs the "down" command as if it is a "pounce" command: when we say "down," he takes a flying leap into the air and pounces on the floor in the "down" position. He then tends to bob right back up again in excitement. When we say "sit," he sits and shifts excitedly from one foot to another in a sort of sitting-down dance for about ten seconds, after which he bobs right back up again in excitement, or else shifts rapid-fire between "sit" and "down" about forty times in the space of twenty seconds, hoping that if he hits the right combination of un-issued commands he'll earn a dog biscuit. The "stay" command is totally hopeless; he has no idea what it means, and I don't know how to teach it to him when I can't get him to show the slightest inclination whatsoever to even sitting perfectly still for a fraction of a second.

Several of these problems seem suspiciously like dominance behaviors, but I'm reluctant to interpret them that way in his case because he really doesn't seem like a dominant dog. He is slightly larger and considerably stronger than Boston, yet if we try to offer them treats in only one dish, even if it's a huge dish that you'd think they could easily both put their heads into at the same time, Ganymede invariably backs off and slinks quietly away to another room without any food, allowing Boston to eat it all herself. If I take the big dish away from Boston and try to offer Ganymede a turn at it while keeping Boston away from him, Ganymede is still very reluctant to eat any of it, because he considers it to have been claimed by Boston.

Boston is about three years older than him - she's probably around her fifth birthday, while he's around his second birthday. She sits perfectly, does the "down" command perfectly, and stays pretty decently although not absolutely perfectly. She is generally reasonably behaved and does not make us crazy, although she would certainly not win any prizes for her performance of the "heel" command. She also barks at people more than I would prefer (specifically: she barks her head off at all adult male strangers, though she has no such reaction to adult female strangers or children, and she sometimes but not always stops barking at the male strangers if we tell her to stop), but for the most part she's easy enough to live with. She comes from a troubled puppyhood just like Ganymede does; a vet tech took her away from her original home because she was being repeatedly brought to the vet with horrible injuries from the other dogs in her home viciously attacking her. This has not prevented her from becoming a fairly normally well-behaved dog. Now we just need to figure out how to bring Ganymede to that same place.

Today we took the dogs for a walk at Gray Lodge State Wildlife Area, where over a million waterfowl spend the winter. Here I am with the dogs.

Supposedly, about 60% of the waterfowl population in the Pacific Flyway and about 20% of the waterfowl population in North America spend the winter in California's Central Valley. According to this, 95% of Central Valley wetlands have been drained or filled in over the past 100 years. As a result, waterfowl have become increasingly dependent upon refuges such as this one. But although we did see plenty of birds there, the place did not actually present very good opportunities for photographing the birds - at least not today. I've gotten much closer to birds, and gotten better bird photographs as a result, on the American River Parkway in Sacramento than I did at Gray Lodge.

( Many landscape photographs, and a few of us and birds )

Look what I carved tonight!




It's to scare Susan's students. (She's a math teacher.) It's supposed to be easy enough that most of them can get it and feel good about themselves as a result, but hard enough that their first reaction will be fear.

So far, though, no students have shown up at the door. We're mostly getting kids too young to recognize long division when they see it, but we got one teenager who said "20" in place of "Trick or treat" and thereby earned an extra piece of candy. And we got one parent who demanded of Susan, "What does that stand for???" in a wary voice like maybe it was a gang symbol or something. (Which, in this neighborhood, may not be as unreasonable an assumption as it seems.)

Edited to add: Just now we got one of Susan's students, who guessed that the answer was 12. Another kid with her agreed that 12 sounded right, and then the mother of one of the kids told them they were right, that 12 was the right answer! Susan decided to politely say nothing. This kid's mother has made our Halloween truly frightening.

Last weekend we went to Lassen for our geology field trip class. Susan came down with a cold during our stay, and now I think I've caught the cold too. But we still managed to have a good time while we were there. We had both been camping there before, but I hadn't been there since I was about nine or ten years old, and neither of us had seen all the same parts of it before. Also, it was the fourth geology field trip class we've taken with the same professor; we took the first one less than a month after we met, so they've become a sort of romantic tradition for us.

Here I am on a boulder outside the recently built Kohm Yah-Mah-Nee Visitor Center in Lassen Volcanic National Park.



( More pictures )