What I'm Doing on My Vacation

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Being a college professor of sorts, I have the liberty of taking long summer vacations, and this year I'm spending several weeks in the Southwest, with my daughter.

Several weeks ago, (before I got here, certainly,) she brought home a little puppy, called by the whimsical name Bibbet.  It was a couple of months old (not just a few weeks as reported previously), little more than a highly animated little mop, full of life and no little charm.  Very soon the new arrival took over my daughter's house.  By great fortune --for the mistress, if not for the pet-- the puppy had been trained to a "crate", in this case a traveling cage, and she (the puppy is a female) was left in it for four hours at a time, while the mistress tried to concentrate on her work a couple of miles away.

It appears that the puppy had been initially procured for someone else.  But within a few days my daughter and her gentleman friend were too attached to Bibbet to even consider parting with her.  When the originally intended owner finally met the puppy, it was love at first sight.  So at the time of my arrival, all parties were totally infatuated with the little lady.  I have a link to a video clip from those early animated mop days:  Bibbet.  From studying photos on the Internet, it has been guessed that Bibbet is a Chihuahua-Maltese cross (sometimes called a Malchi).

Soon after I got here, my daughter was notified of another stray that was available for adoption from the Shelter.  We took Bibbet along to the Shelter to make acquaintance with the new puppy, Tillie, a Poodle cross, and seeing that they got along nicely together, we brought her home.  She was about the same length as Bibbet, but had long, spindly legs, twice as long as Bibbet's.  So now we have two pups, of around the ages of 8 to 10 months old, running around the house.  When their mistress is at work, they follow me around everywhere, and if I turn around and look at them, they blink back at me in stereo, fascinated.  Wow, what's he doing?

It is fun to watch them fool around together!  They wrestle, very quietly, and all you can see is two balls of hair rolling about, with an occasional, alarming glimpse of teeth.  Then, especially in the afternoon, they suddenly flop down on their doggie beds, sometimes with their cheeks on the cool tile floor, as if they're asleep, but with their eyes wide open!  They seem to alternate between extreme energy and total exhaustion.

All these sights must be old hat to owners of terrier pups, but it's quite new to me, and fascinating.  The conspicuous absence of yipping is an enormous relief; perhaps their previous owners performed some magic, and they hardly bark at all, unless they hear or smell a delivery man, or something equally interesting, quite invisible and inaudible to me.

I have also been reading Anne of Green Gables books, and I've made it to the end of the second book (Anne of Avonlea).  I have to confess, with a blush, that many of my own literary values have an echo in Ms Montgomery's writing.  This either means that Ms Montgomery was very forward-looking indeed, or that my own style hearkens back to the turn of the previous century.  I have been very much influenced by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott as well, so I know: I'm something of an anachronism.

For the benefit of those who are familiar with the Anne of Green Gables, I want to say that I find the character of Charlotta the Fourth absolutely delicious!  OK, gotta go.  More later,

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