Close encounters with Rupert

Scene: Orange stray cat lies curled up squarely in the middle of the corridor leading to the field.

Fox terrier, on his way to his peeing spot, stops dead in his tracks. He doesn't know what to make of the cat. Or how to handle a situation where a cat blocks his path.

Cat narrows his eyes at the terrier, daring him to continue on his path -- which would require the cat to move.

Fox terrier sets his ears back in thinking mode. But the brain, seldom used as it is, has never processed such a situation before. Completely flummoxed, he lifts a paw and looks up to the human. If life was a comic strip, the thought bubble over his head would say: "What is the heck is that Thing?"

Human winds up the slack in the leash so that terrier is on a tight lead and urges him past the cat.

Terrier walks past hesitantly at first, then picks up speed and walks straight past. He still can't work out what this creature is. He still has quite a bit to go before he realises that traditionally, dogs chase cats.

Cat continues his nap, unmolested.

I have a blog entry.

Everybody wins.

The cat, especially.

The Bean Brothers

I was off on Tuesday and had time on my hands after my physiotherapy session, so L and I went over to C's house since he lives just a short walk from the hospital. Actually, I had an ulterior motive: I wanted to see Colin, Rupert's brother. I like comparing the two from time to time, to see the difference and similarities in two dogs from the same litter. I've never been able to do that before and even now, long after Spock died way too young, keep wondering about how his brother is doing, whether he had the same health problems and why didn't I keep in touch with the woman who had him.

Colin shares the same sweet disposition as Rupert, and is just as cuddly. That's where the similarities end. Physically, they could be night and day. Rupert is broad-shouldered and barrel-chested while Colin is lean and slender. Perhaps this is the part where there is some truth that dogs resemble their owners (or the other way round). You can tell that Rupert is our dog and Colin is C's.

Yeah, this post requires a photo of what M calls the Bean Brothers (imagine two Mr Bean characters bumbling around) together. Ok, I will get round to that. Some day.

And Toby, the older dog, is still the Young Master of the Universe, requisitioning my lap as soon as I sat down. When I got on the papa-san sofa, both he and Colin were like a well-synchronised tag team, instantly taking up positions on either side of me for a cuddle. I was surprised at first because last time I was there, the papa-san sofa was for humans only, and the dogs could only get on it by special invitation. (There's another sofa in the room which is the dogs'.) It was only when M caught us in the middle of the cuddlefest that I was told the special invitation rule still stands. Busted.

Busted again when we got home. There was hell to pay when HRH smelt the scent of the two dogs on us. Me, especially. I was the chief cuddler culprit.

Watching the watcher

Lsaid that he mentioned "Mummy" when I was at work and he was home with the furkids -- whereupon Rupert promptly went to wait by the door for me. And when Mummy did not materialise and the floor got a bit hard, he got on to the couch but sat at the corner nearest the door and kept staring at it, and waiting.

I came home to a red carpet welcome, of course. But then again, I always do. :)

And where was HRH while Roop was mounting guard by the front door? Lying in state on our bed. Her bed. But to give her credit, L added, her nose was pointed towards the door. Hmmphf.

Life's ironies

While the UN spent the weekend working out a new set of sanctions against Burma, the Sunday paper here runs a fashion feature on how to choose Burmese gemstones.

*bangs head against wall*

In which I actually went shopping

I don't shop a lot nor very often, but when I shop, *I shop*. I had a day off on Friday, and met L downtown after he was done with work for dinner. It was actually so that we could stop by for groceries after the meal, so that we wouldn't have to battle the weekend supermarket crowds. I usually get the shopping when I have a weekday off but this time, I didn't think my back would let me carry the groceries home alone (although it's much better, thank you).

Proof that I don't go downtown enough: I didn't know that there's an underground traffic tunnel at the Stamford Road/Fort Canning bottleneck. Not that it's necessary knowledge: traffic still slowed to a bottleneck after emerging from the tunnel.

So since I was downtown, I shopped. Marks & Sparks for tea bags -- nobody does extra strong malty tea like they do. Prestat for chocolates -- nobody charges for chocolate like they do, purveyors of fine chocolates to HM the Queen not withstanding. It's $22 for 100g, which amounts to about 20 pieces. Still, I regard the expense as medicinal. I have given up eating mass brand chocolate from the supermarket because they induce migraines. This is not a snooty statement. I actually experimented, after the last incapacitating migraine, which did not fit in the hormone cycle and came on after eating cheap(er) chocolate.


And then I wandered into Birkenstocks. And noted that they have a new shoe model out (which may not be that new, given that I'm so fashionably behind time) -- it is not open-toed and has a strap round the back of the foot so it doesn't look like a slip-on sandal. In fact, it looks like a pair of Mary Janes. A far cry from the brown "nun" sandals, eh, ES? I remember showing you my pinkish lavender pair the last time I bought one -- and that's how long ago, so that's how often I shop. Behold, my new pair of work shoes. And it also helps that it comes in happy colours. Black Monday's not so dark today.

When you don't feel much like doing anything, playing with the dogs takes up a lot of time.

And posting their pictures on the blog means you don't have to think of something to write.

Told you my life is going to the dogs.

One world

And just when you think the world's a sorry place, you come across a food court that has representations from China, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Italy, Singapore and the US. I think this place (next to the office) qualifies for UN Security Council membership.

As the world turns

... Gays in Australia are recognised for their achievements.

... But gays in the US are beat up

... And gays in Singapore are fighting for their legal rights.

... Wanna bet that monks in Burma were shot by bullets made in Singapore?

I have been too dispirited to write and post since the last entry. The above are links sent to me by friends or were posted in their blogs in recent days. And that's why I'm dispirited. One world, indeed.

Meanwhile, ordinary folk go to work, cook dinner, call their mums, tell their gay friends they love them, walk their dogs. And hope they make a difference.

Act now

Repeal Section 377a
The deadline is Oct 19, I wish I'd known about this site earlier. But it's not too late... yet... act now!

We love our humans, just like our cousins Vivi, Toby and Colin love their humans. Only instead of having a mummy and daddy like us, they have two daddies. And that's the only difference. Their daddies lavish love and attention and many, many T*R*E*A*T*S and spoil them rotten. Just like what our mummy and daddy do. Their daddies work hard at their jobs. Just like our mummy and daddy. Their daddies pay their taxes and contribute to the community. Just like our mummy and daddy.

But the law here makes it a criminal offence for their daddies to love each other. However, the penal code may be rewritten. Please help us repeal Section 377a. And help us to help them love each other.

Queeni and Rupert

Bag lady

I read about people queueing for hours for this Anya Hindmarch designer bag, how it was snapped up within hours of its launch in the UK, is now sold out in the US and how the company has now closed the waiting list for new orders.

I really didn't understand the hype over it. It isn't even fabulously pretty. Honestly, I've got prettier non-designer bags. Not that I have any designer anything, by the way. I certainly wasn't going to get it, I don't shop, I don't follow fashion and I don't join queues. For saying that, I expect my Singaporean nationality to be revoked anytime now.

And now I have an Anya Hindmarch. Because I can. Without queueing or waiting. Or even jostling or punching -- which I gather occurred among tai-tais queueing up outside the flashy boutiques, so much so that the company is withdrawing launches across Asia for customer safety.

It's excess stock. Somebody had a bunch of them and I was asked if I wanted one. So I bought one. Admittedly, this designer bag is designed not to come with a designer price tag. Still, does this make me hip and happenin' now?

Further adventures in subbing

Back when George W Shrub stole the US presidency, the departing Democrat administration reportedly pried off the letter 'w' from the White House computer keyboards. In the spirit of things at the time, I wrote a column without using the letter 'w'. It turned out to be easier and much more fun than writing verse. The byline presented a bit of problem since my surname starts with 'w' but I thought maybe I could circumvent that with two v's set close together. In any case, in the spirit of not having to sub my own work, I left that to the sub to worry about. In the end, the column was spiked but I enjoyed the literary exercise anyway.

Now here's more literary gymnastics. How do you sub/layout a page without hyphens? And it's not ragged-right so you have to break words at some point. You could maybe force some line breaks but imagine doing this for every line of every column. And it's not a frivolous literary exercise this time but damn serious. There's a sponsor who doesn't want hyphens on his page (!) and the poor sub (not me, thank goD) is tearing her hair out.

Mid-life crisis

You know you're on the wrong side of 40 when *getting off the couch* results in a sprained back muscle.

I honestly don't know how I did it. I was lying on the chaise longue and getting out of it has always meant scooting your bum to the edge before you could swing your legs on the floor and haul yourself up. I was doing that but my feet were not solidly grounded on the floor because there were two dogs under my legs when I leaned forward and that did it. I already have a bad back, what I did just aggravated it.

I didn't realise how bad it was. Well, there was a momentary flash of pain that made me want to spit out the coffee I just swallowed. But after that, I didn't feel anything. I could even walk the two dogs and bend down and pick Queeni up out of the neighbour mak cik's way when she was sweeping the corridor when we went past.

Never underestimate adrenaline until it wears off. One hour later, I was immobile in the shower. It took me 20 minutes to get my pants on.

The doctor proclaimed it to be a bad sprain which would take a week to heal. But he only gave me 3 days' MC. What, doctors think that there are only 3 days in a week?

Now for part 2 of the sorry story. Doc also gave me muscle relaxants and heavy duty painkillers that had to be taken with an antacid. I took them on a full stomach but still, the medication churned my stomach so much that I spent all night and most of this morning puking.

Moral of the story: Never ever get off your couch. Stay on it. Wallow. Getting off the couch results in Bad Things.

About last night...

I check my junk mail folder once in a while just to make sure that no legitimate email slips in there (you know who you are, who sends L emails with .doc attachments to my email account, which go straight into the Junk folder because of the said attachments, which cannot be read anyway because this Mac does not have, *will never have* MS Office, dammit.).

But I digress. Back to the Junk folder. Where I saw mail from:
Sender: Mohammad
Subject: I won't forget last night
That sure stood out from the crowd offering replica watches, discount medication, software and performance enhancers, especially during Ramadan. Even so, it cannot be The Mohammad. Although Jesus did send me email once. And he had a Latino surname and was selling medication. Siddartha Gautama does not have email yet, I think.

Last night. Last night I went to the office party for the paper's 31st anniversary. Where I got sabo-ed by the deputy chief sub who was prowling around with a wireless mike ... after having been slapped on the wrist by him the previous night for a subbing infringement.

I'd rather forget last night. If that's okay with Mohammad.

Spooky story

You know all these real ghost stories that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend? This is the only one I can tell, and it happened to a friend of my friend and I swear it's true. Sumpah.

A woman who works for her friend recently adopted a rescue dog, an Aussie mix. She calls him Curley and he is deaf.  He is an older dog found wandering around. The rescue group people noticed that Curley goes crazy when older men come around so they surmised that he must have belonged to an older man who may have either passed away or had to go to a nursing home or hospital.
 
One night, the woman woke up and saw a spirit standing by her bed. It was an older man and Curley sat up in bed, staring at him and wagging his tail. When the woman finally got the courage to speak, she asked the spirit if he was Curley's owner, and then it faded away.

Curley had been having some issues and his owner is working them through with him. But since the man appeared, he has been a much better dog, she said.

What spooks me out isn't so much that the woman saw the spirit, but that the dog also saw it, and sat up. *And wagged.*

But I guess maybe Curley needed some closure from his former owner, that he needed to be told that his former owner couldn't take care of him, so the new owner would. And maybe the former owner also needed to know that Curley is being taken care of. Hence the visit. So maybe this is a good sort of spooky story.

Clean bill of health

HRH went for her six-month check-up following the amputation, following that nasty mast cell tumour episode. She's got the all clear. We are happy.

What wasn't a happy start this morning was trying to get a cab. It still doesn't pay to be honest. We could have used the automated booking, but as always, bypassed that to tell the operator to indicate to the driver taking the booking that we have a dog in a carrier, especially as this is the Ramadan month and we don't want to screw up a Muslim driver. We ended up getting screwed. It took more than 45 minutes to get a cab and that was after lost tempers and indifferent operators. We were late for the vet appointment, but they were very nice, as always. They even called a cab for us, for the trip home.

That time round, we got a driver who was very concerned about Queeni -- since he picked us up at the vet, he thought she must be ill. He used to have a dog, a Pomeranian. He talked about it all the way back, how it used to run around naughtily but became quiet and still when it was ill, how it used to wait by the door for him when he went out, and how it leapt and jumped with joy when he came home. He was smiling as he recounted all that he loved about a dog, now long gone. It made our day too.

There's something about dogs.

The perils of subbing, part 2

I thought it was too good to be true when the copy subbing workflow slowed to a trickle at 11pm last night, with an hour to go before offstone. Damn right it was too good to be true.

One innocuous foreign page, assigned at 4.30pm and with the line-up ready at 5pm, was forgotten until 11.30pm, with half an hour left on the clock on a die-die-must-meet-offstone night because there was a supplement insert to go with the regular paper.

No one had the heart to blame the page sub for forgetting about it. She had two early pages, one of which was killed in a pagination rejig -- after she had finished the page. Then as the night progressed, she had to switch her focus to the VIP front and prime pages.

But it did mean half-an-hour of frenzy for the rest of us. And I guess there's no such thing as a full-page house ad.

The perils of subbing

... trying not to get teary eyed while going through the pictures and wire copy coming out of Myanmar.

The White House of course has already made its statement; the UN Security Council is convening (probably already has by now); even China, the junta's only friend, has had a discreet word. Only Asean, with Singapore in the chair, hasn't said anything. What goes on in the neighbour's backyard is the neighbour's problem. Typical.

[Update late on Thursday night: Reuters has photos of the AFP photog moments after he was shot. I don't think anyone could use those photos.]

The morning after

... Mid-Autumn Festival and the lanterns are still hanging prettily on the trees. What's not so pretty is the new footpath splattered with wax and scorch marks. And what's more insidious is that someone strung a line between two trees in the field, presumably to hang lanterns on last night. I hope no late night dog walker got decapitated.

Signs and wonders

One morning, this sign appeared at the edge of the field outside our house. I wonder what it's going to achieve. The people who already pick up their dogs don't need it and the people who don't aren't going to be cowered into submission by a wordless sign.

As it is, we already differentiate the dog people in this estate into those who pick up and those who don't. Those who don't are usually also the ones who keep their charges on a tight leash and won't let them socialise even though their dog and mine are madly wagging their tails at each other.

So not surprisingly, those are the dogs whose names we don't know so we've formed our own: Devil Dog for the aggro Japanese Spitz; The Schnauzer With the Tail, to differentiate him from the rest of the Schnauzer crowd, most of whom we know by name anyway; Ugly Shihtzu, but then L thinks all Shihtzus are ugly -- and we say this having had a pug once so we've nothing against adorably ugly dogs. Actually, we finally found out Ugly's name. It is Yogurt. As in dairy product. He was better off as Ugly.

Once, one of the the non-picker-uppers' dogs was in the middle of a squat when I was out walking mine so I walked over and offered the woman a sheet of newspaper. I don't read English, she said in Mandarin. In my limited Mandarin, I told her it wasn't for reading, it was for picking up her dog's poop. She looked clueless.

I wonder what excuse she'll use for not understanding this pictorial sign.

Sleep positions

Now that Rupert has won bed privileges, the two dogs start the night like this, mirror images of sleep, with HRH Boss taking the top of the bed, of course.

Then when we get in, Rupert tries to move to the top of the bed. Some nights, HRH gets grumpy and growls at him, so he hops off to sleep in his dog bed in his Cinderella corner of the room. On the nights he gets to stay on the bed -- and that's usually only if she is too sleepy to budge herself or him -- he puts his head on the pillow, and his bottom half is under the duvet. By the morning, he has shifted so that his head buried under the duvet (I don't know how he breathes) and his ass is next to my face. That's phase #1 of my morning wake-up.

Once, just at about dawn, I stirred because there was a weight on my pillow. I opened my eyes to find HRH sitting on the pillow, perched on the highest ground she could find, looking down at Roop in consternation: how the hell did he get up on the bed? Didn't I push him off?

Rupert gets up when L does, and is taken out for a quick pee. I don't trust him on the bed when he has a full bladder. Then he jumps back up on the bed for round #2 of a lie-in. My phase #2 wake-up finds a dog on either side of my legs, lying sphinx-like alongside me and facing the door, like two sentries guarding me since L has by that time left the house. It's a great, safe, warm feeling to wake up to. Much better than a dog's bottom in your face.