Monday Afternoon in Fairbanks

I took two of the three boys to a veterinary appointment today.

Guy is literally tearing his hair out from a staph infection. This is the second spring now that he's done this:

So now I've got a soothing spray and ten days' worth of Cephalexin for him, and he gets to stay inside while we're at work, though he does have to wear this:

Beenie has a gunky ear, so he got a bottle of cleaner that will get squished around in his ear once a day until his next appointment in three weeks.

Oh--gross aside. The doctor said he didn't see any mites in Beenie's ear, but that the gunk looked odd and he wanted to be careful; hence the re-check next month. Then he told me about a dog he had been treating last year for ear mites, who kept not getting better. Then when they put that dog under anesthesia, the air going through the dog's nose created an unwelcoming environment for the nose mites that were there. And the mites all came out of the unconscious dog's nose and were wriggling around on the table. "I read about nose mites in school," the doctor said, "but I'd never seen them before. And they can travel from the dog's nose to its ears, and it turned out that that was what was wrong with the dog. Nose mites, not ear mites." So I am following Beenie's regimen to the letter.

On my way home after their visit, I saw this stopped at a red light at the corner of University and Geist:

It might be hard to see, but there are two wheels in the back, and the trailer is hitched between them. He also had Canadian plates.



The first part of this post has nothing to do with the second, except that one happened right after the other. I was feeling pretty good because the boys were so well-behaved at the vet's, in spite of the presence of small dogs and a cat, a probing camera and skin scrapes. "Are all of your dogs so big and calm?" one of the techs had asked me.

When I saw this motorcycle guy, and my first thought was: At some point, don't you have to concede and just get a convertible?

But then I realized that this dude might be my new hero of sticking to your guns. Maybe I do want stability and a lot of stuff, but I'm still on a motorcycle, and I'm riding it all the way to Alaska!

So with solstice nearly upon us, I want to wish everyone a good summer, including my doggies who both already feel better. And to the motor-tricycle dude I say, Ride on, friend, ride on.

The Wayward Huskies are moving!

Woah. It's been a little while since my last post. In fact, this is my first post of 2012. Hooray! Happy New Year!

A few things that have happened in the last six months:

• The Toyo stove (the only source of heat in our cabin) died during a -50ºF/-45ºC cold snap in January.
• I went on a few trips for work: Once to Anchorage, AK; twice to Portland, OR; once to Houston, TX. (And I have two more work trips coming up: Another to Portland, OR; one to Austin, TX.)
• Earned MVP status on our airline again. (Sweet!)
• We bought a cabin.

This last one is the only thing that's really at all interesting. We bought the place right next door to where we're living now; the same people built both cabins, and they're very similar. When my husband and I moved in to our current cabin, we rented it from a couple. Then the couple divorced and split properties; he's still our landlord for now, and we bought from his ex-wife. Both cabins are standard-issue crappy Alaska cabins:

The only thing beautiful about it is that it's ours, and we can change whatever the heck we want about it.  It's most definitely a fixer-upper.

So this summer will be filled with projects. The cabin in half-dry, which means that there is hot and cold running water, but no septic. (Technically, there is septic, but it hasn't been connected in years and years and we will likely just entomb the tank.) My husband's goal this summer is to install a graywater system. My goals are more modest but also more numerous. They are:

1: Re-paint the bedroom.

The bedroom used to be this lurid green:

And is now (mostly) covered by this ghostly primer:

It's on its way to being a pleasant (I hope) yellow. But boy, painting is slow, dull work!

2: Fix the backdoor.

At the moment, there's a suggestion of a door, but no apparent hinges, and it's padlocked on the outside. (The key to the padlock may well be in the septic tank.) I'll just tear the thing out and install an actual door.

3. Build steps out the back.

So we don't step out into mid-air.

4. Build a Scout-and-Guy pen out the backdoor.

This should be relatively easy, and then we'll be able to let the dogs O-U-T without leashing or necessarily accompanying them. Heaven!

5. Fix the existing dog pen for the other dogs.

This pen will be nice because it's so much bigger than their existing pen, and we won't have to line the whole thing in plywood because it's not sited atop a mud pit.

6. Build a composting outhouse.

V. excited about this. There are two decrepit open-pit outhouses on the property (why? why?!), and though I'm not terribly outhouse-squeamish, I don't want to go near these things and I will probably just tear them down and fill in the pits. But we still need to do our business, so I'm investigating sustainable ways to do this.

So things have been busy and the dogs and I haven't been out as often as we'd like. I did snap a quick photo of them after one of our runs this spring:

Notice that Beenie has slipped out of his harness partway, which happened after we'd stopped, thank goodness!

It'll continue to be busy, but I hope to find balance with work, the new house, the dogs, and life in general. I'll end with a video I shot (from the safety of the truck!) of one of our neighbors. This little guy knows all about balance, and I would do well to learn from him:

Clips and Fids, or what to do on the last day of the year

Two of the dogs live inside full-time.

Guy (in front) because he's an oldster: I've had him for ten years, and he was about one when I adopted him from the animal shelter.  And Scout because she's Scout, and she is the apple of my husband's eye.  The other four dogs live outside all together in a pen, but come in at night when it's colder than -25.

Scout is visiting her family here.

When Scout and Guy go O-U-T, they get clipped to either the truck or the pen, so we had two leashes with snaps at both ends for this purpose.  Guy has never been a chewer of forbidden items, but Scout occasionally has lapses in judgment that result in a hole in my blanket or little pieces of tissue all over the floor.  A few weeks ago, Scout got impatient about being clipped to the truck and chewed through her leash, so I decided to make a new one.

I pulled out my line-making and harness-repair box:

I took one poly rope end:

and turned it into this:

like this:

The pencil-like metal thing is hollow and called a fid, and helps feed the rope end through the poly rope.

I put a handle in addition to a clip on the other end:

And I was done!

Then I made another one:

They work great, but it's too cold and dark now to take a picture of them in action, so I shall post one later.  In the meantime, it is New Year's Eve, so in honor of new beginnings, here are some pictures of the first time I ever stepped onto a dog sled:

This was about 14 years ago down in Paxson, Alaska.  It was great fun, and a few years later, I started handling for a distance-racing kennel and learned about working with sled dogs, wrestling with sleds and straw and bags of dog food, making lines, and having a sense of humor.

Happy New Year from all of us at Sally's Home for Wayward Huskies, and best wishes for a happy and productive 2012.

明けましておめでとうございます。

Who is Sally?

Winter solstice 1999 coincided with not just a full moon but, as I heard on the radio, an extra-bright full moon because of some celestial coincidences.  Not being a moon-brightness connoisseur, I didn't notice anything except that the moon was indeed full, that it was awfully bright out when I went out for a walk, and that I'd just adopted a dog.


I hadn't meant to adopt a new dog.  I already had two, an old one and a puppy one, but earlier that day I'd made the mistake of going to the animal shelter to drop off some food that the old one didn't eat anymore and the puppy one wasn't ready for.  There was a skinny husky with yellow eyes who looked at me like this:

and I was toast.


The card on her kennel said that she'd been running loose on Farmer's Loop Road, and though she was lactating, they didn't know where her puppies were.  She was malnourished but friendly, about two years old, and if she didn't find a home that day, she would be put down that night.


So, she came home with me.


Sally was a singular creature.  She always had the best spot in the house (the green ear in the top photo is from the shelter's post-tattoo antiseptic smear).

She liked to run (on the right, with Kobi)

but not too much.

She did enjoy having a job to do.  (I published this photo of her when I was managing editor of a certain magazine of dog-powered sports.)

She was the only dog of mine who really knew how to line out

which she learned from a former Quest dog named Sam (Sally's in lead on the right).

All the Wayward Huskies were in thrall of her.  She was a bully, she was lazy, she ate like a vacuum cleaner, and she was the happiest creature I've ever known.


Sally passed away in February 2010, but unfortunately, she might've had too much influence on one Wayward Husky in particular.  Here, Cricket is punching her brother Delroy.  If Sally had ever deigned to notice other dogs, she might've punched them too.

This is a photo of Sally's last run, on the day before 2010 began.  We had some guests from Japan and took them out on the sled.

Sally was not a good dog.  She knew how to sit and shake and lie down, but didn't see the need to keep proving it.  She rarely ever came when I called her, and even at the end of her life, sick and very weak, she used up all her strength walking wherever she wanted to and I had to go and get her and carry her all the way back to the house.  She smiled all the while.


Who is Sally?  Sally is the original Wayward Husky.

Reasons for November

There's a poem called "Reasons to Survive November" that you can listen to here, which inspired me some years ago to write a poem called "Reasons for November" about my own battle with the terrible eleventh month of the year.  The end of Daylight Savings this year came out of the blue for me, but then I think it does every year, too.  I blink, and all of a sudden it's really, really dark and cold out there.  I have a light box at work that I try to use all winter, but it's been so busy there lately that I've been forgetting to turn it on.  Which is all to say, it's been a while since I posted.

But never fear!  I haven't been hibernating the days away, as much as I would have liked to.  An exciting new development here at Wayward Huskies is the purchase of a fat bike:

The car you see in the back is to be sold to pay for the bike.  Anyone need a front-wheel drive Corolla with battery issues and fantastic winter tires?

Why have such a ridiculous-looking bicycle, you ask.  Well, let me explain.  Those fat-fat tires are great for floating on top of snow, and also on top of not-yet-very-snowy trails.  Up until now, I've been riding my LHT with studded tires in the wintertime, but that involved a lot of sweating and cursing in anything but packed snow.  With this, I'm able to just coast over it all like a dream--the wide tires make it very stable.  Also, it's great for bikejoring:

Bikejoring is a great way to work on commands, and Beenie did fantastic.  We met a few other dogs on the trail, and once he stopped to say hi to a really fluffy buggy, and another time he just went right on-by a two-dog skijoring team.  He did so great that I decided to bring him inside to sleep.  I left him alone for about five minutes, though, and I think he wanted to learn how to build birdhouses:

When I told him that books are for reading and not for chewing on, he felt very bad:

In addition to snow-biking, I've been doing some maintenance.  For example, I came home from work one day and found Delroy with no collar.  All that was left was an O-ring and this:

I believe that Cricket ate the rest of his collar, but I never did find evidence of that; of course, it may be that collars are highly-digestible.  Also, the s-hooks I'd used to attach everyone's tags were not up to the challenge of a Wayward Husky, and almost everyone's name tag had fallen off, leaving just a sad, lonely rabies tag.  Guy's s-hook had snapped clean in half at one point--I never did find his tags.  So when the new name tags I'd ordered came in the mail, I took everyone's collar off:

Then I got my tools together, including bigger s-hooks:

And I made one of these for everyone:

Ta-da!

The four oval tags are the puppies' from the Borough rabies clinic.  Ghost Dog's is the blue flowery one; she got her vaccine separately, at the Raven Vet.  So, some time with the s-hook tool later, and we were all set:

I had fixed Guy's collar some time before, which is why his isn't in this picture.

So I was doing stuff in November, but just as with the start of any winter here in Fairbanks, every little thing was so hard to do, and I could barely keep up the bare minimum.  On the plus side, it did snow quite a bit.  However, that meant shoveling the driveway:

We have a long driveway, and you can see the shovel on the left-hand side.  I'm only about a fifth done.  While I was out here, though, I saw a team cross the road on the trail, a six-dog team pulling a sled, and it planted an evil seed in my mind.  Of course, it got dark while I was doing my chores, though I did manage to organize the tarp garage:

And then I thought, it's pretty warm, there's a fair bit of snow, and mushing on the trail is apparently possible.  Maybe I'll go for a run.

At first, I decided to take just four of the dogs, as that would be plenty of power for a first run.  But as I was setting up the gangline, all six were so excited and I thought, I'll take them all.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it was a pretty white-knuckle ride, and I'm glad that they were a little out of shape.  We tore out of the yard, and I banged my knee when the sled knocked into the tire I'd used to line out the leaders.  But no one else was out, and we sped along like a barely-in-control missile.  It wasn't until we were headed back home that I could let go of the handlebar enough to snap a spooky picture:

That's the moon at the top of the photo, three nights past full.  But below is the raison d'être of Sally's Home for Wayward Huskies.  Terrifying as this first run was, it was also terribly exhilarating, and the dogs and I had fun, despite the fact that it's still November: