16 posts tagged “lamont”
It's like this, every day when I get home from work. Lamont is just not himself without his evening constitutional.
Reminds me of that SNL skit.
Thanks to Dirty Jase, I happened upon this guy's Web site, 4Q Conditioning. It is awash in amazing photos of vintage motorcycle and skateboard culture. I could look at this stuff for hours.
On the site, he has a tribute to his beloved pooch who had passed away. This poem, if you will, is identified as having an unknown author. I find it incredibly moving, if not entirely accurate, specifically that last sentence.
"He is your friend, your partner, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion."
But he likes to "help" with the laundry.
If we go too long between grooming for Lamont, he ends up looking like this:
We were on the receiving end of a few inches of snowfall Friday night, which, personally, wasn't as bad as I thought it was. It served nicely as one of those take-a-good-look-at-it moments before I went to bed, to gawk upon the backyard and its snow-draped trees, knowing that such a landscape will very soon be a thing of the past. It may snow once or thrice more before shit starts to bloom, but that's about it. It has been a long, gnarly winter; one of the snowiest I can recall.
So, we celebrated this by taking Lamont to a nearby park first thing Saturday morning. The city shut down our legitimate dog park. We are now on a committee (every time I say that or think that, I hear MCA's voice in the back of my head, going "They got a committee to get me off the block/'cuz I say my rhymes loud and I say 'em nonstop") to raise funds with other members of our community to slap a fence around a city park so our dogs have a place to go. But this park, this is not affiliated with that. It is just a big, kickass park about three blocks from our home. Sadly, it is owned by the school district, who insists on doing its best impersonation of a suburban junkie angling for the best price on the last of his Dewalt power tools at the pawn shop by selling off as many of its assets as possible. The last of which, was a venue formerly known as a school across the street from said park. That will be sold to developers, who will convert the location into a block of cookie-cutter, $280,000 homes nobody will want to buy. And the park across the street? That will endure a similar fate, just a few years down the road.
But for Saturday, it was this, a partly untouched sheet of winter
I say "partly" because it looked like a cross-country skier busted a (decidedly slow) move through the park earlier.
We then proceeded to assume our traditional roles at the park. Kerry and I fan out and let Lamont run between our two points.
Speaking of the dog park, we took Lamont to the St. Patrick's Day Parade in our suburban hometown last Saturday, where he had an opportunity to walk with about dozen or so other canine companions. Our committee, R.O.A.M. (Royal Oak Animal Mission; a name, by the way, that I think is somewhat misleading. Our charge is to raise money for a dog park. The name implies, to me, that we are rescuing animals, which we are not). Here is our Web site.
We marched in the parade last week to bring about awareness to our group and to foist upon the unwitting and unsuspecting, some fliers. We received a very warm reception. There will be a mailer going out in a couple of weeks and a cocktail fundraiser April 1 at Goodnite Gracie's in Royal Oak. If you live in the area, come have some drinks and tip heavy. It's for a good cause, we believe.
When we returned home, a certain someone was pretty exhausted.
See those brown pillows? Those, by the way, are no longer with us. They are the latest casualty in our attempt to ease the dog into staying out of his cage while we are out of the house. Those pillows went bye-bye when we thought we would try an 9-hour stint while we were at work. He's going to be 2 soon and he's still a chewer when we aren't around. It is really one of the only drawbacks to his personality. That, and he sometimes jumps up when he's not supposed to. But, that's really about it, as far as shit that annoys me about his behavior.
Yeah, yeah, we let him up on the furniture. And we let him up on the bed, too. We never really had opinions about that either way. He comes and goes as we do. When we want the bed and him not on it, he's not on it. Same thing with the couch. It's not that hard.
We had the sublime luxury of a dog park about 6 blocks from our house. Every day we would take Lamont and he could run and scrap with his dog buddies for a good hour or so. Well, the city recently closed it because the far end abuts an elementary school whose district is too stupid to put a fence around its playground. Has anyone seen an elementary school playground in the last 20 years that wasn't fenced in?
So, an equally bigger dumbfuck comes walking in on that end of the park, lets his big dog off the leash (a good half-mile from the designated dog area) and it promptly runs into the playground and scares the hell out of some kid. The city clamps down and closes the park. And rightfully so. Now, the parks and rec commission is looking at other parks to have the dog run (which is cool), will decide which one, get approval from city commission (hopefully) and slap a fence around it. In the meantime, Lamont is sans a dog run, until I found that this place has an indoor/outdoor dog play area.
I've long admired what owner Liz Blondy has done with her shop, Canine To Five. She opened a dog daycare, boarding and grooming facility damn near smack in the middle of Detroit's Cass Corridor, which, back in the day was a counterculture haven in the 60s and 70s and then a drug-saturated (read: heroin, crack) wasteland into the '80s, '90s, and even today. But, she's trying to institute change and growth and that's pretty fucking rad. They opened an outdoor, fenced-in dog play area last summer. I noticed it quite a bit as I blasted down Cass to the get to the ballpark. Canine To Five now has an indoor play area. For $5 (after screening and proof of shots) a visit (Tuesday nights from 7-9:30 and Saturdays from 9 a.m.-noon), your dog can go nuts with other dogs. Liz Blondy runs it tight in there too, which I like. The place is clean, the people are solid, and the whole operation is top-shelf. I took Lamont on Saturday. It was his first trip to the city.
Lamont basically sniffed around and didn't play much, until he met Sylvia
and these guys outside ...
We'd been warned of the big snow storm coming, so I loaded up on groceries and whatever else we needed and we chilled Saturday night, with two long-time pals over, getting high on vodka and cooling it by the fireplace. That night we got decked with about six inches of snow. Lamont was digging the yard the next day, running all over the place with Mrs. Chicken.
With all of this snow comes shoveling, which I used to love as an adolescent but not so much as an adult. So, with the football games starting, Kerry went out and started on the sidewalk. The plan was for me to come out and relieve her, doing the front part of our driveway and our neighbor's driveway (my car is parked there; their house is on the market). She's out there about 40 minutes before coming in and asking me "Who loves you?"
"You, I hope," I said.
"I do. That's why I just hired two kids the finish the rest."
YES!!! Jackpot! I grabbed another beer, left the slippers on and continued watching football, even though Detroit got their sick, sorry asses handed to them yet again. Man, that team absolutely sucks.
So yes, this is the ultimate Sunday gift, if you ask me:
If you live anywhere where it snows, and you are able-bodied, and you don't clear at least your sidewalk or pay someone to have it done to the point where it looks like this,
then you're a fucking dick. I'm sorry, but you are. Actually, I'm not sorry. But you're still a dick.
It's been a while since I've thrown up some shots of Lamont. He appears to finally be done growing, topping out at a firmly packed 77 pounds. Our next step is to ramp up his training. He doesn't always come when called, he sometimes lunges toward strangers (but only because he wants to lick them) when on walks (but not very often), and we basically want to get him to the point where, when on the leash, he is neither in front of us or behind us. Ultimately, we would like to get him trained to the point where he could be a hospital therapy dog. He gets such a genuine and warm reaction from people pretty much everywhere he goes. My problem is that I fucking hate hospitals, so we'll see how far this goes.
He's been a near-perfect dog. He rarely barks, he doesn't act like a tempermental dickhead and he seems to be great with other dogs, kids and people. He has a hard time getting comfortable while in the car, and a couple of nights per week, he demands to be let outside at about 3 in the morning. That, and we still cannot leave him unattended in the house. The last time we tried that, for about an hour one Sunday, he chewed up some couch cushions. So, in the cage he stays. But, this week, we intend to upgrade him to the bathroom hallway, using a baby gate to restrict his access to the rest of the house. Again, we'll see how far that goes.
But damn, it's hard to get mad at the fuzzy (not so) little fella when he looks like this:
Kerry knocked out a great little shade garden in the back yard where an unsightly wood pile once sat. Not 20 minutes after she was done, that dog of ours decided to make it his resting spot. And of course, I would take the next half an hour taking pictures of him. I know, I know. We are really annoying dog people. You should hear the shit we say to him when nobody is around. It's not very flattering for either one of us, believe me.
That dog of ours continues to grow. It's almost scary. He's putting on weight, has been actually, for the last several months. He is now 10 months old and I have no idea what he weighs. I know it has to be more than 55 pounds. When he jumps up, if I'm not paying attention, he could possibly knock me over. If I come home shitfaced drunk and I'm not paying attention, he could probably out slap-box me.
He's good, though. He's going through what looks like an awkward, gangly teenage-type phase. I mean, look at these legs of his. It's almost hilarious.
His behavior is, and has been, pretty good. I don't have too many
complaints. He's been completely house-trained for about four months
now. And I've just now stopped coming home for lunch to let him out and
take a leak. So, he can hold it for eight hours, it appears, with nary
a problem. He has outgrown his cage, so we are getting for him the big
one this weekend. He usually sleeps through the night. There might be
one night a week where he wakes up, gets bored and decides to walk
around the bedroom and lightly pant. This usually means it's about 3:30
a.m. and he wants to go outside, and, more than likely, eat as much of
his own shit in the yard as he can handle. But that doesn't happen a
lot. Normally, he just sleeps, like us. And he's been sleeping in his
cage with the door open at night, which just astounds me. I thought he
hated that fucking thing.
He still, however, continues to chew on things he should not, and because of that, he still needs constant monitoring. Doors to other rooms need to be closed and anything I don't want destroyed has to be out of his reach, which is both good and frustrating for us — maddening, because we sometimes forget and then there goes a good pen or pillow; and good because it forces us to keep a very tidy, organized, everything-in-its-place household, which, we should be doing anyway.
Our house is small. Very small. Oh, its fucking cute and cool and full of love, and when people walk in we get a lot of compliments, but it's still very small. We have two closets, that's it, and they are both full. We are in the process of emptying one of them completely to use in his training, per our obedience guy, Jim Lessenberry.
Lamont has developed this very bad habit — one perpetuated by me, so I'm especially to blame here — of using his teeth during roughhouse play with me in the backyard. He'll get me good a couple of times, especially on the hands. Problem is, it's cold as hell out and I have big gloves, and he's so fucking fast, that when he does it, he's gone, and then he comes back to play. Once, I was able to get him right after he did it, put him on the ground and let him know what's up. He stopped. But the next time outside, he did it again.
Jim, during a now-completed obedience course back in December, told us to do this: Take a six-foot long piece of clothesline and tie one end through his collar and let the rest of trail on the floor. Let him get used to this. Clean out a closet completely. Next time in the yard, at the very instant he uses his teeth, stop, step on the clothesline, don't say a word, haul his ass into the house and put him in that closet for 15 minutes. Again, no commands are used. Let him stew and then let him out. He says it shouldn't take more than a couple of times in that closet and he'll figure it out.
I just wish we had more closets.
Otherwise, Lamont has turned out to be a very good dog all the way around. He rides well in the car, walks great on the leash (we walk him once, sometimes twice, a day), will chill out if we want to watch a movie or something, sleeps well at night (although we do let him up on the bed probably more than we should), doesn't bark incessantly and generally has a very chilled, very moderate temperment. He can sit and lie down, and is now starting to come to his name better than ever, although that is an ongoing work in progress, and if we're at the dog park, forget it, he can't hear shit. If we can break him of the teeth thing and get him to come to his name more consistently, and even graduate to greater periods of time where he "stays" in one place on command, we'll be very happy. Of course, a dog is only as obedient as the time we make to work with him.
The goal is to get him to do these things so we can maybe get him certified as a therapy dog. People have stopped their cars to get out and pet this guy and he brings so many smiles to the faces of strangers, it's the craziest fucking thing I've ever seen. It only makes sense to maybe take him into senior centers or childrens hospitals to share the Lamont love.
