On the downbeat

 

The Hoan Bridge drowning in fog.  

It would be disrespectful to say the weather is like the pandemic. But it's depressing in its way. I've been biking semi-regularly, but for two days now I haven't had the spunk, and, outside the window, it's a sunless 50 degrees and threatening to rain, so maybe I'll take another day off and just futz in the house.  

The dining room is littered with dog toys like car parts in a vacant lot. You have to walk very carefully just to cross the room, and we're looking forward to getting out of town in May when we'll be all vaxxed up. 

I can't wait.

The lakefront. Same day as above, no kidding!

I'll do my best.

Hostage to a 4-pound dog

Jamison with his keeper

It's been two and a half weeks and young Jamison is settling in well. He has us trained in his service and we are meeting his every need. We think he was in shock for the first couple of days -- he was wary and did a lot of staring, and of course who could blame him. It would be like me, for example, waking up one morning to find myself on the Serengeti tended to by kindly elephants. 

Ms. V has been a warrior on his behalf, enrolling him in a class, taking him to the vet, procuring special foods, and taking him out to do his business six or eight times a day, including at least twice in the middle of every night. She has slid into a kind of baby talk with him that is barely comprehensible, but he is, like, in love with her, and even tolerates me in short polite intervals, which is about what I deserve. He travels with V everywhere, including to see her mother -- two hours each way -- and is pretty content to ride it out in a little crate, where he also sleeps at night, propped on a couple of chairs so he can see his momma all night long. 

He understands the world mostly through his mouth -- that is, seeing something is not quite enough; he has to taste it, chew it, see what it's made of. He has accumulated quite a few toys and he likes nothing better than to have to retrieve a thrown squeaky toy or a plastic bone. He runs fast, paws flying, skitters to a stop, picks up the toy and races back to drop it on his red T-shirt or his pad, whichever he has designated as his nightly Base of Operations. In the hours before bed he gets so wound up, scrambling here and there, we call it the Nighttime Crazies, and it's better than TV. 

POSTSCRIPT: We have appointments for vaccines this week, and we are excited! We used this link: https://mke-vaccines.egov.com/  It may require you to be a City of Milwaukee resident. 

 

 

  

Dam-burst of dog dreams

Our long-running push-me pull-you dog discussion ended last week with Ms. V the winner, just as she wins most of our discussions. Hey, she's a lawyer. 

It's not that I don't like dogs. I just didn't want to have to care for a dog, what with my full schedule of eating, biking and fretting. Until recently, Ms.V was working full time, exercising or yoga-ing straight thereafter, and then rushing off to book club or investment club or theater club or church club or one of her various dining-out clubs -- much of which is not my cup of tea, and which would've left me the de facto dog-walker-in-chief.     

But along came the miracle of retirement. I had to relent. 

We took a little day trip to a pup breeder last week and spent about an hour with a variety of little dogs one or two at a time. We finally decided on a thoughtful, playful but scholarly little fellow, a 12-week-old "Poochon" (poodle/bichon). Julia was nearly giddy in the presence of pup after pup after pup, and has spent recent days buying toys and foods and reading up on her training manuals. We will actually bring the dog home Friday. 

 

We're calling him Jamison -- pronounced like "peanut butter and jam-ison." See Take a Letter for a good use of it. 

• 

Jamison on prom day

Jamison (right) valiantly battles a mighty foe. 

 

Leave me alone for a minute, lady!

Ahh.

Well, I didn't want to drop him.

Earlobe fatigue

 

It's not really the lobe, google says, but rather the pinna or auricle that all that crap is hanging on. The lobe is the drippy thing on the bottom, as if you didn't know.  (Bet you didn't think I actually did research, did you.) In any case, it's gotten to be kind of a lot, as the crimpled, folded state of the top of my ear shows. 

If I put it all on wrong and then, say, try to put a stocking cap on, it all comes tumbling down and I have to start over. If I try to take off my glasses, or, for example, pull my mask -- or both masks -- down, you can see the problem. And don't even ask about changing the volume on my sound system. None of this, of course, has yet risen to the attention of the Biden administration, but for those of us not skilled in health care, or not flying to Cancun, it is what we're left to. 

While we're on the subject of ears, let me take you back about 40 years to one of the best days my ears ever had :

Ah, shucks. That's Ms. V, in her best flannel pajamas, fingering my smooth elfin auricle. Such hair!  

 

 

38 years

A big party in a park would've been better, but you do what you can.

The energetic Ms. V graduated -- er, retired -- last week after lawyering for almost 38 years. A great career. Her first job was as a lackey at a small law firm in Milwaukee -- collecting overdue bills and taking out the trash (at least, that's what it sounded like to me) -- before signing on with the Legal Aid Society, closer to her heart, where she stayed for 16 years, rising to chief staff attorney for the guardian ad litem division, which represents the interest of children in cases of abuse or neglect. A tough job. 

For the last 20 years she worked for the county as a judicial court commissioner. Starting in June 2000 she presided in many different courts, including small claims, children's, and criminal intake. She made decisions regarding bail in intake court, placement and safety decisions regarding children in juvenile court, and did soup to nuts in small claims court -- performing marriages, ruling on neighbor disputes, debt collection and eviction actions.  

I heard a lot of stories -- storytelling is a Vosper family trait -- such as one about a child kept in an attic by her neglectful family who found the strength to reach safety; kids on the brink of redemption who, in a moment, became involved in a car theft or worse, affecting the rest of their lives; weddings in small claims court with sometimes happy, sometimes contentious participants.

She would tell you that among her most satisfying experiences was the day same-sex marriage was legalized in Wisconsin, when the courthouse doors remained open late into the night and she got to  perform some of the state's first gay marriage ceremonies; and the day when a mother who had battled addiction for years at long last was reunited with her children after success in a drug treatment program.  

She's been assigned to small claims court in recent months. With the pandemic raging, all of it is done online, and the most difficult cases have appeared in evictions court -- tenants frantic to be given time to pay and landlords frantically facing months of lost income. There are never enough solutions, there is never enough time. Every day she would come home feeling like there had to be a better way of getting through this covid crisis. 

This retirement has been long-planned. She says that the scary days she spent in the ICU trying to will me back to health in August 2019 gave her time to see that life is short and retirement shouldn't be -- and this was well before the pandemic upended the world. Now we start our new (mostly) calendar-free life together! Clearly, the first priority is to get her a good road bike.

Somewhere else

                                                                         Dropping off a table on the road to Arcadia.

You just have to trust.

We got out of town just in time to meet the bad weather up in northern Michigan last week. It was cold, windy and damp. But the scenery was different; the house had been professionally cleaned; and it was just really nice to be somewhere else. We saw no one but grocery clerks, played Scrabble with a real board and wooden pieces, and actually conversed on topics beyond politics for minutes at a time. 

We were going to take the Milwaukee ferry on Sunday morning, but when we arrived at 5 a.m. the ferry had been cancelled because the lake was kicking up 9-foot seas. So we drove up through the UP, the calming, scenic route, and I did get a bike ride in during a one-day break in the weather. It was a lot of climbing, and, if I wasn't such a sissy, the descents would have been chaotically fast. We took the ferry on the way back, and it was harrowing, the boat lurching and slamming from side to side. They should have cancelled that one, too, and I will never ride the Lake Express again.

I feel good on a bike. Normal. With my feet locked in, pushing down is no problem. It's just walking I find difficult. My MD-afflicted ankles are such a mess. In a strange house, I lurch from counter to table to wall, pull myself up stairways with the railing and hold on tight coming down. Getting up from a couch requires a push down with my fists, which makes me feel like a very old man. Wearing boots I can do pretty well, walk for miles, but in tennis shoes or just socks I walk with care, or just sit. Do I need a cane? Boy, I hope not. 

Here's a few pix. 

The scenic overlook

Down the other side

About to topple?

(Ms. V photo)

  

Work barge near the lighthouse

(Ms. V photo)

Tough bird

Home and away

                                                                                            Pinewoods Campground

                                                                                               Kettle Moraine South

     

                                          

I planned weeks in advance and got approval from the woman in Human Resources (Ms. V) to take a little overnight bike ride to a campground near Dousman, about 40 biking miles west. Left Tuesday midmorning and had clear blue skies, temps in the 60s, a full load of gear, and a tolerable headwind. I rode the trails -- the Hank Aaron to the Oak Leaf to the New Berlin to the Glacial Drumlin. I stopped for tamales in Waukesha, took a longer break in Wales, and, at Waterville Road, followed the hilly country lane to the campground and set up in site #6. I saw just one other person, and my site was passed by just  three or four cars in the evening and the next morning. 

I texted and called and emailed Ms. V that I had arrived safe and sound -- her sole requirement -- but I was out of range, and I thought, "Well, what can I do? I'm sure it will be fine."

Famous last words.

Site #6

So I ate a freeze-dried meal, went to bed before 8 p.m., and listened to the vice presidential debate with earbuds on a little transistor radio. 

In the morning I got up, made oatmeal and packed up. I waited for the weather to warm up a little bit, and, near the campground entry, called Ms. V. 

"I've had a great time," I said. 

"Where are you?"

"I'm leaving the campground."

"Where?"

"I'm leaving the campground."

"Where are you right now?"

My connection was bad, she said, but it was the fixation on where I was that stuck with me. 

When I got home I called her at work, and said again I'd had a great time, no problems.

And she said, "Well, let me tell you about my day."

Now, just so we understand, she's a woman suffering PTSD from my bike crash of last summer. So she and my solo bike trips are not on the best of terms. (Even though she gave me pro-forma approval for this one.) In any event, she was up most of the night, and called Ahna, our daughter, who also disapproves and also was involved in the bike-crash recovery, and I suppose they got a little revved up.

So, by 6:40 a.m., Ms. V was driving to the Southern Kettle Moraine. Ah! the fixation! She went first to the wrong campground, got directions to the right one, and didn't find me, though I was still there. She was certainly one of those few cars that drove by my site in the morning. 

I should say that I had cleverly camped in a little wooded thicket, completely screened from the road -- because who wants to be seen from the road?  

So she reported to work late, and had to explain it to her boss, and by the time she got home, I had showered and was settling down to rest. In the end, I went and got us take-out to make amends.

Next time I'll bring a GPS.

*

Besides the damage to my relationships, when I got home I couldn't turn this light off and it later burned out, dammit: