we shoveled more snow today

we shoveled more snow today.

the cats and i “romped in the snow” as my human calls it. chloe continues to bury herself wherever convenient, peeking at me with the tops of her ears and all eyes. i jump on her when she does it, but she usually does it again.

tika did a nice trick: she (the lightest of us 3) managed to walk on the top of the snow without falling through. it’s hard to chase her when she can run on top, but a lot of fun. once i get her moving quickly (trying to escape) she usually falls through, planting herself neatly on her face, with a couple of hind legs and a tail sticking up (easy pickins).

my human went to safeway.

he took pictures (camera and phone) and put them on the web. (see his 2 snow albums... use the slideshow in upper right; space bar to pause it & arrows to go to next picture.) (click here)

my other human was really aghast that there was so little food left. he didn’t take a picture of the dog food section, so i think it’s okay. i don’t understand the cat little part.

anyway, it’s still snowing. this is kind of fun. apparently, when it snows, it’s saturday. it brings out the “pack instinct” in the humans, and they want to hang out with me more than going anywhere.

oh! fun stuff tonight! we walked over to ace hardware store and blockbuster movies (both were really full of people) and both times, the people who worked there stopped what they were doing and yelled at my human as we walked in (together)… “sir—please bring your dog inside. it’s fine. it’s cold out there.” my human kept mumbling “dog town – friendliest dog city in america.” (makes you wonder if there are cities where they let the dogs in but humans have to stand in the cold…)

grins, goofy, psychology, and circularity

my lady human has been coming home rather tired these last few days. i notice it in the way she doesn't throw the ball with as much verve. she also seems to not be very receptive to my telepathy these days...so, i've been watching her a little closer. her eyes are a bit glassy, and what little fur she has (mostly on the top of her head) is a bit lack-luster...

she seems to spend much of her time away from home listening to other humans in work that is called counseling psychology...

this got me curious, partly because she speaks very evasively about what she's actually doing; something to do with confidentiality, but she does talk about how important insight is to humans, and so i poked around the internet to see what insights i might gain about myself...

i found this www.willowglyn.com/shelti.htm

warning: it has EXTREMELY annoying music, but you can turn that off.

of course, the thing is written from an EXTREMELY human-centric position, but i'm very accustomed to this way of thinking, you have to put up with it when living with humans...but what was very interesting was:

"Many Shelties grin...that’s right! Like a big smile on a person, Shelties sometimes bare their teeth in a huge grin."

and as i'm reading the article, i'm thinking, 'uh-huh, well, maybe, uh, hmmmm, oh, yeah, right, grinning, my humans grin, like a big smile, like me, right....there were other things there that i'll comment on another time as they aren't quite on target as to how we shelties really are, but to the smiling, yes, this, this is correct, my humans do smile just like me,' and i suddenly remembered that when i smile/grin, my human guy often says,

'hey, goofy!"

which is always a bit confusing, and i really mental telepathy to him, 'my name is VIDI; VIDI, VIDI, VI-DEEEEEEE' so i quickly googled 'GOOFY' to gain some insight like my lady human thinks is the magic answer to everything (such simple creatures...) and

i find these pictures, as well as my beloved wikipedia as a google result: Goofy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and i can hardly believe this one.....

the first line in wikipdeia reads, 'Goofy is a fictional character from the Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse universe. He is an anthropomorphic dog and is one of Mickey Mouse's best friends.'

ANTHROPOMORPHISM, FASCINATING...

as i read through it, i am struck by how no where in the entry is any warning about how dangerous this ANTHROPOMORPHISM might be or at the very least that this state, this, dare i say it, personality disorder, might be at the very heart of humans inability to receive my mental telepathy.....

seriously, folks, this is INSIGHT!!!

gotta go...i smell squirrel!

VIDI

eating fruit with wax on it (or anything...)

“people are stupid and eat fruit with wax on it.”

that’s something one of my humans has said, more than once. the first time, i thought i misunderstood him. the second time, i thought his vocabulary was broken. then, the day everyone got dressed up in “we-ding clothes” there was another human here – a really great one i was hoping would stay – named “aye-run” and he said it several more times.

“people are stupid and eat fruit with wax on it.” i love to run at the dog park, so i knew when i met aye-run, i’d like him.

when everyone was at the “we-ding” i rubbed the apples against some of the candles they forgot here, and it was true: the humans ate all the apples with the wax on it. (my little human girl, eee-lye-zah, ate most of them. blech!!!) humans really do. but what did it mean?

so then i got to wondering if i eat dog food with wax on it.

and while i was sniffing around, and i realized the answer. (answer: god only knows, with this stuff) i think i realized what my human and aye-run were getting at…

we eat all kinds of stuff, whether we understand it or not.

it reminds me of my “puppy-poo” period. back when i was a puppy, i used to eat… well, never mind. it’s kind of embarrassing now, like the infamous “bathtub photos” for human children, and the “bathtub photos” for cats from adulthood.

anyway, so it makes more sense to me now, this sentiment, “people are stupid and eat fruit with wax on it.” eating stupid things (and being embarrassed) makes sense.

and so since the “we-ding clothes” day, i’ve noticed lots of moments of “people are stupid and eat fruit with wax on it.”

something called “car insurance,” for example. my human said, “oh look what the rates did!” and said it again.

we were driving to the dog park and the car was thirsty, and he said it again.

i was at work with my human (i sit behind him so he can concentrate) and he worked at his computer, saying this over and over (it sounded really tiring). i think he sells “web clicks” to fruit trees.

and so, as far as i can tell, i’m only beginning to understand what this means, “people are stupid and eat fruit with wax on it.” it’s kind of mysterious, and kind of wholesome. it makes me glad to have my humans, and learn more about it. sort of like watching battlestar galactica and realizing that cylons evolved from shelties, even when the characters don’t see that coming.

i’ve decided that if i can help humans (all of them) with anything, it might be to help them not eat the fruit that has wax on it. i played with the settings on this blog; i might create a “don’t eat fruit with wax on it !!!” page, but i don’t see how yet. if you want to join the cause, email me. i’m just a dog in denver, but this seems important. i'd bank on the internet over fruit.

ciao for now,

vidi

sniff me a smelly christmas

i figured out what all dogs must want for Xmas. forget the shrink-wrapped bones.

after tolerating all the blabbering from humans about smells (that a flower smells nice but i stink, that i have dog breath, that the meat is old and stinky, yada yada yada) when in fact HUMANS really just have NO SENSE OF SMELL at all...

and whats with the perfumed shampoo that can be smelled (by us dogs and cats) a block away? (that's about 20 shampoos upwind of our house at any one time)

i want a smell-o-vision device!

wired magazine writers blog about them.

i think i'll get one for the cats, too, though i think they'll need an internet connection out in the garage now that they live out there

imagine! take control of what i'm sniffing. sniff anything i want, anytime i want, and if i can go wireless, anywhere i want. i'll be in mobile sniffing bliss. i'll be the most popular dog at the dog park. i'll dial up "hot dog" and won't all those big dogs just swarm around me.

as i think about wikipedia, where lots and lots of humans write information about stuff (my primary means to decipher what humans are talking about half the time)...

...and i think about the new explosion of non-text content on the internet (youtube.com & google's videos, for example). (seriously, is there anything better on the internet than this?

...so it occurs to me that dogs will really finally become netizens (netidogs?) when we can contribute SMELL content on the internet. how many smells do you think my humans are really going to be able to post, or appreciate, compared to a dog like me? it's like the 7 words for snow according to an eskimo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)

but in this case it will be ... you google "rotting meat with gravy" at smells.google.com and you'll get 32 (synthetic) listings, all of them posted by MOI!!!

i think this could be the big break for us dogs on the internet, sort of how keyboards were the tipping point for humans.

i can't wait to blog lamb. you'll smell it here first.

my purpose: opposable thumbs and human centrism....

my humans laugh sometimes. this seems to happen a lot when the talk about me and 'opposable' thumbs, and how i don't have these. i googled 'dog with opposable thumb.' i haven't found any dogs that have grown any.

i did find a website that sells t-shirts for dogs with the saying, 'i'm only an opposable thumb away from world domination.' i'm not posting the url for you to buy that. in the first place, my guy human talks about getting paid for 'clicks' and i'm want to find out more about that; perhaps, if i could make some money, i could save up for some sheep. i long for sheep, but i digress... i'm not posting the url for that website because, well, frankly, they list a lot of different breeds, but they don't list 'shetland sheepdogs,' of which I am one...so, call it sour grapes....but mostly, i'm not posting the url to that website because i dislike the t-shirt saying for a bigger reason: HUMAN-CENTRISM....

i find humans very human-centric...they really seem to have difficulty seeing things from other creatures' perspectives. sometimes, i'm not even sure they realize i have a perspective... let's address this t-shirt saying....have they considered that an opposable thumb isn't the end all or be all of existence? have they considered that i have no desire for world domination? what would anyone do with world domination if they had it anyway? don't they see the benefit of living with a pack? sometimes, i feel a bit undervalued, not respected...

training humans takes a great deal of patience and understanding, i am coming to realize....

i guess, the point i'm making here is that i hope that this blog will enable me to connect with other creatures more: other dogs, cats, hamsters, geckos, mice, to name a few, and of course, other humans. i do love my humans. i think they understand that, that's one of the simpler things that they are finally getting....

gotta go, there's a strange noise coming from the front yard, if only i could get the humans to lower the windows, so i could see better...

my first blog, t-bone, TIVO'ing jimmy carter

i’m not really a technologist but i recently started thinking about my place in the universe and decided that even a dog like me could have a blog. after all, if i can type and surf the web, why wouldn’t my blog be as valid and worthwhile as anyone else’s (that is how this works, right?)? i guess you can disagree, and you can post that on your own blog, or post a comment to me. i think they call this democracy.

i tivo’d the charlie rose interviewing jimmy carter yesterday, but i haven’t watched it yet. my humans were home most of the last two days because of the snow that came to denver, so i didn’t get a chance to watch it yet. humans are so controlling with the remote. i’ve trained mine to throw me the ball seven different ways, but when i get them to watch *my* tv programming, that will be something to brag about.

it’s morning and the sun is just coming up, and my humans are up earlier than usual. the big guy is making coffee, and the lady is pouring her bath and calling me. i like to lick the water off the bathtub ledge, of course, it's never as fresh as the water in the toilet.... my two bigger humans celebrated something called “barbequing” last night, and they gave me a "t-bone steak" bone when it finally ended. i usually eat bones outside: the humans seem to prefer this, as do i (who in their right mind would eat a bone *inside* the house?). last night though, when it was time for bed, i snuck part of it in the house. i think she found it. humans are so funny about these thing. i guess i need to go calm her down now.

more later. -- vidi