Around the Homestead

Pesharim - Around the Homestead

My Great Dane bitch recently had a litter of puppies. About three weeks ago. There were ten in all but one was stillborn so we have nine now. They are really great puppies, most favoring their father in body shape, head shape and hair length. They are 3/4 Great Dane and 1/4 Saint Bernard but they tend to favor their father who is Great Bernard (1/2 Saint Bernard-1/2 Great Dane).

Although in body type all favor their father in coloring they are a mixed variety. There are three Tiger stripes as seen here:

There are three that look like a Golden colored Great Dane as seen here:

And there are three who are black with white spots, (all of whom favor their uncle Saint George) seen here:

Saint George (who died of multiple snakebites - either copperhead or cottonmouth), and Galahad (the only short haired dog aside from Noal we've ever had and he died as a very young pup of some viral disease the Vet could never identify, but I suspect was possibly parvo - I hate parvo) were extremely good, not to mention tough and fearless dogs. I was gonna keep one of the black colored dogs at first because they all favor George but the only male black one was stillborn. So I buried the little stillborn male and we're gonna keep the male Golden one that my wife and daughters like so much.

At first I wasn't so thrilled with taking one of the Golden ones, I liked the Tiger stripes better, one of whom I named Bear because of his immense head and paw size and because he looked so much like a Bear. But I've been watching this Golden Boy and I have to admit, he seems amazingly intelligent. He also has the most incredible powers of concentration. When he is awake he will stare fixedly at anything he wants to investigate before approaching it, as if to say to himself, "What is that thing, and how do I best approach it, and how can I make use of it?" He doesn't turn his head as most dogs or pups do, but will stare without moving or blinking. Then he will finally approach it and explore it in about every way he can think of. Also he is quite a fighter, you can see that already. So he has really grown on me in the past week or so. He sleeps a lot though and likes to be held like a human baby, looking up at the face of whoever is holding him when he does. He is the only pup who will lay on his back and look up at you while being held in this way and will sleep in this way curled in a fetal position. He seems to think he is human. Or human like at any rate. He always sleeps with his tongue stuck out slightly.

Picture of him:

We have officially named him Gawain Maximus. The girls named him Maximus, or Max for short, but I gave him the first name of Gawain in keeping with George and Galahad, his uncles. We've named a few of the others as well; Bear, Lucia, Maria, Galileo, Curia.

I have been conducting the same metaergogenic nutritional experiments I performed on his sire and mother, and on my own children, in order to increase the size, strength, health, and intelligence of every pup. They are growing at a phenomenal rate and they all seem extremely intelligent and inquisitive, Max the most so. So we supplement the nursing they take from their mother with pureed bottles of cow milk, dog food meat from a can, dry dog food, baby formula, vitamins, and the metaergogenic formulas I developed for myself and my children.

We plan to find the other eight very good homes at time of sale. I will continue my experiments with Gawain, since we're keeping him, the same as I have with his father and mother, both to increase his size and strength, and to increase his intelligence. Every generation I see improvements and advantages.

These are some pictures of the father, my dog Bart, or Bartholomew. He's up to about 170 pounds now and still putting on weight and size.

This is him chewing apart his large plastic bowl.

He will chew small limbs to sawdust and for some reason loves to reduce plastic to small bits and even eat it. Sometimes he'll vomit it back up. He's an incredible hunter and an awesome guard-dog (I trained him myself). I've seen him take on an armed man in full SWAT gear and armor, totally fearlessly. The only thing he really fears on God's green Earth is me cause he knows I'll knock a knot in his noggin if I have to. But I very rarely have to. He's a fantastic dog and the Great Bernard is a great breed.

My bitch Noal feeding the litter.

She has lost some hair patches since she has started nursing them all, probably from the stress of feeding so many. But with supplements and vitamins she is getting her hair back to normal. Actually today, at about their third week from being born they ate solid food for the first time. Dry puppy food.


In other news around the house my oldest daughter has chosen to perform a piano rendition of part of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the Piano Guild later this month. She'll be in open competition but she always does well in competition if she doesn't think bout what other people are playing. For some reason if she does this she becomes nervous and her playing becomes stilted. But if she concentrates only upon her own piece and playing then she is fluid, sonorous, and an incredibly good performer. She has been playing since about 6 or 7 and she has become the pianist my mother always dreamt of becoming, and she is far superior to me as a performer. Actually, musically, she is quite naturally ingenious, often improvising at key and on key practically any piece she plays whenever she wishes. It also takes her only a very short period of time to learn any new piece to which she is exposed and since I compose I have taught her exercises by which she can change key, tempo, dynamics, flow, expression whenever she wishes and in an improvisational fashion. Though I did not teach her to improvise. She just started doing that on her own one day around 8 or 9. Hopefully as she ages I can teach her to compose and then if she composes anything like she plays she will be both a fantastic pianist and composer.



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Humours of Idleness - The Living Serpent

Humours of Idleness - The Living Serpent

Coincidentally, and synchronistically, I came in from cutting the grass last night and my wife and daughters came home from getting the groceries about the same time when something very interesting occurred related to an event from a few days back. I sat down in the den while my youngest daughter went upstairs. A few minutes later my wife said, "She's screaming!" I don't hear very well but after a few moments concentration even I could hear it, she was screaming so loud and in such a frenzy.

My youngest daughter tends to be overly dramatic about many things but from her wailing you would have thought she were being butchered. So I bounded up the stairs and as I passed I noticed a rather long black cord lying on one of the steps about three quarters up the stairs to the next floor, but I passed by in such a hurry (I was really booking it and concentrating on my daughter) that I only glimpsed the thing. When I got to the end of the upstairs hallway and to my daughter's room I could still hear her screaming uncontrollably and she had the door locked so I couldn't gain access. This worried me as I thought she might have pulled something over on herself and was severely injured. I thought momentarily about kicking the door in but I yelled at her asking if she could open the door and could she move? She answered yes but said she wouldn't. I asked why and she said hysterically, "Because there's a snake on the stairs and I heard it hissing."

I went back to the stairs to investigate and sure enough there was about a two and a half to three foot long rat (black) snake sitting on the stairway about half way up by now. That was the black cord like object I had bounded by on my way up the stairs to check on my daughter.

I laughed when I saw it and wanted to just pick it up. Unfortunately it was spread directly along the bottom length of one step, pressed flat against the rise so that I couldn't approach it from above or behind to simply pick it up and take it outside. It was obviously terrified as by now my oldest daughter and wife were crowding around as close as they dared and all but my oldest daughter were screaming and yelling at both me and the snake. (My wife seems to share the same unreasoned horror of snakes that my youngest daughter does.)

Now rat snakes are very beneficial, like king snakes, and so I like snakes like that. King snakes, rat snakes, black snakes, coachwhips, I like them all and they are all beneficial.

I imagine what had happened was that when I left the basement door open while cutting the grass I must have flushed the snake out and it came up the steps through the underground floor and into the hallway and foyer on the ground floor. Then it was gonna make its way to the top floor via the upstairs steps. Rat snakes have overlapping, angled belly scales which make them very good climbers. But they will also fight and take a striking coil when threatened. I'm not afraid of snakes at all and handle them often at the Science Center or around here but I had already once tried to take it behind the head and it coiled and hissed and made a half-hearted lunge, just to warn me it would fight if cornered. Coupling that with it's attempt to hug the wall to prevent access by me, I knew approach was not gonna be easy. Although far from venomous I had no desire to be bitten on a Friday night and so I withdrew to the bottom of the steps to see what it would do.

In the meantime I thought to grab my digital camera and take the two photos you will see below. I also opened the basement door because I figured that all it really wanted to do by now was escape the way it had entered. Soon it tried climbing down the wall beside the stairway but the paint on the wall made the wall too smooth to hold onto. It did an excellent job at the attempt as you can see from the picture of it hanging but eventually it fell to the hardwood floor. At that point my oldest daughter and wife practically ran over each other trying to flee the area. My wife is black and as she says, "Sistas don't play with no snakes!" Watching them flee made me laugh again.

But the snake made her way down the hall and out the basement door, then down those steps and I imagine back into the south field. Watching it I realized that this snake looked almost exactly like the one I had run over a few days earlier (only that one was much smaller) on my mower and after examining those remains more carefully I realized it was probably a rat snake as well. The snake that had gotten into the house was probably either an older sibling or the mother of the clutch that had produced the small snake I had killed by accident.
And now you know the rest of the story.