Apollo – Page 2 – Into the West

Windy Earth Day Walk

I waited until almost noon before taking Apollo on our weekly extra long Sunday walk. Since I woke up in the middle of the night to watch some of the meteor shower, I slept a couple of hours past when I normally wake up. With a brisk north wind blowing in clouds, I also delayed the walk in the vain hope the temperature would rise. I wiled away the morning recording the first two races of the F1 2012 season to DVD and reading a couple of books. I wrote a couple of short blog posts as well. Once Terry woke up, I left with Apollo, leaning into the stiff northwest wind. I needed to reinforce Apollo’s training, so I placed the pinch collar on him. I could immediately tell the difference. Apollo did not want to pull me along, since he inflicted the pinch on himself when he did.

When we reached Nina Street, I noticed a different type of blooming flower growing along a fence. I took a picture, even though the wind ruffled the blooms continuously:

Apollo and I continued northwest towards the highway and West Mary Street. I planned an hour long walk, meaning I would continue until a half hour had elapsed and then turn around and retrace my steps.

We didn’t wait long for the signal to change and were on our way west after safely traversing the highway. I saw a couple of other walkers on the other side of the street, but so far no other dogs. Apollo didn’t seem very interested in the grass or light posts or fire hydrants, perhaps because he didn’t like tugging on the leash and causing the collar to pinch him.

We walked past the first apartment complex, where the American flag flapped stiffly in the wind (see first photo above). We continued past the second under-construction apartment complex and approached the relatively new Lansing Elementary School. Just as we were passing the school, I heard and saw lower flying jet aircraft just to the north of our position. These planes were flying under the clouds, and circling around in formation. I immediately realized they were military aircraft, probably rehearsing for a flyover of the Kansas Speedway and the NASCAR race to take place this afternoon. I tried repeatedly to snap photos of them with my cell phone as I continued walking towards my chosen turnaround point: Bittersweet Street.

We crossed Mary Street, mostly to give Apollo new sights and smells to investigate. A man and his dog, which seemed to be a smaller younger version of Apollo, continued west on Mary Street, but not without the two dogs trying desperately to meet each other. I finally got Apollo headed east, although he whined about not meeting a new dog friend for a few seconds. I continued my efforts to photograph the jets, finally catching them as we neared the highway.

I learned (later) via friends on Facebook, that these were A10 Warthogs and they did, in fact, flyover the Kansas Speedway.

Apollo and I safely crossed the highway and returned home. We walked for an hour, despite the wind and the Warthogs.

Second Saturday Storms

Every news channel, federal state, county and municipal government agency hammered home dire predictions for extremely severe thunderstorms (with large hail and multiple straight-line tornadoes) for this weekend. Any plans I might have had for the weekend quickly hinged upon the Weather Channel’s coverage of said storms and any weather map I could lay my eyes on (whether it be on TWC or via my Nook Color or my cell phone or my laptop). I didn’t even change clothes when I got home from work on Friday before I finished mowing most of the back yard and the side yard.

Saturday morning, I woke up early (nothing new there) and gauged the likelihood of storms to be slight for the next hour or so. I decided to take Apollo on a Saturday morning walk, instead of waiting for our normal Sunday morning window. We left the house under grey skies and damp yards and pavement. I didn’t plan to venture far away from home, in case of a sudden change in the weather. We walked by some flowering trees and shrubs, which I tried to capture with my cell phone’s camera:

As you can tell from the first photo above, Apollo doesn’t miss an opportunity to stop and smell flowers or grass or shrubs or trees … anything really. It can sometimes be frustrating, especially if I’m trying to actually get a workout. This Saturday morning, though, I preferred to stroll along at a leisurely pace and let Apollo sniff to his heart’s content.

He waited patiently for the light to change before we crossed K-7/US-73 and proceeded west on Mary Street for a block or so. I turned north on a ‘new’ street (which I don’t know the name of) walking towards West Kay Street. Another walker with two large dogs (I think they were a Newfoundland and a Border Collie) crossed Mary Street and followed us. Apollo lost all interest in heading north. He wanted to make friends with the two dogs behind us. I didn’t feel like wrestling with him and he wasn’t wearing the pinch collar that I could have used to ensure his obedient and gentlemanly behavior. So I turned back east on the deteriorating section of West Kay Street abandoned when the new street was constructed. I walked halfway up the hill back towards the highway, then turned around to make sure the other walker and his dogs continued on east.

Before walking back down the hill, I took a photo of West Kay Street, including the house we rented back in 1996-7 before we found and bought the house we now live in. Back then, West Kay Street sported a large wooded hill (now flattened and grass covered in the left side of the photo to the right) and several houses, all of which have been demolished or moved, save for the ones on the north side of the street.

Apollo and I retraced our steps and returned home before eight o’clock. A few hours later, Terry woke up and he showed me some of the dogs he’s been looking at to adopt or rescue. One of the first ones he showed me was a female Boxer named Butterscotch who just happened to be living in a foster home up on Post (aka Ft. Leavenworth). Terry called the foster home and arranged to meet Butterscotch mid-afternoon. I cleaned out the car, not knowing the current requirements for gaining access to Ft. Leavenworth. I can’t remember the last time I went up on Post (years most likely). We stopped at the Leavenworth Animal Shelter on the way north, which should have been open (the sign clearly stated they were open on the Second Saturday of every month until 4:00 pm) but the doors were securely locked. Terry and I got back in the car and continued north to the Ft. Leavenworth main security checkpoint gate.

We handed our driver’s licenses to the guard and he asked where we were going on Post. We didn’t know so we had to call the foster family again and get an address. Once he wrote the address down on his clipboard, he handed back our IDs and waved us through. That didn’t take long at all. I thought I’d have to get out of the car and open all the doors and hoods and wait for them to inspect it inside, outside and underneath.

We stayed on the phone with the foster family for directions to their home. We arrived and met Butterscotch (shown at right). She took to me immediately (why do I attract any and all canines?). She was excited to see us and seemed to have a very sweet disposition. She was a bit skittish towards Terry and submissive to both of us. She is small (well, smaller than a Rottweiler), weighing about fifty pounds. She recently had puppies, but had also been spayed within the last week. She had all of her shots and she was already microchipped. Terry and I got down on the floor and got to know her better for a few minutes. I really liked her. I also felt confident that I would be able to pick her up, should she ever be unable to walk on her own.

We told the foster family we would sleep on a decision to adopt her. I am torn. I think she would make a wonderful addition to our family, but I worry that Apollo will bully her. I really wish there were some way for him to meet her. I wonder if we could foster her for a few days as a test? We’ve never had such a ‘small’ dog … not since Nugget back in the 80s, who was Terry’s mother’s small dog. By the time I met Nugget, she was nearly blind and mostly deaf.

I think Terry still has his heart set on a female Rottweiler. He just can’t seem to find one in the Kansas City metro area. I’m not sure I want another extra large dog. I am torn. Perhaps another night of sleep will help me make up my mind.

Oh, and about those storms. We experienced nothing but wind and barely any rain. I never her any thunder or saw any lightning. Now, mid-afternoon on Sunday, the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. A beautiful spring day to wrap up an otherwise gloomy weekend.

Apollo and Venus

Soon after I returned home from work Tuesday evening, Terry suggested that we take Apollo to the dog park. I briefly thought of just taking Apollo for a walk around the neighborhood, but my legs kept shaking from the first workout I’d done in nearly a week. I capitulated and led Apollo out to the car on the long leather leash. We arrived at the dog park a bit after seven o’clock. We only saw four other dogs in the ‘large dogs’ side of the park. As I took Apollo off his leash, he loped over to two dogs, one of which was leashed, to make some new friends. Those two were on the way home, so that left only two other dogs to meet and greet.

We wondered around the back half of the park, strolling leisurely through the trees and watching the sun slowly sink in the west. As we continued on towards the southwest corner of the park, I remembered an article I read recently that stated I should be able to see Venus during daylight hours this week. I placed my right hand between my eyes and the sun and looked up away and to the left. For the first few minutes, I could not see Venus. But I kept trying and eventually, I found it, shining brightly more than thirty or forty degrees away from the sun, with the sun still about five degrees above the western horizon. You can estimate degrees while observing astronomical objects by using the width of your fist from top to bottom held at arm’s length, which equals about 10 degrees.

I tried to take a photo of Venus and the setting sun with my cell phone camera, but upon review, I can’t find Venus in the shot I took. I’m not entirely convinced I succeeded in getting both the planet and our sun in the same field of view. My reading glasses were in my purse in the car, so I took a leap of faith and prayed I succeeded when I clicked the shutter (or whatever virtual equivalent my cell phone camera sports). Here’s the photo, but I can’t find Venus in it:

Look for Venus later — Venus should have been in the upper left hand corner of this photo.

I tried to direct Terry to spotting Venus, but his prescription sunglasses were too dark and too out-of-date to be of much help. I sent a Tweet from my phone as soon as I found Venus and spent the next few minutes enjoying the view.

We wondered back east along the fence and met up with the other two dogs. A squirrel taunted them from a few feet away on the other side of the fence. One of the dogs, some sort of hunting breed, kept barking at the squirrel, who ignored all the dogs.

The sun began setting and we herded Apollo towards the gate. The dog park is only open from sunrise to sunset so our brief play time rapidly came to an end. We made sure Apollo got a good drink of water before loading him back into the car and returning home.

A Fool Walks a Dog

That fool would be me and the dog would be Apollo (shown at left). My back did not need to be walked (or pulled by a 90+ pound Rottweiler), but Apollo desperately needed the exercise. I woke up stiff and still sore, but not as bad as yesterday, during which I spent most of the afternoon and evening either in a recliner or in bed. I am eternally grateful to Terry for multiple applications of Icy Hot to the affected lower back area, which seems to have helped relieve the pain a bit. Once I’d had a few minutes (well, let’s be honest, more like two hours) to wake up, stretch and compose two blog posts, I had just settled down to continue reading an ebook on my Nook Color, when Apollo looked at me expectantly. I sighed, slipped on my jeans, tied on my walking shoes, slipped on my sunglasses, grabbed my cell phone and his leash and we headed out the door.

I decided to make this walk very short (especially compared to last Sunday’s hour and a quarter walk). I thought a tour of the local flora, especially the lilac bushes, would be perfect for a pleasant Sunday morning stroll. We walked in a slow loop from Olive, north along First Street, east along Nina Street, back south along Second Street, back west on Olive to First Terrace. Along the way we saw more lilace bushes, lots of tulips in a rainbow of different colors, some phlox and several flowering trees, including red buds and apple trees.

Apollo only caused my back grief once. As we approached First Street Terrace eastbound on Nina Street, a guy was walking a Spitz or Husky, slightly smaller in size than Apollo. Naturally, Apollo wanted to meet this new canine friend, but my back just couldn’t deal with the added stress of restraining all of Apollo’s determined energy. I forced him to sit and held his collar with my right hand while keeping a firm grip on the shortened leash in my left. He whined for a couple of minutes, as did the other dog, while they continued moving westbound on Nina. Apollo behaved better than he did last Sunday, but still needs some work on his obedience training.

We made it back home in about a half an hour. Apollo got his exercise. I got to see some spring flowers. For the rest of the day, this April fool is doing nothing but reading.

Just Dew It

I decided Apollo and I needed some physical therapy to deal with an entire week of rain which prevented either of us from enjoying the newly arrived spring conditions. The last time we walked happened to be exactly one week ago. To make up for six sedentary days, I decided to traverse the entire sidewalk system of West Mary Street in Lansing.

We set out at a quarter to nine and headed west from home to First Terrace, where we crossed to the other side of the street and headed north towards Olive. We passed a flowering red bud tree (see photo at right). We continued north towards Nina, where we dog-legged back west to First Street, which parallels very closely with Main Street (aka as US-73/K-7). While on Nina, a small Benji-like dog attempted to intimidate Apollo from behind a chain link fence. We’ll revisit this canine curmudgeon on the return trip.

Apollo always does well waiting to cross the busy intersection at Mary and Main Street. We proceeded west along Mary street, staying on the north sidewalk. I only spied one other person walking their much smaller dog ahead of us, but they turned onto the Town Centre boulevard that connects the terminally undeveloped land between Mary Street and 4-H Road.

West Mary Street makes several sweeping curves through the wooded hills and creeks as it meanders between Main Street on the east and DeSoto Road on the west. We passed by a muddy construction site for some additional multi-family housing, within easy walking distance of the nearly new Lansing Elementary School (in the background in the photo above).

We passed one walker and were passed by four joggers on our jaunt westward along Mary Street. I saw my first cardinal of the year, but didn’t attempt to photograph it with my cell phone. I prefer to have my good digital camera with my telephoto lens attached to photograph birds. We finally arrived at the top of the long hill, where Mary Street dead ends against DeSoto Road at a quarter after nine. I finally achieved my goal of a minimum hour long walk, since the return trip would take at least thirty minutes. I took the following three photos while letting Apollo catch his breath and cool off (being a black dog means he absorbs all the sunshine and it’s accompanying heat) from the top of the hill.

I crossed to the south sidewalk and Apollo decided he should become a hunting dog on the return trip down the hill. He foraged through the tall, wet grass, determined to pull me with him into the mud and the woods in search of deer. By the time we leveled off, his snout, paws, legs, underbelly and first third of the leather leash were soaked with dew. Several times he nearly pulled me off the sidewalk while sniffing and snuffling through the dew-drenched grass and soggy ground. I saw ample evidence of the presence of deer by the tracks they left in the mud. The wooded areas along West Mary Street team with them and I often see them emerge at dusk when Apollo and I venture out on sunset strolls.

I sighed with relief as we approached the construction site because the fence prevent Apollo from straying to far off course. The construction materials seemed to have other ideas about the fence though. The rest of our walk along Mary Street proceeded apace and without further forays into non-sidewalk environs.

We crossed back to the north sidewalk just before crossing the highway and continued back to Nina Street. Once again the Benji-like small dog charged the fence, snarling and barking and this time Apollo caught me completely off-guard. He lunged to meet and greet the dog at the fence. I temporarily suffered a wrenched left shoulder, elbow and thumb and had to scold Apollo for his un-gentleman-like behavior. I guess it’s time for some remedial obedience training with the large pinch collar instead of the small choke chain Apollo usually wears. My elbow didn’t stop aching until we crossed Olive and walked under another beautiful flowering red bud tree (see photo above).

We turned the corner east onto Fawn Valley and walked the half a block to our yard. Just one of the advantages of owning the southwest corner lot on Bambi Court. Apollo waited patiently on the porch for me to disentangle him from his leash (he set a record this walk, although I lost track of how many times) and open the door. He rushed to his water bowl and then collapsed for a nap under the table at my feet while I composed this blog post. I noted the time (ten o’clock) and took off my pedometer, which had recorded 7,695 steps (is that’s 15,390 for Apollo?) taken on our one hour and fifteen minute Sunday morning walk.

Green Men, Red Planet, Grey Lord, Black Dog

After spending a very lazy Saturday avoiding the invasion of little green men from the Emerald Isle by baking bread, reading about life under Mao in China and watching action flix, Apollo and I took a long walk Sunday morning under an increasingly gloomy overcast sky. Oddly, we saw only one other dog, which looked like a miniature version of Apollo. Only three other people were walking during the nine o’clock hour yesterday. We passed by two clocks on our walk, both of which are broken (either not telling time at all or completely incorrect in their display). Here’s a couple of shots of the clock at the north end of Lansing’s long undeveloped Town Centre street:

As Terry and I were about to leave the house in the early afternoon, my father stopped by on a surprise visit, mostly in response to a status update I Tweeted late on Saturday. He wanted the nitty gritty details concerning my success in updating my Autostar hand-held computer control device for my Meade ETX-90 telescope.

A couple of weeks ago, I had downloaded the most recent Autostar Updater software from Meade and finally remembered to attempt the hardware portion of the update. Hardware and I have a long history of adversarial confrontations. Basically, I used several different connector cables between my laptop and the Autostar device: 1) a serial to USB convert cable, 2) a proprietary Meade serial to Autostar cable (looks very similar to a phone jack, not nearly as big as RJ-45 though), 3) the Autostar cable to connect to the Meade ETX-90 and 4) a universal 12 volt transformer and power cable to supply electricity to the telescope. Once all the connections were in place and secure, I fired up the software. I did an auto-detect on all available COM ports and the software found the Autostar on COM5. Then, I instructed the software to download the most recent firmware version (43Eg … an increase of nearly 20 versions over the 26Ec firmware that came on the Autostar when I received it) from Meade and proceeded with the download to the Autostar at the astronomically miniscule data rate of 9600 baud. The update amounted to about 36 kilobytes of data. I have text files that are larger than that. It took fifteen to twenty minutes to complete the transfer. Man, has data transfer come a long ways in the last decade or two.

I gave dad the bread I had made him Saturday, as well as the Netflix envelope with The Adventures of TinTin sealed in it so he could watch that movie and then return it for me to Netflix in a second unsealed envelope I sent home with him.

Without further ado, Terry and I headed to the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library to attend a lecture and presentation by John Carter Tibbets billed as “From Africa to Mars! 100 Years of Tarzan and John Carter.” We arrived just in the nick of time and parked in the tenant parking garage, since I remembered to bring my security badge with me. I happen to work in that same building. As a result of the lecture, I decided to add the DVD of Greystoke to my Netflix queue. I remember watching it in the mid 80s, probably on a VHS tape, but decided now is the time to see it in wide-screen via DVD. I also acquired a movie poster for the John Carter movie, and other memorabilia, courtesy of Tibbets’ recent private screening of the film at a special showing to a select group of Burroughs aficionados. Tibbets closed the session with this wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis, summing up the why behind the timeless popularity of characters like John Carter and Tarzan:

To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much: he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. He ought to be as nearly as possible Everyman or Anyman.

— C.S. Lewis, On Science Fiction

On the return trip home, Terry and I detoured to Mission Med Vet to pick up Roxy‘s remains. We spent the drive home in silence, cherishing memories of her and missing her deeply.

Roxy Is Watching You!

Yes, that’s Roxy, my favorite Rottweiler, eyeballing you from my blog header photo, sporting her new pink collar.

If you squint just a bit to the right of her head, you can see an unfocused Apollo guarding her back. He’s my other favorite Rottweiler. But you can’t see his new red nearly identical collar.

Aren’t they cute?

Here’s a similar closeup of Apollo:

And because I just can’t leave well enough alone, and will change my header photograph the next time I take a nifty photograph, here’s the photo I used to crop the shot above from:

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