People suck

This dog didn't have a name, at least not one that we knew. We didn't give her one because we knew how this was probably going to end.

She was wandering around the parking lot of our complex the other day, howling and crying and scared, but not hurt. No collar, no tag, no microchip.

And nobody looking for her. We put up flyers, told the neighborhood vet and pet store, but nobody called. She was about a year old, part lab and part pit bull - couldn't walk on the leash but could have learned. Not aggressive. A good girl.

She deserved a home, but we couldn't give her one. We're already over the limit for dogs in our town house, and since she could have snapped any one of our wimpy dogs in two without even thinking about it, we couldn't let her inside with them anyway. She didn't like being in our tiny yard by herself, but she got a safe place to sleep for a little while and several bowls of food. She whined a little, but no more than I would have.

There are lots of dog lovers in our area, but everyone with room for a foster already had one, or more. Both of our area Humane Society shelters were full. The pit bull rescue was full. Everybody was full. There were four flyers up at the pet shop looking for homes for identical dogs as this one.

Maybe we could have kept her longer. Maybe we should have kept her longer. But we've kept a lot of foster dogs more adoptable than her in the past, for weeks or months sometimes. That wasn't an option, and probably wouldn't have worked. She didn't really have a chance.

So she didn't get one. The same thing happened to a few hundred other dogs just in Atlanta on the same day. Lots of them were good dogs too.

She deserved a home and a name, but she didn't get either. It feels like our fault, but it's not. Somebody didn't bother to get her mother fixed, and didn't bother to take care of the puppies that resulted.

That person sucks.

Back from BC

I last left you, my faithful reader, with a few pictures from Whistler. Seems a long time ago, so I'll spare you the blow by blow of the rest of the Canadian odyssey. The short version: from Whistler we drove a few hours through the Canadian outback, stopping only to ogle several waterfalls and to acquire sustenance in the form of some unexpectedly yummy Chinese food in Middleofnowhere, British Columbia.

We got to our whitewater rafting camp early Saturday evening, which turns out to be a potentially difficult time to find any peace and quiet in nature. This being a summer Saturday night, our campmates consisted of four separate stag parties. I couldn't ever tell any of them apart, all I know is one of the groups of guys was sitting around the campfire with us and really doing, I think, an admirable job of
sharing their feelings with each other, particularly on the topic of the various sexual acts each had performed with the others' mothers and sisters. One of the other groups brought their own DJ and sound system with them to hold a dance party in the camp with no evident concern for the lateness of the hour nor the stupidity of holding a dance party in the woods with only a bunch of guys.

Fortunately, the rafting trip the next day on the Nahatlach River was awesome, about seven kilometers (I'm feeling very international!) of class III and IV whitewater with basically no breaks between rapids, followed by two kilometers at the end of solid class Vs. No calamities on our raft, though the raft behind us flipped on one of the falls, which we learned only when they came down the river upside down with three of their paddlers clinging to the bottom of their upturned boat (the others popped up out of the water unharmed).


That night around the campfire made up for the annoyances of the previous. The campground was hosting a singer-songwriter symposium that opened that evening, and we were able to convince a few of them to join us and play for us for a while. One was a grizzled old cowboy from Vancouver Island and the other was a young urban hipster with a very different vibe and style, but despite the fact that they had only met a couple of hours earlier they played together wonderfully, and both had written some very good songs and seemed happy to talk about them, which is also always fun.

We spent a day getting back to Vancouver and another day hoofing it around the city, bicyling through Stanley Park and marveling at the massive amounts of construction being done in preparation for the 2010 Olympics. We stumbled upon a beautiful dog beach that looked like tremendous fun for the hounds and really made us want to move there, until we remembered that we have three Shelties that all despise being either wet or sandy.

The day after we got back from British Columbia Leslie's folks came down to visit from Asheville, in time to take in the last game of a Braves-Cubs series (they're big Cubs fans). It was fun, though my continuing wonder at how many people give a crap about baseball was compounded by the frequent use of a zombie-like, cultish back-and-forth arm motion employed by Braves fans called the Tomahawk Chop or something like that, which evidently is used to point out obvious points such as "someone on our team has just done something better than someone on your team" to nobody in particular in an allegedly intimidating fashion. Since they kept doing it even as the Braves were four or five runs behind, it was hard to see it as terribly effective.

Whistler does grow on you after a while. It's as plastic as can be, but there's so much to do here that it's nice that there are tons of good restaurants and breweries and patios all right together so you don't have to haul yourself too far once you're done with whatever you're doing. We've been hiking, biking and kayaking and we finished up this evening with a zip line through the old-growth coastal forest above us here in Wistler Village. Tomorrow we'll go and explore the gold rush territory between here and the Nahatlatch River that we'll run on Sunday and then head back toward Vancouver.

The video doesn't do the zipline justice - it's a little hard to stay straight and upright. But it's a hell of a way to see the forest!

Whistler Mountain

Made it to Whistler

It's always fascinating traveling to foreign lands and immersing yourself in an unfamiliar culture. Take here, British Columbia. When we got off the plane there was a line of natives in the waiting area to welcome us to their land. Some of them held signs inviting visitors to travel with them. As we walked we saw that there were shopkeepers and places to get food lining the corridors of the airport offering traditional Canadian delicacies like hamburgers and pizza. Strangely, we found that the people who were staffing the customs line and the rent-a-car desk provided lackluster service, which is obviously unheard of in the United States. It was really eye-opening to see how other peoples on this vast, diverse globe live.

We drove straight from Vancouver to Whistler, stopping in Squamish for dinner. Whistler will be the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics and it will be perfect for that - it's basically a Disneyland for skiing, a whole perfect Alpine village made from scratch without any real hint of authenticity. Which is fine, we're here for the outdoor activities, and there are tons here. The plan for tomorrow is hiking on Whistler Mountain the morning, kayaking in the afternoon on the River of Golden Dreams and then a trip to Brandywine Falls before sunset. I think we'll do a rafting trip on the Elaho and Squamish rivers Friday. Saturday we drive up further into the mountains for a couple of nights to do a run on the Nahatlach River, and then back to Vancouver to look around for a couple of days before coming home.

Oh, Canada

You can't get far with a U.S. dollar overseas these days, but apparently we can make it as far as Vancouver, which is where we're off to for the next week. Normally when we're gone for so long at a stretch after a few days we end up worrying about our dogs who get just a twice-a-day visit, and since we moved to Atlanta we also get to worry the whole time about break-ins. None of that this time, thanks to a friend of our's who will be moving in as a full-time house-sitter. She's a cat person herself, but she's under strict instructions not to let on.

Now I just get to worry about Homeland Security confiscating the laptop I use for work on our way back across the border...

Atlanta Botanical Gardens

Spent the afternoon at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens today, after deciding that it may well be 95 degrees outside for the rest of time, so we might as well brave it.
It's about the right size, maybe an hour and a half worth of gardens - too much more than that is too much for me. But they've got a great installation of kinetic sculptures that bob and sway and rotate in the wind.

We're off to spend a week in British Columbia this week - flying into Vancouver, then spending a couple of days in Whistler, a couple of days whitewater rafting in the Canadian Rockies and then a couple of days back in the city before flying home. We've been on a brief visit to Victoria and Leslie has been to Vancouver before on busines, but we're looking forward to a relaxing week. We'll enjoy it more because a friend will be housesitting for us, which is better for security and gives the dogs somebody to pat them on their heads for more than a few minutes a day, which is probably all they get from the dog sitter.