Goodbye Sasha

Sasha, 2000-2011
Today, my dog Sasha passed away. She is the only dog I've ever had in my life, and biased as I am, I think it's safe to say she is now up in the creme de la creme of doggie heaven that they reserve for the best of the best pets out there.

There will be no right words to describe the sadness and loss I feel - the sense of yet another chapter of my childhood coming to an end - but I would like to spend this moment dwelling not on sadness, but on celebration of a wonderful animal who blessed my life for ten years.

I spent the better part of my youth wanting a dog. It took a family trip to Arizona and a long weekend spent with my aunt and uncle's wonderful Rhodesian ridgeback, Riley, to convince my mom that not all dogs drool and shed and are otherwise awful. I spent the entire car ride back to Kansas borrowing familiar tunes and rewriting the lyrics to describe why I wanted/needed/deserved a dog, and howling them aloud from the backseat. ("99 reasons I want a dog, 99 reasons that I want a dog..." You get the idea.)

The dog search process was long and arduous, but eventually the three of us - my parents and I - agreed on a breed. After falling in love with a friend's silver standard poodle, we opted for the same. Sasha was born in October 2000, a black ball of fur.


She loved learning tricks, wrestling, tearing stuffed animals to shreds, and playing soccer with me in my kitchen; I'd score by getting a deflated soccer ball into our mud room, and she'd score by grabbing the ball in her teeth and dashing into her kennel with it. After each point, we'd drop the ball again in the middle of the kitchen and start another round.


She was a smarty pants from day one. Eager to have a dog that might someday make it to the bigtime (this was pre-Youtube, but I had such aspirations for my puppy), I worked relentlessly to teach her tricks: the usual repertoire of sit, stay, shake, roll over, all that - but bonus ones, too, like wave, crawl, the infamous "back away" (see video below), and to ring a bell with her paw when she needed to go outside. Bright as she was, she started abusing that last trick in her teenage years...a squirrel outside in the yard, and Sasha would be rushing to go ring her bell.

Here's a couple of my little cousins playing with her at a family reunion years ago.




She was wonderful with kids - patient, friendly. She was a big fan of pulling her own stunts, though. Her favorite trick was with strangers at the dog park, trotting over with her frisbee or tennis ball and dropping it at their feet. "Aww, how sweet!" the stranger would think and bend down to pick up the toy. Just as their fingertips would reach it though, BOOM there was Sasha, pouncing back on the toy in a playful and defiant "Ha, gotcha!" sort of maneuver. She'd shake her toy ferociously back and forth in her mouth, drop it on the ground again, back up several steps, and sit innocently looking up at the stranger with her smiling eyes, waiting to do it all over again.

I've always had backwards pets, in that my cats are the cuddly, needy ones, while Sasha the dog was always an independent soul. She never slept on my bed like I always dreamt a dog would - but she did like to hang out. She always wanted to be in the same room as us, whether in her kennel, on her bean bag, tucked into a cabinet when she could still fit inside one, stalking the cat, or getting into some other kind of mischief.






Sasha saw our family through many transitions in our lives. She came on many road trips and family vacations; she loved traveling in the car. She knew three different cats that graced our family over the years. She's also seen me through three significant relationships; there are home videos of me and Mike playing with her as a young dog still, videos of Daniel doing tricks with her, and videos I made for Alan when I first met him and wanted to share with him from afar my beloved dog. She stuck with my dad when the other two ladies in his life moved out of the house, and carried him through what were probably some of the toughest times in his life.

Check out her mad skills: (okay, the "bow" is pretty half-assed, but cut a girl some slack; she was excited about those treats.)


She was truly an amazing dog. Thank you, Sasha, for a decade of delight, and may you rest in peace. I will love you and cherish your memory always.

Trekking with a pooch + Meteor-watching with wild pigs

HIKE #4: WEST TIGER MOUNTAIN


Seattleites love dogs. They're everywhere. People hike with their dogs, swim with them in the lake, take them into stores, sit with them on the sidewalk outside of cafes. Of the six units in my apartment building, which technically disallows dogs, two managed to talk our landlord into keeping one anyway.

Every time I'm out running or hiking in the mountains, I'm a little jealous of the people who are hiking with dogs. I still remember reading an article in Runner's World maybe 5 or 6 years ago about the ultrarunner Scott Jurek, and how he'd go for epic long runs in the mountains with his husky, Tonto. (On a sidenote, the article also discussed his making a home in Seattle, working at a local running store, and cooking delicious vegan food all the time. Upon reading the article, I remember thinking to myself, I want this guy's life! It's kind of cool now that we live in the same neighborhood in Seattle and overlapped at the Orcas Island run back in February.) Anyway - the problem, of course, is that there's no way my current lifestyle would allow for a dog. Some days, I leave for work by 8 in the morning, and between jobs, don't get home again until 11 at night. Not a dog-bladder-friendly schedule, by any means.

Likewise, I think it's really cool that people don't let having babies keep them from getting out into the mountains; I love the kid carrier backpacks, and how happy and engaged the little toddlers look as they get to go for a slow ride through the forest. I will strive to be that kind of parent someday. But of course, no dogs or small children for now; in the meantime, my only hiking companions are other grown up humans, when we can coordinate our work schedules.


Happily, this week, though, my friend James called me up with an awesome proposition: he's dogsitting for the week and wanted to take his dogsitting charge, an adorable lab/border collie mix named Ruby, for a hike. Elodie and I had made late evening dinner plans on the eastside for that evening, so it worked out well for James, Ruby, and I to do a nice local hike on the eastside, then meet up with Elodie for dinner (giant avocado bacon burgers at Red Robin, YUM) afterward.


Yes, it was everything I dreamed it would be.

The sunset rocked, too:


Miles: 7.5

HIKE(ish) #5: THE PERSEIDS


This one wasn't really a hike, but I'm enjoying my blog's temporary foray into hike-chronicling, so I'll keep the format. Last night around midnight, the annual Perseids meteor shower peaked. It's always the second week of August, and traditionally, my aunt and uncle host a big stargazing/meteor-watching party and campout on their land. I'd forgotten about the meteor shower this year, until Brant brought it up at work yesterday and mentioned that he'd rented out a bivy sack, with no plans whatsoever except the general thought that it'd be cool to go sleep somewhere away from the city's light pollution and watch for falling stars.

The big deal this year is that we've just had a new moon a couple nights ago. "Moonless Perseids" only happen once every three years - but the absence of moonlight makes a big difference in terms of how many stars are visible with the naked eye. Although I had a late tutoring lesson last night yesterday and had been dreaming through my whole workday about getting a long night of sleep in my wonderful bed, I was intrigued by Brant's plans. Although neither of us knew exactly where to go to watch for meteors, Cam popped out of the woodwork at the opportune moment to contribute a suggestion. He reappeared moments later with a printed Google map and a hand-drawn dotted line snaking all over country roads between Redmond and Fall City, with a little star marking "Da Spot" which he recommended for us.

Come 10 p.m. last night, Brant and I set out for the country. Again, I felt amazed at how easy it is in Washington to move between vastly different landscapes in a short span of time. You can literally go from beach to mountains to city to suburbs to rural farms, all in the span of an hour's drive. It didn't take us long to get completely away from city lights. With my sun roof open, we cruised winding country roads in search of the perfect place to lay out our bivy sacks and sleeping bags.


We found it. We had it all to ourselves. We had flat ground to lie on and a panoramic view of the night sky that included thousands upon thousands of stars. I could hardly even find the big dipper, because I'm so unaccustomed to several hundred stars being visible inside of the dipper, too. The meteors were pretty spectacular - at least one every couple of minutes, and sometimes two or three right in a row, almost criss-crossing each other in the sky. We had great snacks.


At some point, there was a fairly loud chorus of snorting and grunting from the other side of the tall row of blackberry bushes we'd lay out sleeping bags next to. Brant was off exploring on his own, and my sympathetic nerve system seriously kicked in at the idea of some wild animal being out there in the darkness. Brant had heard it even from where he was, probably fifty yards away, but we concluded that it was probably just a little piggy at the farm next to which we'd camped out.

Finally around 2 a.m. or so, I dropped off to sleep. Woke up at 6 to Brant tromping around in the sea of fog that had come in overnight. (The sky was completely clear for the duration of our meteor-watching...a miracle!) I got up, and we walked around a little bit, plucked fresh blackberries off the bushes, and picked up where our conversations had left off the night before as we dropped off to sleep.


Overall, a great success.


Breakfast!
Miles: .5ish

Total Mileage so far: 30.5 (of 100)
Total Funds Raised so far: $170 (of $300)

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Brewskis, beaches and bargains

So, the big event of last weekend was a barbecue that Seyeon and I hosted for her co-workers at Gregg's Cycle. A bunch of them rolled up to the house on two wheels throughout the evening for burgers and brewskis and bike talk - it was neat to meet all of them and enjoy good food and great summer night weather.


The past week has been a lot more of the job searching business (again, scared to jinx things by blogging about specifics - but hopefully soon I'll have something for sure to show for all this agonizing waiting?), learning my way around more, getting together with Lucinda (yay!) from high school, doing a couple writing assignments for the magazine and house/dogsitting for a wonderful flat-coated retriever named Xochi who's quickly become my best doggy friend in this city...


We've taken to going swimming together in the mornings or evenings in Lake Washington - a beautiful, tiny rock beach tucked away in a residential neighborhood nearby. He's a great swimmer and takes immense joy in paddling around me in tight circles with his tennis ball. I've also gotten to know many of the neighbors with dogs at the local park, and had some nice talks with locals and other Seattle transplants who, like me, visited here once upon a time and were convinced they wanted to live here. Anyway, the swimming hole is beautiful, with great views of the mountains and downtown Bellevue - hopefully I can post some pictures soon!

In other sporty news, Seyeon and her mom and their 86-year-old neighbor Millie and I all went kayaking on Monday. We paddled for several hours, riding the wakes of passing tugboats and stopping in the shade to snack on Rainier cherries - hands down, the tastiest cherries I've ever eaten! It was a blast.

Lastly, this morning, I got together with a guy named Kam whom I met at the Oberlin alumni picnic last week. He graduated back in the eighties and we'd had a great time comparing notes on Oberlin and exchanging stories at the picnic - so today, he took me around in his fantastic little '86 Fiat convertible to cruise yard sales all morning in Seattle's different neighborhoods.


I passed on the 1-dollar bra box...


...but for $8.50, (Mama, again, are you reading this? Alan told me I had to write about all this on my blog because he knew it would make my mother proud!) I procured the following: a set of brand new, adorable espresso cups and saucers, an unopened Cranium game, an unopened 1,000-piece puzzle, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, a beautiful ornate candle holder, three bottles of bubbles and bubble-blowing paraphernalia, three bars of French soap, a package of incense from India, and probably the most exciting useless purchase of all: a set of holographic-cat-and-dog playing cards. + A Saturday morning well spent with a new friend, cruising sunny, tree-lined Seattle with the roof down and the wind in my hair!


Days in Seattle with no rain yet: 17