Manipulation tactics

Shaun and I were talking about manipulation last night.  It’s interesting how we all do it unconsciously and even children learn it very early – like in the first few months of life.  We have three children, three large dogs, two cats, and two diamond doves and all but one regularly manipulate us to get what they want. All but one step up their tactics or try aggression when manipulation doesn’t work.

That makes the one abnormal.  It’s really strange to see such blatant honesty lived out and she really doesn’t realize she’s atypical.  The one is our Great Dane, Nola.  All the other babies, human and fur, have manipulation tactics that range from playing coy, buttering you up, trying to get on your good side, using the sandwich effect*, and all the way up to blatant con-man tricks.  Ernie uses the whore tactic – make you think you’re the most wonderful thing in the world until he’s successfully stolen what’s on your plate and sampled your drink too.  Abbie stares and begs.  Cali pretends she’s dumb (she’s got the dumb act down PERFECT) then when you least expect it, she goes for what she wants.  Spooks has us all convinced that HE’S the master of the house and we should bring him gifts and attention.  Even the birds manipulate you – they repeat your coos and fluff up and act happy.  They know happy people give good things.  However, forget to pay attention or give them a millet spray, your ass is getting pelted with birdseed until you do it.

Nola just really is that happy.  I’ve read that about other Great Dane’s too – that they’re abnormally goofy and happy.  They want their people to be goofy and happy too… apparently so they can pretend to be lapdogs  and get hugs.  Nola LOVES hugs more than anything else.  She’ll come up, stand up on her hind legs so she can wrap her front legs around you and lay her head on your chest.  When she sees me or Shaun be grumpy, she looks so confused.  Like “what the hell?  You must need a hug.”

I’ve met other dogs who were just as happy but they were “touched in the head” as my Granny would say.  They aren’t all that bright and that’s ok too – there are plenty of dog lovers who love those big lugs.  We like dogs who solve problems and think for themselves.  This is a mixed blessing though – we end up with dogs who think up ways to get out of the fenced in yard.

But normally thinking dogs are more serious and sober.  Nola is neither serious nor sober.  Last night, Abbie was laying at my feet while I crocheted.  Actually, she layed UNDER my feet so that the soles of my feet were resting on her back.  Nola wanted me to play and I kept telling her no – the kids were in bed and to go lay down.  She laid down and then army crawled over right next to Abbie and set her head right ON TOP of my feet.  She rolled her eyes  up at me like “haha.”  Then she pounced me and wiggled her big but into my lap and tried to curl up.  Shaun tried to explain relative size to her but she just grinned at him.

* The sandwich effect is a business tactic.  If you have bad news or a message that will be responded to negatively, find two positive messages to sandwich the bad message in.

Big dog

I just put up a new flickr set, showing step by step how to play with a big dog.  Featuring Nola, the giant twit, our youngest puppy.  She’s a Great Dane/German Shepherd mix and is the most wonderful dog.

She’s got a propensity for escape, hence the Orvis collar.  It’s got Shaun’s cell number on it in REALLY BIG NUMBERS so that which ever neighbor finally catches her can call us.  This isn’t hard because Nola loves people.  Her trademark stunt is to run at you full speed so that you shit your pants, then perform a dive-roll over onto your feet with her legs stuck straight up in the air.  She then makes big dog smiles to get you to rub her tummy.

Our neighbors call saying they “found” our dog but never seem to feel put out that they are now restraining a 70 lb dog.  Nola really is that much of a pleasure and she really is that adorable.  People are like “oh, it’s no problem! She’s such a sweet dog!”   The guy who caught her on Saturday said “you can tell she’s a runner with all those muscles.”  Yeah – there’s seriously no fat on that dog unlike our other two barrel butts.  I worry that people think we don’t feed her because she’s so lean, but the vet is happy with her weight and size, so we’re happy too.  If we fed her any more, we’d be going through a 50 lb bag of dog food every week.

Nola is a pound puppy – she was turned in to the shelter because she was too big.   That makes me wonder what people really expected when they adopt a Great Dane mix… she’s even on the small side for a Dane.  Did they not expect a puppy with paws the size of a dinner plate to, I don’t know, grow?

When Abbie was lost for that awful week and we were scouring the shelters every day, I was walking through the large dog room and saw Nola.  She jumped up on the bars, even though she’d been in the pound for a while, and licked me through the chain-link.  How can you resist that?  I just couldn’t leave her there even though it felt like a betrayal to Abbie.  God works wonders though – it was Nola’s scent in the back yard that brought Abbie back.  I looked out the window over the yard and saw them sitting nose to nose across the fence.   Abbie was covered in tar and ticks and was so dehydrated she could hardly move – but she had to know who was in her back yard.  That’s another story for another day, but I’d really like for you to enjoy the pictures above.

A common phrase in our house is “if you weren’t so damn cute…”

Deep Thoughts

Hopefully I have at least 5 deep thoughts for you tonight.

1.  It’s impossible to own a human being but we use “ownership” pronouns constantly.  My kids.  My mom.  Your dad.  Our parents.  My husband.  We simply lease relationships with people until we are seperated.

2.  On the other hand, the law sees animals as property.   Not all animals are meat on the hoof… but still we “own” our companion animals.

3.  Being at the dentist at 8 am is not my idea of fun.  However, the children’s dentist is really cool and they give “candy air” to the kids.  It makes them very funny for about an hour, especially when it starts to wear off.  Alyssa says “Mommy, my feet tickle all by themselves!”

4.  6 oz birds should not be able to rule your life, but somehow, Pete and Cami certainly think they own me.  They’ll have to fight Spooks, Ernie, and Abbie for ownership.  Nola’s happy just being my friend and Calista is interested in the flavor of my chapstick. I need to remind them that they only reason they aren’t food is because they’ll never be big enough to stuff.

5.  My The kids who live in my house have an absolutely 0% chance of being normal.  Ever.  Their mom’s idea of fun is to freak up the makeup, strap on the camera, go to the aquarium and remind the freak-sized spider crabs that they taste good with butter and take pictures of the shocked faces.  It works even better when you have about 6 adorable kids with you who look absolutely innocent.  The oldest gets to hold the camera.

6.  Bonus thought!  No matter how odd my life is, I’m still shocked that the local supermarket is giving away a free watermelon with every purchase.  Things you don’t expect from your cashier:  would you like a free watermelon?  A what?  A watermelon.  Say that again.  WATERMELON.  It’s free – pick one up on your way out.

7.  Bonus thought!  Every single person I know objectifies my “ghetto bootie” and I kind of like it.  One of my friends who is from Haiti said “you know your daddy ain’t white, right?”  the very first time we met.  Not-so-secretly, I love that.  It’s like the only physical feature I have that seperates me from the crowd of average height, average weight, pink toned women.

Time to pick one of my three new books and get in the tub.  I should be able to sleep in tomorrow, thankyouJesus!  I get to choose from Laurell K. Hamilton, Michael Palmer, and Catherine Coulter’s TailSpin.  The first two are guaranteed to rock.  The last one is not so sure… I’m about to reevaluate my love of Ms. Coulter.  The last few have been just exploiting her bestseller name.  I’ll keep TABLP updated on THAT relationship.

4th of July aka if this neighborhood kid doesn’t stop with that firecracker…

When I was a little, little kid we lived in Pensacola between the Air Force base and the Navy base.  I’m from a mixed marriage:  Mom was active Navy and Dad was active Air Force.  They met in school while training to be meteorologists for their prospective fields of duty and married over Christmas leave 6 weeks after they met.  So Pensacola is a good a place as any because the bases are only about 70 miles apart and we lived in the middle in a little apartment complex.

Northern Florida is much like southern Georgia: it’s populated by a whole lot of stupid white people.  The whole upper half of GA is metro Atlanta but there’s a line right around the Macon area where you enter the twilight zone of the South.  We’re not just talking gun-toting conservative Christian racists – we’re talking about flatland and swamp folks whose general education level is around the 4th grade.  Around cities or military bases, it’s better, but still – there’s a reason we drive straight through the night when we go to FL (southeastern part.)  That reason is that people from the interstate are only good for two things:  buying pecans and advertising the greased pig festival so that you can sell em more pecans.

I know a lot of people who love south GA and northern FL, but hey, I’m a mountain girl.  I don’t trust flat places and if you’ve got to drive more than 30 minutes to reach the closest Wal-Mart, you’re too far out in the sticks.

Back on topic:  we lived in Pensacola and while base towns are normally more diverse, you still have asshole rednecks with guns and too much liquor.  You get those folks everywhere, they’re just called different things.  At this point, I’m about 3 years old and my brother was a baby and Mom had just sat us all down for dinner on the 4th of July.  Next thing you know, a bullet comes down through the ceiling and lands in the middle of the kitchen table.  Turned out one of our hell-raising neighbors decided to shoot off his .22 pistol in celebration of being free for another year.  This is not a good idea!

I have no idea what happens next.  This is the part of the story where my mom’s voice trails off and you get the idea that my Dad probably returned that bullet to its owner by shoving it straight up his ass.

Every July right about this time of year, we heard this story and as a kid, you start to duck when you hear firecrackers.  This is doubly true when you realize that until 2 years ago, any sort of firework or firecracker was illegal in the state of GA.  People would drive out of state to buy em, but still, it was a precious commodity and you only set em off after dark on the 4th when every one else was too.  Otherwise, setting off a firecracker was about the quickest way to have a handful of cops on your front porch and a whole lot of pissed off neighbors.

Firecrackers still startle me, but now that we live on the edge of some private hunting land, it’s not as bad.  We normally hear a couple of rifle shots a day during hunting season and during the summer, we hear the race cars down at Road Atlanta and Lanier Raceway.  Imports at Road ATL during the day, hot rods at Lanier Raceway at night.  In the spring, you hear the cows making their mating calls from a few properties away.  The mountains have a way of amplifying sounds, so we get it all, and it all becomes background noise.

We moved here exactly 9 years ago over the 4th of July weekend.  It’s a nice little starter-home community where you have an actual piece of land located in between two major interstates but it’s still out in the country enough to not be right on top of people.  It was a quiet little place in the very back of a quiet neighborhood with quiet neighbors who liked quiet things.  Now, there’s a school right across the street and a whole lot of development in every direction.  That means a whole lot of people who moved in around the same time we did either moved out of county or moved into one of the hundred McMansion subdivisions where you could reach out your window and touch your neighbor’s house.   Our direct neighbors are nice enough, but a few houses down some people with teenage boys moved in.

Teenage boys have two paths in life:  they either have something to do or they terrorize the neighborhood.  Apparently, these folks couldn’t find their kids something to do, so we have been terrorized.  Our house and cars have been egged, they’ve thrown stuff at our dogs (after coming onto OUR property where our dogs are fenced in), they ride up and down the streets at all hours on a 4 wheeler, and generally act like little ass-hats.

And now fireworks are legal in GA.

These boys are about to have a Come to Jesus moment if they don’t stop with the firecrackers.  It started about a week ago and they scare the shit out of our oldest dog.  Abbie, our German Shepherd/Lab mix was abused as a puppy with cigarettes so anything that smells like smoke scares the living shit out of her.  Shaun couldn’t even get in the bed last night because she crawled in the bed on his side and glued herself to me and just shook all night, even after she got her puppy chill pills.  Cali and Nola don’t like the firecrackers either, but they’d rather bark at the little shithead than hide behind me.

Last year, they shot off one of those little bottle rocket things and it hit one of our trees during a motherfucking drought!  At least ammo is so scarce these days, none of our local crazies decided to shoot off their guns last night.  The crazies are probably the only ones with ammo since they’re stocking up for the apocalypse, forming a militia, and are ready to defend their homeland from terrorists.

Someone forgot to tell them that their two little teenage twits are the only terrorists I’ve met in our little corner of suburbia.  I ought to just put the dogs on a leash and walk down there to remind them that their good, quiet neighbors would appreciate them not spooking the cattle.

If I get really pissed off, I’ll let the dogs poop in their yard.  What do you think?  It may just be better to invite them over for beer and then throw the cats at em when they least expect it.

I have a pet, and I got it myself.

I don’t know whose great idea it was to give out “bug aquariums” with kids meals, but now each of my little sociopaths in training have one.  It’s not one of those ecologically friendly toys that look like colorful cricket cages that come with tongs and a tiny vaccuum powered thingy.   It’s a fully plastic “garden” with a clear dome that covers the little flat bottom.  It clicks closed like a makeup compact.

Not only does it look like the only bug it is capable of catching is the dead bug, it looks like any bug that did get caught would soon end up dead from suffocation.  It’s one of those toys you give your kids expecting them to catch a rock or at least promptly lose.  You never expect them to follow the directions and actually catch a live insect.

It’s only slightly less creepy than this.

My daughter, Alyssa, is particularly bad with pets.  I don’t know if it’s because she’s a tomboy or if she’s just that self-centered but she considers pets to be toys that don’t need foolish stuff like batteries.  She doesn’t realize they are ALIVE.  Our family is full of pets so we’ve been trying to teach her some compassion to the four-leggers and non-mamallian animals that live with us.

First, there was a fish named George.  George’s original name (from Alyssa) was Fish Piss.  After I got over that little bit of brain shock, we decided to name him after Curious George.   He had to move out of her room when she poured so much food in his bowl that the poor little guy couldn’t swim once the freeze-dried flakes puffed up.  The second time he had to move out (after much begging and pleading) was when she used the water from his bowl to supply her tea party. Repeat this scenario a couple more times before George bailed ship on his fishbowl and his corpse has never been located.

Teaching her compassion finally got laid by the roadside and now we’re just preaching “leave the animals alone.  Don’t interfere in their ecological setting.”  People ask the kids all the time “do you have pets?”  I don’t know why people talk to my kids, and I also don’t know why “do you have pets?” is such a common question.  It just is.

Ethan will start to talk about the cats and dogs.  Alyssa will yell over him “Mommy said I can’t have a pet because I’m mean to them.  She says maybe when I’m 6 we can try again.”  She’s really upset that I won’t provide her with an endless supply of living entertainment.

Back to the bug catcher.  I allowed her to keep it really because I was sick and Shaun took the kids out to eat and that’s what they came home with.  The next reason was that I didn’t consider the fact she’d catch something.

Cue Alyssa, proudly marching up to me like she’s just beat me at the world’s hardest game and she’s clutching the prize with a death grip.  “What you got?”  I asked.

“A pet.”

“What kind of pet?”

“It’s a fly.  I know you said you wouldn’t get me any more pets, so I went and got my OWN.”

“Is the fly alive?”

“I got my own pet and you have nothing to do with it.”

“Is the fly ALIVE?”  I’m trying to ignore the fact that she’s rubbing my face in the fact that mom’s have nothing to do with the raising of five year olds.

At this point Shaun, who has been examining it with a boy’s curiosity for all things trapped in tiny plastic cases declared that it was alive.

“Honey, do you know that bugs can’t live in there for long, right?”

No answer.

“The fly won’t live for long, baby.  Maybe we should take it outside and let it go.”

At this point, the soon to be insect coffin in clutched to her chest.  “No, he’s going to be my pet.”

She marched past me and set him on her shelf in a place of honor.  Shaun is so helpful at this point.  “If he dies, it’s ok.  We’ll just feed him to Ernie.  Ernie likes dead flies.”  Cue the chorus of EWWWWWs.

I have a feeling that I should be disturbed my daughter has a (possibly) dead fly in a plastic box in her room, but really I just want to teach her about Schrödinger’s cat. That would lead to nasty explanations of quantum mechanics and philosophy. I’m sure that her first words on the topic would be “this cannot be a quantum test because there’s a WINDOW into the box.  You can’t have an illustration of quantum potential when you can tell whether the fly is alive or dead.”

She, of course, would be right and have more ammo to feel superior to my old-school education.  The school year will be quite interesting with Singapore math and dual-immersion language studies.  She may very quickly surpass my skills.  I’ll just have to go old school and hack her computer terminal to play random Schoolhouse Rock videos.

I wonder if finding evidence of things that one can do with a dead fly will persuade her to flush it down the toilet and use the little aquarium the way it should be used – as a mold for the sand box.