coffeefog

So. Hello. Nice to see you again. I’ve been taking my sweet time before I got back to blogging here at coffeefog. But it’s not my fault - see, all of a sudden blogging became pretentious. And I was like, “oh, shit, I need to lay low on the blogger front until this blows over.” I did not even wear my “Blogger” sweatshirt. But fuck it - I just got a dog and I need the internet to coo over this cuddly little silky terrier as much as everybody we see on the street does. So without further adieu, meet our 4 year old silky terrier Ella. Emily and I adopted her from Wonder Dog Rescue yesterday, and she’s settled into a nice pattern of sleeping on the couch all day and glaring at us when we wake her up. She is simply a laid back animal. Way cool.

Except you see, before we adopted the new dog Ella we took a vacation to Buenos Aires. And do you know what Buenos Aires is all about? Stray cats. I discovered this in the Recoleta cemetery, where there’s a rather large feral cat population.

Say hi to ella again! She’s cute. And a bit of a lap dog. Central Valley animal control picked her up roaming free in Modesto. They had to shave off a few inches of matted fur, hence the scraggly little monster you see here. In 6 months she’ll probably look something like this, once her hair grows in. I will look like such a dork walking around with a dog like that.

Buenos Aires!

One funny thing about our time in Buenos Aires is that the infrastructure was crumbling by American big city standards, so much so that we’d immediately feel edgy walking amongst sidewalks of rubble and very run-down buildings. But our perceptions were wrong - the visible decay in Buenos Aires wasn’t indicative of danger at all, we eventually felt pretty damn safe everywhere we walked, even at 2am.

To be clear, we are food tourists. Our goal, our purpose, was to eat as much delicious food as Buenos Aires had to offer. I had the best beef I’ve ever had in my life at a neighborhood grill (parilla, pronounced par-eee-sha (they pronounce LL as a SH noise. go figure.)) for about $10. We ate a fancy meal in a hip gourmet restaurant, with wine, for $80 for the two of us. I’d call that easily a $250 - $300 meal in the US. And the next day we had 50 cent empanadas. Such things delight us to no end.

Dinner starts around 9 or 9:30PM in Buenos Aires. We regularly didn’t eat until 11PM or midnight - it made it much easier for us to never leave Pacific Standard Time. If you’re used to going to bed at 4am on vacation, it’s very easy to get back to a sleep at midnight schedule once you factor in the 5 hour time difference.

Buenos Aires has an innumerable quantity of feral cats living in the public parks. I took several nighttime shots through the iron fences, like this one. Imagine walking 6 blocks along a tall iron fence, and every 10 feet there’s a new cluster of wild cats sitting 5-15 feet away from the fence. Most of them were acclimated to humans and more than willing to come check if we had any food.

And of course, Mr. Otto. Regular readers of coffeefog will know that Otto stayed with us for 6 weeks as a “medical foster” from the SF SPCA in october and november. Unfortunately the little man caught distemper when he was 3-4 months old. Distemper attacks a dog’s immune system, and is usually fatal. Otto got lucky (unlike several of his litter mates), but with it came 2 months of isolation while he remained contagious, most of which he spent at our house. In his time here he managed to pickup a couple of new contagious dog diseases - ringworm & demodex. oops! We fear that his immune system is forever compromised due to his young exposure to distemper, but only time will tell.

We returned Otto to the SPCA in early November, before we travelled to Buenos Aires. It was certainly hard for both of us to hand Otto back. But ultimately, Otto is an energetic 7 month old and much harder for us to deal with that Ella, the laid back sleepy 4 year old.

Freakin’ homeless cats. everywhere.

Another homeless cat mugging for the camera in the back-alleys of the Recoleta Cemetery. Did you know Evita Peron is buried there? Do you know what everybody’s going to do with all the pictures they took of her tomb when they get home? I’m guessing “not so much.” So on vacation, and in general, I make it a point not to take pictures of things that everybody else is taking pictures of. Sadly I could not stop Emily from grabbing the camera from me and taking a couple of shots of Evita’s tomb.

So far we know this about Ella:

• Ella weighs 8 pounds and needs to gain 1 pound

• When they shaved off Ella’s matted hair, they shaved down her whiskers. This concerned me, but a quick google tells us that it’s OK for her. Certain breeds regularly get their whiskers trimmed/cut during grooming, and they do in fact grow back. Ella, as a Silky, has hair and whiskers that will grow back.
• Ella does not like driving.
• Ella is very good at curling up into a ball and getting out of your way whenever you’re not actively paying attention to her. That is a way cool trait, especially after you’ve been caring for a puppy for 6 weeks.
• Last night I made up the futon for a friend who was staying over. I put on the stretchy sheet, laid down the top sheet, and turned around to pick up the comforter. In the time I had my back turned Ella jumped up onto the bed and urinated in the exact center.
  
  
  

  I think by the time this picture of Otto was taken, he knew something was up. He could smell the tension in the air, but the only thing he couldn’t predict is that a week later he’d be sitting in isolation back in the SPCA’s medical ward. The little dude managed to gain a couple of pounds over his first month in isolation - he was considered so contagious that he was not allowed out on walks, and he just packed on the pounds.

  He was not a happy man sitting there by himself. I’ve been visiting him about once a week there, and he didn’t really seem like himself until they allowed volunteers to walk him again (he got walking privileges back about 2 weeks ago, when his ringworm disappeared). I think he cheered up, once he got to go outside and see the sun again. He seemed happy again.

  
  
  

  I do not know who this statue man is, but we can assume that either (a) he was a very famous man in buenos aires decades or centuries ago, or (b) he had a very large sum of money.

  This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.