The Big Sleep

Cassie. She was 15. A good dog.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable:

Sleep (Anglo-Saxon slaepen).

To sleep off. To get rid of by sleep.

To sleep away. To pass away in sleep, to consume in sleeping; as, to sleep one's life away.

To sleep on a matter. To let a decision on it stand until tomorrow.

To put to sleep. Commonly used as a euphemism for painlessly putting to death pet animals.

We had our aged staffy, Cassie 'put to sleep' on Friday afternoon. That is she received a lethal overdose of anaesthetic and died swiftly and hopefully peacefully.

We are fortunate that we can exercise this judgement in relation to elderly, unwell dogs and cats. Anyone who has watched humans suffer the final stages of cancer would have at least considered the desirability of such an option.

There was no moral conundrum for us but that still didn't make it particularly easy. Cassie timed things well - her rapid decline occurred on the afternoon of the last day of the working week. We got home from the vet's surgery with her at about 5 pm so there was no digging in savage sunlight. The only hiccup was an unfortunately timed phone call from my employer hoping that everything was 'okay'. We buried her in the still twilight (luckily there were none of the wild winds that have characterised many of the last few days). Her plot is home to a fragrant boronia we bought at the nursery 5 days ago without this destination in mind. My green thumbed sister says boronias are notoriously hard to grow so it may not be her long term memorial shrub.

All in all not a bad death. We feel sad and drained and I have been doing quite a lot of 'sleeping it off' however endorphins from aquarobics and sympathetic hugs from the aqua women and from my dog walker/book group friends and reminiscing with the family about Cassie's traits and adventures have all helped. No 'anger' stage of grief with this one!

Sometimes I've read a poem or piece of prose or a song lyric when saying goodbye graveside to a pet (we've said a few goodbyes over 34 years) but Cass needs no other epitaph than this quote from my son's Facebook posting for that evening:

Just buried (my) dog of 12 years, Cassie. She was 15. A good dog.

Damn Spot is outed

The canine bard in authentic Elizabethan garb

Debate has long existed about whether William Shakespeare is actually the author of the many plays (and presumably poems) attributed to him. It is generally asserted that a village boy who left school at 15 would not have had the vocabulary or the knowledge of the classics, the sciences and humanities that his canon displays. Rival candidates usually cited are Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Dead white males all! In 'A Room of One's Own' Virginia Woolfe posited a genius sister for Shakespeare, who perished in anonymity because of the circumstances an Elizabethan woman of letters would have faced. But no-one has gone beyond questioning the sexism of assuming Shakespeare was a man to consider whether he or she was human at all!

Now with the discovery in rural NSW of The First Bonio any doubt about where the foundation stone of the British literary tradition originated has vanished! This precious manuscript was found in 2004 lining an abandoned kennel in Gulargambone when the community embarked on the massive clean up that won it that year's Tidy Town award. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that 'Shakespeare's' works are by a dog!

Just consider these titles:

All's Well That Smells Well
Julius Schnauzer
Muckbreath
Two Cattledogs of Verona
As You Lick It
Prince, Great Dane of Hamlet
Corgi Ole Anus
A Midsummer Night's Walkies
The Distempest
Measure for Muzzle
The Taming of the Shi-tszu
Love's Labrador Lost and
Richard the Turd

Only arrogant human plagiarism explains how they have been mis-attributed for so long! It's time to laud the doggy bard, Wilhelmina Wagtail, not to view her as 'a beast that wants discourse of reason' but to acknowledge her thusly:

What a piece of work is dog! How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable.
In action how like a wolf. In apprehension how like a dog. A dab paw with the thesaurus.
The paragon of animals!

Living Rock Aquarium & Tailoring

The Campsie/Canterbury area where I live is highly multicultural and burgeons with the enterprise of immigrants. Earlwood shops cover every facet of the bridal industry: bombonerie, page boy & flower girl outfitters, florists, solariums, manicurists and businesses offering deluxe wedding photography and video packages. It also has two serious Greek Tavernas. Campsie has halal butchers and Turkish coffee and nut shops, Vietnamese bakeries and Fijian grocers as well as purveyors of saris, sushi, kebabs, Indian spices and DVDs and twee kids' fashions from Taiwan &Hong Kong.

Canterbury Road specialises in appealing to renovators and petrol heads with most automotive services offered, car dealerships inBMWs, minis and Japanese imports and three car seat cover businesses. It has lighting, plumbing and tile emporiums aplenty and shops selling both new and second hand furniture.Ausland Furniture is not, as I first thought, a store specialising in furniture for the deaf, but one that sells the flashy bedroom suites and gigantic ceramic leopards beloved of some of our middle eastern neighbours.

However, by far the most original experiment in commerce on Canterbury Road was Living Rock Aquarium and Tailoring where in a single visit you could be measured for a bespoke suit and pick up a couple of guppies for your lounge room tank. This combined business lasted for about two years until piscatorial supply nudged out budget couture and we now need to go a bit further to get a pair of pants altered. The tropical fish business has also relocated but the sign proudly announcing this bold entrepreneurial venture remains. See photo below (we have enhanced it a bit).

We are abject - we can no longer order a suit and top up our aquarium at Canterbury's one-stop supplier of tailoring services and tropical fish.

Post script: If you go looking for the original Living Rock Aquarium & Tailoring sign you will be disappointed. It was painted over a week after I posted this!

TOFU SNAFU

Tonight I made my first attempt to cook tofu. I decided my stir fry needed a bit of protein and that defrosting chicken fillets would take too long. We had a packet of tofu in the fridge from when one of the kids' vegetarian friends came to stay that I thought would be just the ticket. Don't be fooled into believing that tofu's bland appearance and taste infer simple preparation! A site called vegetarian.about.com provides a helpful video that stresses that before you do anything with tofu you need to squeeze all the moisture out of it. Their recommended method is putting it on paper towel with a board and two tins of tomatoes on top of it. However, in my case this method did not result in a neat rubbery block like the man in the video held to camera but more of a white squishy mess reminiscent of cottage cheese but gelatinous! I did use tins of soup, not tomatoes, so that may have been my mistake...

Appearance isn't everything so I soldiered on and attempted to fry fragments of the mess in the wok in sesame oil with ginger and garlic. The tofu did not go brown & firm like those perversely yummy wettex-like lumps you find in laksa. It stayed basically the same except that it was now covered in tiny specks of burnt ginger and garlic! Oh, well taste is the ultimate test so I tried some. Yuck! It was pretty much how I imagine mixing warm cooking oil with plain yoghurt would taste. It went in the compost and I defrosted the chicken!

I am completely open to critiques of my method and hints for future attempts but in the mean time the only tofu I will be eating will be cooked by experts in Asian restaurants!