The Dangerous Affair of the Black Dog in the Night-time

Plus Sides to House/Dog-sitting:

• Indoor plumbing, including running water (including warm water, shower, laundry)
• Lots of space, so you can spin in a circle without running into something
• Full-size kitchen with a full-size oven (I was the main appreciater of this)
• Impressive dvd/streaming/tv set (Phil was the main appreciater of this)
• Lots of indoor plants (we only have room for a couple if we want to be able to set down a cup or piece of paper)

Minus Sides to Dog-sitting:

• Dog hair on your plate
• Being woken multiple times in the night by a dog obsessed with her dead bunny out in the yard but not wanting to stay out
• Getting stuck somewhere (home or a trailhead) because a dog isn't coming when called
• Dog coming home wearing a stench so noisome, the other dog recoils 
• Two dogs puking in the wee hours of the morning, having feasted on porcupine bones during a hike
• And, the BIG minus--take a big, goofy, brave foolhardy dog, like the one on the left below (she's much bigger now than in this photo from last year, a fair bit bigger than the other dog)...

 ...and take a bluff like this, with our cabin eighteen feet back from it (our neighbors where we're staying are just a couple hundred yards farther back, and Phil had been working down here with the dogs running around...

 ...and I got home at 6pm last Thursday to be told K had been missing for several hours. She didn't show up for dinner, which was a bad sign. We checked all closed doors in the barnyard, checked the truck...
We called the radio stations, the animal shelter, the police. We called everyone in the neighborhood. Phil and another neighbor drove everywhere looking. 
This is a big black dog on a dark night. Phil walked all over our and our neighbors' properties, paying special attention to the bluff edge where she'd been fascinated earlier.
Phil walked up the highway checking the ditches.
Phil drove the truck out on the beach, all the way up to beneath our cabin, shining lights up. He thought he saw a pair of eyes 30-40 feet down from the top of the bluff, the area to the far right of that photo.
Phil burst into the house, where I was working, and told me to come quick, this was an emergency, we got to get the dog, pretty sure she's clinging on to the edge of the bluff.
Phil, torn elbow tendon, bum knee, plantar fasciitis and all, ties a rope around himself, we deadman it around one of those posts up top, I hold on, and down he goes. First time, wrong place, so up he comes; we tie off to another post and try again. Yes, there she is; not enough rope; untie, pay out more--for a moment I'm all that's holding him there.
Stupid dog, very pleased to see Phil, but she doesn't want to climb up. And why did she never respond when he was calling from above?
Phil ends up having to climb one-handed while pushing her up with his knee and other hand. Did I mention she's a big dog?
When she gets to where she can sort of see the top, I start the cheerleading endless stream of noise which is so totally out of my character it just seems totally ridiculous--Come on K, yes come on, good girl, yes, you can do it, come on--blah blah...But it worked.
We got her home, and the first thing Phil had to do was pick her up and carry her all the way to the bathtub. She was caked. It took both of us scrubbing and soaping for several minutes. 
Almost done, I left Phil to finish up, and went to fix her dinner.
When I came back, there was a zig-zagging flail of muddy tracks all over the bedroom carpet, and she was back in the tub. Phil had let her out without realizing there was clay impacted between every toe, and she had done a dizzy happy dance all over the bedroom carpet. The funniest part about that was, the cleaner had just been there that afternoon; the whole place was, or had been, pristine!
I think we finally got to bed around 1.30.

Reorganization--of Bluff and Home

Small announcement: If you're in Homer, come on down to the Library at 6pm this evening to hear Twelve Local Writers read their work. No, I'm not one of them, but I know just about all of them and will certainly be there in support.

It's been a while since I've shared pictures of the stunning edge on which we live, so I'm going to put that right today, having remembered my camera when I hiked yesterday. Phil gets back tomorrow afternoon, and will find himself accelerating seasons from the mid-harvest Fall of Oregon to nigh-winter here. It's been freezing hard every night, and the grasses at the bottom of the bluff just above beach gravel are autumn-colored and falling over.

Isn't it all a big process of rearrangement? A different side of the earth's face is kissed by the sun, different currents become prominent here.

I've been thinking of this "rearranging," speaking of how we're all connected, as I start preparing to teach the Linguistics course next term. When I look to see how others do it, many of the best sites online belong to people who were my classmates in grad school. They did what they were 'supposed to do' with their education, and have been excellent professors at prominent schools for some years already. Meanwhile, I muddle along--but here I am, rearranging some of the same material in a different place, with different goals, for different students.

And rearranging has been on my brain in a more literal sense too: I've been trying to get as many organizational projects as possible straightened out and sustainable during Phil's absence.

So, yesterday morning, our bed looked like this (after I'd wriggled out of it, of course!)

The bookshelf along my side of the bed in the loft had been overloaded in haphazard and book-breaking fashion...

...and when our incredibly kind and generous friend Tom made us these cubes to be footstools/storage space to go with our armchairs...

...it liberated these IKEA cubes that we'd been using for that purpose (not ideal, as they're not very stable)...

...which had in turn been liberated from pantry duty, because they're really not much good for that, either.

Well, they're also not ideal bookshelves, but by sunrise yesterday morning, my bedside area looked so much more sane!

It is a great lesson for me that having stuff organized can make such a difference, can be a weight off the ambient energy, can help me see things anew. This has been on my mind ever since we were house-sitting a couple months ago. I feel like a bit of a retard for being so slow to come to it: seems like most people know it by second nature. How about you?

Meanwhile, outside, the bluff keeps on rearranging itself...

 More land falls down toward the ocean, more headlong trees, more tussocks of grass hanging on to clumps of displaced earth.

This runoff has only looked like this for about the past month. It's a funny hourglass effect--the beach has piled up around the trickling water, while the land from above falls down and silts in the stream.

Even the bedrock calves off in chunks, and even in this photo, you can see how friable the bluff's edge is. The spruce tree at the top didn't used to be at that angle!

I feel grateful to live in a place where change and reorganization are so constant and literal. Grateful that sometimes I can learn to put them into practice, again literally, in my own existence.

Are philosophical posts like this tedious for you? There are so many things I could choose to write about, and I've really been thinking about which ones are most interesting for readers. Any feedback is hugely appreciated.

And I do have a beet-bean stew to share, but I'll do so tomorrow in order to keep this short and sweet. Much love!