Tucker the Weird Dawg, R.I.P.
Tucker left us this morning about 8:45, a victim of too few red blood cells, or perhaps too many white ones. You know that he was the best dawg in the whole world, as all of our dogs are to all of us. He was good to me in my last time of need, and I tried to be good to him in his. I left home this morning with a dawg and returned home with just a collar. It hurts.
His last days were not good, but he was as comfortable as he could be made. He was treated with love and respect, and given all the love (and treats) that he could stand. He has had all the love he could stand for the last five years, if not all the treats. He was a rescue dog, and there was no way to know how bad his first years had been. Therefore, we always erred on the side of love.
The vet and his staff were wonderful this morning. They have a room for this sort of thing, called the Quiet Room, with a thickly padded vinyl mat covering most of the floor, partially covered by a large towel. All of the necessary arrangements were handled in advance. Tucker was carried out of the room and catheterized, then carried back in. The vet and I petted him, and spoke quietly to him. I gave him one last treat and nodded to the vet, who injected an overdose of anesthetic, then backed away. I was holding his head and petting him gently about sixty seconds later, when the vet pronounced him dead.
I am typing this through tears that will not stop yet, even though I know I did the right thing. He was beginning to suffer, and he did not deserve that. He deserved only the best, and I hope that he felt he got it during his years in our home.
Long live Tucker the Weird Dawg.
Tucker the Weird Dawg
Tucker is an English Springer Spaniel, the third Springer that I have been proud to house, feed, and love. Tucker was also my third Springer rescue, this time from the amazing people at ESRA, the English Springer Rescue America organization. There is little point in getting a dog if you do not rescue it. There are so many that need to be rescued, from a pound or a rescue group, and too few people to do it.
Tucker had somehow wound up out on his own for a long time, and then went the limit of time before death at two animal shelters before being recognized as a Springer and saved by ESRA. I adopted him after they had already cleaned him up and groomed him, though he was so, so thin. A dog that weighed 60 pounds when things were going well, even after a week of good ESRA food and the ridding of some intestinal parasites, still weighed just 45 pounds.
He responded quickly to love and a steady diet. He had separation anxiety in the worst way; he did not want to be left alone once he had discovered love and regular meals. He did not want his people to leave him, ever. He was soon back at 60 pounds and happy, perhaps for the first time, though he was seven or eight years of age.
He would occasionally wander off, if you were lax and let him. This was not running away, it was each time a slow jaunt into the surrounding neighborhood. He would quickly make a human friend that could read, who would call my cell phone number from his tags. I would then go get him and he was always overjoyed to see me, his adopted dad, and ready to go home. His new friends were always sorry to see him go.
A year or so after we adopted Tucker, I was diagnosed with cancer. It turned out to be very serious indeed. After a very long time in surgery, and after two weeks in recovery with numerous complications, I finally got to go home., though I was far from well. Cancer had aggravated my multiple sclerosis mightily, and I was not anything close to well. Tucker, his sad eyes always on me and always staying as close to me as he could get, did not leave my side for 75 days except to eat and eliminate.
Tucker, now 12 or 13, was diagnosed today with leukemia. There is not much that can be done. A few medications to ease his final journey, perhaps better food than his usual health conscious dry meals, because Tucker does like his food. A little more attention, if that is possible. More hugs, more rubs, more scratches. I can expect more sleeping, and less movement. I can expect him to be puzzled, because he cannot possibly understand why he feels so weak or why he is in pain.
My job now is to do for Tucker what Tucker did for me. My job is to see that my good boy is happy, and that he is well fed, and loved in the time he has left as a living organism. My job is to take as good care of Tucker as he took of me. My job is to recognize that point at which Tucker’s life is no longer pleasant, and to take him gently on his last ride to the vet. My job is to hold him as he gets that final injection, and as the pain and infirmity are finally over. My job is not to cry where he can see me, because that would make him sad.
My job is to love him as much as he loves me.
101 things about me
There is a “meme” going around herein people write eight, or sixteen, or twelve things about themselves. I have not yet figured out why this is important. However, I thought I would give it a try. I am a natural over-achiever, so it got a little out of hand. There follows 101 random things about me.
1. I am the only member of the Frawgish race.
2. I became a half-orphan in 1992.
3. I have been ejected from the continent of Europe.
4 .I have several pins helping to keep me together.
5. I was once a Viking.
6. I own a tailhook.
7. I read every non-fiction book in my elementary school library.
8. I once yielded to stress and shot a telephone.
9. I did rodeo for several years but never learned to rope worth a crap.
10. I was once a monarch.
11. I once dropped conversational French because I could not get my mouth to make those sounds.
12. I programmed for 35 years and never took a programming class.
13. I once fell three stories off a roof into a rock garden.
14. I have a brother five years younger and a sister five years older.
15. I went to a high school that would not let guys take typing. I’m still bad at that.
16. I had a career as a safety engineer between careers in the software development business.
17. I had the only Austin Healy 3000 in Nebraska for a short while.
18. At age eight, I buried a time capsule in the bank of the Missouri near a power plant in north Omaha. I have no idea what was in it and don’t really care.
19. I have driven non-stop from Pensacola, FL to Portland, OR, except for gas and coffee stops.
20. I inherited a single oddly arched great toenail from my father.
21. My last name should be VanderHeident.
22. I like to write poetry but kind of suck at it.
23. My favorite color is blue. I’m a guy. My dryer lint is blue.
24. I once lived in San Francisco and worked in Philadelphia.
25. I got my first real job at 13.
26. I have been been drinking espresso since 1973, mainly mochas.
27. A man named George Horni used to build engines for me. His girlfriend would not marry him because she refused to become Tammi Horni.
28. I like to read plays aloud, especially Shakespeare but will try most any of them…
29. I have written two novels and begun a third.
30. I earn part of my living writing blog posts on technical subjects.
31. I live an interesting two years in Geneva, Switzerland.
32. I love to paint, especially abstracts of southwestern scenes, but have not done anything new for several years.
33. I played football for 10 years, seven years as a fullback.
34. I owned an ugly green big Chevy Blazer known as Thunder Truck for 19 years and almost 400,000 miles. It had a Horni racing engine with 650 horsepower and just over 700 foot pounds of torque. In low range, it would pull the gates off hell.
35. During the time I had the Blazer, I bought and sold maybe 20 other cars.
36. I was one of the first 50 people to sign up for the CompuServe Information Service in 1980.
37. I still own the 150/300 baud accoustic coupler that I furst used on CompuServe, hooked first to a Heathkit home-brew system, then a very ritzy Radio Shack TRS-80.
38. I have a largish collection of frog items, sent to me by a wide variety of people, most of whom met me on the internet.
39. I had an IBM 360/25 as my first personal computer.
40. I love being places where my license plate does not match everyone else’s.
41. I love reading and books, an ingrained habit acquired well before the advent of popular television, which may be why I prefer the former to the latter.
42. I will hate it when real books are no longer common, but will probably live to see it.
43. Most of my forbears on my fathers side, from which I have the most obvious genes, lived to be quite old, many well over 100.
44. Like many people, I feel that there is entirely too little available time in comparison to the number of available books.
45. My favorite development project used sonar to do quality assurance on General Electric industrial diamonds.
46. That was the most software I ever wrote for a project, a bit more that 2 million lines of Pascal (not my idea) and assembly language.
47. I have a Springer Spaniel named Tucker the Weird Dawg, a rescue dog with a great personality to make up for a low dawgie IQ.
48. I stopped smoking on June 18, 2004.
49. I almost refuse to wear clothing with someone’s advertising on it.
50. Much of the time, I am listening to my (currently) 893 favorite tracks, on shuffle.
51. I once unknowingly landed a C-47 on half the required main landing gear. Big mistake.
52. I have been Kermit D. Frawg on line since 1981.
53. I really enjoy cinnamon toast.
54. I once paid almost $3000 for a 1 megabyte Winchester disk drive.
55. Most of my life, I have been able to get by on four hours of sleep a night.
56. I did not like Chinese food before I moved to San Francisco in 1970. That quickly changed.
57. My favorite meals ever were abalone steaks, which have become quite rare and hard to get.
58. I was a drug counselor for the YMCA in California.
59. I moved back to the midwest after the Bay Area became too full for my taste, measured by being unable to easily find a parking space at Safeway in the mid-afternoon on a week day.
60. I worked my way back to Kansas from California doing entrepreneurial software projects in Palm Desert, Las Vegas, and Austin, TX.
61. I am an avid photographer and once made part of my living taking photos, mainly for magazines and textbooks.
62. My sister taught me to read, starting with the funnies, and I had graduated to real books before I was 4 years old.
63. I spend way too much time on Plurk.
64. I loved living in Moss Beach, CA more than any other place I have lived.
65. I am the proud owner of an internally lit pink flamingo.
66. I once owned a gay male dog.
67. I love devils food cake with dark chocolate frosting.
68. I own every book written by Frederik Pohl, many of which are autographed first editions.
69. My first car, purchased in Omaha for $25 in 1963, was a 1947 Chevrolet coupe with an odd dent in the left rear fender. I found that exact car on a used classics lot in San Mateo, CA in 1982, for sale for $5,500. I had given it to a friend.
70. I was born in Omaha, NE and left as soon as I reasonably could.
71. I once owned a company that built homes and did commercial remodels in Omaha, and did a large remodel job on Henry Fonda’s home.
72. I lived most of my life in the San Francisco Bay area, mainly down the coast below the city.
73. I went to school on a National Merit scholarship. I’m not all that bright but I was one hell of a test taker. 
74. I commuted between San Francisco and Columbus, OH every two weeks, on average, for almost three years, in Thunder Truck at first, then via the Delta Airline and Screen Door Company.
75. I had very wavy hair until I had cancer surgery and now it is almost straight.
76. Last time I filled out an IT knowledge questionnaire, I found that I could write code in 20-odd programming languages.
77. I love physics and the associated sciences.
78. I have an underdeveloped sense of my own importance in relation to the universal scope of things, probably with good reason.
79. I love horses almost as much as dogs.
80. I used to build furniture, but stopped several years ago. I don’t know why.
81. My cursive writing is so bad that I print everything, almost, but can do that quite neatly.
82. I really like Oreos, but think that natural almonds are my favorite all-around snack.
83. I have had very few nicknames, but was called “Rowdy” for a while late and just after college.
84. I love classical music but have been too lazy to amass a good collection of it.
85. I regularly wear out the “N” key on a keyboard first.
86. I have had the same cell phone, an old Motorola Razr, for well over two years.
87. I moonlighted as a sous chef for a few months while a friend’s shattered leg healed.
88. I had a friend named Russell that was the last train robber ever arrested in California.
89. I once hired a programmer called Big Frog even though he told me up front that he refused to work on days when the moon would be waxing gibbous. It proved a good decision.
90. I love to cook, mainly French, Italian, and Cajun, but will try most anything.
91. That said, I am not a very good baker.
92. For some reason which I cannot explain very well, my current favorite food is Drunken Noodles with chicken, medium hot, from Zen Zero in downtown Lawrence, KS.
93. I was on the board of directors for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for four years.
94. My left leg is almost an inch shorter than my right leg.
95. That came from a bone condition called osteomyelitus and kept me out of the Naval Academy, to my great relief and my father’s great consternation.
96. One of my most prized current possessions is a container of pure maple syrup.
97. I delivered meals to AIDS patients in San Francisco for several years.
98. The music of Django Reinhardt captivates me.
99. I moved from Windows to OS X on a 15” MacBook Pro six months ago and am quite pleased that I did.
100. I started with Windows in 1986 and put up with Microsoft until 2008. I am a patient man.
101. I met many of my friends in the last 25 years on the internet. Most of them call me Kermit.
