fri, 09-sep-2016, 07:28

Buddy

This morning I came down the stairs to a house without Buddy. He liked sleeping on the rug in front of the heater at the bottom of the stairs and he was always the first dog I saw in the morning.

Buddy came to us in August 2003 as a two year old and became Andrea’s mighty lead dog. He had the confidence to lead her teams even in single lead by himself, listened to whomever was driving, and tolerated all manner of misbehavior from whatever dog was next to him. He retired from racing after eleven years, but was still enjoying himself and pulling hard up to his last race.

Our friend, musher, and writer Carol Kaynor wrote this about him in 2012:

But it will be Buddy who will move me nearly to tears. He will drive for 6 full miles. On the very far side of 10 years old, with his eleventh birthday coming up in a month, he will bring us home to fourth place for the day and a respectable time for the distance. I’ll step off that sled as happy as if I’d won.

It wasn’t me pushing. I don’t get any credit for a run like that. It was Buddy pushing himself, like the champion he is.

Read the whole post here: Tribute to a champion.

After he retired, he enjoyed walking on the trails around our house, running around in the dog yard with the younger dogs, but most of all, relaxing in the house on the dog beds. He was a big, sweet, patient dog that took everything in stride and who wanted all the love and attention we could give him. The spot at the bottom of the stairs is empty now, and we will miss him.

Buddy in lead in Tok, 2012

Mr. Buddy

tags: Buddy  memorial 
sat, 21-jan-2012, 11:48
Piper, Buddy, Pollock

Piper, Buddy and Pollock

Another Tournament of Books pick, The Devil All the Time meets the last book I read (Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending) in the first round. They are such totally different books that I wonder how judge Emma Straub can possibly decide between the two. Devil is about hard lives and evil, taking place on the other side of the tracks in towns in Ohio and West Virginia. There aren’t any characters in the book that you’d want to meet, and if you did, you’d either need to be carrying a firearm to survive the encounter, or would want a shower after the experience. One reviewer commented that reading this book was like “wrestling a grizzly.” I know someone that has actually done that (not her choice), and I doubt if she would equate the two.

In many ways, it reminded me of Stephen King’s 11/22/63, except without the hero protagonist trying to make the world a better place by murdering Oswald. The brutality and poverty also recalled Matthiessen’s fantastic Shadow Country.

It’s an excellent book, if you can handle it. It isn’t one of my picks to win the tournament, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if it did. How it fares against Ending in round one probably depends on how much the judge hated the ending of Barnes’s book compared with feeling beaten down by Devil. I think I’d pick Devil, but it’s close.

tags: book review  books  Buddy  Piper 
tue, 12-jul-2011, 15:43
Shoplifting, Buddy

Shoplifting from American Apparel, Buddy

Shoplifting from American Apparel is part of Melville House Publishing’s “Contemporary Novellas” series. I believe the point of the series is to provide a place for writers to publish short works, longer than what would fit into the usual short fiction outlets. The novella is a complelling format: long enough that the author can stretch out a little and expand on the characters, but short enough to read in a sitting or two. That’s a nice change of pace in between big, complicated books.

Tao Lin’s entry in the series is a collection of brief moments in the life of Sam, a writer who seems to drift around thinking about writing and interacting with whomever happens to be around in the backyards, bars and parties he attends. The writing is crisp and short, and there’s very little plot beyond Sam and where he goes. But at 112 printed pages, I wouldn’t expect a grand plot anyway.

There’s a lot of product placement in the novella, and I suspect that the commercialization of our lives is part of the point Lin is making. At one point Sam started thinking about what his life might be like if he were to really work hard on his writing:

Loneliness and depression would be defeated with a king-size bed, an expensive stereo system, a drum set, a bike, an unlimited supply of organic produce and coconuts, and maybe calmly playing an online role-playing game.

This idea doesn’t get very far, though, and the next scene is largely about the sound a “Synergy” brand kombucha makes when dropped on the ground. I think part of the message here is not that much really happens in real life, and we don’t really know what the moments are that are going to be really meaningful at the time they happen (either that or our lives are basically filled with moments that aren't meaningful).

Anyway, it was a fun read. I like the style and the way Sam moves through his world, but it makes me wonder how Lin would handle a longer format. I wouldn’t want to have read much more than the length of this book at least not without something actually happening.

tags: books  Buddy  review 
sat, 09-jul-2011, 15:09
Hornet’s Nest, Koidern

Hornet’s Nest, Koidern

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the third book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. If you’ve read and enjoyed the previous two books, you will enjoy this one as well. Like the others, once you get into it, it is difficult to put the book down.

It’s not great literature, and there are hard to overlook flaws (anytime an interesting woman appears, there is a good chance the main character will eventually sleep with her), but it sure was fun to read. I’m looking forward to watching the movie.

This was the first book I read electronically, on an iPad and iPhone. I didn’t think I’d like this as much as I did, and will likely read a lot of books this way in the future. The only limiting factor for me is that most electronic books include Digital “Rights” Management (DRM) encryption, which means that it is a real hassle (and is probably even illegal in the U.S.) to convert these books into formats that can be read on different sorts of eBook readers. I don’t like the idea of buying something that I can only read on a particular device or software package because the support for that system could easily disappear in the future. Plus, if you buy books from multiple different sources, you have to have a different reader for each of them. For now, I will probably only purchase books using formats without DRM, or with DRM that is easily circumvented (like the Kindle format, for example).

tags: books  Buddy  review 
mon, 23-may-2011, 17:55
Buddy, McSweeney’s 37

Buddy, McSweeney’s 37

I took some time out from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King to read the latest McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 37, packaged as a hardcover book which has been decorated and trimmed to give the illusion of, yep, a hardcover book. Leave it to McSweeney’s to produce yet another cool, well-produced (sewn binding, actual cloth cover) object containing some great writing.

Favorites in this issue include Jess Walter’s Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington, John Hyduk’s great story (essay?) about being unemployed (which has the great image of a warehouse building at night: “It’s dark and raining, but the building glows like a birthday cake”), and Joe Meno’s Lion’s Jaws. I didn’t really get into the five stories from Kenya, but I guess they were interesting from the standpoint of reading within a totally different place and culture.


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