On this 7-year anniversary of Partial Ellipsis of the Sun and 14th-year anniversary of Maizie’s birth (in October), I am writing about Maizie, canine extraordinaire.
Maizie May was my beloved, fun, and happy companion for 12.5 years. I went to the Denver Dumb Friends League with my friend, Mike, on April 2, 2008. "Pucker" was released from the lost animals hold for exactly 1 minute when we found each other. I ran down the hall to the Adoption Desk saying "She's the one! She's the one!" And so the newly-named Maizie came home the next day to live with my daughter, Zoë, and me. Here she is on that day.
This girl loved a good road trip. We took more than a dozen trips to the Great Sand Dunes, one of her two favorite places. Kunming Park was the other favorite.
We trekked to Arches National Park, the Paint Mines in Calhoun, to Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Arkansas, to Minnesota for Zoe’s drop-off and graduation from college. We took so many trips to Silver Plume, Palisade, and all over the Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming mountains.
Maizie died in my arms September 21, 2020 at 4:40 p.m. She was bathed in heliotrope-magenta light as she crossed over the Rainbow Bridge. I held her body for over an hour and felt her comforting me.
During the ten months she fought lymphoma with chemotherapy and her oncologist’s help, we had some awesome adventures, including a trip to San Luis Park and the Great Sand Dunes in April, just before they closed the gates:
https://youtu.be/bhnOENk2QDk
Maizie was spunky, calm, sweet, and adventurous and up for new treks up until the day she died. The growths on her neck returned and even large doses of lomustine could not stop them. She was still so Maizie right up to the end when breathing was difficult.
I miss her every minute and talk to her all the time. She brought me such joy. Grief is so non-linear. I find sad tears, happy smiles, weird firsts (moving her water bowls) commingle.
I saw her in the full moon Thursday night. She was smiling broadly, telling me she is always in my heart and how much she loved our adventures.
Here’s to Maizie, the most faithful, loving, sweet dog ever.
Thanks for coming on this mountain and park ride with me.
Happy trails, Maizie,
Steph
And PEOTS fans, thanks for being here for 7 years!
ReplyDeleteBlogger changed their editor so I wrote this on my phone with difficult editing abilities...so it just is how it flowed from me. . .
One of my students from China who graduated last year sent me this:
ReplyDelete"That's a really really really upset news to hear, Mrs. Stephanie. I have felt exactly the same sorrow as you. May I know what happened to our beloved friend?"
Words flow how they do, eh?
Touching tribute. Congrats on your blogiversary.
ReplyDeleteThanks, jan. This year October 1 just flew right by.
DeleteYour tribute flowed poetically, Stephanie. You penned an absolutely beautiful tribute to the most beautiful dog ever!
DeleteLegoWhoBelievesThatAllGod'sCreaturesGreatAndSmallCanButAspireToBeSoAmaizing!
Thanks so much, Lego! She truly epitomized amaizing. :-)
DeleteThanks for sharing your memories. May the sadness slowly recede, and the joys last forever.
ReplyDeleteTrump faces the risk of VIP Syndrome. (Walter Weintraub was my wife's uncle.)
ReplyDeleteQuite plausible. VIP Syndrome--bet 45 loves that diagnosis.
DeleteAnd as to Walter Weintraub (another WW!) -- cool about your wife's uncle.
DeleteWell, maybe. But then there was his involvement in the CIA's MK ULTRA experiments.
DeleteHmmmm. Could not read all of the archived article. But, I'll take your word for it.
DeleteThe relevant paragraph is near the bottom: "Another doctor who worked in the same project, Walter Weintraub, was quoted by the Post as saying that the Army had gathered the volunteers by promising them extra leaves and other inducements. “I don't recall we told them they would get LSD but it probably wouldn't have meant anything at that time anyway,” he was quoted as saying."
DeleteIf you're not familiar with it, the story of Project MKUltra is worth learning about.
I understand they will be repackaging 45's magnificent return to the White House as a feature documentary titled "Trumph of the Ill."
DeleteWill October 2nd, 2000, be "A Day That Will Live In Irony"?
Must be a bit odd to have family that has done infamous things. I remember reading a long article about MKUltra (Rolling Stone? Mother Jones? or one of the alternate papers, back when they had such things?). Too bad they couldn't wait a decade, volunteers would have been a lot easier to find, though they would have been Leary.
Closest I've had to an infamous family member was a great uncle who had an apparently famous ongoing feud with Noam Chomsky - about linguistics, not politics.
PS does it seem like the Trumpster's got enough 'Roid Rage that he could be a participant in his beloved professional wrestling? Anybody else worried about a pumped up pres?
DeleteI was surprised that none of the reports I read/heard mentioned the feeling of well-being you get with corticosteroids. "I feel better than I did 20 years ago" should've been a tip-off to their medical advisors.
DeleteAnd his behavior since? It's hard to diagnose since his base line behavior is more than a bit off base.
DeleteI think the best indicator to his health is the absolute silence for the last 2 days - no videos, no Hannity call-ins, etc. Other than tweets, which can be done invisibly or by surrogates, we've heard nothing from him. Makes me think his lungs have been racked.
Same with Chris Christie, one doesn't just "check oneself in" to a hospital unless there are severe conditions. Though Christie is the picture of health. And then Rudy Giuliani was hacking up a storm on Fox last night....
@#$%^&* potty-mouth scientists!
ReplyDeleteBone? Geez!
Delete"words that had been rejected by the software system set up to filter out profanities: knob, pubis, penetrate and stream, among others."
DeletePuts the kibosh on watching the live ****** of the door hardware conference. And now I wonder if hardware would be censored.
Nazca cat. (Peru purrer?) Why haven't these been spotted sooner?
ReplyDeleteLook at those fe-lines!
DeleteMeh, we've got one of those in my 'hood.
DeleteThe big news should be that college football was so important to the ancient Peruvians. Go Hummingbirds!
I like this one in England, overlooking the Chunnel entrance.
DeleteThat reminds me of the story from 2 years ago about the ancient crash course on Brexit.
DeleteI don't recall that being covered in this blog, and I didn't see any comments from around that time, but maybe I missed them. I would have assumed the Anglo-French Connection had been studied to death, and yet there are things to hack, man.
And there's this related story on how the land bridge between Calais and Dover was destroyed, a melting glacial lake may be to blame.
DeleteReminds me of the Black Sea Deluge theory; that the Biblical Flood was the actual flooding of a then relatively small freshwater lake, surrounded by human habitation, when the land bridge at the Bosporus Straits collapsed.
Of course it's easier for some to explain. Why research when you all you have to do is contort the evidence with a book that has all the answers? Never mind that the people who wrote about the "global flood" had no idea of the existence of more than 90% of the globe. Enough ranting.
eco, we're bound to be flooded with responses.
DeleteSpeaking of things that haven't been spotted yet.
ReplyDeleteThis is something to spit at!
Surely the headline writers enjoyed writing about "secretive organs."
DeleteYes, I'm sure the pun was intentional.
DeleteI wonder why the Times decided to use a 185-year old anatomy drawing of the nervous system of the head to illustrate a story about a discovery of the exocrine system? And why they don't mention the name ("tubarial") given to these new glands?
This video from the study is much more helpful.
Speaking of discovering and naming new organs late in the game, when I was in PA school, I did an elective rotation in gastroenterology, mostly because the location was convenient for me. One day, the doc I was working with was doing an upper endoscopy on a patient. As he worked the scope through the duodenum, he pointed out the ampulla of Vater, the junction of the pancreatic duct and the common bile duct. There's another, smaller, accessory pancreatic duct a short distance away that's always referred to just as the minor papilla. "How come there's no eponym for that one?", I asked. "Nobody claimed it, I guess." "Can I claim it? That's the Ampulla of Wolitzky now."
Years later, I was talking with a PA student who was rotating through our family practice about the clinical rotations he'd already been through. He mentioned that he'd also done a GI rotation with Marc Wolfman. I told him about the Ampulla of Wolitzky incident. "Oh, yeah," he said, "he called it that when he showed it to me."
jan, congrats on your Ampulla of Wolitzky fame!
DeleteAnd thanks for the video.
While the video is more revealing, I still enjoy my copies of Gray's Anatomy (book not TV show) which is much newer at only 160 years, I also like my copy of Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy. Much clearer for us lay folk.
DeleteAmpulla of Wolitzky would be a great name for a punk rock band.
Yesterday I met Barbara Higbie, the first woman to be signed to Wyndham Hill Records (we listened to a lot of that label in architecture school, it calmed the nerves). Interestingly, her next door neighbor is the bassist for the proto-punk band The Dead Kennedys.
That's probably not relevant.
Gray's Anatomy is quite a book!
DeleteAlas, 2018 VP1 missed.
ReplyDeleteNatch!
DeleteInteresting Twitter thread linking geology with US voting patterns.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's fascinating! Thanks for that twitter thread.
DeleteThere's an ancillary story that I learned about 12 or so years ago: I was part of a group helping a poor African America family and their farm in north-central Illinois - about 80 miles south of Chicago.
DeleteMany generations ago their ancestors were granted 40 acres as part of the compensation for slavery. But they traded that for a 75 acre plot. What they didn't know is the new land was almost entirely sandy soil, not at all good for growing crops. In other words they got duped.
Part of the group (not me) was there to start working with them to build the soil. My group was to help with physical buildings, including how to weasel-proof the chicken enclosures. Out here raccoons are the biggest threat, except in the farther countryside wild dogs, but neither of them are very good at digging. Our best solution for the weasels was to lay down a fairly tightly spaced welded wire mesh, and then piling some dirt and sand on top of that. Making sure to tie the mesh into the chicken wire walls.
I guess folks in Georgia/ Alabama/ Mississippi didn't get taken like this family, probably they knew the area better.
Anyone feeling slightly optimistic about the election? But remember, it ain't over till the fat man is in Sing Sing.
That’s some good dirt there. . .
DeleteCongrats to President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Harris. Their speeches last night were inspiring.
Bye, bye, Don. The White House is “for-biden,” and not for you, in 73 days.
Person, Man, Woman, Camera, TV.
ReplyDeleteQuote of the day in The Guardian:
ReplyDelete"Naysan Rafati, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group. He called the coming 10 weeks as “less a lame-duck period and more of an adrenaline-infused mallard”"
Is he using the French/ Spanish/ Italian definition of mal (evil) to describe the lard?
So, the National Hurricane Center, as we all know, has an alphabetical list of alternating male and female names for tropical storms and hurricane, and lately, as the number of named storms started exceeding the length of the alphabet, they've started giving them Greek letter names. We're currently up to Theta. If a storm is particularly destructive, they remove that name from rotation (so there'll never be another Hurricane Katrina, e.g., nor many others). But what happens when a Greek-letter-named storm hits the big time? Given climate change and the length of the Greek alphabet, we're going to need a new naming system pretty soon.
ReplyDeleteAnd a bigger boat. . .
DeleteName hurricanes after Greek gods? Or better yet, Hindu gods. That should hold out for most of the decade.
DeleteA truck loaded with thousands of copies of ROGET'S THESAURUS crashed yesterday losing its entire load.
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome! Thanks for sharing.
DeleteWe may have (temporarily) found the Centaur upper stage that launched Surveyor 2.
ReplyDeleteNice graphic
DeleteCitizen science is cool. OK, SETI@home didn't find any little green men, but crowdsourcing uncovered Aurora's friend, STEVE, and now, STEVE's little green streaks.
ReplyDeleteAnd, together, BARNEY!
Delete?
DeletePurple and green, Barney the Dinosaur colors.
Delete"Hey, Siri, do I have Covid?"
ReplyDeleteSpecialized software to detect Covid coughs?! Wow.
DeleteAs we head into a winter shrouded with Covid, you must remember what to do when a moose starts licking your vehicle. I particularly like the video starting at about 1 minute.
ReplyDeleteGreat moose mouth close up, eco! Thanks.
ReplyDeleteWe experienced the deer licking our vehicle at the Great Sand Dunes. They get so engrossed in licking they almost forget anyone is nearby.
I've had problems with pigs licking my car, but that's probably because I only use Trader Joe's Truffle Salt to de-ice my driveway.
ReplyDeleteThe wild turkeys here are becoming a traffic hazard. I was biking near the zoo the other day and saw a driver almost get rear-ended when he stopped for one that just decided to cross the road. In Cambridge, sudden traffic slowdowns often reveal a flock ambling across Mass Ave ahead. I'm tempted to try leaving a trail of bread crumbs to have a pre-stuffed Thanksgiving bird arrive at my door.
jan, let us know if your turkey ploy works.
DeleteHappy almost Thanksgiving to all PEOTS fans!
And if it doesn't work just wait for the bumper crop on Mass Ave.
DeleteDon't you love our polysemous vocabulary?
DeleteSome good Smith College news to balance out the GSA non-signer of the transition paperwork (She is a Smithie, class of '95, who has gotten hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters/e mails from us fellow Smithies. Alas, no luck so far.)
ReplyDeleteThere is a simpler solution, alas I suspect it is lost to many: don't put out your private and intimate (and often ill-conceived or unregulated) thoughts out into the public sphere for everyone to see.
DeleteI don't tweet, don't facebook or snapchat or instagram, and am really glad things I said as a teenager are lost to the ether.
Absolutely.
DeleteHow breaking cable news can be really sad.
ReplyDeleteWhat a blow for science.
DeleteThe rest of the telescope finally collapsed last night.
Delete"Such an undignified end!"
DeleteIn case you weren't aware of the story behind your heart-shaped honeycomb thumbnail, Steph.
ReplyDeleteThanks, jan. I didn't do the research. I just thought it was a cool image. H'ive obviously got more digging to do ;-).
DeleteIt is a cool image. And an interesting story about how it was made. Reminded me of photos of webs spun by LSD-dosed spiders.
DeleteThose who enjoy cryptic crosswords (I know Jan does) might take a crack at this archive from the Atlantic.
ReplyDeleteSome answers are hard, some not so hard. A True Connection might have you asking for More More More... We've made great progress in lip-syncing.
Cute. I got the theme when I noticed a certain characteristic similarity in the endings of 3 and 5. Though I understand why they did it, I don't like that three non-theme items are unclued, as well.
DeleteNot sure which items were unclued? There are 4 answers that share a starting square with unclued items, but they have clues, just not in the usual order.
DeleteNever mind, I'd failed to notice something.
DeleteNow all I need is a bone to whack that tapir!
ReplyDeleteNice, but I think the visible rivet heads are a problem.
DeleteOne time, freshman year in college, I was walking across our muddy campus (SUNY Stony Brook) with some friends. We were approaching a large puddle as another group approached from the other side. Suddenly, one guy crouched down, started knuckle-walking, grunting and shrieking. One by one, the rest of us joined in, gesticulating threateningly. Both groups circled around the puddle 180 degrees, and continued on their original headings, occasionally yelling back and shaking fists as we parted. No one said a word.
jan, was it an all guy thing?
DeleteThat's how I remember it, but it was a long time ago.
DeleteVery anthropocentric to assume that our alien masters haven't mastered rivet technology. Or maybe the other way around.
DeleteAbout 20 years ago I had a project to develop a new community in Escalante, also in Southern Utah. At the time Garfield County had around 4000 inhabitants in its 5000 sq miles. Almost as large as Connecticut, with a population just a bit larger than Berkeley High School.
I found it remarkable how devoid of human presence the landscape is, except almost ubiquitous barb wire fencing. An interesting place to put an object, I wonder how long it's stood unnoticed.
Riveting story, of course.
DeleteI suspect part of the appeal of Great Sand Dunes (in addition to the raw natural beauty) is the ease of finding quiet and solitude. And awesome nighttime skies.
DeleteA blessing of the west, harder to find back east - perhaps backcountry Maine, but higher humidity impinges on the night sky. And really rare in Europe, I've only seen it in northern Finland and Sweden. I'm sure it's in Norway too.
Linguists
ReplyDeleteLoved the circuit diagram, too.
DeleteGone but not forgotten.
ReplyDeleteMission accomplished Nov. 3rd. Now to find the others on the moon and orbiting Jupiter.
eco, I saw that. The reflections in that silver strip were etraordinary.
Delete^^^extraordinary
DeleteNew post on "Introducing Bruno!" is now up.
DeleteYou were right the first time, ET ordinary.
DeleteNow to meet Bruno, does he know his name? Third one down, it never grows old.
:-). Bruno came with the name. Unfortunately for him "no" is right in his moniker. I have used that a few times when necessary. . .
DeleteNew post on "Introducing Bruno!" is now up.
ReplyDelete