A Dog is Forever

Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I come across many posts from Jerusalem Loves Animals – this is the organization that we adopted Diamond from. They always post pictures of their dogs who are looking for homes, including their stories, how old they are, how long they were in the shelter, the foster homes they went to, what kind of dogs they are (playful, loving, challenging, docile, energetic, etc.).

With every post I read, my heart gets decimated. I always wish I had a bigger house and more time on my hands so that I could adopt another dog, or two or three or all of them. The stories that kill me the most are the ones of dogs who get adopted by a family who didn’t know what to expect and had no prior experience in owning and raising dogs. And these dogs always return to the shelter for the most ridiculous reasons. Like the other day, I read a story of a dog who was returned to the shelter because he had an accident at home. This family should have been told that dogs do not know how to use the bathroom and if you don’t take them out, they will do their business inside the house. That’s like giving up a baby because they soiled their diaper. Yes, that’s what they do, and it’s what dogs do, too.

During the holiday season, I hear of a lot more dogs who go to shelters because the family who received the dog as a Christmas present were not ready for the challenges that come with having a dog as a pet. It’s not a goldfish. Especially when the dog is a puppy. Even on the posts from Jerusalem Loves Animals, whenever they post about a puppy for adoption, they specifically say “Anyone who is interested in adopting will need to know what having a puppy means.” Unfortunately not everybody does.

People say that having a puppy is like having a baby, and that’s absolutely true. There are many reasons for that:

1. A puppy requires 24/7 care. If you leave the house for hours at a time (like going to work or going out of town), you either need to take the puppy with you or have a doggysitter come in to take care of the dog, walk him, feed him, play with him, spend time with him, clean up after him, etc. You can’t leave the puppy alone just like you wouldn’t leave your baby alone.
2. A puppy needs proper training. Puppies act out, play naughty, nip and chew things and destroy property because they have a surplus of energy and don’t know any better. You can’t possibly expect a baby to teach itself anything anymore than you can expect the dog to train itself. Spending time with the dog and training it with positive reinforcement is imperative for any puppy and it will also grow up to be a loyal, obedient, friendly and loving companion.
3. Puppies need to be toilet trained. Toilet training a puppy is probably the most challenging part of raising a dog. The younger the dog, the harder it is. A puppy needs to be crated for that purpose. The dog needs to get used to sleeping and eating in a crate, and spending the entire night in the crate. A dog’s natural instinct is to not poop and pee where it eats or sleeps, so when the puppy is in its crate and suddenly needs to go, it will cry and bark to be let out of the place where it eats and sleeps. And yes, this will happen during the night too. Just like having a baby, you will need to get up in the middle of the night several times, to take the dog out. The older it gets, the dog eventually learns that the only place he can go is outside.
4. Older dogs have accidents too. If they eat something that doesn’t agree with them or they get some sort of stomach virus, they will poop around the house. When that happens, you don’t take the dog back to the shelter. You take it to the vet. And you clean up after it. If you can wipe your baby’s bum when you change their diaper, and change your kid’s pee-soaked sheets when they have an accident in bed, you can sure as fuck clean up after your dog. That includes picking up after them when they poop outside. It’s common decency.
5. Dogs get sick. Dogs are living beings. Living beings get sick sometimes. The vet is expensive but necessary. You will not let your baby suffer when they get sick. Same thing goes for your dog. For better or for worse, they are now a part of your family, and you need to treat them as such.
6. Dogs get dirty. And they also dirty up the house. Sometimes they play in the mud, they track dirt around the house when they come back from being outside, they shed A LOT, fur will get on everything. Can you honestly say that babies are clean freaks? Babies get food all over their face and hair and clothes and the floor, they draw on the walls, they tear up books and photo albums, and they will bring a bunch of germs and lice home with them when they come back from daycare and share it with the entire family. If you can handle that, you can handle a dog. Also, dogs are smelly. But believe me when I say that dogs think you stink too because they have a better sense of smell than you.

Sadly, people still adopt puppies thinking “Oh, they’re so cute and fluffy,” and assume it will be like having a cute little doll sitting quietly around the house looking pretty. If that’s what you want, buy a doll. Having a dog, and especially a puppy, is a major sacrifice. If are ready and willing to handle all the hardships, you will reap all the amazing rewards that come with having a dog. That’s another thing that is like having a baby. It’s difficult, but so worth it. But you need to be ready for that.

If I had the means to adopt another dog, I would definitely go for it. But having a dog is not for everybody. So this holiday season, please, please, please do not give a puppy as a present to anyone who does not know the challenges and requirements for taking care of a dog.

And also – adopt, don’t shop.

Peace, love and my lovely Diamond

MoZiPro 2022 – April Prompt

Today, I finally managed to get my ass in gear and finish the Monthly Zine Project zine for April. The zine is about pets, which I love, so why the fuck did it take me so long to finish it? I kept getting sidetracked by a variety of things, and once I had a chance to get back on track, I used that chance to do anything but work on the zine. But I finally did it! Here’s the cover.

I’m determined to have a monthly zine collection by the end of the year – 10 minis and 2 full-length ones. So I need to stay on track.

After I was done with the April zine, I was a bit stuck. The prompt for May is “Protection” and I got nothing to write about that. Back when the prompts were published, I said I’ll change it to “painting/drawing” and include some of the paintings I made in my drawing class. But I don’t have enough material for it, so I needed to come up with another topic.

I’m thinking lists… I love lists. I make them all the time. It makes me feel organized and it helps me to remember things – things to do, things to buy, things to make, things to bake, things to think about, etc.

I wonder if I can fill a whole zine with a bunch of lists. Check in with me at the end of this month to see if I made it work.

Peace, love and Bermese Python FOREVER!

Creatures of Our Nights

The Sleeping Kid:

Last night, for the first time in two and half years, my daughter fell asleep on my lap. Lately, she’s been refusing to go to bed and it’s been frustrating as hell. Even if I somehow manage to get her into bed, it takes her forever to fall asleep. She gets out of bed and lies down on the carpet instead. She asks for no less than eight or nine dolls, a bottle of water and a band-aid (don’t even get me started on her fixation with band-aids as a good night toy). If she still doesn’t fall asleep, she calls me back to her room to shoo away the (imaginary) mosquitoes in her room. Mosquitoes are my daughter’s boogeyman. So I pretend to shoo them away and she falls asleep on the carpet surrounded by her stuffed animals and a bandaid stuck on one of them or on herself. I obviously transfer her back to her bed with a loud grunt.

But last night was pretty awesome. We were sitting on the living room sofa, and she laid her head on my lap as I was reading her a bedtime story, and fell fast asleep. My husband transferred her to bed, and she slept through the night. No dolls. no bottle, no band-aid, no mosquitoes and no tears. I was so happy about that, I decided I’ll try it out every night.

The Feline Intruder:

We have a neighbor who likes to feed the feral cats on our street. So since the municipality removed the open dumpster from our street, many of the cats relocated to our backyard. Sometimes they sit on our windowsill and scratch the fuck out of our screens (we’ll have to do something about that because once summer comes around, we’ll open our windows for two minutes and my daughter’s imaginary mosquitoes will becomes a reality). We feed them too sometimes, so I guess we’re to blame for that too.

The cats also hang around in the hallway between our front door and our neighbor’s. Then they spend the night either fucking or fighting. And they make a WHOLE. LOT. OF FUCKING. NOISE!

Last night, by the time my daughter was sleeping soundly in her bed, my husband and I settled down to watch our TV series (last night was Inhuman and Van Helsing. Tonight it’s The Outsider and Runaways). The cats in the hallway started screaming bloody catnails on chalkboard. I was scared they were going to wake my daughter up, so I told my husband to chase them away. He did, but neglected to close our door so one of them ran right in. My dog lost her mind and I got even more scared that someone was going to get hurt (either my dog, or the cat, or my husband, or my daughter sleeping in the next room in case one of the animals runs in there), so I screamed too.

It was a sight to behold. Me with my “KISHTAH!” holding my dog by the collar. My husband with his “HACHUTZA!” standing by the door. And the cat with its “HISSSSSSSSSSS!” running around the house.

And my daughter with her “Zzzzzz”.

I think I could have switched on our rumbling-on-the-verge-of-explosion dryer and she’d still be snoring away. Thank the Goddess for that.

Fucking cats. Fine, they’re cute and all. But still. Fucking cats.

Peace, love and muted TV shows forever

Snow Blows

Another weather rant. But seeing as I survived this past weekend, I pretty damn well earned it.

Israel is not the place I expected to be snowed in. And although the temperatures were not entirely reminiscent of my years in Montreal, where they reached the lowest of the low, -20, -30, even -40, they were cold enough to make me utterly miserable.

The snow started falling on Thursday morning. I received an SMS from my boss informing me that the office will be closed and to enjoy the long weekend. From my perspective, the long weekend was already ruined due to the snow. My boyfriend came back from work early even after being stuck in traffic for three hours. He was also one of the lucky ones as many people were stranded mostly at the entrance to Jerusalem. Some even abandoned their vehicles and either walked or hitched a ride to a temporary shelter and out of the cold.

We had warm soup, doubled our pajama layers and blasted both the wall heater and the one with the spiral beams. My boyfriend went back to sleep for a ridiculous four hours while I read a book. At around 17:00, I got dressed (this took me about 20 minutes considering the extra layers) and took Diamond out for her evening walk.

Diamond happily trotted by my side, every once in a while slipping into a pile of snow. As I zigzagged my way across the unplowed sidewalk, and seeing Diamond getting covered in snow which kept on falling endlessly, I looked up at the sky through the sliver between the hem of my tuque and the thick wool scarf which covered half of my face. I flashed back to the time in Montreal when I would take out my dog, Buxy, during the coldest nights of the year. He hated the snow just as much as I did since his feet were webbed and the snow would accumulate between his toes and turn to ice. He would then proceed to limp the rest of the way back home. That was until we bought him socks, which he also hated.

I remember the Montreal nights being bright since the snow and the clouds reflected back all the street lights and lit up the night as if it was day. One of the things I love about Israel is that most of the year, there are no clouds and there is no snow. None of the lights are reflected and the nights are as dark as it is within the confines of my inner child’s shelter room. The moon and the stars are clearly visible on the background of a pitch black sky. There was no such thing in Canada.

So flashing back to my years in Montreal, while I was still walking the streets of Jerusalem, was surreal. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was just surreal.

When we got home, my boyfriend was just beginning to wake up. I took a steaming hot shower and got back into my double layered PJs, carrying my hotwater bottle around like a teddy bear. Outside my living room window, the snowflakes fell in clumps and completely blurred out the wadi and the parallel street overlooking our backyard. The wind made the night even more dreadful. The electric company employees and technicians were all on overdrive as thousands of citizens were left in the dark, as the cool air seeped into the houses through the poorly insulated walls.

We were of the lucky few who had a short power failure in the early evening hours on Friday, which lasted no more than 10 minutes. But others weren’t so lucky. Some had power failures that lasted up to 24 hours, sometimes longer. It was reported that 30,000 retirement homes were left with no electricity. One can only hope they had gas heaters or at least a few generators to keep the elderly and the bedridden from freezing to death.

We stayed indoors the entire weekend. Going out anywhere was impossible. No plowers passed on our small street. We couldn’t even go grocery shopping and we still have no food at home (luckily, my boyfriend’s parents live right upstairs from us and they had plenty of food). We were forced to keep walking Diamond in piles of snow, wearing about four to five layers of clothes, two layers of socks covered in plastic bags to keep our feet dry in case water seeps into our boots, and it did.

Diamond’s Husky side became more evident as the snow levels grew. She kept begging us to take her out again and again, to play in the snow in the backyard. I was worried to leave her outside on her own. Husky or not, she’s still Israeli and not used to such weather.

Now it’s Sunday. The snow started melting a little last night but most businesses and government offices are still closed. There is no public transportation and taxis are the only ones profiting from that. By some miracle, I managed to make it to work today. I was hoping to finally get one of Hasalatia’s awesome soups, which have eluded me since last week due to bad timing. But of course, they too were closed. I have yet to figure out how to make it back home and how to take out Diamond for a walk through the streets, which have now become all icy and slippery.

Now all my Canadian and North US friends will probably tell me to suck it up – that at least I don’t have to suffer through five months of that white shit, that the temperatures never get lower than -5, that the worst that could ever happen in Israel right now is buckets of rain. Well, no. I won’t suck it up. Israel is a country which is built and organized according to hot weather. There is no insulation because there is no need for it. The plowers can’t plow everywhere, and there aren’t enough of them because there is no need for them most of the time. There is no readily available street salt also because there is no need for it either, and there hasn’t been any need for it for dozens of years. So no, Israel was not ready for a snowpocalypse. Despite my prior flashbacks, this still isn’t Montreal. At least, a city like Montreal is always ready for the absolute worst because it’s bound to happen. So being completely unprepared, snow in Jerusalem is pure hell and I still hate snow with every fiber of my being.

Peace, love and have we paid our dues? Good, now let’s see some sunshine!

The Reason God Made a Dog

I finally managed to develop some pictures from an actual film camera. It seems so hard to do that these days with all the digital shit.

I took these pictures outdoors during days where the sun was unapologetic. It’s because my dog likes to run around and low light would mean slower shutter speed and cause blurry photos. It was still hard to get good pictures because the focus on my old-ass camera is also manual. But I got some pretty good shots. Diamond is super photogenic.

The scans do not do justice to the quality of the photos, but here are some of the better ones anyway.

Queen Diamond.

What’s that behind me?

That one was probably before we applied the Gentle Leader. So beautiful.

Out for a walk.

In the backyard.

Diamond is out of focus on this one. But I like it because the focus is on the drain, and Diamond’s blurry shiny texture gives the photo a unique matty quality.

Totally out of focus, but it’s the only semi-decent photo I managed to get of Diamond’s “crazy” expression – Hanging tongue, wide eyes, ears back.

Peace, love and camera, lights, woof!

DIY Month – Day 25: Photo Book

Since Diamond is the most photogenic living thing in our apartment, the photo book I made last night was about her.

Most of my hand-made publications (i.e. zines) are either completely in black and white, or have only the cover page in full color. So this photo book is the first time I compile a full publication in full color.

It’s 16 pages long including the cover, and it’s not a standard size book. It’s square and is slightly smaller than an A5 but a little bigger than an A6. I made it so that I could fit all pictures, portrait and landscape, straight and leave some space for text.

The photo book introduces Diamond, her hobbies, her habits, and her sleeping positions. Since this is the last production I made this month that I would want to make copies of, I gave it to my boyfriend along with the split zine, the flyer, and the stationary to print (I already printed the quickie zine myself), as he works in a print shop and does the best print work ever. And being his girlfriend, I either get it at a discount or completely free of charge.

If anyone wants to trade or buy some of my printed work, drop me a line.

Peace, love and spoken word is gonna be the death of me (more on that tomorrow)

DIY Month – Day 19: Painting

In the spirit of making art in memory of my recently deceased dog, I decided to paint him. I used one of his pictures as a guide. Although he was two-years-old in the picture I used, in the painting, he came out looking like a puppy.

The hardest thing was trying to mix the right colors to match his fur. He was a vibrant shade of blond/white/yellow/gold/beige, and I tried various combinations until I reached something that was remotely close. I started off with a rough yellow outline. It came out so bad that I felt like taking all the paint I mixed and just scribble all over the canvas. But I kept on painting according to the picture in front of me. By the end, the yellow outline was a pretty good idea because it gave Buxy a sort of a golden glow.

I haven’t painted since I was maybe 18, and didn’t think I’d be able to create something as great as I used to in my youth and I was totally dumbstruck that I DID. I still don’t know if this painting fits any classical painting methods, but I am so damn proud of myself. The painting looks even better than the pencil drawing I made earlier this month. I think it’s a really nice way of commemorating my lovely dog.

I put this painting on my night table.

 Peace, love and doggy kisses

DIY Month – Day 18: Modify Shirt

I’m still depressed because of Buxy’s passing. Last night I couldn’t stop hugging Diamond and kissing her forehead. The time we spend with our pets is too short. Buxy was 11 when he passed away, but I’ve been with him for only five years because I couldn’t take him with me when I moved to Israel. He would have been miserable. So I take comfort in the fact that he was happy and loved until the very end. But I’m still sad that I didn’t spend the last years with him.

Last night, I had to force myself to do the activity I planned. I think art and creation is the only thing that can keep you going when you feel upset. When you are standing in front of your creation, the fruit of your labors, sometimes it’s the only thing that makes you feel alive. So last night, I picked a shirt to modify.

The shirt is one I got from my aunt in LA. She always sends my mom and me really neat stuff. This t-shirt is dark gray with skulls and anchors drawn on the front and nothing on the back. My aunt knows I like stuff like skulls, so she thought it would be good for me. When I tried it on, the length of the shirt was good, but the sleeves were weird because they weren’t long enough to be t-shirt sleeves and they weren’t short enough to be tank-top sleeves. They were somewhere in the middle and it made me uncomfortable.

So I decided to do away with the sleeves. I also cut out a bit of the collar to make it look more like a normal tank top. And the empty back of the shirt bothered me, so I printed a grrrlVIRUS logo in Hebrew with a stencil I made.

I’m happy with the tank top. I have something new to wear in summer. Now all I need is some sunshine.

The shirt before it was modified

Shirt after it was modified. Sleeves and collar chopped off.

Back of the shirt with printed grrrlVIRUS logo in Hebrew.

Peace, love and making some art in Buxy’s memory seems like a good idea

DIY Month – Day 17: Flyer

I made a few flyers for grrrlVIRUS many times before. And also one flyer advertizing the Crafts for a Cause Etsy shop to benefit the Jerusalem Rape Crisis Center. But that one was done on Adobe InDesign. So I decided to make a flyer that is more appropriate for a shop that sells DIY feminist art – a DIY flyer.

In other news, I’ve just been informed that the dog I had when I was living in Canada (which my parents had to give away to better owners) passed away last week. The latest owner told me he had a good life and everyone loved him, and he was happy and loyal to the very end. I shed quite a few tears when I got the news, and it ruined my mood completely. All I wanted was to come home to Diamond and get some doggy hugs.

I therefore decided to dedicate the split zine I made this month in loving memory of Buxy Ben-Ari, the most beautiful and wonderful golden retriever in doggy heaven.

 

DIY Month – Day 8: Photo Day

On Saturday, I planned to take my dog and my cousin’s dog to the new dog park in Be’er Sheva. But we didn’t know where the dog park was exactly so we settled for my cousin’s front yard.

I didn’t take as many pictures as I planned to because the dogs were going crazy and many of the pictures came out blurry. Also, my dog was too busy trying to find junk to eat, and I was too busy trying to keep her from eating junk. Between that and freezing to death as the day grew darker, taking decent pictures proved to be harder than I expected.

I’m still happy with the photos that did come out, though. So here they are.

 

Peace, love and woof!