Fungible Convictions

My dad just scanned and sent me this photo of my parents’ dog Clara from back in 1979.

LOOK FAMILIAR?

This is how it looks 95% of the day.

Today had two little highlights. First, Gatsby finally laid still while I had my camera in hand to get a shot of her pornographic belly rub position:

Second, I sat in on one of MIT’s dozens of IAP courses—informal classes held between the fall and spring semesters. The one I went to was on surveillance, mainly telephone wiretapping:

The Bugs in Mr. Bell’s Circuits: Telephone Bugging and Debugging
James M. Atkinson Granite Island Group
Tue Jan 27, 03-06:00pm, 1-190

No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event

The fine art of telephone surveillance and how to detect it, distilled into a two-hour lecture by one of the nation’s top technical counter-surveillance experts. Ever wonder if someone’s listening in on your calls? Maybe that phone on your desk has been turned into a bug that sends your enemies anything you say nearby — regardless of whether you’ve picked up the handset or not. Drawing on 20-odd years’ experience hunting bugs and finding security leaks for governments and major multi-national corporations, Mr. Atkinson will cover both highly rigorous and somewhat more practical ways of frustrating spies and thinking about physical security.

Basically the presentation scared the sh*t out of me, particularly with how easy it is for anyone—a spy, a local cop, a jealous ex, whomever—to tap anything that goes over a wire. James Atkinson was pretty familiar with the MIT campus and its hardware too, so he was able to show a slide with a photo of the very phone I use in my office and show how to bug it so it acts like a microphone, picking up conversations from the room even when the phone itself is hung up. The simplicity of bugging was fascinating though, yet a lot of its success depends on laziness, like phone company workers who don’t lock what they should.

The whole thing made me wish I had understood circuitry better in AP Physics. Circuitry killed my grade.

The normal reaction by strangers to Gatsby (aka The Gats, aka Gatsbarina) has been cooing and polite questions and requests to pet. But last night and this morning on walks, I got two really odd ones.

This morning–this would be around 6:45am–Gatsby was affectionately and confusingly accosted by a drunk woman. At 6:45! The woman couldn’t quite stand up straight, and The Gats was not a fan of her, um, musk. When she bent over at the waist to pet Gatsby, a bottle of Kool-Aid-colored something fell out of her coat. She slurred an apology and explained, “Oh! Lemme just pick up my soda!”

But last night’s reaction was actually odder. We were walking down Mass. Ave. and a middle-aged couple was walking towards us. When the woman saw Gatsby, her eyes went wide, she dashed into a nearby doorway, and in broken English begged me—BEGGED ME—to take the dog away. Of course all Gatsby wanted to do was stare at her and maybe tentatively sniff near her shoes, but something about dogs—something about my puny 20-pound dog in a fluffy coat—caused bona fide panic.

I’ve never seen anything like it before.

Gatsby is ridiculously sweet.

She likes to dance on her back legs and to snuggle and to sniff everyone who passes by. After a few days of minor disinterest in her new brand of dogfood, she gobbles everything up.

But we’re still having trouble getting her to go to the bathroom when she should—and even when she needs to. We’ve been keeping to a schedule, going to the same spot on Lancaster St., doing everything we should. Yet a couple of times, this morning included, she went to the bathoom in the apartment just after going for a walk.

To her very cute credit, she’s incredibly embarrassed when she does goes in the house. After she pooed in the house this morning, she dashed into the bedroom, hid under the covers, and wouldn’t come out.

We’re not sure why she does this. It may have something to do with the cold weather: she seemed worried about being outside the first couple days we had her—when it was 15 degrees—but started leading us to that spot on Lancaster several times in a row the last couple days when the weather was above freezing. Today it was cold again, and Gatsby seemed more interested in getting back inside than in doing her business.

So who knows. We’ll keep sticking to our schedule and see if she learns it.

• 95% of the time, her tongue sticks out.
• She can learn really basic rules after only three tries; for example, the first two times she got on the part of the couch without the blanket, I picked her up and put her on the blanket. Now she goes straight there.
• She likes a little warm water mixed in with her kibble.
• She demands belly-rubbage! Now!
• She only barks when she’s playing with a ball. And her barks are kinda cute.
• She’s a little picky about treats but seems to like turkey jerky strips. (Thanks to the guy at Greenward for the suggestion.)
• Her farts are frequent, loud, and thermonuclear.

To paraphrase Lindsay: “Our Gatsby. I think we’ll keep her.”

The first dozen of thousands of photos:

Lindsay would like you to know that Gatsby fell asleep and then farted. She’s perfect!

She was very nervous on the way back from New Hampshire, understandably. But she started settling in surprisingly quickly once we gave her a tour of the condo. She’s gone for two walks and pooped both times. She really loves having her belly rubbed, maybe even more than Lindsay does.

Right now she’s curled up and sleeping on the couch next to Lindsay. She seems to recognize the sound of our voices and responded once or twice to her new name. And she’s smart. We left a bone next to her food and water, and she grabbed it and took it right to her crate in the next room.

We love her, like, a whole lot.

Big huge enormous thanks to Paws and Claws, to Kim S. and Kim B., and especially ginormous thanks to Vicki for letting Gatsby (née Patty Cake) into our lives.

“i’m proud of you, whitacre. for the first time in my life. sure, you stared cancer in the face, but what’s that to rescuing a dog?”

After doing everything humanly possible to fight temptation and hold off getting a dog until we were married, Lindsay and I next week will be the proud parents of a Boston Terrier named Patty Cake (which, per our years of planning, will be renamed Gatsby).

She’s three, crate-trained, and reportedly likes to snuggle. She’s a rescue, having been given up by a family that had a few cats—she, like us, doesn’t get along with cats.

Despite all the planning, it still feels like it’s happening really fast. Next Saturday we’ll drive up to New Hampshire to meet the transporter who’s coming up through the Northeast. I’m preparing to be overwhelmed because apparently there will be lots of people receiving lots of dogs.

This week we have lots of final preparations to make. We get to use a $200 gift card to our local Petsmart (thanks mom!) to get a crate and leash and some toys and a jacket (they’re short-haired, and our winters are rough). We need to hide a few last cables around the condo. And we have to train my sister-in-law not to crush the dog with excitement: her away message currently reads “PUPPY!!!!”.

I’ve wanted a dog for who knows how long. My family had two, Coffee and Clara, that passed away when I was little. I once thought I was getting two dogs when I asked for one for Christmas and my step-dad amended my wishlist to read “I would like a dog dad. Yes, you can have two of them.” And then I found out few years ago that my mom’s reason for not wanting any more dogs—that she was allergic—was a lie, that she actually just couldn’t bring herself to tell me that she couldn’t handle dogs getting old and passing away. Which isn’t stopping her and my step-dad, once they found out my wife and I are getting one, from deciding it was time for them to get a dog too.

We’re getting a Boston Terrier because it’s the official family dog of my wife’s family. Her cousin has one, her aunt used to breed them, her dad grew up with them, and her grandfather’s 90th birthday card featured him being crushed by three chubby Bostons. Our pup will get the name Gatsby because BT’s are known as the American Gentleman—they look like they’re wearing tuxes, and to us tuxes equal Jay Gatsby.

It scares me that I’m actually looking forward to getting up even earlier to go for walks….