Cozy Tales: 29. Newf Net

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8-30-98-Bath_13_700When we first decided to get a Newfoundland dog, we scoured the bookstores and quickly discovered that there were precious few quality books on the breed. The Internet was just starting to take off and the dot com boom was in full swing so we focused our energies trying to find quality information on-line.  Our Internet searches uncovered an email list called Newf-L which was short for the Newfoundland Mailing List.

An Internet mailing list allowed one person to send email to “the list” by sending to a single email address. The email address was a server which then resent the email to everyone that had subscribed to the list. Forums were still in their infancy, and blogs did not yet exist because this was the still the dark ages of the late 90’s when people used dial-up modems.  Back then, email lists were still a pretty common means of information sharing for on-line communities. Read More

Cozy Tales: 28. Meghan

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MeghanLookingUpAs the pregnancy developed, Lauren took the idea of eating for two to heart, all the while telling everyone that the idea was a myth. Lauren had naturally researched pregnancy to the extreme, so she knew what she was doing, and we just figured that nature would take its course as it had for millions of years before we got involved.

In Lauren’s ninth month of pregnancy we went in for one of the many ultrasounds to check the baby’s health. Lauren’s OBGyn was very smart, very type-A, and very young. We had long ago nick-named him Doogie after Doogie Howser from the TV show of the same name. Doogie took one look at Lauren and told her that he wanted to induce her. Lauren flat-out refused, insisting that nature should take its course and that nothing should impede the beauty of the process or some damn thing. Read More

Cozy Tales: 27. The Table Incident

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CoffeeTableWe used to have a coffee table in the family room that was a two tier affair. The bottom was just a shelf while the top was comprised of three square panes of glass separated by wood with four pillars in the corners. We’d had the table for years and it had become the centerpiece of our family room, around which our lives continued to unfold.

One night while watching television, Lauren was lying on the long couch perpendicular to the  TV while I sat on the love seat. Cozy sat on the floor near me and Daisy had mashed herself in the space between Lauren’s couch and the coffee table. The dogs loved to be in this space that seemed too small for them which we figured had something to do with their den instinct. Regardless of why they liked those spots, they were always there making it difficult for people to get off and on the couch. Lauren, eight months pregnant with Meghan, had an even tougher time when the dogs chose to lie there, which was all the damn time.

For reasons that escape me now, I decided to sit on the coffee table so I could get closer to Lauren. Maybe we were talking, or maybe I felt the need to give her some smooches. Whatever the reason, it was overshadowed by the events that were about to unfold. Read More

Cozy Tales: 26. The Cozy Hole

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MuddyLook-AltCozy liked to dig. She was a dog after all, so that shouldn’t have been a surprise, but what surprised us was the size of the holes. While we expected digging, we had not reasoned through the fact that big dogs meant big holes.

The reasons for Cozy’s excavations were also not obvious to us. She would be outside in the yard and suddenly just start to dig and within minutes there would be a hole large enough to cripple a horse. Luckily we didn’t have any wild horses passing through our yard, but still, the holes were a menace to navigation for those of us who did traverse the yard.

For Cozy, digging was an obsession. While digging, nothing mattered to Cozy but the hole, and by God, the hole in question wasn’t wide nor deep enough. We would often find her outside in a hole-digging trance, her entire head beneath the surface of the Earth as she sniffed out the next stage in her tunnel.  When I’d yell her name from the deck she would stop, pull her head from the hole, look up at me with a far-away look in her eyes, then stick her head back in the hole and resume the task at hand. Cozy was an artist driven mad by a singular vision who happened to use our yard as her canvas.  Read More

Cozy Tales: 25. Remote Control

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JVC-PQ10779-RemoteBack before the days of wedded bliss, having dogs, or even the existence of DVD players, I had come into some money and bought a very nice 27” JVC TV and a matching VCR. Each of these items had cost me over $800 and at the time were about the most expensive things I had ever bought. By the time we had Cozy and Daisy living with us, these devices were each probably eight years old, but since High Definition television was still many years away, they were both still used daily. Used, I might add, with a certain amount of nerdy pride since they were still pretty great devices.

The VCR was a top of the line model (circa 1989) that had a wonderful remote control including a large LCD screen that kept the time so you could program the VCR when the power failed. The remote had two levels of buttons with a very cool plastic door that would open to reveal an additional level of controls. It was a masterful piece of geek technology that I really enjoyed using. It was a remote among remotes. It was sublime. Read More

Cozy Tales: 24. Daisy the Critic

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DaisyResting_700-2One fine night Lauren and I decided to sit and watch a movie. Lauren was five months pregnant with our first baby, and we were trying to enjoy as much “us” time as possible before our lives were turned upside down.

As we settled in to watch the movie, we heard an odd sound from behind the coffee table. I got up to investigate, naturally expecting giant spiders or robotic invaders, only to discover Daisy sitting with a newspaper on her paws. I kept a pile of old newspapers by the fireplace to help start fires in the winter, and apparently Daisy had something else on her mind regarding the fair use of these papers. She had pulled one off of the pile and was sitting there methodically tearing the newspaper to shreds.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Daisy never got into trouble, she never did anything wrong, and she was always the consummate lady. She always seemed to look down her nose at Cozy’s shenanigans, and here she was being naughty out in the open. The Duchess, it would appear, had a wild side. Read More

Cozy Tales: 23. Newf Cam

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Surveillance-CamerasBeing the computer geek that I am, I decided in 1999 to build myself a monitoring system to watch the dogs from work. Back then you couldn’t buy wireless network cameras on Amazon. Hell, back then wireless didn’t exist yet and very few stores had websites. Also, Amazon was barely a thing.

Working at a local Internet Service Provider when local ISPs could still thrive, I was learning the ins and outs of Internet network devices, and in order to manage and maintain the ISPs network, I had a scorching 128k ISDN connection to my home. You have to remember that everyone else was still using modems, and they were slow. The modems at the time were mostly 28.8k models, with 56.6k being the absolute cutting edge. DSL and cable Internet feeds were still in their infancy so having a dedicated 128k connection to my house was a very big deal at the time. No one out-nerds me! Read More

Cozy Tales: 22. Graviditas

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PregnancyTestThe dogs had known that Lauren was pregnant before we did. I’m also sure that they knew we were never pregnant – only Lauren was. Daisy, having had litters of puppies before her retirement seemed especially intuitive regarding hormonal events such as pregnancy. Cozy just seemed to go with the flow for the most part;  Daisy was the natural midwife.

We had gone through this once already. As soon as Lauren’s body started changing in order to grow a new baby, Daisy would know, and even before we knew Daisy would start acting strangely. As Lauren would try to walk down the hallway, Daisy would walk in front of her, then stop and turn around in circles, almost as if she was trying to make a bed for Lauren. Daisy would become very attentive and be with Lauren constantly to the point of annoyance. When Lauren miscarried the first baby, Daisy lay on the couch with Lauren while Cozy and I looked on helplessly. Daisy had been there, and she knew just what Lauren was going through. Read More

Cozy Tales: 21. Grandma

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Mom1-600We visited my mother and her husband David in New Hampshire for thanksgiving in 1998.  My mother had moved there with her then new husband back in 1984 and I had made the trip once or twice a year since then with one of those trips always coinciding with the Thanksgiving holiday. Traveling the 350 miles by car was usually a six to eight hour experience that could range from boring to fun depending on who was in the car, and this trip was surprisingly uneventful given the fact that we had almost 300 pounds of dog in the back of the Subaru.

Since we had two slobbering beasts stuffed into the car with us, we stopped often to let them out so they could walk around, relieve themselves and enjoy some time doing anything other than being stuffed into a car. Come to think of it, those were the same reasons that we usually wanted to stop. After what seemed like 384 hours on the road (it was seven) we arrived safely, setting a personal record for the most stops caused by the need to clean drool off of the back window (four).  Read More

Cozy Tales: 20. The Pool

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CozyDumbLook_700-2A well groomed Newfoundland dog is a majestic animal. Their shiny coats glisten in the sunlight and they seem to exude power, grace, and nobility. A soaking wet Newfoundland dog is the very image of the pathetic drowned rat. Their voluminous coat lies flat on the skin, and their long fluffy tails attain the appearance of being thin, pointed and dare I say, scaly.

It gets surprisingly hot in New Jersey, and we didn’t have central air conditioning. We did however have a hose, and we would have great fun hosing off the dogs in the midst of hot summer days. It could be a challenge getting a Newfy wet enough to do their rat imitations because their coats were very water resistant but persistence and good aim won every time. Read More