dogs

oh god how do I write this. on sunday may 16th, both of the dogs were killed in an awful freak accident. i don’t think i can write the story here, but it’s unbelievably hard to lose them both at once. they’re gone and we miss them more than any words can say. life is so different now, sadder and quieter and emptier. it’s been a month now and we’re still crying and grieving but we are also starting to think of finding another rescue puppy to take in. maybe sometime this summer. and we’ve still got my parents’ two sweet and lovely dogs to lick our ears and console us. but of course no other pup can ever be quite like cuddly little emmylou or our beautiful wild inga. we miss you an awful lot, girls.

here, now

We’ve arrived in Maine at last! Got in to Boston mid-morning (beautiful snow falling all around) and made it to Gorham in the afternoon, after about 23 hours in transit. Feels like a miracle that we made it here. Dogs didn’t enjoy the flight, but are still alive and are now in high spirits. Today we went to SEE the house for the very first time! It was mostly just as I expected it, after seeing photos and videos. But I was really struck by how BIG and cold and messed-up it is. It’s like a maze that just goes on and on. The walls are basically totally uninsulated and it was bitter cold today. And it is a mess! A beautiful, rambling shambles. There is so much stuff left behind by the previous tenants; in the ruins of the upstairs ell apartment, the bathtub is filled with baby clothes, a large old beige computer monitor and a smallish plastic christmas tree. The fridge and freezer are still filled with stinking, eight-month old food. In other rooms their traces are fainter, just cigarette burns and half-painted walls. It’s weird and a bit creepy but oh, it’s ours, and filled with possibilities. The room that might be my studio is huge and has six windows and a beautiful peaked ceiling. The dogs went nuts running in the yard, Inga was careening around, crazed by more open grassy space than she’s ever seen in her life.

The Puppy!

oh, this post is long overdue. I’ve just been so busy with the new puppy that it’s been hard to find time to write about her! On December 6th, Mike and I strolled over to Parque Las Heras to “look at” the rescued dogs up for adoption because we had begun to think that maybe a new friend would be the perfect cure for Emmy’s lonely neurotic anxiety blues.

If you don’t know Emmy, she’s always been a delicate flower, thrown into fits of desperate anxiety and violent shaking by thunder or rain, passing trucks, cameras, tv, opening the oven door, the entire world outside of our house, the sound of the water heater or the chirping of birds outside the window, to name a tiny fraction of the many daily occurrences that made every day a horrible day for poor Emmylou. After Zviah died she seemed like she had lost her security blanket and she got even more miserable and terrified and anxious and preferred to spend most of her waking hours trembling in a dark closet or shaking under the bed, hyperventilating, her beady little eyes bulging in terror. When she wasn’t under the bed she was relentlessly needy. She wouldn’t run and play with other dogs outside, she just ran under a bush and hid every time we took her to the park. Everything we tried to do to cheer her up seemed to make her even more afraid. So we started thinking that maybe we should get Emmy a new friend to try and bring a little joy into her days. It seemed like a great idea for her but maybe a questionable idea for us since we are planning to move overseas (back to the usa, that is) within the next few years. So we were just at this “kind of maybe” stage when we decided to stop by this park on a Saturday afternoon, to visit the rescued pets up for adoption and think about our options…

And then we sat at the park ALL day long, snuggling puppies and cooing and playing and cuddling… and then we just could not let go of this puppy and put her back in the cage and say goodbye, so we had to bring her home with us!!! she was just a tiny, sleepy little pup, beige with a black snout, 5 weeks old. She pretended to be polite and affectionate. She weighed 2 kilos. Mike wanted to have a medium/large dog and we thought she looked like she might grow up to be a big one. We could only guess since all the pups are rescued mutts, who knows! When we walked in the house, Emmy ran at us, excited, and then caught sight of the little puppy in my arms and backed away, shaking, and wouldn’t come near her. I thought Emmy would be SO excited to meet her new friend but she did not want anything to do with her! It took her about a week to start warming up.

I will have to skip over lots of stories. Too much to type. It took a few weeks for the new puppy to be named, we were indecisive and made a list of cute names and thought about it for a while and Inga was the one that stuck. I think Inga was a good choice, it fits. Inga peed and pooped all over the house, squealed and screamed constantly, kept us awake all night every night, chewed on everything in sight, chewed on our arms, feet, fingers and toes, bit our noses, and had no manners at all. She was ravenously hungry all the time and once tried to kill me over a bag of doritos. She couldn’t go up and down the stairs, she would sit and cry until someone carried her. She viciously massacred our plants and turned plant-pots into excavation sites. She was madly in love with Emmylou and we were madly in love with her. She never really showed much interest in us at all, except for biting us and trying to steal our food. She HATED going for walks and had to be dragged, screaming and fighting, down the street every single time.

Now Inga is 6 months old, basically house-broken, and LOVES walks. She weighs over 20 kilos, she was recently spayed, she has no problem tearing up and down the stairs, she has stopped biting us and humors us with cuddles sometimes, but obviously Emmylou is her one true love and best friend. She still screams and yaps constantly, what is up with that. She screams mostly when she’s bored and wants someone to pay attention to her (anyone who has advice about discouraging this behavior, please send it my way).

Emmylou is now just as much in love with Inga as Inga is in love with her. They spend their entire lives snuggling together, biting each other, chasing each other, wrestling and stealing each others’ bones. They run carefree at the park, jumping and chasing and shrieking and sprinting and pouncing and wrestling. Emmy still gets afraid and shakes alot and hides under the bed, but I like to think that Inga helps to take her mind off of her worries most of the time and shortens the duration of her terrors when she gets them. Inga likes to bite Emmy a lot more than Emmy likes to be bitten, and I think sometimes Emmy is hiding from Inga. But they are both completely in love with each other. Inga is the most happy-go-lucky, carefree, well-adjusted dog I’ve ever met. We were worried that Emmy’s bizarre anxieties might rub off on Inga but that has not happened at all. Inga is a bold and fearless explorer who loves everything and everyone, except for big dogs that walk up to her in the street. She gets scared of big dogs and when they sniff her she runs away crying with her tail between her legs. We feel like we totally made the right decision to get her as a friend for Emmy and I am still just out of my mind with love for her cute little puppyness and her cute little puppy face. Those eyes!

can’t keep up!

Lots of exciting and awesome things have happened in the past few weeks/months, and all of these exciting things have been keeping me very very busy. Too busy to blog! I’d like to go back and write a more detailed entry about each of these things, but for now here’s a quick list:
-October: weekend at the beach in Uruguay with Julia and friends.
-November: taking Level 5 spanish course at the University of Buenos Aires aka La UBA
-November: got the worst flu
-November: Amy Sawyer came to visit, yaaayyy!!
-November: 8-day trip to Salta and Tucuman provinces in the north of Argentina
-November: nice mention of Morris & Essex on Design*Sponge, which brought me tons of card orders and wholesale inquiries! i’ve been working like a sleep-deprived madwoman to fill wholesale orders and keep up with it all. I am my own sweatshop.
-December: adopted a new puppy! we wanted a friend for Emmylou Elbows, who seemed terribly sad and lonely and scared all the time. new puppy is adorable and fearless and nameless. we’re thinking of calling her Inga Josefina.

Zviah

On Monday at noontime, we had Zviah put to sleep. We just found out this weekend that she had cancer, and she must have been sick for a while, though she only appeared to be suffering the last few days. It was an incredibly hard decision to make because we knew how much we would miss her, but I’m sure it was the right one because she’s much more comfortable now, chasing bunnies in greener pastures.

Zviah was born in Alabama in 2000, and raced in Daytona Beach and Palm Springs, Florida. You can see her pedigree here and her racing history here. Her racing name was ML Bannerville and her training name was Angie. When she was three years old, she retired from racing and was rescued by the Michigan Greyhound Connection. Mike adopted her on December 2nd, 2003 and named her Zviah, which is Hebrew for “deer.” When she came to live with him in Ann Arbor, she had never lived in a house (having grown up in the racetrack kennels) and it was the first time she had to confront challenges like stairs and windows and cats. In 2004 they moved to Brooklyn, where she met Emmylou Elbows and spent many happy Saturday mornings running free with her friends in Prospect Park. In 2006 she came with us to Buenos Aires, where she was studying Dog Spanish and advanced napping.

She could most often be found sleeping upside down on her giant bean-bag bed, with all four legs sticking up in the air, eyes open and tongue hanging out. If you rubbed her belly, her teeth would chatter from happiness. She also enjoyed steak dinners, looking fancy, cuddles with Emmylou, eating garbage in bed, sprinting at the park, leaning on strangers, and sleeping in closets. She hated fireworks. Zviah was a great dog and we miss her lots.

the strange and the familiar

Milanesa
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

En Argentina, hay algunas cosas diferente de los Estados Unidos. It’s pretty comfortable for a North American here. Aside from the language thing, Buenos Aires isn’t very different from living in the US. I think that the Argentinians have a slightly different relationship with their country’s institutional corruption. So far the most apparent evidence of this is the postal service. I haven’t received any mail yet, though my mom says she’s mailed me 3 envelopes. Anecdotally, everyone I’ve met has a story about mail that has been opened, pilfered, stolen, lost, held for ransom at the central post office (until the recipient bribes a postal worker to release it), or just disappeared. Aside from the corruption issue, I think this is a symptom of the local economy and the incredibly steep import tariffs on everything.
On the other side, Mike gets health insurance from his job and I GET TO BE ON HIS PLAN TOO! I haven’t tried to use it yet, but it is allegedly some of the best health insurance / health care in the world. I can’t wait to get sick so I can try it out!
Other things that are strange to me:
-MATE. This tastes like creosote and makes me have to poop, but I keep trying it anyway, because I like the accoutrements. It seems like a really appealing local custom.
-FRESH-SQUEEZED ORANGE JUICE. US$1. everywhere. holy awesome.
-GRAPEFRUIT-FLAVOR EVERYTHING. from soda to gatorade to chewing gum, I like it!
-ICE CREAM. It’s pretty different. It’s stickier and meltier and creamier and has SO MUCH flavoring it makes your lips pucker and sometimes obscures the delicious creaminess. Usually a cone comes with at least 2 different flavors and a bowl comes with at least 3. My favorite so far is Dulce de Leche with Brownie Chunks.
-DULCE DE LECHE. Argentinians are not afraid of sticky, gooey sweetness. Usually I’m not either, but I’m startled by the ubiquity of this caramelly stuff. You can get Oreos with Dulce de Leche filling or Dulce de Leche flavored schnapps. Any dessert in any restaurant is guaranteed to come with at least one ginormous mouthful of this gloopy sweetness, either displayed proudly on top (with powdered sugar too!) or hidden deep inside to get you when you don’t expect it.
-SWEETNESS. aside from the dulce de leche, things here tend to be sweet. such as sushi and sashimi with some kind of sweet glaze? I like lunas con jamon y queso, a ham & cheese croissant with sweet glaze. But sometimes already-sweet desserts are served with crunchy granulated sugar on top. I read about a syrup-drenched Thai dinner that tasted like dessert. And pastries! they are SWEET! i think that’s the way pastries should be. maybe not sushi though.
-ARTIFICIAL SWEETNESS. WTF?! this is hard for me to avoid since I am not familiar with the brands and words to avoid. They will put Sucralose in practically EVERYTHING, from soda to yogurt to fruitcake. blech!!!!
-NO SPICINESS!!! they don’t do it here. bring your own hot sauce.
-MANTECOL. It’s like halvah, but with peanuts instead of sesame seeds. I have considered trying to make a sandwich out of this, because they do not have peanut butter here.
-WINE. MMMMMMMM good.
-JACARANDA BLOSSOMS. every park is full of huge bright purple trees! pretty. they scatter their leaves all over the ground and it’s so cute when Emmy frolics in the fields of purple.
-DOGS. I had no idea there was a place in the world where everyone has a dog! They’re very well-behaved. They sleep under tables at sidewalk cafes and wander the sidewalks without leashes and sniff each others butts with cool detachment. Everyone is quite used to dogs here. It’s nice to take the dogs for a walk without getting undeserved dirty (or terrified) glares from dog-phobic bypassers. There is at least one veterinarian on every block here! You can’t spit without hitting a shop that sells dog food, dog toys, and dog beds. There’s also this crazy dog-walking scene, where one guy will be trotting down the street holding 40 leashes with 40 dogs trotting along beside him. On the down side, there’s dog poo *everywhere* so watch your step.
-TANGO. I don’t know anything about Tango, but they love it here! They say that every tango song is about some kind of heartbreak, whether it’s horse-racing or ladies. Last night we went to see this “rockstar” tango orchestra in a converted warehouse, with a dozen hairy hipsters playing raucous violin, accordion, bass, piano, etc. I loved it. They sounded like the Dirty Three but even more dramatic and bombastic. People were dancing and they looked like they were floating on air and spinning around without even trying. I had originally thought of Tango as an old-people thing, but it was super fun to see this youth-culture-Tango scene. Also, I realized how much I love accordion music. The more accordions, the better.
-THUNDERSTORMS. The best way to wrap up a 98 degree day is with a hair-raising, apocalyptic thunderstorm. It’s very tropical. I have never seen such awesome and terrifying storms with so much lightning, thunder and torrential rain. they last for hours and hours and really scare the dogs.
-KEYS. they all look cool. see picture.
-DESIGN. this is an incredibly beautiful city. architecturally, there’s lots of old French style, and fantastic art-nouveau, and lots of very 70′s-looking white geometric high-rise towers with varying degrees of kitschy style. Palermo Soho is full of little design shops, lots of young, start-up designers selling hand-sewn goods ranging from incredibly cute to sophisticated. More on this later, I won’t go into it all now.
-MULLETS. ladies here are looking good, and they have almost as many “sho-lo” haircuts as in Barcelona. I can’t wait for my hair to grow out so I can get one too.
-SEXISM. the international language of leering is easy to understand and hard to avoid. I’ve heard nasty stories from other women here but it hasn’t got under my skin yet. I think the common attitude is that a man’s desire is a compliment to a woman, and she ought to enjoy it whether she likes it or not.
-BLACK-FACE PASTRIES. holy crap. this is a very white city, and they don’t have the same kind of racial history or taboos as the USA. hence, cookies in EVERY BAKERY decorated like 1920′s-era black-face caricatures complete with fat pink lips and bulgy white eyeballs. Also, I have seen the same motif painted in the logo of the “Harlem” bakeshop and delicatessen.
I hear that it is not easy to be black here.

I can’t comment too much yet about porteños and their habits, because I’m still conversing with the locals at a nursery-school level. Pretty much everyone has been incredibly nice to me considering my handicap. Some people speak a lot of English, but for the most part you need some Spanish to get around here. I’ve talked most with taxi drivers, who are consistently kind and patient and chatty and willing to endure 20-minute conversations in level-one Spanish!