Dazzle

 

          This beautiful lady is Dazzle. The other beautiful lady is Annette, one of my church peeps.

Annette and her handsome husband, Pork, exchanged the cold and snow of northeast Pennsylvania for sunny Florida. Although, they may be blamed for letting some of our weather hitch a ride on their coattails. Florida temperatures have been running ten to twenty degrees colder than normal. Fifties and sixties are still way better than our minus two in my opinion.

“I did it!” Annette texted and sent me pictures. “And it was awesome!”

“How cold was it?” I asked.

“It wasn’t cold at all until I got out. The air temp was about seventy with the water being in the low sixties.”

Being curious, I asked more questions.

“How long did they let you swim with Dazzle?”

“It was about a forty-five-minute program.”

“Were there others in the tank with you?”

“It wasn’t a tank, it was a huge swimming pool,” she clarified. “There were three other people but they stayed in the shallow water. I paid extra to actually swim with the dolphins.” Then Annette told me more about her dolphin. “Dazzle is thirty-seven years old and is a mom and grandmother.”

I was curious to know more, but Annette is on vacation and couldn’t babysit her phone while I fired questions at her. I totally get that. Life is more important. Making memories is more important.

I did a little research on my own, asking Copilot, my AI buddy, all my questions.

Dazzle was born into captivity. She’s never been a wild dolphin and can never be released into the wild. As you may well guess, but I didn’t know, the mother dolphin teaches her baby important things like the best way to swim, how to use their voices, how to socialize in the pod, how to find food, and how to avoid dangers.

          Dolphins in captivity can live forty to fifty years with some even reaching sixty, whereas in the wild it’s about half of that. They start to have calves between six and twelve years old and will have one every three to six years. Like people, they stop having babies when they get older. At thirty-seven, Dazzle could have another calf, but chances are they will retire her from the breeding program.

          “So what will Dazzle teach her baby?” you wanna know.

          The calf’ll learn to be calm around people, to swim over when the trainer calls, and good social manners with the other dolphins.

          Marineland never forces their dolphins to participate. If they don’t want to, they can swim away or stay on the bottom. The trainers read their body language constantly. They know each dolphin’s personality, mood, and stress signals. If they see anything like fast, choppy swimming, avoidance, or agitation, they are pulled from the session immediately.

          “How many dolphins do they have?” you ask.

          I know, right! I wanted to know that, too!

          “The exact number isn’t listed on their website but the estimate is between twenty and twenty-two,” Copilot told me.

          Are they happy? is another question I had.

          Judging by her behaviors, Dazzle seems to be. She willingly participates even when she’s not required to, she stays engaged without being prompted, her swimming is smooth and relaxed, and she exhibits playful behavior like bubble blowing, vocalizing, and spyhopping.

          “Spyhopping?”

          That’s where they come straight up in the water, vertically, with just the head above the surface, and pause to look around.

          “Have their dolphins ever hurt anyone?” I asked Copilot. Dolphins are powerful and weigh between three- and five-hundred pounds.

          “There are no documented cases of a Marineland dolphin causing severe injury to a guest during a swim.”

           There are accidental bumps, splashing, nudges, or a missed hand-off during feeding.

          Marineland teaches its guests how to ask the dolphin to do a trick.

          “I learned the command to tell her she did something wrong,” Annette told me, “and she made a really sad sound. Then they taught me another command but didn’t tell me what it was. Unbeknownst to me, it was a command for her to spray me.”

          Annette got a belly ride from Dazzle while she held on to the pectoral fins. Doesn’t she look absolutely ecstatic?!

          We had snow!

          Boy, did we ever have snow!

          I think this was our biggest snowfall of the season. The official recording is a foot but I didn’t get quite that much on my snowboard. However, I didn’t put the big snowboard out and this one is narrow. I’m sure the snow was piling up and falling off. I'd scraped off half of it when we had about three inches so one side is lower for that reason.  I ended up with a total of only about eight inches.

          Raini went bounding through the snow.

          I laughed to see her plowing the snow with her chest and she stopped and looked at me. Our snow was half a Heeler deep.

          Mike had the foresight to bring the snow blower up from the lower barn and went out to clear the driveway.

          He finished just in time for Lamar to stop and pick up Miss Rosie’s weekly letter blog.

          Raini and Bondi went to greet him and Tux but only said a quick hello before turning tail and heading back. It was c-c-cooooold!

          Later in the same day, Mike took me for a ride out the back snow-covered dirt roads, through the game lands past the Snyder farm to the black top, circled around and came back in the other road that runs past the beautiful Walker farm, then across the creek and out Woods Road. Without further ado, here are those pictures.

          These cats!

          I’ll tell you what. Being so cold and snowy out there has caused our cats to be indoors much more than they normally would. I’m guessing that’s why they’re spittin’ and spattin’ with each other.

          The other day, just for a change, Spitfire chased Tiger through the house! They knocked my tower of recyclables over (I haven’t been able to get to the recycle site for two months now), so they knocked over the boxes, came tearing through the kitchen, cut the corner too short, landed in the water bowl, kicked it over getting out of it, the water bowl goes flying, and the kitchen floor ends up looking like a small lake.

          Aye-yi-yi!

          I guess the mopping didn’t hurt the floor at all. 

          Speaking of critters, I lost two bowls this week.

          I was standing at the kitchen sink and watched a bird land close to the jelly feeder. My eye went to the jelly feeder and it was gone. As in not there. Disappeared.

          It got knocked down, I thought.

          Grape jelly is not good for dogs. I went out immediately to find the dish and scrape up whatever frozen grape jelly might be there.

          It wasn’t lying in the snow anywhere I could see.

          It must’ve gone down before the snow started, I thought and kicked up the snow the whole way around the pole. It’s not there. I know it was there the day before because I added jelly to it in anticipation of the storm. My only guess is maybe the jelly was frozen to the bowl and whatever critter came for the jelly took the bowl.

          “How did you lose the other one?” you wanna know.

          Here’s the deal.

          I give Raini and Bondi allergy pills at night to help with their scratching. I wrap it in a small piece of braunscheiger and they swallow it no fuss, no muss.

          When I open a new roll, I divide it into four portions. I’ve got the perfect bowls for this job. They’re one-cup plastic containers with lids, and came in a set of four. See! Perfect.

I keep one in the fridge and put the other three in the freezer. When I scoop the last of it out I give Raini the bowl to lick out.

The next day, while washing dishes, I realized I washed the lid and not the bowl so I went looking for it. I knew where to go. Raini has a spot, just a few feet into the dining room, where she takes all of her lickables. It wasn’t there. I got a flashlight, got down on my hands and knees and looked under the buffet. It wasn’t there. I shone the light under the table and around the chair legs, it wasn’t there either. I turned around and looked under Sugar’s condo. Not there. I crawled to where I could look under the coat rack. Not there, either! Where was it?! I continued around the table and looked under everything else in the dining room. The hall table, the tea cart. I couldn’t find it anywhere!

The next day, on my morning love call to my Miss Rosie, I was telling her about losing two bowls and she told me she lost something, too! Well, nearly lost it. She was doing laundry when one of her dryer balls went... what? Flying? Rolling? Bouncing? Luckily, she saw it go under the hamper.

“It was completely out of sight. If I hadn’t seen it go, I’d be looking for it to this day,” she told me.

I was walking through the dining room, watching for booby traps like dog toys that squeak and scare the poop out of you when you step on them, when I spot the missing braunscheiger bowl. It ended up behind the burnable trash can and Raini’s open kennel door.

I expect I won’t find the birds’ jelly dish until the snow melts.

          Speaking of birds...

          This little Carolina Wren sat on the feral cat house and raised such a ruckus I had to go and see what all the fuss was about. I thought if there was something I could do for her, I would. But she just hopped back and forth for a while, then took off.

          I’ve been making my high protein wraps nearly every day this week. For one thing, I really like them. For another, I don’t want to lose a tub of cottage cheese. Normally, eating it in a timely manner isn’t a problem, but Mike, for reasons undisclosed, decided he didn’t want any cottage cheese this week.

          So, there I am, mixing the egg and cottage cheese. I get it on the parchment paper and I get the half piece of sausage out of the freezer. It’s easier to chop up when it’s been out for a few minutes. I’m thinking it’ll be thawed and ready for the microwave when the wraps are done.

          Why am I doing that? I wonder. Why am I putting it in the microwave when I can put it right on the wrap and cook it with the wrap!

          Aye-yi-yi!

          I bet you had that figured out a long time ago!

          Something else that just occurred to me this week too is, why am I making two? I’m going to eat both of them, why not just make it into one?

          So, I did that the next time I made it.

          I wrapped it around a couple lettuce leaves to make it healthy.

          Let’s end this week with pictures I took on our shopping trip to Sayre.

          This is a good time of year to see how well your roof is insulated. “That guy is losing so much heat he has giant icicles,” I said.

          I think I commented on a lot of houses as we drove through Waverly. Sayre and Athens sit on the New York border, with Waverly just on the other side. That’s where we go for cheap gas when we’re up that way.

          “He’s got heat dimples,” I said and immediately, realizing how silly that was to say, said, “Don’t ask me what a heat dimple is.”

          What does Mike do?

          “What’s a heat dimple?” he asked.

          The air was so cold the steam from the power plant just hung there.

           They lost their billboard. If I were paying for the advertising, I’d be on the horn saying, “Fix it!” It’s not cheap to advertise on them.

          I took a picture of our house when we came back in the driveway. It seems to be holding its heat pretty well.

         Remember, don’t ever forget, you’re all in my heart.

         With that, let’s call this one done.

          Done!