when the world gets weird
I'm Gino.
I'm an 11year-old, half-blind, mostly deaf dog. The source of my maladies is a longer story. We'll get there. But the sad part of my story ends with a garage sale where I was rescued and, after a short stint in foster care, adopted by ManHuman and LadyHuman. I've been with them since October 2017. It's not bad.You might not expect such energy and general joie de vivre from an old dog with major sensory limitations, but blindness is a minor issue when your humans hunt for you, and let's just say that the deafness is a mixed blessing in a noisy neighborhood. Also, I deal in snuggles, and snuggles are all about the feels.
I also lean heavily on my spatial memory to get around the house. I know what dresser is where. I know the number of steps between the food bowl and the bed. I have my safe space on the rug where I bring my peanut butter snacks and assorted food I find on the floor.You get it.
So you can understand how weird things got when my humans began moving and removing my environment over the past few months.
It started with minor stuff. The lawnmower disappears. A lamp moves. A wall mirror gone. These things change. But once the big stuff started to move around and disappear-- the tables, the dressers, the kitchen island, my plants, my BEDS, my FOOD BOWLS?!-- I suspected tides of dramatic change. Stuff was getting weird.
Then came the seemingly inconsequential visits to the V-E-T, the road trip to hang out in the mountains with BrettHuman, TinaHuman, and Hazelnut-the-Dog, the long car ride to and from the coast to drop of the leather-seat-car, and several spa weekends away from Man-and-LadyHuman so they could "visit friends and family," the house party with lots of friendly humans, and then...the empty house.
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| Me. Hiding on the 'hairy pork' at the Quarter Way Inn. Can you find me? |
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| "Holy crap. Where's all the crap?" |
And then things got even weirder.
Man-and-LadyHuman placed me in my small, cramped travel basket, and we sat in two different pressure tubes: one for eight hours and one for two hours, with a six hour layover in Munich. Why we do this from time to time escapes me.In the first pressure tube, ManHuman got scolded by a German flight attendant for taking me out of my travel basket. Bad timing. LadyHuman was more sly about it, and waited for the cabin lights to dim. We snuggled for the rest of the flight! Amazingly, I held my pees and poops the entire flight and ManHuman walked me through a labyrinth to the exterior of the Munich airport where I left a mark for my Bavarian brethren. Ahoy.
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Me. Tolerating life in a travel basket.
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| Me and the Humans. Entering Gothenburg Sweden. |
And then, we were done with the pressure tubes. A short car ride later, and we entered what I imagine will be our new home for a while. The Humans pulled out my bed, and we all slept for 12 hours.
Where are we?
My sources explain to me that we've landed in Gothenburg, Sweden. Göteborg (yuh-tay-BORee) in Swedish. Gothenburg is the second largest city in Sweden. Population ~600,000. Birthplace of Volvo. Birthplace of Alicia Vikander. The largest non-capital city in Scandinavia. We're about 3 hours north of Copenhagen, 3 hours south of Oslo, and about 5 hours west of Stockholm.
Why are we here? ManHuman found a new reason to leave me for hours and hours during the day, mostly related to sustainable mobility research, and it happens to be just up the coast from where LadyHuman was born. Gothenburg is one of the world's leading cities in Mobility-as-a-Service (Maas) which envisions transportation as a subscription-based service (like Netflix) rather than the consequence of everyone owning their own vehicles. Helsinki, Finland is pretty far ahead on this. I'll be writing much more about this in coming installments.
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