Tag: family

“Aurora” is her name

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…and she’s filling the big gap in our lives since our Sheila left this life of ours out in Santa Fe County. No pictures, yet…because we just returned home after filling out all the Animal Shelter rigamarole…and Helen is off taking Aurora for her first walk around Vistaland. Two miles and the two of them will be back and I’ll get a snap or two over the next 24 hours or so.

Just updating folks who might wonder how long we’d be dogless…

OK, Helen and Aurora are back from their first Vistaland neighborhood dog walk. Time for lunch and a nap for both, I would imagine.

Dogs, reunited with their owners, cry tears of joy

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Dogs literally cry tears of joy when they see their owners after they’ve been away, scientists have found in the first study of its kind that is also totally going to make us cry, too.

Published in the Current Biology journal, this study by Japanese researchers found not only that dogs shed happy tears, but also that the love hormone oxytocin — the same one that causes humans to feel emotional bonds with each other and with animals — may be underlying that mechanism.

Researcher and paper co-writer Takefumi Kikusui of Azabu University in Japan said in a press release about the study that he first began to wonder about oxytocin tears in dogs when his standard poodle gave birth to puppies about six years ago. He noticed then that his dog had tears in her eyes as she nursed the puppies, and has been fascinated by the topic ever since.

My parents bought my first dog for me when I was 5 years old. An Alaskan Husky, his name was Hank. And that’s about all I can put down on this page, right now.

Funerals are now livestreamed — and families are grateful

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❝ …There were friends who couldn’t travel and family members who lived too far away to make it in time for the service, which, by Jewish tradition, had to happen as soon as possible. But their chapel had a solution: It livestreamed the funeral, and uploaded a recording of the service to its website shortly after, with a hyperlink prominently displayed in the obituary…

❝ In a culture obsessed with tweeting and Instagramming every moment of life, it’s little surprise that streaming extends to death. Funeral livestreaming services have been around for more than a decade, but the practice has recently exploded in popularity, says Bryant Hightower, president-elect of the National Funeral Directors Association. He estimates that nearly 20 percent of US funeral homes now offer the service — a big number in an industry resistant to change — in response to demand from clients…

Close-felt examples, thoughtful reflection. I’ve always been useless at funerals. I don’t know that I feel emotions any more deeply than anyone else; but, I fail at containing them to the boundaries of what passes for American culture. The last time I flew instantly cross-country for a family funeral I ended up sitting alone in my sister’s home while the rest of my kin attended a wake, then the funeral the next day. My family has learned to accept how I am affected by grief and loss.

That I appear to be outliving most of my peers, close family, doesn’t help. So, they understand. Tell me to stay here in my own home – with my wife to console me directly. I guess I’ll start asking if ceremonies are streamed and/or available after the fact. I’d like to try that.

Our dog owns me every time she gives me “THE LOOK”

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Our Sheila

❝ New research suggests that over thousands of years of dog domestication, people preferred pups that could pull off that appealing, sad look. And that encouraged the development of the facial muscle that creates it.

Today, pooches use the muscle to raise their eyebrows and make the babylike expression. That muscle is virtually absent in their ancestors, the wolves…

❝ The researchers believe dogs, over their relatively short 33,000 years of domestication, used this eye muscle to communicate, possibly goading people to feed or care for them — or at least take them out to play. And people, perhaps unwittingly, obliged.

No, she’s not winking. The Española Humane Animal Shelter where we found and adopted her said she was born with only one eye. Her loving look simply counts for twice as much.

Appeals court needed for NM family to sue coppers for illegal arrest — WTF?

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Heather and Stephen Maresca and children

Elementary school principal Stephen Maresca was heading home from hiking in the Sandias with his wife, three children and their dog when the family was arrested by armed deputies after a rookie Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office deputy typed in a wrong license plate number.

Responding officers had the couple and their children exit the truck, walk backward with their hands up and lie face-down on the pavement. The officers aimed firearms at the parents and children, including two boys ages 17 and 14 and a 9-year-old girl, according to a summary of evidence in an opinion by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

The court ruled last month that the arrest was illegal – reversing an earlier decision that gave the arresting officer, Deputy J. Fuentes, immunity.

The county is now on the hook for that 2013 arrest by Fuentes…

So, that much took two years.

The reversal was based not on the mistyped number itself, the appeals court said.

Instead, it was based on the fact that the deputy failed to notice the difference between a 2009 Chevrolet sedan with expired plates, which was the vehicle reported stolen, and a 2004 Ford pickup with current plates, the vehicle Maresca was driving, or to check the information. That information was in front of Fuentes on a computer screen the entire time…

Incredible. Ignore the typo. The copper who called in the bust and all the responding boys in blue never noticed a Ford pickup truck doesn’t look like a Chevy sedan.

According to the family’s lawsuit, Fuentes, followed by another patrol officer in a separate vehicle, called in the correct license plate number to dispatch but entered a number off by one digit in her computer.

The computer indicated from that number that the vehicle was stolen.

Garbage in = garbage out. Forever.

The deputy behind her, G. Grundhoffer, did not run any plate numbers before the two approached the pickup at gunpoint…

Other officers arrived, but none verified that the license plate belonged to a stolen car…

The family was detained for about 40 minutes, fearful, humiliated, tearful and separated from one another in different vehicles, it says. Maresca had been allowed to take their agitated dog, Maya, with him after it wandered into the highway.

Eventually, a sergeant arrived and apologized for the deputies’ mistakes…

The case was first heard by Circuit Judge Paul Kelly of Santa Fe, who found all the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity because the stop was an investigatory detention reasonable under the circumstances.

The three-judge panel in the Appeals Court found that “an unreasonable mistake of fact cannot furnish probable cause…” NSS! Stupid does as stupid is – is not a reasonable defense. None of the responding coppers ever checked the description of the vehicle. Not so incidentally, the father of this family tried his best to lead them through correct procedure. He was an ex-cop.