My Dog's Water Bowl

And other hyðelic projects.

They say the key to building an audience is to find a niche and stick to it. They say it to me a lot, in increasingly frustrated tones.

Anyway, here’s some of the crafts and recipes I’ve been working on recently.

The Infinite Water Hack

Louie can be a little finicky by dog standards. My spouse and I both had a vague impression that he wasn’t drinking enough water, but it felt too silly to try to override his judgment. But after a checkup from his vet, she told us that we should try to get him to drink a little more. So we started thinking. The main clue was that even when he wasn’t interested in his own water bowl, he’d often sneak sips of humans’ drinks.

Turns out this is a fairly common thing—dogs instinctively avoid drinking from large stagnant pools of water (unless they’re really thirsty), as well as water that tastes like a dog has been drinking from it. His water bowl was just too gross for him.

My first working solution was to give him water in teacups. He loved this—it was like getting to steal people’s drinks all the time and get away with it. The vet confirmed that he was well-hydrated.

But he’s a 40 pound dog who likes running around. I was spending focus and energy I didn’t always have (I have some intermittent health issues) refilling his teacups six-plus times a day. I yearned for a more hyðelic solution. (As previously discussed, hyðelic is an Old English word variously translated as “convenient,” “appropriate,” or “hydraulic,” all of which apply here.)

The first iteration was to order this product¹:

PetSafe Drinkwell Pagoda Ceramic Dog & Cat Fountain.

It worked as advertised and was pretty neat. The ceramic tower is removable and hides a water pump, two filters, and an electrical cord that feeds out through the bottom. Water bubbles up to the top through a hole, then falls into the main basin, so pets can drink from either.

But Louie was afraid of it. While he prefers fresh water, he really doesn’t like getting wet under any circumstances. (This is not the only trait of his that makes me sigh and go “‘Cat.’ You’ve invented ‘cat.’”) The top part is mysteriously bubbly, the bottom part is splashy, so nowhere was safe to drink from. He gave it a wide berth most of the time.

I needed a larger basin, along at least one dimension, so that the splashy/bubbly part could be separate from the drinking part. I didn’t really have anything suitable. Googling things like “large ceramic basin,” or really anything with the word “basin” in it, only got me extremely expensive items. The trick turned out to be to use the word “trough” instead, which oddly enough got me to this stainless steel hotel pan, which I must not be the only one repurposing as a trough.

That was one problem. The other problem, of course, was that it didn’t make visitors briefly question the nature of their reality.

So I ordered a kit from TheseWatersCA on Etsy for creating illusion water fountains. As it happens, the width of the sturdy transparent tube that’s key to the illusion is an exact fit for the hole at the top of the central tower, so I could reuse that.

The rest isn’t particularly interoperable. The Drinkwell pump isn’t quite strong enough to use with the tube, and it’d take some more modifications to get the Drinkwell charcoal filter into the base of the spout the way it’s meant to be. The other filter is meant mainly to protect the pump and works fine with the new one.

One solution is to just run both pumps, but that’s pretty janky and not appropriate for Louie’s issues. It’s kind of fun-looking, though, in that “the longer you look the worse it gets” kind of way.

Here the added pump is outside of the tower, so it’s visible from other angles. From this angle, though, it kind of looks like the faucet is pouring water into the tower, and then you get closer and see that no, it’s just bubbling up out of nowhere. (Sorry about the mess. This is not our only ongoing home improvement project.)

In its current form, I instead have the charcoal filter wedged between the tower and the side of the trough, under one of the tower’s two spouts, so that gravity forces some water through it.

The bubbles mean it’s time to change the charcoal filter, I think. The filters should be changed every month or two, but they’re cheap.

I put in rocks to help hold the filter in place, and because I was like “people put rocks in fountains, right?” But I think one of the reasons people put rocks in fountains is it makes them burble more, and Louie is not a fan of irregularly-timed burbling sounds, so I’ll probably replace them with something simpler.

The main improvement is that all the magic is at one end, leaving the other end at that precise almost-still-but-not-quite state that my particular dog prefers.

As near as I can tell, Louie doesn’t register anything strange about the faucet being suspended in midair. It’s just a visible source of running water, which must seem less mysterious to him than the store-bought version with the water bubbling for no apparent reason.

This. This is what it was all for. The pump can run outside if it’s sheltered from the weather, but I’ve mostly had it next to the TV (that’s Seaside Hotel/Badehotellet playing), in part because there’s already a tangle of wires there so it helps hide the one for the pump. I do always prototype changes outside because sometimes I accidentally turn the drinking fountain into a regular fountain.

I’ve also played around a bit with hiding the wire and filter more thoroughly, by putting something on top of them and taping the wire to the back of the trough. I used the container from some Costco peanuts for a while, which did some fun reflective stuff but also rusted pretty quickly.

I top it up every day or so using a pitcher, and empty and clean it about once a month, which is fairly painless—after you unscrew the faucet, everything can just come right out. I need to clean it more often when it’s outside, but even then it’s stayed surprisingly clear for days.

It bugs me that the illusion mostly isn’t original, but unfortunately a faucet seems to be the objectively best thing to put there. I might try to add in like a trompe-l'œil picture of a water source or something. I’ve consoled myself by playing around trying to create more original, and purely decorative, effects along the same principle.

Water pouring out of a transparent plastic bottle held by a ghost, is kind of what I’m going for, but it’s tricky to set up so that the flow is strong enough to hide the tube, let alone to get it to be stable when tilted as would look better. We’re getting towards the season where outdoor fountain experiments aren’t a good idea, and indoor fountain experiments are never a good idea, so I don’t think I’m going to get this working in time for Halloween, but the current plan is to repurpose the tube from a used-up hand-soap dispenser. I don’t have a video of this yet because without the attached bottle the water just goes everywhere, but I’ve verified that I can attach it to the pump and bend it a bit, so hopefully I can make the bottle be tilting instead of perpendicular. Or using a heat gun to bend a larger tube into place seemed to be the standard solution, when I gave in and Googled it.

The one submersible pump I’ve bought separately, for replacement/experiment purposes, is this one from wholesalepumps.com, the RWYF635. It does indeed seem to have about the same specs as the ones I got on Etsy, but I can’t fully recommend it because the suction cups on the bottom are inexplicably designed to be removable, meaning that they inevitably end up stuck to the container by themselves while the actual pump floats free. I’ve usually ended up having to weight it down, which is probably a bad idea.

Sweet and Savory Tofu Carrot Pie

To me the most important thing about carrot-based dishes is that they’re carrot-colored.

I’m even less of a cook than I am handy, but I am working on changing these things! Inventing vegan recipes, even though I’m not vegan, has been a good low-stress beginner project because I can be fairly confident I’m not going to give anyone food poisoning, and can taste as much as I want at every stage of the cooking process.

Ingredients

1 block of tofu (any consistency, about 14oz)

2 carrots, preferably different colors

pie crust

seasonings, flavorings, and sweeteners

Directions

Drain, but do not press, the tofu, then divide it into two equal blocks.

Scrub an orange or yellow carrot and blend it with half of the tofu.

Flavor to taste. I like using turmeric and steak seasoning.

Set your savory mix aside, and blend the other half of the tofu with a purple carrot. It’s not necessary to clean the blender in between these steps.

Flavor your sweet mix. I like using blended blue and purple fruits, and/or maple syrup, to avoid depurpling.

If either resulting mix ends up too runny for a pie filling, stir or blend in collagen or some kind of powdered flavoring.

Prepare your pie crust.

Add each half in the pattern of your choice. I haven’t tried this with layering but it could work. Flatten the top with a plate.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, or whatever’s appropriate for your pie crust.

Variations

I like the sweet and savory approach because it highlights the contrast between the colors, but all sweet or all savory is fine too.

I often make this not-quite-vegan with marine collagen and/or honey (still, that’s known to be pescatarian in the state of California).

For a vaguely healthy chocolate dessert, you can prepare just the filling as a Three Bean Mousse by blending vanilla extract, cocoa powder, tofu, and your choice of sweetener.

And, in general, the base here is bland enough that you can use whatever spices or flavorings you want.

I’ve also once added olive oil and baked it as cookies instead of pie, which was a hit at the block party this year, if only because how are you not going to try something that weird? Other structural experiments have mostly resulted in delicious failure.

1. I’m not being paid to mention this or any of the other things I ordered online for this so-called DIY endeavor.