It's that time again

Tonight I'm braving the thunderstorms, the heat, the crowds, and the traffic so that I can hang out, eat junky food, and catch up with a friend for a while. I don't really like fairs all that much but I admit that I'm looking forward to getting out. I've been too stressed lately.

My daughter is in dog club, so I get a free pass this year and have to be there several days for her dog events. The first is tomorrow evening. It's supposed to thunderstorm every day. It has been doing that all week, so I have no reason to doubt the prediction. I hope the dog isn't scared of storms.

One of her events is the costume contest. Their theme is books. So she is basing her costume on the first Harry Potter book. She is going as Hermione. And her puppy is going as Fluffy, the three-headed dog:
Puppy seems less than thrilled at the idea.

Three things that begin with P

1. Pets

The kids are with me this week, which means the dog is too. And we're all having fun with the kitties, but I'm not sure Rina is having as much fun. Before bringing her to my house, every time we took the dog out, she and her siblings would come up to see her, and she'd nuzzle and lick them. Now Rina is in Mandy's territory and Mandy is not too happy about it.

First of all, Mandy doesn't get to go to her basement. The kittens are living in the downstairs bathroom, and since Mandy made her own squeak toy out of the baby bird she found in the back yard the last time she was here, I'm a bit nervous about how she might play with a kitten! So she's not too happy with that gate across the stairway.

She's also determined to let Rina know whose house it is. Whenever she sees Rina, she runs up to her and puts a paw on her back to push her down. Rina just stops moving when Mandy approaches, and sits there calmly with the paw on her back.

We are equally determined to NOT let Mandy show Rina who is boss. So whenever Mandy pulls her paw on the back, my daughter puts her hand on Mandy's back and pushes her to the floor and holds her until she stops fighting. Mandy is pretty sure that she's the one in control, so she's not happy with this.

Hopefully they learn to coexist soon. And when little Zephyr is bigger and we let him out, I think Mandy may get a few swats to her nose if she tries this with him. I certainly hope so... someone needs to put her in her place!

2. Plants

One of these was hiding in the long grass I pulled on Sunday.

I am less than happy about that today. We're going to have a little Roundup battle soon.

3. Publications

I just finished reading The Hunger Games over the weekend, and on Friday my book club meets at my house. I've been trying to plan an appropriate menu for our dinner; below are the ideas I've come up with so far. If any of you have read this book and can offer any alternative suggestions, please speak up!

The Hunger Games Menu

Main Course

Chicken legs/thighs cooked on an a charcoal grill
it's not rabbit or wild turkey on an open fire, but it's the closest I can easily do
Endive salad with hard boiled egg
with a warm bacon sweet & sour creamy dressing
Katniss would find greens for salads... I'm not sure what sort of dressing she may have used on them, but since her sister had a goat, it could have involved a milk base.
Steamed whole carrots
Katniss ate a lot of roots, and generally boiled them
Variety of bread from various regions
I'm making a loaf of homemade whole-wheat bread in my breadmaker and adding green food coloring because the book specifically mentioned a green bread from one of the regions.
I'll also purchase a few other regional breads (i.e. croissants?) as well.

Dessert

Strawberries, and other mixed berries over angel food cake
Katniss found a wild strawberry patch and sold the berries to the mayor.
Other berries she found in the woods and ate. (I will avoid any poison berries, as she did!)

Beverage:

Mint tea
Katniss would chew on a mint leaf when food was scarce to
trick her body into thinking she had food

As an alternative, I thought I could just serve a mixed greens salad with some added items you might find in the wild... sunflower seeds, mushrooms, dried cherries, etc. Possibly with some crumbled feta cheese, since Katniss' sister had a goat.

I'm considering serving the meal without utensils... but the salad isn't very conducive to that. It's not like Katniss had utensils during the games. My daughter loved this idea... not sure how the other book club members would take it though!

Alone, together

I finally chose a new name for "Moo".

Moo was an ok name for an outdoor stray that you kind of feed and watch out for. But when I decided to take her in, I wanted to find a fitting name. We called her Moo because she's white with black spots... kind of like a Holstein cow. And honestly, I've never liked when people give animals a name due to their color. It reminds me of Junie B Jones playing horses with her friends... horses named Blackie, Brownie, and Yellowie.

Ok, so I still laugh at Yellowie, I admit it.

And I didn't want to name her a person name either. I wanted something that felt like her. That gave a sense of who she was... how she acted... anything deeper than just her appearance. After all, beauty is only skin deep. Or in the case of a cat, fur deep.

But Moo clearly needed her forever name, along with her forever home. So I thought about her... not about how she looked, but about how she acted. I thought about what she was like when she first appeared at the house last fall... about how she and her two sibling kitties ran away if you even looked at them. .. how they huddled together in a hole under the porch for warmth at night. I thought about how we put food out for them, but they would only come eat it when no one was watching.

I thought about how the one kitty began to come and wait for the food to go into the dish when you came outside, and then eat as soon as it was available... about how she watched warily to make sure you didn't try to touch her, but as long as you let her alone, she was fine. I thought about how she looked at you and meowed, as if to say, "Is that all you brought me?" I thought about how she began to sit outside the door, waiting for her food to come out... how she'd run as soon as the door opened, but return immediately if she still wanted her food. I thought about how she climbed the screen door for the first time, and hung there just watching what we were doing inside. I thought about the first time she rubbed against my ankles while I put the food into her bowl.

She has been reborn, from that wild stray who had no future, to a loving kitty who follows me around the house, talking to me and rubbing on my ankles.

I couldn't find a word in English that said what I wanted it to say, so I chose a word in Italian. Rinascita. It means rebirth. Rina and I are living our new lives together. Somehow it seems fitting.

It's just you & me baby.

Triggers

Triggers are a big issue for me lately. I don't like feeling like I've been acting irrationally when I look back on my behavior. And I certainly don't like being TOLD that I'm being irrational.

Due to some high-stress levels, I've had some issues lately with things triggering random emotions and reactions. It's tough for me to sort things out when stress is messing with my thought processes. So I can sometimes get a bit too reactive.

And with this in mind, this post really spoke to me today.

So thank you, Pastor Sharon, for allowing me the freedom to shed the tears, and for letting me know that it's normal to be picking at the wounds a little as they heal.

I look forward to continuing to find myself.

And in other news... we brought the seven kitties home last night. :)

Meow! Meow! Meow! Meow! Meow! Meow! Meow!

So apparently I have agreed to take in 7 cats... well 1 cat and 6 kittens to be more accurate.

I wanted to adopt one cute kitten... preferably calico, one with lots of colors like that cutie above... but then Moo got herself pregnant. Yes, I know that immaculate conceptions don't occur on a regular basis, so I'm sure that some other feline was involved, but she's the one who ended up waddling when she's barely a year old herself.

See... Moo is this adorable stray that appeared at my almost-ex's place last fall, along with Bee and Mindy who were probably her siblings. Moo is a tiny white female with a black face and a few black spots (like a cow - hence her name) who seems to want to be an indoor cat. She used to climb the screen on the storm door and hang there looking in at us. She'd sit outside the door and wait for it to open and then peek in, perhaps hoping to get a chance to check out where we keep disappearing to. She liked to be petted, and even let us pick her up. So hopefully once she is indoors, she'll adjust fairly quickly. Bee is (was? He seems to have disappeared now) gray tiger-striped male who loved to have his belly scratched once he tamed up a bit. And Mindy is gorgeous... white with a gray face, a delicate pink nose, and the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen... but she never tamed enough to let us touch her.

My daughter and I started to feed them because we couldn't bear to see them go hungry during the winter. They spent the first part of the winter sleeping under the front porch, until they got too big to fit through the lattice. Then they moved to the neighbor's decrepit garage. He kindly kept the door open slightly so they had a place to get away from the cold. So it makes sense that Moo would choose his garage as the place to have her kittens.

Which my daughter named Whinny, Oink, Woof, Ribbit, Baa, and Meow. And I have apparently agreed to take in until we can find new homes for most of them, thus giving up the cute calico kitty I planned to find.

In a twist of fate...

My daughter saw a post on her Facebook feed today.  The boy said something about having gotten their dogs back that had run off.  They had to go to the Humane Shelter to get them, and apparently had to pay to get them back, because someone turned them in to the police.

Serves them right for having no tags, collars or microchips.    
(MY dog has all 3, she says self-righteously).

This was a family we used to carpool to school with.... who left my prior town and moved to my current one about 4 years ago... and who apparently now live even closer to me than they did previously.  Which I did not know.  I had no idea where, exactly, they had moved to.  So I checked a map, and they are just a few winding streets away from my new home.

I think I'll stop by on the way home to say hi to the dogs.  :)

But I'm a cat person!!!

I woke up grumpy this morning.

Now granted, I'm not a morning person.  I can happily stay up to 2 am most any day, but if I have to get up before the sun wakes me, I won't be happy.  Ever.  And given that it rains every day, there is no sun waking me these days.  So let me sleep already.

But even if I were a morning person, 5:30 am is too early to wake up to a dog barking.  Nonstop.  For an hour.  I was ready to curse the neighbors who were so thoughtless to let a dog bark at that time of the morning. I was also ready to call the police, but I decided that as the new kid on the block, that didn't look very good.

So I covered my head with a pillow and muttered.  And texted a friend who works with the animal control officer on the police department once I knew she'd be up. 

Turns out, it wasn't a thoughtless neighbor.  Minutes after I texted my friend, my doorbell rang.  Three of my new neighbors were outside with two dogs... asking if they were mine.  (They probably thought that I was the thoughtless new neighbor, just like I thought one of them was!  Oops!)

The animal control officer and my friend were both off work today for election day, so our only recourse was to call the humane shelter, which we couldn't bear to do.  So I volunteered my fenced in yard, and left for work with two sad puppies penned in my yard.

My post on Craigslist has not given me a response from their owner, but I'm hoping that one of the neighbors had better luck.  They are cute, friendly little pups... though given their volume, I think I'd have to pass!

 

Here's hoping they didn't dig TOO many holes in my hard while I'm at work today!

Ick

I haven't gotten enough sleep in two nights now.

Saturday night was my 30 year high school class reunion.  It was a great time.  I have a very small class, and around half of the classmates came, so we had good turn-out percentagewise, even though we're not so mighty in number.

I didn't get to bed until 1:30, and soon after Hyper-Puppy (HP) woke me up from her crate downstairs, whining.  I took her out to spare my daughter having to do it, but all she wanted to do was bark at the strange things she saw in the dark.  She got my daughter up a few more times through the night with her diarrhea.

A dog with diarrhea is a wonderful thing.

Last night was more of the same, except it was all me.   This morning I woke up at 6:45 to the yips that were saying, "Let me out," and came downstairs to find a lovely crate full of surprises.  My daughter spent the night with a friend, so I got the puppy joy, diarrhea, and doggy vomit all to myself.

So now, the washer is running, the crate is wiped down and re-stocked with one small blanket and no food or water.  I took HP out for more diarrhea, along with a few yelps of pain as she tried to pass more.  She is back in her crate, and has resigned herself to laying down, though she seems to have stomach pain and was pretty unwilling to do so.

And I'm nervously waiting for the vet to open.  It's funny... when it was my kids up all night like this, I just cleaned them up and knew what to do.  I knew when to wait it out, and when to call the doctor.  But I'm new to the joys of doggy sickness.  How do you know when to worry?

Why I don't have a dog

My daughter wants a dog. Really, really badly. I keep putting her off. I have never liked dogs much, even though we always had one while growing up.

However, I love cats. We always had cats, and in all of my early photos I was always surrounded by them.

We had pigs which I avoided except when falling on them from the barn stairs or trying to chase them back into the pen when they got out.

We had steers which I ignored mostly, unless they stepped on my favorite cat, breaking its neck. Then I cursed at them (silently of course... I'd have gotten in trouble otherwise). Well I didn't totally ignore the steers... they were good for supper at least.

We had rabbits, which made a good Sunday dinner. Often. Because they were very good at doing what rabbits do best.

We had a horse that I pretty much ignored too, unless my sister (the family horse fanatic) saddled it. I didn't mind the horse when we were behind it in the cart, but falling off of a horse wasn't much more fun than falling on a pig.

We had a pet lamb too, named George. I avoided him too, because once he became a teenager (in lamb years) he was a really mean sucker and loved to butt me down. Usually on the driveway. Or anywhere else he could get at me.

Clearly I'm not a huge animal lover. I have no clue where my daughter got it, because it certainly wasn't from me. I mostly tolerate her guinea pig and her pet tortoises. I avoid the two pet snakes if at all possible.

So back to dogs. I have always been a little afraid of dogs. I even got bit by a neighbor's dog once, in the back of the leg. They knew I was coming over, and as I walked up to their house the dog began growling and no people were visible. So I quickly tried to return to my bike to go home. The dog, seeing my ass retreating, snuck up behind me and bit me in the back of the leg.

Dogs are like that. They may even be nice to your face, but if they smell fear they'll bite you in the ass. And apparently I stink with dog-fear. It flows from my pores like sweat on the 4th of July.

So I avoid dogs whenever possible. Which seems a prudent thing to do, because sometimes dogs will go after you even if they don't smell fear.

Like last night when my husband went jogging. He moved to the opposite side of the road as he ran past a house. Not due to fear, but because he knows that some dogs just don't like people too close to their property. A dog ran up to the road and followed along at the edge of the property until he made it past the property. Once he left the dog at the corner of their property and ran on, no longer watching it, the dog crossed the road, ran up behind him, and bit him in the ass.

He doesn't mind that I like his ass, but he wasn't too thrilled at this dog.

He got two inch-long cuts, one which required 3 stitches. So we spent a couple of hours visiting the nice people in the emergency room.

Did I mention that I don't like dogs?

I hear that the couple who had this dog runs a rescue facility. They take in stray dogs and then place them into new homes. The wonderful little creature that so loved my husband's ass is apparently almost ready for placement in a new home. Once the 14 day quarantine period is past of course. If I were the new owners, I think I'd back out.

My daughter would probably take the dog if we let her.

He's Baaaaack!

Meet Speedy, the prodigal tortoise.

Last week, hubby put him outdoors to sun himself while working in the yard. When hubby got ready to mow, he moved Speedy into the "clubhouse" part of the swingset. The clubhouse is filled with gravel. Hubby didn't think Speedy could climb over the edge of the frame, but the gravel raised him up enough that the frame wasn't as high as the one where we usually put him.

And then hubby went back to work and forgot about Speedy.

The following evening while feeding her pets, my daughter found Speedy wasn't in his cage and told me daddy had taken him outdoors. This was at 11:00 at night, and I soon realized she meant he'd taken Speedy the day before.

By the time we discovered that Speedy could definitely climb over the edge of the frame, over 24 hours had passed since he had been put there. We don't know how long he had actually been gone, but after spending 1 1/2 hours with flashlights combing our yard, we had to give up and get to bed. The daughter wouldn't go to sleep until we made some "lost tortoise" signs, and came up with a distribution plan.

I'm someone who attends church regularly, but sometimes it's hard to really feel like God is definitely real. Know what I mean? And I always feel like it's selfish to ask God for little stuff... like to bring a lost tortoise home (especially when you know the tortoise is probably happier out in the wild). But after my daughter and I said a prayer together, asking God to help keep Speedy safe, I added my own little quiet prayer, asking God to help a little girl and her mother's faith by showing us that prayers really are answered.

The next day while I worked, she and her brothers distributed the fliers to the neighbors. I stopped by the nearby golf course with her to drop off another one and ask permission to hang a sign on their fence in case Speedy managed to cross the entire corn field and make it that far. When we left town Friday for a reunion, 3 days had passed, but all the neighbors knew who to call if they saw a tortoise wandering around. We even got a few phone calls & visits from people asking if we'd found him, and promising to watch for him.

Now, keep in mind... Speedy is a Russian tortoise. Most people look at him and see a turtle, and expect to find him near a pond. Wrong. His native habitat is in the deserts of Afghanistan, where he would be expected to live in burrows in the ground and eat any plants he could find. So I expected him to head for overgrown plant areas and try to dig himself a new home. I just didn't know if he had enough survival instinct to do that (or how far he might travel), considering that his entire life was spent in a large plastic container! Plus he's only about 5 inches across, and he's leaf- and ground-colored, and rock-shaped. Not the easiest thing to spot among overgrown plants!

On Saturday, a pro from the golf club called my husband. (The kids and I were still out of town at the reunion.) My husband was told, "I think we saw your tortoise, and I see why you call him Speedy!" Apparently he was spotted on one of the greens of their golf course, but when they tried to approach him, he hissed at them and ran back to the overgrown areas.

Yes, ran. There's a reason that tortoise won the race with the hare, and it wasn't ONLY because the hare was lazy and cocky. Tortoises can move really fast when they want to.

The pro showed hubby where they saw Speedy, so hubby poked around a bit, then went home to change into jeans so he could get into the underbrush a bit more safely. When he returned in jeans, he decided to postpone the golf course side, and instead, walked along the cornfield side of the fence, lifting the weeds & grass, and found Speedy almost right away. He brought him along yesterday morning when he drove up to meet us at the reunion, and almost surprised my daughter into tears.

Now, I don't know about you, but I see this course of events... including hubby walking to the exact area where Speedy was hiding out... as an answer to the prayers I said on Wednesday. I think that God sometimes tries to tell us what we need to hear. And I think He knew that my faith could use a little kick in the pants.

A number of years back I was feeling really depressed, but another course of events gave me a very strong message that God is there, and that He's got a really good sense of humor. And when you're depressed, it's good to just learn to laugh again... it may not fix things, but it helps bring back hope. This time I heard Him say that it's really ok to ask for what we want. We may not always get what we ask for, but God still wants us to ask. And sometimes, when you least expect it, God says, "Ok."

Welcome home, Speedy! You may have enjoyed your freedom, but one little girl is very happy to have you home again.

Introducing Peppermint

Patches has a new companion. Her name is Peppermint. We hope they become friends.

Patches was pretty happy to see a new guinea pig when we introduced them today, squeaking and purring for the first time since Buttons died last Sunday. Peppermint wasn't quite as thrilled.

They are still jockeying on who gets to be queen of the cage, but I think they'll do well together once they settle in.

Current reports from the kids state that Patches prefers country music and Peppermint likes rock music. Must be the age difference or something!

Isn't she cute? :)

Saying Good-bye Sucks

I've never been good at good-byes... even as a kid. I remember hiding up in my bedroom in tears, refusing to come say good-bye to an aunt, uncle, and cousins who were ready to head back to Pennsylvania.

Today we had to say good-bye to Buttons.

This really sucks. My daughter, younger son, and Patches would all agree.

Living in a Zoo

Buttons (left) and Patches (right) in healthier days.

When you have kids, you tend to have pets. Sometimes they are pets you wouldn't otherwise choose. Of course, my husband has chosen some that I wouldn't choose! (Can you say snakes?? Yuck!)

The guinea pigs are some that HE wouldn't choose. He calls them gophers just to make our daughter squeal, "They are GUINEA PIGS!!! Why IS it that he has to make her squeal all the time??

Yesterday Buttons quit eating. She hasn't been herself for several days, but when she wouldn't even nibble on her apple slice I panicked. Knowing hubby wouldn't be too thrilled at this idea, I called the vet anyway. They told me they were booked solid but that I should come first thing this morning, so I got up at 6:45 on a Saturday morning to take a guinea pig to the vet.

Buttons had overgrown teeth, causing her to not be able to eat. Their teeth grow throughout their lives, and if they aren't worn down by chewing can become misaligned and overgrown to the point where they grow over the tongue making eating painful or even impossible.

The vet trimmed & filed the teeth, and sent us home with a groggy, half-awake guinea pig, a small syringe, a bottle of pills, and a bottle of powdered food to mix with water. I get to force feed the little piggy 3-4 times a day.... shove a quarter pill down its throat twice a day... and calm one very worried little girl. All for a bargain price of $71.

Mr. Logical was probably seeing that for half the price you could just buy a new guinea pig. I was seeing the daughter's red-rimmed eyes and wavering lower jaw.

The syringe opening is too small. The powered stuff thickens into clumps after mixed and won't go through the syringe. We dug out an eyedropper from an old medicine bottle lid and had a little bit of luck, but still made a large mess each time we tried to feed her.

The pill was much easier. I just propped it under my pinky fingernail, stuck the finger into the side of the guinea pig's mouth, pushed a little and then pulled the finger back out leaving the pill behind. She swallowed it right down.

She was too weak to stand up, so we also gave her water in the syringe. That went much better than the food!

After the 3rd attempt at feeding her, we tried to tempt her with a slice of cucumber (her favorite food). She grabbed it... wouldn't chew it but also didn't want to let us take it away. I guess that's a good sign. And once she was back in her cage, she made a few weak attempts to reach her water bottle. I'm not sure she got anything, but she tried.

Her best friend, Patches, would be devastated if anything happened to her. Patches was listless and wouldn't eat anything while Buttons was gone at the vet's this morning. As soon as we brought Buttons home, Patches began squeaking and purring and prodding her with her nose. I think the lack of response frustrated her, but she was thrilled to have her buddy back.

Sure, all they really do is convert fruits and vegetables to fertilizer, but I still like the little critters, and they make my daughter happy (as well as give a good excuse to not get other pets!) I think $71 will be a bargain price to make her smile again.

I'm just praying that the treatment works. I wouldn't mind a few more prayers if you've got some spares around to share.

Sign me,
One nervous mother