In which my life going not fast enough down the drain actually tips over into a screwball comdey

Things have been, well, in a word: damp.  We have been chasing roof leaks & plumbing leaks, rain (sorry California-if I could send it along I would) & flood washing under the doors.  Seriously, it rains so hard so fast that the very well functioning drainage cannot handle it.  An oak tree came down last week under the force of water.  It was not struck by lightening it just got pounded over.

All of these adventures have had side stories & upshots.  If I tried to put them all in one post it would be a novella.  So I thought I would give you the latest, or rather what was the latest when I started typing this yesterday afternoon.  It has been a long summer.

Because of the plumbing, we had to day board the big dogs (the down side of an open plan home is it's wide-openness) & I don't know if you know but I DID, I just forgot:  kennel cough vaccines only last six months or so.  You can probably guess the rest; a week later our boy  was coughing his out. The phlegm was SO BAD I went into the utility closet for the swiffer wetjet (uncompensated endorsement, I love that thing) even though it was not raining.  & no one had been outside to track anything in anyhow.  That's it for that part of the story.  There is more dog-hacks-up-a-lung material, but I will save it.

The next day it rained.  Again.  I went back into same closet, got that same wetjet, reached for the same box of clean pads & came away with a sloughed off snake skin in my hand (miniature dachshund for scale). A Snake Skin clinging to the box I handled the day before.  Until that moment I did not know it was possible to laugh & gag at the same time.

We cleaned the closet, no more signs of the snake but we are pretty sure we know how it got in.  & will likely get in again as there is only so much we can do to keep it out if indeed, it ever left.  It might be hiding.  In the walls.  At least our mouse problem is solved (OH! I didn't mention the mice populaiton explosion the month after we got the new roof?  A story for another day).

Last night I rolled over in my sleep & A had his hand flung across the top of my pillow.  This is not usually something I find alarming, but in the dark, in my sleep, those fingers weaving through my hair, over my head...  I am definitely taking a nap today.

Not 18 months

Technically not 17 months.  Sadie came as a foster, failed & stayed.  Yesterday, after a week post protein-losing nephropathy semi-diagnosis (we elected not to do the diagnostic surgery) we put her to sleep.  She stopped eating on Tuesday, stopped drinking on Wednesday.  We could have lasted another few days, but they would have been awful days.    So we didn't. 

I moved the stairs so I could vacuum

"He won't bite"

While I have been neglecting my blog, I have not been neglecting my running.  Running, walking.  Intervals.  I am up to: run a mile, walk a minute, run a mile, etc. for a total of 4+ miles run.  Yes, I am slow & I built up slowly & this means the neighborhood has had ample opportunity to observe my....fine physique ambling about.  Ditto I have had plenty of time to learn the routines of the dogs in the neighborhood & label the deadbeat owners.  & now I will list them, for the benefit of all of you & the Dumb Ass Dog Owners Blog Hop (hosted by Tales from the back road & Heart like a dog) I found at The poodle & dog blog.

I begin mile one all too often trailed by the long legged beagle things that live in the opposite direction up the road.  That's right, the guy whose dogs have attacked our stock, killed one of our cats, sent the other for an extended stay on the roof, & generally made a nuisance of themselves are still around.  Animal control makes almost weekly visits to this guy but there does not seem to be much that can be done unless the dogs are caught red-pawed. 

I lose these dogs once I get to a row of yards with fenced yards & dogs in them.  One has an elderly back mutt of roughly lab-size.  It was out once (someone must have left a gate open) & I ended up crossing the street because it clearly did not want me crossing its driveway, but I would not flag this as dumb-assery; anyone can forget to close a gate once in three years. 

After the old black not-quite-a-lab, there is a pair of corgis who are kind of hilarious.  Their house is off the road but down a straight drive, so I can see them clearly, barking theirs head, off running slightly faster than me, but not much.  They invariable stop ten feet before their closed gate & make sure I know this is their house & then they run home again, as fast as they can.

It stays quiet until I turn on to the dirt road & start past the larger horse farms.  Farm number two has what has to be a full blooded Cane Corso.  This thing is HUGE.  He (yes he, no question) has only barked at me once (I passed another runner & we said "morning" or some such & maybe he was just saying "morning" too but I could live a happy life not hearing that dog-voice again).  He has the gravely bark that goes with an Ancient Roman dog of war.  Mostly he does the other thing he is bred to do, he courses.  He easily keeps pace with me, inside his fence, escorting me from one end of his territory to the other.

Another turn & another largely dog-free stretch, mostly because the houses move further off the road, until I make my final turn & move past Grayson, The Slinker. His family really does call him Grayson, I call him The Slinker because he once climbed to the top of a five foot gate, crawled through the gap at the top & slunk after me.  When I turned & yelled "HEY!" he took off back into his yard.  I saw his people & told them & the very next day there were bungee cords wrapped across the gap & a few weeks later a new, much narrower-gapped gate.  Grayson lived with the most majestic Doberman I ever saw.  I don't see him anymore; I suspect he is sleeping away/has slept away his old age because...Grayson now has two Rottweiler puppies keeping him busy.  I wish they made less noise, but they stay in their (fenced) yard; some days they do just sit & watch me go by, no noise at all.

While I am on the road I might meet the guy next door who I am pretty sure has undiagnosed Asperger's walking his big male German Shepherd whom he adores & is pretty much the only way to connect with him. Also the dog is wonderful to behold, beautifully cared for & trained.  I may also meet the other German Shepherd guy who USED to walk his dog off-leash until it took of after a little girl on a bicycle (she's fine, I'm not sure she knew it even happened, but her father saw & chewed a hole through every ear he could find & actually got the sheriff to issue a ticket-no easy feat) & now clips the leash on grumbling about leash laws whenever he sees someone heading towards them, because the rest of us using public roads is a huge inconvenience to him.

Finally, I might meet K****** who walks a faux-German Shepard she found abandoned in the parking lot at K-Mart & a boxy headed lover boy who look like they could yank her arms right off her body but actually seem more interested in tripping her than anything else.  We usually talk a bit, often about those first long-legged beagle things (the owner CLAIMS they are Walker Hounds but they are the scaredest,  scrawniest, most swayed-back walkers I have ever seen) as they often trail her home, giving her the credit for not scooping up after her dogs, which she does do but if you see a lady walking two dogs & a pile of poop a minute later it is hard not to connect the two.

I never see Bishop anymore.  After that documented encounter, I saw him once or twice being walked on a leash, but it has been well over a year since the last Bishop sighting.  I pass his house twice on my 5-6 times a week run, so I am confident if he still lived there I would know.  I guess when it became clear they could not just send him out the door (they were new to the neighborhood in those days & plenty of people not from around here think all dogs roam free in the country), he had to be relocated.

Which might leave you wondering where is the Dumb Ass Dog Owner?  After all, there is only one continuing problem & I don't go into any detail.  Well, there is a new dog in town, a short timer, as I am pretty sure it belongs to a contractor working on a sizeable addition on one of the houses on my route.  Every time I pass, this dog goes nuts.  Most of the time, it is sitting on the seat or in the bed of a pick-up & seems happy just to bark its face off but this week-end things were different.  I started this same stretch & I could hear the dog, as I often can.  I realized the sound was getting closer & looked up.  A smallish (30-40lbs, maybe), scruffy cute dog was bearing down.  I stopped.  Then I heard a guy saying "He won't bite".  The dog was still running towards me, barking.  It cleared the end of the driveway.  I shouted "HEY" for the dog really, but the guy seemed to think I was trying to get his attention & said something along the lines of "He's just being friendly.  He won't bite".  I started looking around for a rock or stick or something.  When I came up with a chunk of cinderblock, the guy decided it was time to maybe bring his dog to heal (in all fairness the dog was now less than three feet from me & had made no attempt to bite, but it was barking & lunging & barking & lunging & looked ready to settle in for a long game of bark & lunge).  We had a brief chat in which DADO made it clear that I was being completely unreasonable & I offered to smash his dog's skull in there on the public street & then we could wait for a sheriff to sort out who was in the wrong.

I meet a DADO fairly regularly (usually the same one, yep the guy with the free-range mongrel hounds), but I am often impressed by how many I DON'T meet.  There are many red-flag dog breeds on my route (& in my house:  a German Shephard, a pit-looking mix, two mini-dachshunds -the bitingest breed of all & a cocker spaniel, another breed no stranger to nips), but mostly people who get "dangerous" dogs know it & take care.  It is the people who think their little angels would never hurt a fly that are the real problem. 

One old dog

52 Photos Project: A Day In My Life

I am almost at the end of my year of following along with 52 Photos Project, only two more to go after this one.  I think.  This week it is a day in my life which is not particularly anything really, except I wanted to take all the pictures in an actual day & I am not in the habit of bringing my camera with me. 

Struggle number one:  remember to bring my camera when I walk out the door.  The assignment went up sometime Sunday, it was Thursday before I got my act together.  Maybe this is because Thursdays are more predictable than most as it is my usual on campus day.  But plenty of things happen before that.

The short version is I forgot my camera.  This seemed like an excellent opportunity to learn to use the camera on my phone.  I did take a few pictures of my workspace (nothing thrilling-almost the same as the pictures I took a few weeks ago, except would you believe another floor-to-ceiling cabinet has been added to that center row?), so there is no point in posting my less than spectacular new photos.

But I did manage to take a couple pictures of the work I am doing now (specifically matching old index cards wit wood specimens in drawers that are mostly in order...or were when they were last accessed which was mostly in the mid-80s. 

When I left the herbarium I felt like crap.  This is typical of herbarium days.  Between the chemicals to deter the bugs & the frigid temperature to preserve the specimens, I know I look ridiculous walking to the car.  It takes about that long to warm up & breathe clearly even in the tropics. 

But it turns out there was another reason I felt like crap.  By the time I got home, I could not stop shaking.  At 7:30, I had to go back to campus to pick up A.  I brought Sadie with me & we sat on the hill & watched to door to the loading dock until he came out & said her name.  She went nuts. 

I have been in bed (except when I have been "unwell") since Thursday night & got out jus in time to watch a college basketball game.  Which was an accident, really, that just happens to be when I got up.

So this is all I have to document my day.  It was, aside from being sick, a normal Thursday.

52 Photos Project: How I Start My Day

How I start my day has gone through a few changes in the past day or so (& will change back in another cycle, I hope).   It is Spring Break here, which makes no difference really except that A can travel without classes being disrupted.  Last night was the first night he was gone & I tried to have a normal evening, but the dogs kept getting up & barking every time a car drove by & around 3am I moved back out to the couch (A usually gets up around 4:30/5 so they would have been going nuts for breakfast soon enough). 

 

When I woke back up this morning, this was what greeted me.  Also my neck hurt, mostly because in addition to moving out to the couch, I put on headphones to listen to a book which I had found very funny before but it deals with what happens after a much loved wife dies unexpectedly in a plane crash.  & there you have the other reason I wasn't sleeping so well.  What was witty & heartfelt before my husband got on a plane has lost some of its humor.  The book is How To Talk To A Widower so it is not like I had any excuse for not knowing what it was about. 

In the old days, I did not exactly look forward to his leaving, I did enjoy thing that would make him crazy.  Cereal for dinner, late night quilting, hat kind of thing.  Now I want him to come home & not just so I can get some sleep. 

 

This photo is a bit deceptive.  It was taken with no flash & a long-ish exposure.  Lilly didn't move, I didn't move; it looks like a bright sunny day but it was really quite dark.  The sun was up & we were in a room with windows across three walls but the rain was pounding down.  She was not any more anxious to get out there than I was, but it had to be done.  This how we both started our day: completely frozen hoping no one else noticed we were awake & then racing to make it out into the yard to pee before the other dogs jumped on us.  Her, not me; peeing in the yard is not one of the things I enjoy when my husband goes out of town.  

Pillow fight

National Pet Adoption Weekend

Starting tomorrow, which I see is just a few minutes away, is the 2014 National Pet Adoption Weekend at PetsMart.  People who know me (or have read this blog for a while) know I am not a big large corporation promoter type.  Most previous posts about big companies have been about why I don't shop at one or another (lucky me, that 2010 Target donation to a Tea Party-esque candidate kept me from using my credit card on their substandard system during my 2013 holiday shopping; it turns out bad decisions are a lot like potatoes chips of legend, there is rarely just the one).  & did I ever mention that kid at Sports Authority who when I asked if they had any not-Nike running gear asked my why & I said Michael Vick & he said & I quote "You people need to get over that".  So while I doubt very much this is the Sports Authority corporate policy, I still have not been back. 

 

Maybe someday I will get my panties all bent...in a twist...  I digress, but for now, I am encouraging everyone who is thinking they might like a furry roommate to take a stroll through their local PetsMart this weekend.

 

This sleepy girl came from a rescue that does adoptions most weekends at our local PetsMart.  She is an adult female, already spayed & housebroken, almost certainly purebred cocker spaniel.  The rescue pulled her from an overcrowded animal shelter a couple counties over where, if she had not found a home, she would have been euthanized.  Her adoption fee was a whopping $150, mostly because everyone- me, the rescue, the vet that worked with the rescue, everyone -was upfront & clear that she had some dental problems that would need to be addressed.  Soon.  

 

You can get a puppy from a high end breeder, pay a lot more money, do all that training yourself & have a wonderful companion for your life.  You can also go to PetSmart this weekend. 

 

& don't worry about having your heart stolen away & ending up with a pet you are not really ready for.  Most rescues make sure there are a few hoops to jump through with good reason.  If the breeder ho sold her had told the obviously pregnant coupe that a barky little mini-dachshund might be a bad fit for their upcoming life, at least one less barky little dachshund would have gone back to same breeder (no refunds, by the by).  We actually suspect something similar happened to make our own barky little dachshund available; she is very nervous whenever she hears a baby cry on TV but could not care less about other louder, more unpleasant TV noises.

 

So this weekend, at many PetsMarts across the country.  Think about it.

Two former only dogs

52 Photos Project: All Dressed Up

Yes, I am one of those people.  It started when I went to visit my parents.  They live in CT & I brought my short-haired little dog who had always lived in Fladidah.  So I brought a sweater & she loved it.  She would beg to have it put on.  OKay I actually brought two sweaters, even that first time; I had sense enough to know they would get dirty or wet & need to be changed out.

My parents would put the sweater-not-being worn on the rack in their oven.  We (me & the dog) would come in, I would take off the wet sweater & put the warm sweater on her & she happily adjusted to being a sweater wearing dog.

Then came Hallowe'en.  I started with a little witches hat.  Then over the winter holidays I added in some jingle bell collars (with ankle bells, too) & an elf hat....and a reindeer hat. 


Nowadays they are all too often all dressed up.  I think maybe I have a problem. 

These two lovely geisha are usually very good about posing, but I think one of the adornments on her wig was tickling Lilly's ear.  Good thing Lola was there to check it out.

In the people bed

52 Photos Project: Comfort & Joy

Have you ever seen the movie Gregory's Girl?  Was it ever even in the theatres in the US?  I know Local Hero was.  Maybe you saw Housekeeping which actually took place in the US (unlike the others)?  Apparently you are more likely than I would have thought to see Gregory's Girl as it went out to a whole new audience during the London Olympics; I missed it entirely (the resurgence & the Olympics).

Whatever.  There is another Bill Forsyth movie you probably never saw...did I mention Bill Forsyth directed these & wrote most of them (not Housekeeping, which was a book by Marilynne Robinson, although I think he probably wrote the screenplay.  Let me check.  Yep, he did).  That would be his Christmas movie Comfort & Joy.  No, no not that Nancy McKeon Lifetime movie of the week thing, which may be quite charming, I wouldn't know as I have never seen it.  I mean Bill Forsyth's Comfort & Joy & good luck finding it as it sells on Amazon for $130+.  In a nutshell, a man with a public persona out of synch with his private self has some extra time on his hands in the few days before Christmas & ... stuff happens.  No, this is not the synopsis any movie database will give you, but there it is. 

So if you find yourself with time on YOUR hands this holiday season & you feel like breaking your heart into tiny little pieces, let me recommend the movies of Bill Forsyth.  Any of those above or any of the others, but most especially Comfort & Joy which you are never going to find, so good luck with that.

Oh oh I almost forgot:  this week at 52 Photos Project the theme is Comfort & Joy so I though about recreating of one of the scenes from the above mentioned movie.  A little unorthodox holiday decorating maybe, or mugging an ice cream vendor.  Instead I give you this:

This is Sadie.  She came to us as a foster dog after going to a small, poorly funded county shelter.  She was picked up by a rescue & placed with a family who gave her back after a few weeks.  Then she went into a many-dog foster situation while they figured out what went wrong & then she came here.  She is happy here.  This morning she went to the vet for her first ever dental cleaning.  I had to leave her; there is no other way to do a dental.  I handed her over to a very nice, gentle tech & Sadie wailed the whole time.  I picked her up this afternoon & she forgave me immediately. 

We are home now. 

52 Photos Project: My Work

Its a funny thing that this week at 52 Photos Project the phrase is My Work.  Because I have not been blogging because of my work, which has been kind of piling up.  The dogs need bathing, then the bathtub needs to be dusted (hey, before my mom's visit last weekend, no one had used that shower since....well...A*****.  Before that, the last person to use it was also A*****.  & before that, A*****), the books sorted & FotLed, & soon & on & on.

I am a good cook, & other things but housekeeper I am not.  I am not even a bad housekeeper, I am a non-existent housekeeper.

So there it is.  My work, which I haven't done but need to make a dent in because in a week we have people coming for Black Friday turkey leftovers dinner.  But I started with my favorite of the pending chores. 

52 Photos Project: On My Way

Last December, we made a quick trip north, for Christmas In Connecticut.  It was wonderful, but that is not what this is about.  This photos was taken waiting for our flight to begin boarding at what will always be Bradley Field to me, but is officially called Ella Grasso International Airport.  We were on our way home. 

What would Pelham do?

People who know me know I love dachshunds.  & as it happens one of my heroes also loved dachshunds.  He loved them so much that after he left England to live elsewhere, for reasons I will go into, he & his wife never returned to England together.  The reason for the split trips:  they did not want to leave their dachshunds alone in the house.  I can certainly understand that, I don't much like leaving mine alone either.

Who is this Pelham you ask? Pelham Grenville of course.  Pelham Grenville better know as P. G. Wodehouse.  That's right, the Jeeves guy. 

Wodehouse began his career in that venue I always think comedians should do a stint:  banking.  Specifically banking in Hong Kong.  I won't go into the whys & wherefores (you can read a Wikipedia entry faster than I can distill it), but while everyone, including the British think of him as very British, the fact is he is just as much American.  He married an American woman, he more or less split his time between the two shores from 1914 onwards, although as I alluded, he & his wife did not live in England together but commuted from their home in France.  Because of the dogs.  For reasons I am not entirely clear on, time spent in France counts as time not spent in the US & is therefore time spent in England...? 

Back to the dogs:  one of the great controversies of Wodehouse's life was his failure to leave France when the Germans were en route.  The only reason he ever gave for not getting when the getting was good was that his wife didn't want to leave the -you guessed it- dog behind as they could not take it to England with them.  In exchange for this, Wodehouse was interned in a German prison camp & then held under house arrest until just before his 6oth birthday.  I don't know what happened to the dog.

Being a naturally happy person (I am a mostly naturally happy person so I can tell you this is absolutely TRUE), Wodehouse struggled with not being too happy when everyone around him was miserable.  I myself once got chewed out for smiling at a funeral because apparently reminiscing about a happy moment with the deceased is bad.  Actually, Wodehouse DIDN'T struggle with it, he pretty much tried to stay happy.  He made up songs & stories & so on with the intent of keeping himself & his fellow internees happy.  What he thought was making the best of a very bad deal (no one would know how bad from him; he never talked about it) was viewed by the British populace as collaborating.  There is just no pleasing some people.  On the flip side, if that was the kind of reception he was going to get across the channel, you can sort of understand the decision to remain with the dog that got him into the whole mess to begin with.

As a result, Wodehouse was popularly identified as a Nazi collaborator & blacklisted & even banned & pretty much the only public complaint Wodehouse ever made about anything ever in his life was that the MI5 report that cleared him of living off of the Nazis (they had actually seized his accounts & doled back to him a small portion for his living expenses) was not made public while he could have benefitted from it (it was declassified years after his death).  Instead England pretty much gave him the old heave-ho & he settled permanently in the US with his US wife.  & we were delighted to have him.

I won't go into the other things he did, although his famous literary feud with A. A. Milne is hilarious, not just because Milne took himself way too seriously but also because the literary heavy weights came down on Wodehouse's side.  & not just the live-&-let-live types either; George Orwell told the British public to stick a cork in it.  I do love Winnie-the-Pooh, but it just does not compare to a library of Jeeves & Psmith & the Drones & Uncle Fred & Wodehouse Playhouse &....&...  I think I need to go read some RIGHT NOW!

I don't know what to say to that except Pip Pip!  Oh & Happy Birthday Uncle Plum. 

52 Photos Project: Starts With a "C"

C is for Cozy Cocker Spaniel:

52 Photos Project: In The Circle

This weeks 52 Photos Project: In The Circle was a no-brainer.  This is the circular bucket bed.  You can see who is in it.

First world problems

I have hinted at some health problems for Chewba, our German Shepherd.  Without going into too much detail, she had a dental.  While having her teeth cleaned since she was sedated anyhow, we did some joint X-rays.  The results were not good, but not entirely unexpected. 

What was unexpected as a lesion at the back of her throat, which turns out to be....something you almost never see in dogs but the operative word is auto-immune.

& lately she has been having the worst-ever, even for her, allergic response to the world around her.  To be even briefer:  her skin is inflamed all the time, even with a monster doses of Benadryl, which does little (I assume, maybe it would be way-way worse without it what do I know), but does make her drowsy enough to sleep through it & stop scratching herself, creating what I long suspected was a vicious cycle.

So, we have antibiotics, three pills twice a day for six pills a day for the next four weeks.  We have medicated wipes for her exposed skin more or less every time she goes out until she doesn't seem to be so rashy. 

& we have a new waterbed for the dog because she is so overheated all the time she is sleeping on the hard cold tile which she really should not do with her elbows & hips the way they are.  A waterbed she is not entirely sure she likes, although she is willing to lie down next to it.

Yes, we have first world problems. 

52 Photos Project: At the End of the Day

Lola is settling in.  She has bonded very closely to Lilly.  Maybe a little too closely for Lilly's taste.  My camera is full of pictures of Lilly snoozing in her favorite bucket bed & Lola snoozing on top of her.  In the evening, we park ourselves in front of the tv & generally Lola snoozes on top of A but if he gets up for any reason other than a trip to the kitchen (in which case everybody follows him), she moves to the other end of the couch & squeezes in with Lilly.  & then settles down for a nice cozy nap.  This is what happens here, at the end of the day.