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Monday, September 28, 2009

Garden, chickens, puppy.

No, I didn't take any pictures; what do you think this is, 2008?

I just wanted to relate that the garden is doing well and we're eating a ton of stuff out of it and that it is a great reminder of how fast the year is slipping by. I was watering it today, thinking about how many weeks of tomatoes I would be enjoying before frost, because after all, we don't generally get frost until the end of September, and that's...

the day after tomorrow.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. On a DAILY BASIS I experience this jarring what the frack sensation every time I realize that September? Is over. If you asked me when I was half asleep and didn't have time to consciously think about it before answering I know I would tell you that it was mayyyybe the fourteenth or so, at the latest, but it's gone. Life is like a banging, slamming, speeding, whooshing freight train and my poor wee brain just can't keep up. (This is still the case even though we had C's birthday party on Sunday and I know that her birthday is at the end of the month. The party is over, it was an insane madhouse full of crazy fun and there's no way I can forget that it happened, but I still catch myself thinking that her birthday will be coming up soon and we'll have to start planning for it. Because, you know, it's getting on toward mid-September now. Somewhere. Maybe in the alien civilization where apparently my brain has been forcibly relocated.)

Also: Our chickens have laid two eggs. This just started yesterday. It was a Big Event.

Further also: I forget. (I TOLD YOU.)

Oh yes. Rowsby Woof is getting bigger. He's still very adorable and he still pees everywhere in the damn house without seeming to mind or care that he gets praised for doing it in the grass and scolded for doing it on the floor. And he's teething, which means that nothing is safe, whether I as a reasonable human being would think of it as chewable or not. This includes our couches. Oh well, I've always wanted to slipcover them.

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Rowsby Woof

Meet Rowsby Woof:

We put him "on reserve" about two weeks ago and just brought him home today. He is seven weeks old. His mother is a Queensland Heeler mix and his father is a gallivanting rogue of a border collie.

He has not yet learned where to go potty. Oh heaven help me.

He'll be bigger than Scout when he's fully grown. Right now their relationship has just transitioned from WHO ARE YOU YOU NEW LITTLE THING I WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU WHY ARE YOU COWERING to OH MY GOSH THE NEW LITTLE THING RAISED ITS PAW WHEN I CAME NEAR SHOULD I FLEE?

We are all smitten. I haven't had a puppy since I was ten years old. My kids (of course, by extrapolation) have never had one. Bonus: Rowsby likes T just fine. So I guess this will all be worth it, even though I'll be spending the next five months hanging around outside so that I can praise him for peeing in the dirt. Right now, in fact, I'm sitting on my front step. Good thing we bought that laptop. Watch for Twitter updates: "IT'S A NUMBER TWO AND IT'S NOT IN THE FLOWERBED! HALLELUJAH!" Hey, we can hope.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

grieving.

OK, so 20 hours later I'm no longer wallowing in certainty that I made the wrong decision and will always be sorry; I've moved on to merely (painfully) missing the sight of his darling face and the feel of his silky ears and the way he arched his back when I would pet him really firmly. This is progress.

Also: we are a plague house. We need a yellow sign for the front door. You may have infected yourself simply by reading this. I'm sorry.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

AGGGHH.

OK, so here's the deal. Festus the former foster dog terrorizes our cat Mary, right? Mary went missing a couple of weeks ago, and then it turned out she was living under our house to keep out of Festus' way. I hope she's still there because she's not been seen in a few days again. Anyway. So we put Festus the Terror to Cats up for adoption, around the same time Mary went missing the first time. Someone called yesterday and wants him. And here I am in the FREAKING VALLEY OF INDECISION again.

Rationally, I know this is a great home the people are offering him, as an only pet and hiking companion to a family where the dad works from home so he'll always have his people around him. But when he looks at me like that, it's hard to be rational. We're his people!

But Mary!

(But he's cocking his head at me! Mary lives under the house now! He never attacks Smokey!)

But the inconvenience! the having to stash him someplace when people come over! the running off!

(But when we'd put him in the garden - which we won't be able to do in, say, two months - because we had a lot of people over and he got scared by the launching of a substantial battery of model rockets, where did he run when he broke out and could have gone anywhere? Under our porch! This is his home!)

So you can see how it is inside my head. I think T, who looks at this in a matter-of-fact "yes we'll miss him but it's for the best" kind of way but who has left Festus' fate up to me, is wondering who this waffling emotional mess is and what she did with his real wife. I probably will end up calling the guy back today and setting up a time to take Festus to his place, because Mary Was Here First and all. But it's HARD. HELP.

(But he's putting his head on my knee!)

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Festus

Oh, I think you all knew we would end up keeping him.

His original owners didn't want him back (as mentioned previously), and the guy who owned him after his original owners owned him never returned our calls. T especially was still inclined to find him another home, when one magically appeared. Festus took off, something he did a lot in the first couple of weeks we had him, and we got a call on our answering machine from a nearby family he'd gone to visit. Did we have to take him back? They would love to keep him....

OH, THE INDECISION.

I had always pretty much hoped Festus would stay with us. T's position had been that if nobody else would give him a suitable home, we would keep him; now that said suitable home had presented itself he was all for letting the family have him (not that he didn't like Festus, it's just that he's very practical). At that point we were still waiting for the aforementioned guy-who-didn't-return-calls to return our calls, though, so we took Festus home and told the family to wait a few days and we'd get back to them. During those few days we had a Bible study meeting here (an every-week occurrence now thanks to a change in T's work schedule, long boring story, moving on) where Festus proved to be such an annoying, unceasing (, adorable) distraction that even I was all in favor of calling the neighbor family and asking them to collect Festus immediately, in spite of his endearing ways of sleeping upside-down, and cocking his head beseechingly when he wanted to be let outside or given a treat.

Except I just couldn't. You know what did it? I was thinking about an L.M. Montgomery character (everything in life can be tied to an L.M. Montgomery character if you look carefully enough; someday we'll have to play Six Degrees of LMM Characters in order to set out to prove this empirically) who was fearfully indecisive, and what finally cured her was when her fiancé told her that whenever she couldn't decide what to do, she should do what she'd been gladdest of when she would be eighty. Boom! I realized that I would be a happier eighty-year-old if we kept Festus than if we gave him away, and the fence-sitter in the Festus debates became an outright lobbyist for the kids' long-held position that Festus belonged with us. Practical-but-affectionate T hardly stood a chance. (We did address the practicalities. We're to install a redundant gate to help reduce escapes -- hounds do LOVE to go exploring -- and to give him a place to stay during Bible study so that he's neither climbing into everyone's laps nor bounding up and down outside the half-glass door, whining, like a crazy, lonely puppet-dog. Also, we've asked T's sister to stay here with her family -- paid, of course -- during our week-long trip to Arizona in March. We bought him a special collar, which looks like a medieval torture device, but doesn't actually hurt him, so that we can take him for our daily walks without having our arms pulled off or his trachea seriously injured.)

So that's our happy Festus ending. He's not without faults: he loves to chase the gophers in our lawn, which would be fine if they weren't, um, under the lawn. He thinks he's treed the cats if they're on top of the refrigerator or under the couches, which gets very noisy, but he's learning. He's also learning to stick around... mostly. I think he's less prone to running off than he ever has been in his entire history. (I don't think his previous owners let him inside, and he LOVES being inside, and maybe that makes him happier to be here.) When we're arriving home, especially, he no longer tries to get out through the gate, but cavorts around hallooing at us instead, overcome with doggish joy, wagging his whole hindquarters because his tail just isn't enough. We think he likes us.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

generalized snippets, followed by some miscellaneous... snippets. With a bonus FUNNY DOG PICTURE.

I was knitting on the couch, sitting next to Scout (who's on the left). I walked away and came back a few minutes later to find that Festus the Foster-Dog had taken my spot and was already asleep, rather humorously.

****************

Speaking of Festus. He's, um, still here. This morning a friend of T's happened by, heard Festus's story, and mentioned that he knew a guy who might want him, and I had to throttle a visceral instinct to shove our friend out the door and slam it shut behind him. So I guess I'm maybe getting a little bit attached to Festus, in spite of the fact that we may have to take out a second mortgage to buy him food.

And then today he ran off. I encountered our family vet in Barnes and Noble on the day after Christmas, and in spite of the fact that I know she must be so tired of people talking shop with her every time she meets someone she knows, I couldn't help asking if she had perchance met Festus at any point in time. She hadn't, and when I told her about how we happened to have him in our care she said, "Hounds run away. That's what hounds do. Consider him temporary and don't spend too much money on him." Festus's history as our neighbors' dog bore this out -- they spent considerable time driving around looking for him -- and so did his behavior today, when he slipped through a gate and didn't come back no matter how much we called until the second or third time I went out looking for him, when I found him in a (different) neighbor's yard and he came home with me willingly enough. Anyway. As if it hadn't been enough having our friend trying to give him away, he had to go and take off and make me really aware of how much I kind of sort of hope that nobody wants him but us.

Wow, that got long.

********************

We brought in the New Year in style today. We invited family over to burn our brush piles with us.

Really, we did.

(We also roasted hot dogs and hot sausages and let the kids become one giant mass of stickiness as they made smores, a food I personally detest, not least because it's impossible to eat them without getting sticky and I hate sticky.)

*********************

I am working up the energy for a books post. Really, even with two weeks free of school this month, I didn't do as much reading as I thought I might -- only finished four books, and I already reviewed one of those. I blame knitting.

*********************

Speaking of knitting, I made my very first scarf last week. I felt like a baby knitter. Here's a picture:

That's not stockinette; that's k1p1 rib. I'm giving it away. The color doesn't really suit me.

That scarf took two skeins of Patons SWS yarn; I'd bought four just in case, but I didn't want to do another scarf in the same colors, so I went to Michaels while I was in the valley yesterday to get a couple of different colors of the same yarn, which I love (going back to cheap yarn after working with it kind of makes you feel like you're trying to knit with cardboard until you get used to it again) but which is ordinarily kind of pricey for me at $6 for a 2.5-oz skein. It was on sale, two skeins for $3. What could I do but take this as a sign? I ended up buying fifteen skeins. Which I then took home and photographed for my Ravelry stash because I am just that far gone into knitter-nerd insanity.

***************

So this week has been a cheerful way to end what was, for us, in spite of all the general worldwide crappiness, a really good year.

I feel a list coming on. Here... it... comes.

A Small Samplings Of Good Things About Last Year (A Year That Apparently Actually Sucked In Real Life, But What Do I Know)

• We spent it living in our own new home.
  
• We had a really great time with our garden.
  
• We even ate some food from our garden.
  
• We got a dog.
  
• Or, um, maybe, um, two. But not really. Not yet.
  
• Good grades! even in the classes I disliked.
  
• I knocked out some required classes that I will never have to take again. (See? I'm all about the silver lining.)
  
• Gas prices! (At the end of the year, not the beginning.)
  
• We discovered I Spy. OH MY GOSH LOVE THIS SHOW. Usually.
  
• We all enjoyed good overall health.
  
• Nobody broke any bones or required any surgeries.
  
• We developed a few really lovely traditions, at least one of which involves mass quantities of deliciously unhealthy food, which is always a plus.
  
• My sister-in-law and two of her kids moved to town.
  
• We had two bathrooms for the first time in our family's history.
  
• Facebook and Twitter have enabled me to be in better touch with some of my distant friends than I have been in years. Yes, I am a sheep. Baa. But I'm a happy sheep.
  
• We solidified and put into practice some of our ideas about self-sufficiency and pleasure in small things.
  

So yeah, I liked 2008 -- economical issues notwithstanding. But then I'm an annoying Pollyannaish type -- or maybe more of an ostrich, depending on your point of view. But hey, I'm a happy and sane ostrich, and life is too short to freak out about stuff. (Prepare: good. Freak out: bad.) Here's to a blessed 2009 rich in the things that really matter.

Monday, February 04, 2008

four things

Thing one:

Crate training proceeds apace. I can see a tiny light of sanity at the end of the tunnel. (This dog, T points out, has cost us more than a vacation to the beach would have. More than we spent on our first child in his first, oh, three or four years of life. More than I could have reasonably spent in an absolutely dizzying expedition to a bookstore. Or, to get all practical and also to tie in a reference to my other current obsession, possibly more than it would cost to have our driveway graded. She had better plan on saving someone's life, Lassie-fashion, at some point.)

She has just emerged with a very guilty expression from my bedroom. I had better not find any dog-logs in there, missy.

Thing two:
C is sick. She is puky, and flushed but so far not feverish. Poor princess. Here's hoping it's a 12-hour bug. (And also that I don't get it, because tomorrow is a Very Important Night in history class, and also who would take the dog out to poop?)

Thing three:
looklooklooklooklooklooklook:

Not even a single solitary chance of rain. BLISS. I am no longer a person who loves winter. I cannot wait for spring. Heck, I cannot wait until I'm taking the dog for a walk at 8:30 in the evening in a tank top and capris, instead of freezing my toes off in my jammies, jacket, and canvas shoes taking her out for her morning potty. (seriously, we will need some more moisture before the annual drought sets in or we'll all catch on fire around Labor Day. But a break is going to be very very nice.)



Thing four:

HEE.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

test post

Back in the early days of my Internet experience, my primary focus was on e-mail lists. This was, believe it or not, before there was any such thing as Yahoo Groups. I was on several lists covering different topics, and frequently a person would want to bounce a post off the majordomo software to make sure that they were still subscribed, so there would be a post that came through to EVERYONE ON THE LIST that just said "test post. seeing if I'm still subscribed." I always thought, geesh, people, what is up with pestering us all with that? Could you not come up with any content? Even just a little?

Like, say, this scintillating content. Test post! Just seeing if my feed-reader is on crack or not.

OK, ok, ok, content. Um. We are now hopelessly addicted to jibjab.com! There's more snow coming tonight and tomorrow, which makes me want to scream! I desperately need to go to the valley to buy groceries and would like to take the whole family but can't! Because last night while we were gone for twenty minutes Scout completely wrecked some of the curtains I had slaved over so patiently not three weeks ago! So today I am buying a crate! Because everyone recommends using a crate for her if we are gone for short times! Because it's better than an outside run in this nasty snowy weather! And she will dig right out of our nicely fenced yard, it turns out! And because we are not generally gone for all day at a time!

Seriously, the crate will address the symptoms of the separation anxiety that has caused Scout to, in the short space of a week and about four brief absences, do the following:

• unplug and then chew -- I presume in that order -- the cord of the lamp by our door
• tear up the aforementioned curtains
• pee on the couch, because she stands on it to watch us leave and presumably whine and fall to pieces as we drive out of sight. Yay for super excellent odor-removing stain-removing upholstery cleaners.
• poop on the couch (ditto.)
• poop on the floor.
• get up onto the counter
• twice. Once she knocked over a full go-cup of cold coffee, and the other time she
• drank some (very little) cooking oil that was sitting there cold in a pan and then puked on the floor
• twice, and only once was on the easy-clean laminate flooring.

... but I have no clue what to do for the problem itself. Anyone? Anyone? I'm beginning to get a glimpse of an idea as to why Scout may have been abandoned. Not that I even think of doing that, but it might not have been just that someone was moving into an apartment where they couldn't have a dog, which had been my previous assumption, because this is one very nice friendly dog with, as far as I can tell, no faults. Except that apparently she requires absolutely constant human companionship (we tried a little experiment yesterday with Roman and it was a dismal failure, so T is spared any further pestering for a second dog) or she goes completely bananas. Poor thing. Poor us.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

I guess this mostly ended up being about Scout. Again.

Yuck. I had to get that whiny post out of the top spot. Dichroic was right: I needed to go to bed. Anytime I start to feel that way again for the rest of my life I am going to remember that sage advice. Everything looks better in the morning.

(Even if the poor dog DOES get so anxious when we leave that she just HAS to poop inside. Hey, at least she holds the pee! We take her for SO MANY walks, trying to get her to do her dirty business outside, but it just seems like her body clock schedules that second poop of the day right during any meetings we ever have in the evening. I am studying up on how to housetrain an adolescent dog. I'll let you know how it goes.)

OK, that's the only scatological reference in this entire post; no need to leave.

Speaking of the dog, she went to the vet on Monday as aforementioned. She is approximately eight months old, is not spayed yet (but she will be), and is most likely a Queensland/terrier mix. I really thought there was pinscher in that face, but the more I looked at her, the more I remembered a dog my grandpa had when I was a girl -- Jenn and Debi, do you remember Patches? This was Patches' dad -- who was a Queensland and who had exactly the same coloring. He was just larger and stockier, with a slightly shorter face, which of course is where the terrier comes in, in Scout's case. The vet says she doesn't think Scout is even a bit of pinscher. Which honestly eases my mind a little, what with Scout sleeping practically on my daughter's face most nights. I know, I know, it's more nurture than nature, but still.

Also, I really REALLY think she wants a small doggy companion, but T says NO. Quite emphatically. So I guess she'll have to *snif* be lonely *snuffle* for the rest of her natural life. *sniffle*.

Yes, as a matter of fact, T does read my blog! Hi, T! Love you! Smooch!

The parallels between having a dog and having a baby are many, really, when you think about it.

OK, on to something else. Enough about the dog. The weather! Is still lame. Even my children are sick of snow, and that's all that needs to be said about that. We actually had a nice sunny day yesterday, which was good, except that it was also so cold that you couldn't go for a walk without a balaclava and fur-lined gloves. (OK, or maybe it was a knitted hat and mittens. But a scarf would definitely have helped.)

In other news, I have no clue what to make for supper tonight, and said supper has to be made in an hour and fifteen minutes. No. Clue. Yay for the tax return because I think we're going to the little neighborhood store for fried chicken. I am definitely not tracking today's food for my nutrition instructor.

Speaking of scarves (well, I was, up there), I am knitting one. I think I mentioned that before. I pulled out the foot or so that I had done and started over because I wanted to do the edges differently. Then I figured, what the heck, and pulled out the front pieces of the cardigan I am making for C to start them over with different edges too. Here's hoping that the new edges work out; otherwise I'll be making these projects for my grandchildren.

And that is all. I cannot bring myself to bore you all any further this afternoon, although you know I could if I wanted to.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Meet Scout

(as in Jean Louise. In other words, she's a girl.)

Another dream realized: We knew that when we finally lived outside of town, we wanted to find a smallish (so she can travel with us if desired), friendly, short-haired dog who would be happy both indoors and outdoors. So today, thanks to Craigslist and a nice woman named Carly who lives in a sad kind of Dog-Dumping Hot Zone outside of Fresno, we did.

The vet is closed today (it's her horse-riding day, how cool is that?), but tomorrow we're calling to make The Appointment. We don't know if she's been altered or not, and we know she'll need shots, and I have this vague consciousness that dogs require more expenditures than cats, for things like heartworm pills and licenses and who knows what all else.

We also don't know what her genetic makeup is. Any guesses as to the breeds that give her that sweet face? Here are some body pictures, too. She's about sixteen inches tall at the shoulder, although she genuinely DID NOT LIKE it when I brought that stick over to measure her. I'm thinking someone was not very nice to her with a stick at some point in the past. Poor girl. Her tail is longish -- it was between her legs here because this was not long after Smokey had attempted to assert his dominance over this New Big Thing that had come into his house. Poor girl again.

Please submit any and all guesses, because we are truly curious. I'll withhold my own completely uneducated guesses until after I've seen yours.

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