Do We .....

.... look like seemingly normal people?

Do we strike you as out of our minds?

Do we strike you as senseless fools?

(The Sisters need not answer this)

Do we look like soft pushovers with an inability to say no?
(Okay, you don't need to answer this question either.)


Meet Dewey.

Or perhaps his name is going to be Wesley.

But whatever his name is .... we must be out of our ever-lovin' minds!

 

But really, who could blame us?

He is just the cutest little papillion.

Who cares if he is a runt?

Who cares if his ears are too little?

Who cares if he is done growing and is smaller than our cats?

Now, we want to hear what you think his name should be .....

Dewey ---- named after Melville Dewey, the genius behind the Dewey Decimal System of classification for libraries

OR

Wesley ---- named after Mardell's dad. 

We named our other black papillion Walter

which was her dad's first name.

So we thought we might use her dad's middle name for this little guy.

Of course we would welcome any other suggestions as well.

 We already shot down Walter Raleigh, Walter Winchell and Walter Reed.

Christmas Toy

Mary gave me Adobe Photoshop Elements for Christmas.

I have been so good and refrained from doing nothing but play with photos ... until today.

I actually did a load of laundry today.  

I figure that was my quota and I was entitled to play.

That and the fact that I'm home alone. 

So who cares if I spend eight hours 

experimenting with the different aspects of the program?!

 

Here is Benny again, straight out of the camera.

 

Here is a warmer version.  

My camera tends toward the cooler colors.

But hey, cute is cute.

 

This is the Shepard Fairey look -- toned way down.

Probably wouldn't create the response that the Obama Hope poster did.

Especially plastered all over as graffiti art.

 

He might make it as a black velvet painting 

sold in a dusty parking lot full of potholes.

Nah, it just makes him look schizoid.

 

This is the watercolor filter.

I dare say that if Grandma Lou was still alive, 

she could paint his portrait much better than that.

Are you bored out your mind yet?

Then why are you still reading this?!

 

Here he is through a shower door.

It's the ocean ripple effect.

 

The mosaic look ---

perfect for a garden stepping stone.

  

Finally, in black and white.

Yep, I have way too much time on my hands.

Too Cute For Words

 

This is Benny, our fearless, school-bus charging poodle.

Doesn't he just look so innocent here?

Don't believe it for a minute!

He thinks he is much tougher than a school bus and sneaks out at dismissal time so that he can charge down the road at the bus.

I don't know what he thinks he's going to do if he catches it.

We now have to make sure someone is home at 3:10 

so that he doesn't become a poodle pizza.

We put in a pet door so that the critters could come and go as they needed.  It opens up into our herb garden/patio/pond area which is COMPLETELY fenced.

  Does that stop him?

No.  Nor does the fact that he is a geriatric poodle and shouldn't be jumping four and a half foot fences!

Can someone please invent a timer that goes on a pet door? 

We want it set to seal the door off at 2 p.m. and re-open at 4:00 p.m.   

That would fix his little butt.

Meet Edison and Learn a Little Known Fact About His Namesake

This is Edison.

He was a stray that showed up at Mary's when she still lived here.

They named him Edison because his favorite place to sit was on the surge protector for her computer.  He was nothing but a bag of bones with a kinked tail where it had been broken.

  We ended up with Edison and he's been a nice addition.

I don't call him Edison much .... he's always been Eddie Kitty to me.

I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen yesterday and now I'm sorry that he was named after Thomas Edison.  Did you know that Thomas Edison electrocuted stray dogs, cats, a few horses, cattle and an elephant named Topsy?  He wanted to prove the dangers of the alternating current.  It seems that Westinghouse developed AC and it was replacing the direct current that he had invented and was eating into his profits.  He even filmed the electrocution of the elephant and toured the US showing the film in hopes of destroying Westinghouse.

Eddie Kitty has used up several of his lives though.

We figured the first one probably went when his tail was broken.

In either 1997 or 1998, he lost another one.  Sometime during the Christmas season, Mardell and I went to town separately.  She was picking up donuts for the crew that we had working and then going to get a sandwich tray.  When she got out at Holland Bakery, she heard this yowling and saw an orange flash go underneath the car next to where she was parked.  She got down on all fours to discover our Eddiekins.  He had ridden in to town on the exhaust system.  How he didn't fall in twelve miles is beyond us.  From that day on, he become a store cat.  We figured that was destiny or something.

Our employee, nicknamed Becker, even trained him to wear a harness when he went outside.  She was afraid he would run off.  I knew he wouldn't.  We had the secret weapon.  It seems that Eddie is quite fond of catnip and it was growing in our flower garden.  He wouldn't have left for anything.

He was not very happy when we closed the store and he was forced into retirement.  He was so ticked off that he resolved to let our mouse population grow .... and grow.

Two summers ago, he disappeared for about three weeks.  When he finally came home, his feet were sooty and slightly burned.  Our neighbors down the road two miles had a fire in their pasture and he had evidently been in the area and crossed the burn spot while it was still hot.  That had to take another life.

Here's a picture of Eddie in his garden.  Yes, his garden.  He is quite sure it is his.  We even put a statue up in honor of him.  The fat cat pair.  

  

Do you notice his goofy ear?  He had an absess that we had a heck of a time treating and getting healed.  I finally lanced it and it shot all over our bathroom wall.  However, his ear hasn't stood up straight since then.  Gives him character.

 

This is Eddie under the influence of catnip.

 

Now his favorite place is in the middle of my bed or else in the middle of my mariner's compass quilt blocks.  A couple of days ago Mardell caught him with one in his mouth.  He was carrying it off somewhere. 

Meet Goliath

Meet Goliath, our 71 pound American bull terrier.

 

He is a love.

One of his favorite things to do is nap.

On my bed of course.

His other favorite activity is chasing the horse and donkey.

They finally had enough and kicked him.

He has a cracked pelvis that is separated from his spinal column.

He now gets carried from place to place or else he has to walk with his hind quarters supported with a sling. This has to happen for the next six weeks.

Tell me, have you ever tried to maneuver

a sling so that a dog could urinate?

You can all stop laughing now.

Pedometers

Pedometers are evil.

Pure evil.

Somehow I got roped into doing a fitness program at school.

I'm kind of like Sister Two in that I have a hard time saying no.

We have teams of five and we have to actually
exercise 5 times a week for thirty minutes.

We also have to eat three cups of vegetables,
two cups of fruit and drink 48 ounces of water.

And sleep for 7 to 9 hours.

You get one point for exercising, one point for eating right and drinking your allotted water and one point for sleeping. 
At least I'll get one point for sleeping.  That I can do.

At any rate, I decided to buy yet another pedometer.  I somehow manage to either lose them or break them, so I decided that I needed another one.  My budget nag manager was thrilled.

I wore it today.  I had both noon recess duty and afternoon recess duty.

The older boys (5th and 6th grade) asked me to "bomb" the ball to them.

Basically I kick it as high and as far as I can and they run after it.

Then they throw it back to me and we do it all again.

I decided that could count for exercise.
It was more exercise than I was getting, so it should count, right?

With both recesses, I had my thirty minutes in.

I was feeling pretty smug.

I logged about 13,000 steps at the end of the school day which is a bit more than I usually log for a day with our crew, so evidently the recess exercise paid off!

We went into town and then went back out to school to "do just a few more things".  We finally left at about 7:30.

We got home to discover that our four rotten, big dogs had taken off.  We wouldn't mind so much, but Annie was with them. 

She has a bad case of hip dysplasia and we try to keep her in the house or fenced yard as much as possible .... because otherwise she'll run all over the countryside and then not be able to move for a week. 

Let me tell you, she is a heavy brute to carry in and out to go to the bathroom!  So, like I said, we avoid that at all costs, but somehow she managed to sneak out.

I hollered and yelled and hollered some more.

Still no dogs.

So I found my trusty flashlight, changed the batteries
and headed down the road.  No sign of them. 

I walked the creek bed down to the little lake.  I saw a couple of coons and a lot of jumping fish, but no dogs.  Decided to go home .... it was pitch black by this time and with all of the fallen limbs in the pasture, it was really hard to see and I had to slowly pick my way along.
Chip was waiting for me.  I had no idea where he'd been or what direction he came from, so I took the car and drove the canal road.  I drove down to the big lake.  Then I decided to call it a night.
Annie and Goliath were both home when I got home.

We discovered that Chip and Goliath had tangled with something.
They both had extremely bloody mouths and snouts.
So I was really concerned about Longbody,
our resident stupid basset hound.

He didn't show up and didn't show up.
  I walked the road some more,
hollering his real name and
not the made up ones that I so fondly call him.

I finally gave up, thinking he had probably met his maker with  whatever tore up Chip and Goliath.  About twenty minutes ago, he was crying at the door.  He didn't have a mark on him, but demanded to be fed immediately. Then I called him some of the made up names again.

All of that took me to 20,367 steps.  

I'm going to be sorry tomorrow.

Expensive Oreos

This year I have been taking my lunch to school each day instead of eating the nutritious meal provided by the cafeteria.  I have a sweet tooth so I've been taking cookies for dessert each day.  I am especially fond of Oreos and have tried the banana split and peanut butter varieties.  They are both good.  So are the mint Oreos, but my favorites are the chocolate creme Oreos.

 

We bought a package and had eaten about half of it.  

Sometime during the night on Thursday, 

our little bird dog, Tipper,

 

got into the bag and ate the remaining cookies.

By morning he was having tremors.  It didn't take a rocket scientist to see the torn bag and surmise what he had done so we called the vet and he told us to bring him right out.

Mardell was subbing for me as I had a seminar on gifted students that day, so I took him out before I went to the seminar.  I also dropped Benny off at the town house.  It seems that our lovable poodle loves to charge the school bus.  He can scale a six foot fence so we don't have a way to contain him unless we close the pet door.  The others tend to revolt when we do that.  So we've been taking him into town and then getting him at the end of the day.  It works and he thinks he's special because he gets to go for a ride.

 

After my seminar was over, I went back out to school to finish up my day.  At about 5:00 we went out to the vet clinic to see our little guy.  They had him on an IV and had been giving him valium to control his heart and tremors.  They had also been giving him charcoal to absorb what was left of the chocolate.  He'd been throwing up the charcoal so he looked like something out of a horror movie, but he wagged his tail and was happy to see us.  Both Kirsten and Paul were guardedly optimistic that he would pull through.

We went to get Benny only to discover that he had jumped through the screen and was gone.  He is such a putz.  We drove to the old office where Mardell worked before they moved to our old store.  He wasn't there so we went over to our building to see if he happened to be there.  He wasn't there either.  The Humane Society was closed by this point, so we went to the police station to see if he had been picked up.  He had been spotted at 20th and Broadway, but the responding officers couldn't catch him so we knew that he was in the area.  We drove around looking for him until about 11:30 and finally called it a night.  The next morning we were in town at 4:00 looking again.  Still nothing.  I had to go to work, so Mardell got stuck waiting until 9:00 to contact the Humane Society.

She found him there and bailed him out of jail.  He had been hit by a car, but didn't seem any worse for the wear.  A good samaritan had seen him get hit and had taken him in.  He has road rash on the inside of one leg, but is okay otherwise.

Then she went out to visit Tipper.  He had been pretty good at midnight and was sitting up waiting for them at 7:00 when they arrived.  He was happy to see her, but had taken a turn for the worse.  Unfortunately he didn't make it through the day.

That was probably the most expensive bag of Oreos I've ever purchased!
This is also why there was no Flashback Friday this week.
It was Krista's birthday so I had hoped to feature her, but I didn't get it finished.
She's getting a rain check, because I won't be able to do it this week either.  We have parent-teacher conferences and I'm taking off for Seward on Friday.
Hopefully, I'll get back to posting regularly the following week.

Can Trudy Come Out To Play?

I've created two little monsters.

I got these little guys from Julie, my first teaching partner, for finally finishing my master's degree. Actually, I got Grady, the graduate goat and she got Gussie, the pain in the ass goat.


We decided that we didn't want lone goats so we went looking for a pygmy to keep with each of our respective goats. In the meantime, Grady stayed with her to keep Gussie company. A month later we found these two beauties.


By this time Grady and Gussie were so bonded we couldn't bear to break them up, so we decided Julie would keep Grady and Gussie and I'd get the pygmy pair.

Great idea --- except these two were W-I-L-D. Couldn't even touch 'em. We got them from a woman near Bayard. A male and female pair.


She had stupid names for them --- Strip and Strap.
(I think she lisped when she read The Three Billy Goats Gruff.)

Anyway I decided to rename them.

I was leaning toward Thunder and Lightning, but decided that was about as lame as Strip and Strap. I pondered Greek God and Goddess names, but couldn't decide.

I had finally decided upon Riley for this guy.

I wanted a good female name that went with Riley. Then Mardell pointed this out to me.

"Ummm, Trudy. I don't think you have a little girl there. Females don't pee like this."

So meet Sheezahe.

(Think about it as you say it.)

Let's not even get into how long this discovery took.

A year and a half passes. It's amazing what bribing them with Goat Chow will do!

Now they follow me around like puppy dogs --- which they seem to think they are.

You have to admit though .... anything that turns this:

into this:

can't be all bad!

I have been frantically painting the last few days in a futile attempt

to finish before I have to report back to work. These two have been good company.

Their antics have amused me.

Here is Allie, my faithful painting companion.

She's just lying there peacefully minding her own business.

Liittle does she know what is sneaking up behind her.

Of course, the flash on my camera didn't recharge in time to get the butting.

This is why Mardell doesn't like goats.

They like to eat trees.

and more trees

and more trees.

When he wasn't munching on tree branches, Riley made a pretty good inspector.

The ants got to Sheezahe and he spent a good while biting ants off of his back hoof.

Horns come in handy when you have an itch.

But now, it's high time to quit kidding around and get back to work!

Need Help With A Name

 

     Meet our latest bit of insanity.  Do you guys remember how we decided no more animals? 

Yeah, that was a golden retriever and one kitten ago.  

This sweetheart showed up at the office.  It was near the door but hidden in a cement block and panting like crazy.  Karen had offered it water, but it wasn't interested so she called me.  I did the same thing and cautiously picked her up.  She bolted, but we managed to nab her.  She instantly began purring.  Do you know how hard it must be to purr while panting?  Cyndie, the pessimistic, gloom and doom, office worker declared it was distemper and it was dying.  I didn't think it was distemper .... her eyes were clear and she didn't smell at all.  Her nose was crusted over and she continued to pant, even in the cool office.  I got on the internet and searched her symptoms and decided she had an upper respiratory infection.  Karen was taking her dog into the vet the next day so she said she would just take her along.  

     She couldn't wait and took her in yet that night.  My computer-chair diagnosis was correct and she got amoxicllin drops.  It didn't take but a day or two before she was looking and acting much better.  Unfortunately Karen is allergic to cats.  She had decided to bite the bullet and live on Claritin, but that didn't even seem to help.  So of course I volunteered to take her.  Sucker that I am.

 

     But she needs a name and nothing is coming that seems to fit.  Karen had been calling her Missy, but I think my Missy from the Zoo Crew might be offended.  Of course my niece and nephew have the same names as a rabbit and dog that I had.  So maybe that's not such a bad thing. We'll see what they think as they get older.  Do you suppose they'll really believe that Mom and Dad had no clue?

 

So any suggestions and ideas would be welcome.