Lieber Doc,
Du bist so ein softie.If ich das Falsche sagen, verstecken Sie. Wenn ich meine Stimme erheben, werden Sie entsetzt. Wie konnte ich nur so grausam sein?
Du bist mein Herz und Seele.
Du bist mein Sonnenschein. Ich singe dieses Lied, Sie in meinem schrecklich, off-Taste = Stimme und Sie vorgeben, es zu mögen. Ich liebe dich beobachtet. Ich beobachte dich bewegen und bin mit der Leichtigkeit begeistert, dass Ihr Körper die Windungen und Stößen und plötzlichen Stopps verhandelt.
Ich sehe Ihre Plumey Schwanz Welle.
Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, mein Leben ohne dich, obwohl ich weiß, das ist wohl unvermeidlich.
Sei gesund, mein Sohn. Live long. Liebesleben.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KARMA

(Google photo)

This is a Pit Bull Terrier. I am not a fan.Two of the dogs, my elderly cat and I have been attacked by PB's. Around here there is a HUGE element that fights Pit Bulls, so you never know, if you see one loose, whether it is a nice Pittie and or one who is going to charge first and ask questions later.
Consequently, I do not like them loose in the neighborhood.

But around here, the Cops shoot them. And/or they are euthanized, the fighting ethic so pervasive among owners that the shelters and adoption agencies generally would rather kill than risk a lawsuit. It is not without justification.

Years ago I told my husband I did not walk the dogs where there was a Pit being walked because the kids, the teenage boys,like to turn them loose when they see another dog coming. He said this was ridiculous and I was wrong. We had one of those neverending fissing matches about it until one day when we were both walking the dogs in the park and I saw a young man with a Pit. "I'm going back" I said, and spun on my heels and retreated.
"That's just ridic---------" he began, and watched as the young man leaned down to take the leash off.....
Some things I know.

So this morning here i sat and I glanced up in time to see a grey rump and tail vanish into the bushes leading to the backyard across the street and my brain instantly identified it as a Pit.

Grabbing a leash, and two treats, I bolted out of the house and started across the street as the Pit trotted out of the bushes and crossed to my side. She was a young bitch and i wish I had checked to see if she were in season, because it turned out my husband had seen her several days ago. She had a big wide pink collar and no identification.
I sat on the sidewalk and let her come to me, which she did readily enough. We chatted, and I slipped a leash on her.



Had she looked like this, her behavior would have been the same...


So I didn't have my phone, I couldn't take her home or near my house without setting off the cacaphony of hound and herder. There was a woman down the street taking out the trash. I hollered. M'am, could you call animal control,please, for me?

Oh,she says...and then... that dog lives there, where the green car is.
Oooooooooooooooo an owner!!!

Because I know, yes I do, I know what the end result will be for this dog if I call AC and nobody claims her, and around here,people tend not to look too hard.And she is, after all, a nice bitch.

So I walk down and pound (like a Cop) on the door, and someone is at the curtain and I say M'am, is this your dog?

Oh yes yes yes indeed she was, her name is Karma and thank you thank you HOW DID YOU GET OUT?

And I know-- this isn't fair but I know it-- that she is not going to go check the fence to find out,because if she were that concerned she would have done it last week, when my Husband saw the dog loose.
She can get under our gate when my dogs are out and she might well NOT be friendly then.

I told the woman: I am concerned because she is a Pit and around here the Cops shoot them.

Only partly true. The Cops are not bad guys, but...

Well, I did what I could. Here's hoping Karma's Karma doesn't include getting picked up by animal control.....good luck, dog.
 (from Google)

LET THERE BE LIGHT (In the yard)

When EVERYTHING happened a couple of years ago and the house flooded we came back to find that the rehabbers, restorers and rebuilders had cut the power to our big floodlights on the roof as well as removed that handy outside electrical outlet in the back. Some more mumbo jumbo about codes that we never completely (like a lot of the codes consisting of "move that pipe to someplace entirely inconvenient and impossible to reach in case we need to replace it someday" understood.

All we knew was, suddenly, we were unable to see the dogs at night in the yard and, more to the point, unable to check for varmints before we let them out.

 

We had nothing to go by other than the moon and flashlights to check for

(photo by Google)

 annoyed raccoons

  (Photo from Google)

 

annoyed possums

 

And so on.

 

Since Doc will not go out at night without an escort with a flashlight and/or Llewis or Conley this has been inconvenient. The biggest problems is actually not being able to check for skunks BEFORE I open the door and send the pups roaring into the night.

 

Some women are handy with tools. I know what a shovel is, and a trowel, but wrenches and hammers leave me in a cold sweat. Unfortunately, for the most part (He did put my grill together withouot mishap) DH is about as "handy" as one of the dogs.

Doc is good at deconstructing, but not at putting things back together again. He and DH share some traits that  way, altho DH at least makes an ATTEMPT to put things together.

 

But see, we have a neighbor who is a master electrician.

 

So yesterday Roger came over and began putting up new floodlights.

But it rained. And rained, And rained. The yard looks like a rice paddy. The Garden, which I have allowed to go wild, looks like Indochina.

 

So Roger had to quit, plunging us back into blackness in the yard.

And what does he do?

 

He sets up his own floods on his pool deck overlooking our yard! So I step out the door and it is virtually daylight at 11 at night!!!

I still went out with the dogs because Roger had left some things behind and I was afraid the Bassets and Doc would build an escape route over the fence.

(Actually I didn't want Doc eating Roger's stuff.)

 

But it was such a thoughtful gesture. Do we have cool neighbors or what?

At least on one side....

 

 



GRILLING TIME

Last fall I put my much maligned and rusted grill out on the curb for the trash.

The other day I decided I had to have a new grill, and since Menard's was having a grand opening I went and picked up (well it weighs 85 pounds. I didn't actually pick it up,other people did.) a new gas grill, a little fancier than the one I had and hopefully with an ignition that worked. I really hate lighting propane with a match
(photo from google)

The grill is right outside the back door. Everything was great. Mr.Husband put the whole thing together while I stayed far away. Everything was fine until we came to the nice rubber hose that carries the gas from the cannister to the ignition and Mr.Husband and I stood  and stared at it in horror , at exactly the kind of thing that the almost a year old puppy Doc LOVES TO CHEW.

       (I would NEVER chew a garden hose.Look what I found!)

He is a hose dog.
He chewed our garden hose into pieces. Little pieces. This new hose, was not a garden hose, and the consequences of his chewing it were enormous. (kaboom). (He would only do it once.)

Consequently the grill now stands proudly behind an old ex-pen. Like many things in our home, it looks a little weird, but we sleep better.

So now I am grilling everything. We had burgers the other day and chicken.(a little dry).

The dogs stay in the house while I am cooking. (No, hubbie does not cook. Or Grill. That the man of the house always grills is a myth.)

The garden hose, which we had to buy since ours was in chunks all over the yard, is in one of those plastic hose containers and that, being plastic and another chewable, is in a metal dog crate.

(If you have too many crates and want ideas on how to utilize them, ask me.)

It's going to be a bit awkward but perhaps the hose will make it through the summer.

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

                                Me? I would NEVER!

THE HAIRCUT 2

No photos.
Not because the hair is awful, but because I hate having my photo taken.
I got in and lovely Kelly laughed, said that when the phone rang that early she thought "I'll bet that's Beverly..."
She was laughing when I got there.
She took her scissors and went to work, cut it all, didn't yell at me for taking the stripping blade from my dog tack and doing the bangs myself the night before.
And when she got done, it was GREAT! It was exactly as I wanted. It looked as if I had stuck my head in a blender. This is precisely the effect I work for.

 

                     Beaver tree, along the Mississippii river.

The less I have to do with my hair the happier I am. My idea is that one should not have to spend more than maybe three minutes a day playing with your hair.
I use a brush, the gel, and my hands. Done.

I grew up with looong, looong, loong hair. As a child I had long braids. Once my Mother cut it and had a perm done and i looked like a poodle, and even she accepted that this was true.
As a teenager I cut it all off very short (about 1") It was right after
Jean Seberg (remember her?) played in the movie  "BREATHLESS" and everyone was getting their heads shorn

Check the hair. My Mother was crushed. She wanted a girl. She got me.

 

Then I let my hair grow when I got into High school. And grow. And grow. It was down to my ...uh...it was very long. And it stayed that way a long time.

This was High School and beginning College, and my Father was frantic to have me cut it. Only Beatniks had long hair. His own daughter, out of sight at school, was wearing not only long hair but solid black: thigh-high lace-up Capezio black boots, black jeans, black turtlenecks and a cape that I had made for me.

I made a small fortune renting out my Saks, CPS and Marshall Field's wardrobe to the freshmen pledges on the floor.

 

I posed nude for a series of photographs done by a woman I knew. she assured me no one would ever see them because no one came to the exhibits.

Three weeks later my brother, in Medical School there, called me:

 

"Nice photos" he said. I made him promise and he did. My parents never knew.

 

I'm not sure when i cut my hair again. It may have been when I began working with special ed kids. It might have been when I began working with children in a state mental institution. It might have been when I began working for my Vet. I really don't remember,but it was long for my daughter's wedding.

 

During the time I worked at the state mental facility. The kids grabbed my long hair,so I cut it.

This was not the photo I wanted but it won't let me delete it. This is our first Basset,Warf.

 

This was my hair. It got better and longer and then I cut it all off and spiked it and I have never looked back. It is now silver and coarse and does not look good long. It looks stringy.  It's too bad, I loved my long, dark hair. Now I have big, dark dogs instead.

 

THE HAIRCUT

NO PHOTOS

(At least not of the hair.)

Yesterday I got my haircut and foiled with the hairdresser I have had for many years, since my original one had a near fatal aneurysm and had to stop cutting hair.
About every 6 months I go get my hair cut when I am sick of the white cloud on my head.
I always get the same cut: about an inch long all over and spikey.

This time.
Ohhh, this time I picked a photo out of a magazine of a different haircut and took it with. It required a much different look. Never mind that the woman in the photo was maybe 19yrs old and weighed 37 pounds. ("MAYBE if I get MY hair cut like that, I will look like her!!")  I won't admit to that line of thinking but I bet it was in there someplace.

And I decided to have it foiled.
I was thinking of six or seven broad dark stripes...and then this fabulous cut.

That was last night.
*********************************************************

This morning at 8:30 I called the hairdresser and left a frantic message: I have to have you whack this off! It isn't me. I look like Hans Brinker in the THE SILVER SKATE! (Nevermind that she is far too young to have ever heard of Hans Brinker.)

So I have an appointment in awhile and I dutifully washed the goop that was holding it together out and now I REALLY look like Hans Brinker.

No photos of the hair. Absolutely not. I am bad enough just normally there is no way I am sharing a bad-decision haircut.

Here are some others to relieve the monotony of my blather:

The Spiderwort in my garden that came from our house in Des moines.

 

                                                     the way that Llewis

                                                                runs.

Conley discovering that somewhere someone is grilling outside.

                                      ten months old.

EARLY RISING

Sometimes I could sleep for hours longer than I do and other times I need no sleep at all.
1:30 a.m.
It is hot and stuffy. I have a fan on but it is still hot and stuffy. I wake up because Doc is shuffling around in his crate, shoving the pad to one side so he can sleep on the cool plastic and wear the hair off his hock and the inside of one back leg.

(Warning: Photos have no relevance to the text of the blog at all.)

So I thought I would see if he would settle down loose in the room.I put up the gate and opened the crate and he stepped out.
Now, Doc will not get on the bed. I don't know why, but he won't.
He wanted to cuddle.
He wanted to sit in my lap.
He did not want to get on the bed.

I put him away and let Conley out who climbed instantly onto the bed and took my back and was asleep before I had laid down.

 

I turned out the light, closed my eyes and..................

 

I turned on the light and sat up.

Clearly, I was not destined to go back to sleep. Whatever important, massive problem-solving solution had been spinning in my brain 45 minutes earlier had circled the drain and vanished. I was stuck, wide awake.

 

 

I let Doc out of his crate again and gave him a chewie (Made in America unlike every single one at PETSMUCK WHICH COME FROM CHINA--hear me!!)

I found some really cool articles inthe NYTimes that I actually had time to read since it was 2 in the morning. Sustainable farming with horses, was my favorite.

I read the police blotter for town, not usually terrifying but getting worse. Three gunshots reports. Lots of drugs. Adults-- 30 yrs old dealing drugs, what a waste.
I bought a trash book off Amazon (nevermind it has dogs in it.)
I looked at beads.

Doc chewed and Conley slept and along about 9a.m. I will fall into a
stupor. What a day it's going to be.

                           (As long as I get breakfast....)