unconditional love

roxy

My pretty girl. You can't see it, but her tail is thumping rhythmically on the floor because she never ever stops wagging it.

Goodbye to another friend

I've had Sammy longer than any other pet - he was 17.5 years old.



He was the most loving and affectionate cat I've ever known. He especially loved underarms, and he had a tendency to drool. (That combination was not a good one).

We'll miss you, Sammy!

graduate

Here's the whole class. You know the whole "owners resemble their dogs" thing? Yep. There is one pair in particular in there that fit this adage perfectly. Sweet, sweet lady and sweet dog. And they looked very similar.





Proud trainer and graduate. Roxy was praised by the teacher for moving from REALLY out of control crazy to just kind of out of control crazy. Progress is what we're after, right?

It's a Lazy Friday around here

This stoopid picture had better be worth it to you because I was having the BEST dream.

Gecko sprawl.

The master of laze.

Pardon? You want me to do WHAT?

The saga of the rodents, Part deux

Since it was a teacher workday yesterday, the kids didn't have school. Several of us neighborhood moms wanted to do something fun with the kids, and as it was approximately 100 degrees outside, we quickly nixed any suggestions of outdoor activities. We ended up taking several vanloads of children to see Pirates 3 at the local movie theater. The movie itself was ok (very LONG) and we are now all working on convincing our husbands to wear bandannas and earrings. Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp are hot. Anyway, I digress. The kids certainly enjoyed being together in the theater, whether they loved the movie or not. They spread out and took up the whole back row of seats and munched out on popcorn. Afterwards, we weren't ready for the party to end so we bought the makings for Sundaes and all came over to my house for ice cream and wine. (I'll let you sort out who got which treat). E was away at a birthday party during all these festivities.

So in the midst of eating ice cream and drinking wine and sharing spousal secrets with one another (our husbands just looove it when we do that) one of the little girls came in my front door with her hamster in a little carry-cage. I was oohing and awing over it and suggested "Here, Z...let me show you E's hamster." So I took her to the uber-awesome hamster's cage in E's room to show her Ruby the hamster. I poked around a little, because Ruby likes to bury herself under the bedding during the day. "Um...she's not up in her sleeping area. Hmm. She's not in the little log. Huh. She's...." And then I saw the opening in the top of the cage. Without the little plastic cover insert. And Ruby was not in the cage.

Being the dramatic sort I am, I went to interrupt the grown ups' party to make the grand announcement that there was an escapee in the house and could someone please let Sammy the Great Hunter outside and someone put Roxy the Excitable into her crate?
Then I looked over and saw friend M's face.
M reads my blog. She'd read the blog entry from yesterday (which until that moment, I'd forgotten about). And for a few seconds as we stared at each other in horror, I realized I had just launched myself full into the running for the Worst.Mom.Ever. And thus commenced the tasks of pulling out drawers, peeking under beds, inside clothes hampers and under furniture. (The party moved next door. Nothing like an errant rodent to take the sparkle out of a party.) I could not bring myself to go look in the vacuum bag. DH took on the task of filling E in on what happened when she got home. (Didn't bring up the whole vacuum incident though).

To spoil the anticipation, I'll let you in on the ending early. Ruby was found - alive - and not in the vacuum bag. DH heard her rummaging around in the kitchen about 2 am. Thank HEAVENS. With a broomstick and some juggling maneuvers, he had her back in the completely closed up uber-awesome cage by the time we all woke up. I cannot tell you how happy I am about the outcome, though there's a little part of myself that thinks that it certainly would have made for some entertaining blogging. Or not. It would have been hard to blog from the van as I am certain that as the Worst.Mom.Ever, I would have been banned there for at least a few months.

sign of intelligence?

My dear dog, not quite 1 1/2 years, is still firmly in the chewing phase. She has very specific tastes, however. There are certain items that I must keep put up or they will be shredded to bits. Pencils and books are the big ones. She will delicately rip page after page out of any book she finds lying around, then will finish off by chewing up the binding. I do NOT want to go back to the library and tell them we must pay for a book because "my dog ate it". Again. But I must.

For dessert, she will eat barbie dolls or polly pocket dolls.

And no, her tail has not ever stopped wagging. Books make her happy, apparently. This is why she fits in so well here.

I feel so loved

So tonight, being totally exhausted from three straight days of nothing but refinishing floors, I'm sitting on the couch with my *&#$ glass of wine and 'Nilla Wafers. I was hungry (mostly forgot to eat today) so I had a BIG handful of the cookies. I dropped one in my lap. My dog, Roxy, lunged forward and snatched it. (I think she was sitting at my feet waiting for that to happen). I shouted out. (It was my cookie, after all.)

Suddenly, a blur of fur crossed my vision. It was all so fast, I didn't see what happened. The next thing I knew, my cat Sammy had attacked Roxy and had her cornered. There was raised fur, there were throat growls, there was PLENTY of cowering by the canine half. After a several minute stand-off, Roxy slunk off (peering over her shoulder to make sure the feline half wasn't continuing to stalk her), while Sammy jumped up in my lap and comminced purring.

What the hell?

My cat just protected me. Who knew? That animal loves me! I don't know that I've heard of an attack cat before but I cannot imagine any other reason for the attack than he was defending me. Sniff.

insanity

All ski slopes open.
Average base depth: 37"-52"
Forecast for snow Wednesday, and highs at or below freezing through the weekend.
(!!!!)
I have dutifully been checking items off my list: ski pants, helmets, goggles, gloves, wrist guards, snowboard boots that fit. A condo beside the skilift has been rented. We leave on Friday. All that remains is planning the menu, shopping and packing and steeling myself to simply ignore the cost of lift tickets and ski rental. In the past, I normally make DH pay for everything so I don't have to see it. Yipes but this is an expensive hobby to have. Too bad we're not into just taking walks in the state park.

Here's a cool thing that happened this afternoon. I scooped up E and Q's friends at UU this morning and took them home with us. After they tromped through the ravine behind the house for a while, mucking up their clothes and getting faces full of scratches, I took the whole gang up to the library. They were thrilled. Seriously. The kids were all so good and sweet and so into hunting down books and reading that the librarians weren't at all irritated with us when I lost track of the time and kept them there past closing time. Even when they realized we had something like 200 books to check out. See? Kid-cuteness pays off occasionally. We got home and both kids grabbed their books and curled up on the couch admist fleece blankets and warm pillows and a fluffy Roxy dog to read. I felt like I was in a Norman Rockwell painting, it was so sickeningly sweet.

Speaking of Roxy, she is such a terminally happy dog that it's verging on psychotic. Her tail never EVER stops wagging. EVER. She is either in normal wagging mode, cautiously wagging mode (when she's in trouble, which happens a lot) or over-the-top wagging mode which means her entire body from the neck down is wildly thrashing back and forth. She has this plume of a tail that curls up over her back so it's a perky, feathery wag. I found it adorable at first, then mildly irritating, and now I think she's just insane.
"You wanna go for a walk?" WAG WAG WAG
"You need to go out?" WAG WAG WAG
"Time to go to your crate." WAG WAG WAG
"If you destroy another one of my daughters stuffed animals I will replace it with you." WAG WAG WAG
"Did you pee on the floor? Am I going to have to kill you?" WAG WAG WAG
"The cat is stalking you and will soon jump on your back in an enraged hissing fit."
WAG WAG WAG
"(silence)" WAG WAG WAG

It's driving me nuts. No one, no animal can be that happy every freaking second of every day. She has to be insane.

In fact, as I'm sitting here composing a silly blog entry about my insane dog and wondering if I should just delete the whole thing, my dog is in the living room being completely baffled by a ridiculous toy. This toy is a truely horrific attempt to make a rabbit wear a frog costume but to me it has always looked like a frog that is in the middle of eating a rabbit. Whole. Because the rabbit's head is hanging out of the frog's mouth. And even more horrifying is that when you press its hand, it wiggles and sings some inane song to the tune of "My Boyfriend's Back". So Roxy stole this toy from E's room and inadvertently pressed its hand. She is whining and cocking her head and is visibly upset that this half-eaten rabbit is singing "Hey La, Hey La...." while desperately wiggling to be free. And of course the entire time? WAG WAG WAG. I tell you IT NEVER STOPS.

various and sundry

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" will be released on July 21, 2007.
Grab your place in line now. (I'm wondering if we're going to have to buy three separate copies of the silly thing. Me, Q and E all insist we should be the first to get to read it.)

It's good to be a cat. It's about 18 degrees outside at the moment, and while *I* can't tell whether it's 18 or 78 outside as I sit here in my climate-controlled house, apparently my cat can. He spent the evening curled up on the heating vent, purring furiously.

I've been having trouble coming up with coherent thoughts lately, much less be able to construct a meaningful blog entry. I accused my sweet daughter of forging my signature on her reading log. Only when she recounted to me exactly where I was standing when I signed it (in the hall), what I was wearing (pajamas), and what I was doing (the laundry) did I admit to myself that I have just simply misplaced that memory. From yesterday. The worrisome thing is that darling daughter was not miffed at me for falsely accusing her. She was, in fact, totally unsurprised.

I have freshly washed flannel sheets on my bed right now. It's not a heater vent, but it's awfully close... Time to go curl up with DH on the couch in front of the fire, then I'm off to my haven. Cozy.

fallish goings-on

The weather around here where I live has been remarkable for the last few days. The nights are so clear that I can see the Milky Way, with each star a perfect pinprick. It's cold enough to breathe smoke and my fingers and toes get chilly. During the day it warms up but I can still wear my favorite Big Dog fleece jacket and be comfortable. I love everything about this time of year from the colors to the holidays to the smell of fires to school rolling into full swing. It's here. I've been waiting for this feeling to come back, and despite turmoil and upset and general busy-ness, it has arrived, as it always has. No worries.

This morning I was sitting in my home office preparing for my YRUU class, and was only momentarily distracted by the rain on the roof. Eventually, though, I became aware enough to realize it was another beautiful day with brilliant blue skies, and the sound of rain just didn't quite fit. I figured it was the heater kicking on...but those vents are in the floor and not the roof. So I shrugged and let it remain a puzzle.

Later, I decided to take Roxy out for her morning elimination ritual. I choose the word ritual very deliberately. This dog is beyond weird. Peeing is not a problem. She can do that at the drop of a hat (which has been part of the whole problem with housebreaking...she can jump to retrieve a thrown toy, drop and pee and run off before you can blink twice). Pooping, however, requires a much more elaborate structure. We must (1) be at the exact correct location, which she has chosen to be at the very base of the slide on my children's swing set. (Look, I don't make these rules, I just follow them). Next, (2) she must be able to perform an elaborate set of such back-leg-kickings and jumps and sniffs as you've never seen before. This includes her kicking dirt up onto the slide which inevitably scares her (I'm thinking she inherited the lab intellect rather than that of the border collie at this point. I'm just sayin'.). This usually results a direct violation of condition number (3) which is that she requires complete and utter concentration. Any distraction at all, which includes the sound of dirt she has kicked up herself as it thunderously hits a plastic slide, takes her attention and requires that she start the entire process over again.

So we set out outdoors in the gorgeous fall morning for the quick drop and pee and headed over to the swingset for the leg-kicking, jumping, strange gyration, pooping routine. But it was not to be. The rain that I had been confused about earlier was revealed to be acorns. A very large flock of very black birds had settled into two trees just beside the house. I'm also guessing this was a group therapy session for birds with ADHD. I was getting stressed just watching them. They would sit for approximately 0.4 seconds before flying to another branch to sit 0.4 seconds and repeat. All 2000 of them. After 5 minutes or so, I realized Roxy and I had both been standing there transfixed with mouths agape, watching the rainstorm of acorns. Once they started hitting within several inches of Roxy and myself, I worried there may be the occasional non-acorn dropping, so I decided it was time to get her to do her business and get back inside. Uh - No. Condition number 3 was the issue of the morning and was clearly not going to be met so long as the blackbird ADHD convention was going on. So being the mighty human that I am, I picked up a stick and threw it up into the trees with an enormous battle cry. Which had exactly no effect at all on the birds but did make Roxy glance up at me and roll her eyes.

I was finally able to break up the meeting by slamming my shoe against the slide, but that was in such violation of rule number 3 that I gave up and went back inside.

But these are the sorts of things about fall that keep me going. Truly. What a cool world this is - with roaming packs of birds that can make acorn rain, with cold air that makes my toes tingle, with leaves that crunch as Roxy and I wander the yard. These seasons - this rhythm that covers life and death in an endless circle - this is my spiritual core.

patched up

A quick hello and a catchup...

Our computer crashed big time this weekend. Big. Time.
DH has been toiling for 3 days, trying to recover files and reinstall windows. (He's no dummy at hardware/software, so this is not a good sign). I'm currently using DH's laptop on our internet connection to satisfy my internet needs.

So as a result, I owe several of you emails, but no longer have your email addresses. So please forgive me.

Update on my MIL - as far as I know, things are much much better than we had feared. Doc didn't think the lump in her neck was cancerous after all, and spot on her lungs is probably scar tissue. More testing is going to happen, but we are cautiously optimistic now. She is still really sick though, with rheumatoid arthritis. But IMO, that is not as scary as what we had been fearing. Ah, that roller coaster we call life.

Last few days have been, oh, let's say STRESSFUL. I'm dealing with PTA drama crap out the wazoo (basically, a bunch of grown ups acting like middle schoolers). Oddly enough, I have ended up in the role of the level-headed one that everyone seems to be looking to do bring us back around in the right direction. You KNOW things are majorly screwed up if that's the case. Ack.

So this isn't much of a post, but I'm working on half a cylinder right now. (I'm also tethered at the hip to Roxy -literally- as part of my exasperation with housebreaking, but that's really doesn't have much to do with what I was writing. Just wanted to share. We are together 100% of the time that we are both awake in the house. It is driving us both crazy. But I have reached the point where I will make her become fully housebroken simply via sheer willpower. Do. Not. Cross. Me.)

More later, hopefully from my own computer. Sigh.

roxy!!!!!