Dogs, family and websites

I haven’t been here to post for a while. It seems that the dogs and my family genealogy website have been taking all of my time. My son and DIL went on vacation in early June which left me with 9 dogs (yeah that is 9) and the rest. By Wednesday of that week, I was ready to release my finches into the wild, turn the cats free in the front yard and start adopting out the dogs. Luckily one of my son’s friends was able to come over to stay with me. He took over the difficult dog duties and it was such a relief.

My Yorkie is pregnant. That’s why we had 9 dogs instead of 8. When breeding time came, the stud I had arranged was unavailable. His owner was due to deliver a baby herself any day. In desperation my DIL and I searched for an alternate stud. The only thing we could find was a male Yorkie for sale. He turned out to be a proven stud and a very sweet dog. So dog #9 came home. He was very enthusiastic about his duties as a stud. As a result, I have a female who looks like a hairy football. Her first due date is July 21. The male was starved for affection and needed more attention than we could give him. So we put him on Craig’s List and the calls started within 15 minutes. He has gone to a wonderful home where a very lovely teenage girl will give him the love he needs and 2 Pugs to play with.

Hopefully the Boston Terrier and the Cocker Spaniel are pregnant. We had to pay a stud fee for the Boston, but the owner of the Cocker stud wants first pick of the litter. I need to measure their bellies again today to see if there is any change. The Boston has gotten heavier, so she must be pregnant. I hope the Cocker is pregnant. Her stud was very beautiful. He is black and white with a shock of white hair in the middle of his black-colored head. Her litter should have buff and white and black and white puppies.

Through all of this my pain continues. I am having trouble picking the Boston up because of my back. I have finally been to the rheumatologist and fortunately I do not have rheumatoid or psoriatic arthritis. I have good old osteoarthritis, but it is particularly bad in my knees and hands. The doctor recommends injections of an artificial lubricant into my knees. I am all for it, but must pay $160 out of my pocket per visit for 5 visits. I just don’t have it now. When I sell the first of the Yorkie puppies, I will be able to afford the injections. The second puppy is going to purchase a 1988 pickup truck so that I will have a vehicle again.

I have been mentally and emotionally stressed out too. I have finally admitted that my finances are out of control. I sought help with a consumer counseling service only to have them recommend that I file bankruptcy. At this point I have to just try to dodge creditor calls. I can’t even contact an attorney until I have a certificate from the consumer counseling service. It’s part of the new bankruptcy rules. I hate it, but it may be my best opportunity to get things under control. I should not have credit cards; I just treat them like a license to spend.

There have been pleasant things happening too. I found my Dad’s favorite song and made him a CD for Father’s Day. For his birthday I made him a slide show of his early life, my mother’s early life, their wedding and an assortment of family photographs. Choosing the background music was challenging, I didn’t want to make people cry and also didn’t want to be flippant. For my mother’s segment, I used Steely Dan’s “Peg”. It’s one of my favorite songs and of course it was her name. Dad was in Texas with my sister’s family over his birthday. They had a party for him and waited until everyone left to present him with my gift. He loved it. I guess the rest of the family loved it too. My sister had previewed it and decided then that it needed to wait until only the family was there to watch it. I sent extra copies for my sister’s family. I also sent copies to mom’s brother and sister. I had fun putting it together, but had to leave out many pictures to keep the running time down to 15 minutes. I think I am going to make some more slide shows. I have loads of pictures in albums, but never really look at them. If they are put together on a DVD, I may look at them more often. I also have the ability to transfer video tape to my computer. I have super 8mm movies from the 1970’s I want to share. I also have my son’s first year. Some of that is dark and I hope I have software I can use to play around with it and lighten it up.

My genealogy website was hacked and used to send out millions of phony bank emails. As a result, I am moving it to a new hosting company. I have everything back up except the database. That was the point of weakness that allowed the hacker in. I had not been keeping up with the updates, so it is partly my fault. I have been able to get it back up with the version I was using when it was hacked, but I am having trouble updating to the latest version which is more secure. I just keep plugging away until I get it right.

A Day at the Dog Park

Boy, I am pooped! I woke up in pain this morning and barely made it up the stairs to the bathroom. I spent most of the morning reading and taking it easy. Later my daughter-in-law suggested taking some of the dogs to the dog park in Atlanta. I’ve never been there so I decided I would go along. My dog, Raina, has never been to the dog park, so I packed her 20-ft leash so I could keep her under control. The walk from the parking lot to the pet enclosure is pretty long so I got some exercise. Raina did OK until we got inside. I kept her on the long leash, but changed back to the 6-ft leash when she got very aggressive with a Doberman. When we got our dogs alone, they were doing fine. But as soon as another dog came around, Raina went nuts. Hamburger and Penny had a great time. Penny found a Jack Russell terrier to play with. Hamburger liked one dog so well that she almost left with its owners. I had taken my camera along, but forgot to take any pictures.

We stopped for a little shopping at a Petsmart in Atlanta and then grabbed lunch at the Varsity. When we got home, it was time for pain meds and a short rest. Then we went out for flea medication, new coats for three of the dogs and some groceries. We ran short of Frontline and all of the dogs have fleas. That’s not too good when some of them sleep in our beds. Four of the dogs have vet appointments tomorrow, so we wanted to treat them for the fleas tonight.

I felt badly that I had forgotten to feed and water my finches before we left for the dog park. The poor things had no food by the time I got to them and the Society finches were completely out of water. They started screeching in unison when I walked in the door. All is quiet now.

I am such a chump. My niece called the other day and I let it go to voice mail. She changed locations and called again. My son picked up and then buzzed me on the intercom. I spoke to her reluctantly. She wanted me to prepare her tax return. I tried to convince her it was easy to do by touch-tone phone, but she has never done a tax return. I told her to send me copies of her W2s and I’ll take care of it. I should have just said no. Next year for sure, she can figure it out on her own.

Arthritis and Bird Care

I’m whiny again today. This is the second day in a row that my arthritis has been bad. My hands feel like they have been plunged in ice. There is a constant ache and moving is painful. My right thumb actually pops when I move it, which I try not to do. After my third trip up the basement stairs yesterday, I started using the stair lift. I couldn’t wait too long for trips to the bathroom. I wish some generous millionaire out there would take pity on me and build me a safe bathroom in the basement. Remodeling my bedroom cost a lot and it will be a while before I finish paying for it.

I moved for a couple of reasons. My son got married last June and I think he and his wife deserve privacy. I’ve always joked that I will be taken out of this house feet first. I hate moving, so I intend to live out my years here. When my sister was sick, she was so weak that with very few exceptions I had to have the fire department come and remove her from the house. They suggested that I move her downstairs. I thought it was a great idea, but with her being bedridden, I needed her near a bathroom. She could not get to the bathroom, but I needed it for the bedpan and the cleanup. My ideal downstairs bathroom would have a tall toilet. My knees are getting worse by the year. I’ve had surgery on each of them twice. I want a shower stall with a bench. If I need to save money I would use a separate shower chair rather than a built-in bench. It may sound silly, but I want a vanity with a double-bowl kitchen sink installed. I have a kind of kitchen set up now with a coffee maker, refrigerator and microwave. The only access I have to water is the laundry room. I have six 2-liter bottles that I fill. Left over coffee, tea and dirt finch water gets dumped into a paint bucket. I empty the paint bucket in my driveway and rinse it in the laundry room. The only drain in the laundry room is the 3 inch pipe that the washer uses.

I try to keep busy. This morning I used a bathroom trip as an excuse to sweep the kitchen floor. If my son and daughter-in-law had been awake, I think I would have run the vacuum cleaner in the living room. Living with 8 dogs is rather dirty. I wish it would be possible to teach them to wipe their paws before coming in the house. I have now fed my finches and given them fresh water. On a bad day that simple task is hard and painful.

I have two finches that are laying eggs again. I am just throwing them away. I started with 2 Zebra finches last May and I now have 13 or 14. It has been fun to watch them tend the eggs and raise the babies. The two birds that are laying now are children of my original pair. When the first clutch of eggs was produced, I had to use a small stool and a mirror to see the nest. That was upstairs in my old bedroom. I can see into the cages better now that they are on stands. I got to see one of the eggs hatch. The babies are so tiny, but then they would have to be coming out of an egg that is just over ½ inch long. I didn’t know that birds clean their babies after hatching until I saw it myself. The babies do get loud and a bit obnoxious when they leave the nest, but still want the adult to feed them. It’s fun to guess what the sex the babies are. They do not display any of the sexually dimorphic (impressive!) markings until they are several weeks old. The latest baby is just now getting the orange coloring in its beak. There were two babies, but one died. I have two other babies that are a few weeks older. I keep watching to see if they will develop the orange cheeks of the males. I have a feeling that they are females which will mean more eggs to throw away. My room is never quite quiet during the day. Their calls are very pleasant. Thank heavens they sleep at night.

The picture at the top of the post is of a Society finch. The baby it has hatched is a Zebra finch. The Society finches do not have sexually dimorphic markings so I may have 3 males or 3 females. They didn’t seem to care that they had not laid those eggs. They just adopted the eggs are theirs and raised the babies.

A Tale of Two Kitties

I have two cats. I am also allergic to cats. Why would someone with cat allergies live with two cats? Get comfortable, it’s a long story.

Remember my niece ‘T’? About three years ago while she was living with a boyfriend, she would come to my house, supposedly to see her mother, but spent the entire time on the telephone. I knew something was up because she would close herself into my sister’s bedroom or the office so we could not hear her talking. This was one of the danger signals with her. She is the type you hate to be around when she is on a cell phone in public. You hear every word of her end of the conversation. She thinks she is just that important that everyone would care. So when she made phone calls privately, something was up. I insisted she tell her mother and me what was going on. After much yelling and screaming about her privacy, she admitted she was calling about a kitten. Obviously she had not told her boyfriend since the calls were being made where he could not possibly hear.

My heart sunk. She couldn’t even take care of herself, how was she going to be responsible for a kitten? I had already taken in her dog in 1994 because she would not take care of it and my sister had sold her house and didn’t have anywhere for the dog. I just knew that if she got a kitten, I would end up caring for it.

She assured us that she was just considering getting the kitten, there was nothing definite. Two days later she walked in the door with a calico kitten. The boyfriend still didn’t know about it. He was going to find out that day when he got home from work. This is the guy she had been living with for months giving her mother and me a phony name for him. She didn’t want us to know he was the same man who had blackened her eye and broke her glasses two years before. I guess he was as thrilled about the cat as I was since ‘T’ started bringing the cat to my house every day before she went to work so that the cat was not alone with the boyfriend. Then it progressed to us babysitting the cat on weekends. I wasn’t having much difficulty with the cat dander, but I did develop hives if Patches scratched me. My sister also had a mild cat allergy, so we kept the cat out of her bedroom.

When I realized that Patches was becoming a permanent fixture, I decided to get her a playmate so that I didn’t have to take Benedryl constantly. I went to the local shelter and found a tortoiseshell cat. She seemed very friendly and so Eliot became a member of the household. Within 48 hours, Eliot was in heat! I don’t know how people can stand having female cats that are not fixed. They are obnoxious when they are in the mood for love. She even offered herself to my old dog. Since I had gotten her from the shelter, her surgery was prepaid and I set it up as soon as possible.

Eliot’s surgery just reminded me of another incident involving my niece. I had trouble fixing the timing in mind, but the cat was part of it and it helped me to remember. My sister owned two timeshare weeks in Florida that usually started the Saturday after Thanksgiving. She and I would go and just relax, maybe spent a couple of days at Disney World and do some Christmas shopping. Eliot would be coming home from the vet after my sister and I had left for Florida. We entrusted ‘T’ with the care of the dog and cat while we were gone. One condition we had set up was that the boyfriend was not to set foot in our house. By then, we knew his real identity. ‘Z’ and I had a good time and as usual we were ready to go home before the full two weeks had ended. We drove straight home on Thursday instead of Saturday. When we arrived, ‘T’s car was there and mine was gone. I didn’t think too much about it since I did allow her to use my car for work sometimes. ‘Z’ and I unloaded the most important stuff and started sorting the mail. The living room television was on. That wasn’t so strange since we sometimes left Animal Planet on to entertain the dog. It was on ESPN, but I thought perhaps ‘T’ had been watching some NASCAR related show and just forgot to change channels. I tried to find the remote, but it was nowhere around. The missing remote didn’t leave my mind, but I still had the mail, some laundry and the dirty dishes ‘T’ had left in the kitchen. I was also looking for Eliot. She was still new to the household and I had left her with the vet and then wasn’t even there when she returned home, so I kept looking for her. I searched almost the entire upstairs and then started on the basement while I was working on the laundry. We even called ‘T’ on her cell phone to make sure that the cat had been in the house that morning. After 2 or 3 hours I got a little frantic. By then I was upset about the cat, pissed about the missing remote and very unhappy about the dirty dishes. I started another search upstairs (it is a ranch house with a full basement) for the cat. I had never checked the coat closet in the living room since it had been a mild winter and we hadn’t been wearing coats. When ‘T’ arrived to pick up her car, I questioned her about the cat and the remote. Finally in exasperation, I checked that closet for the cat. My heart nearly stopped when I opened the door. There stood ‘T’s boyfriend, all 6 feet 4 inches of him, with the television remote in his hand. I exploded! I should have called the police. That man had been hiding in the closet the entire time that my sister and I had been home and never made a sound. I didn’t ask him how and when he planned to leave without us knowing. I ordered him out and told him to never come back. I guess it was foolish of me not to call the police. This man had been violent with my niece and was on probation for domestic violence with his ex-wife. My niece should not have even been with him. It was a violation of her probation to associate with another person on probation. As far as her probation officer knew, she still lived with her mother and me. My dad is right; you can tell ‘T’ is lying because her lips are moving. (I did finally find the cat. She was hiding so far under my bed, that I needed a flashlight to find her. She came out after I had been home for a day.)

I got off on a tangent, duh. Back to the two kitties; not long after Eliot had been fixed, Patches came into heat. ‘T’ of course had no plans about having her fixed and the cat hadn’t even had her shots yet. ‘T’ knew her mother would take care of it; her mother took care of all of her messes. I called around for the most economical spaying price and made an appointment for Patches. That taken care of, the cat became a permanent fixture after we found out that the boyfriend did not like the cat and was mean to her. Now I had a 13-year old Bichon Frise dog and two cats.

I continued to allow the false impression that Patches belonged to ‘T’. After my sister’s surgery and she became so ill, the only time we ever saw ‘T’, it was when she wanted money or a private telephone for one of her schemes. I decided that the cat was mine. I fed her, cleaned up after her and played with her. So I changed her name to Harley which is short for Harlequin (she has diamond markings on her face). ‘T’ was livid! Too bad.

In early 2005, my now daughter-in-law moved in with her dog. I had to have the Bichon put to sleep in December 2004. He was old and very ill. The cats were accustomed to having a dog around, but an old dog, not a pup. They adjusted to Jack the dog. Eliot would hide all day and come out at night when the dog was in her crate. Harley just went about her day as usual. No dog was going to make her change her habits. When my sister passed away, I started feeling the loss of my dog. I found a Lab mix at the shelter that was about the same size and age as Jack and named her Jill. Then my son got a dachshund mix, a female named Reggie (our vet thinks we have weird names for our animals!). Eliot became a little more withdrawn and Harley began playing with the dogs! Poor Eliot, she just tried to stay out of the way of the dogs, but they are natural hunters and chases would happen. I became concerned when I noticed that Eliot used her claws to fend off the dogs. She also used her claws on me a lot which meant ingesting Benedryl. Even though I don’t believe in de-clawing cats, I had the procedure done on Eliot. I was worried about injury to the dogs and I could not continue to take the antihistamine every day. I think she misses her claws. She bites more now and looks frustrated sometimes when she plays with her toys.

By the time that my son and his girlfriend married, the household had grown to 7 dogs and the two cats. Harley was still very cool about the dogs and just acted as if they weren’t there. I had shelves on the wall in my bedroom. I ended up clearing most of the bottom shelf for Eliot to use as her safe haven from the dogs. Now the cats and I have a bedroom/sitting room in the basement. The only dog that comes down here is my Yorkshire Terrier. She is smaller than Eliot, so the cat does not seem intimidated by Raina. Now the cats play together again and not just at night. Harley has adopted a small cardboard box as her own. I need to post a picture of her in that box. I guess only a cat could find it comfortable. Harley also climbs the exposed ductwork in the room where I keep my refrigerator. The first couple of times she got up there, I heard a lot of yowling from her when she could not figure out how to get down. I made the mistake twice of ‘helping’ her and got clawed for my efforts. She figured it out on her own. Eliot has become an accomplished climber of the containers. She has even managed to get on top of the wardrobe. She isn’t adventurous enough to make the jump from the wardrobe to the bed, but Harley has (and startled the crap out of me when she did it when I was in bed). I received a pair of Zebra finches for Mother’s day last year and found out they are a gift that keeps on giving. I now have 3 cages of birds which the cats love. While we were still upstairs, I had to fasten the cages down with bungee cords. Luckily we have only had one incident of a cat upsetting a cage since moving downstairs and I solved that problem with a little furniture shifting. Twice I have had birds escape and Harley has helped me capture them. I have no illusions about Harley’s intentions. If I had not been there to take the birds away from her, they would have been lunch. She is much better at catching them than I am and the birds were not injured luckily.

I enjoy having my own living area separate from my son and daughter-in-law (I just need a bathroom down here!). I did not realize how much it would enrich the lives of these two cats that I shouldn’t really have, but would miss horribly if they were gone.