All sorts of stuff

Very random post ahead since I’ve had pictures on my camera for a while.

I wanted a nice picture of Dolly and she was laying nicely on the deck stairs so I figured that was a good setting.  I got this really nice picture of her:

As is typical when photographing pets, I had to take several shots before I got this one.  This was one of the others, and I thought it was funny:

Wow.  That’s a really  long tongue!

We were at Mom and Dad’s last weekend to celebrate their 50th anniversary.  I made the cake and it came out pretty well.  I’ve lost my touch so there were some flaws, but nothing too horrible.  Mom and Dad’s picture came out nicely too.

Today I did my first “transport” for a rescue dog.  This 1 year old shepherd was at our local shelter.  He had been adopted, but then was taken to the vet for his tests and shots and tested positive for heartworm disease and subsequently returned to the shelter.  When I read this boy’s story, I knew he was doomed to be put down because it’s very expensive to treat heartworm disease and in our county, I just knew no one would be willing to pay to have it done.  Honestly, I don’t know that I’d want to pay to have it done myself.  So I turned to the folks on a german shepherd messgae board I belong to (because Sam is half shepherd) and found out that they already knew about him and were looking for help for him.  They found someone who was willing to foster him, and a rescue organization willing to pay for his treatment, they just needed someone to bring him from here to Cleveland.  Since I wanted to help him and the trip to Cleveland is very familiar to me, I instantly volunteered.  We set it all up and I picked him up from the shelter this morning.  He’s a big boy, and still a puppy and probably a stray so he needed some manners, but for the most part he was an angel.  He hopped in my car and we came back to our house for a little exercise before getting on the road.  I took him out with the golf cart and he ran along with me like a champ.  I knew he’d been pent up for a while and thought he’d enjoy the run.  After a few laps around the property, we hopped in the car and headed toward Cleveland.  He was great in the car, better than Sam even.  Got in the back seat, laid down and didn’t cause a fuss the whole way up.  He took treats gently from my hand, gave me a few kisses on the way and was all around a great dog.  Stinky, very stinky, but a great dog.  I delivered him to his foster dad who will get him groomed and cleaned up, treated for the heartworm then hopefully placed in a good home.

I was glad to be a part of helping this boy and I’m grateful for all the people out there who do this all the time. Good luck Storm and Bob.  I hope the next month is good for you.  Sorry about the pictures, I didn’t think to take any when we were here at the house so I tried to shoot these while driving.

So far so good ….

Well, Dolly woke up in good spirits this morning, and was up and about within a few minutes ….

Click here to see her in action:  Dolly’s Broken Leg

Sue tells me that while I was at the store getting materials to make a run for her, she was actually running around a little.  She keeps the bad  leg completely off the ground, and uses the remaining three, which is pretty amazing.  It really tires her out though.  It’s going to be a long six weeks.  We’re working on a waterproof cover that will fit over her cast …. something that’s easy to put on and take off, since we’re going to be doing that a lot.   More on that later ….

Let the healing begin …..

Well, Dolly is home, sporting a brand new fiberglass cast on her leg.  They did give me some pain meds, so if she has any problems with pain, at least I can get her through the first few days of that …..

She’s pretty doped up at the moment, so I expect she’s just going to be racked out for the rest of the evening.  Hopefully, she’ll get back into the swing of things in a few days, and if we can just keep her from getting her dressings wet for six weeks, we can put this all behind us …..

Dolly’s a trooper …

I just got back from the vet, and Dolly is hurting, but in relatively good spirits.  She was very happy to see me.  She  sat with me and put her head on my lap, and gave me a few licks.  I hope I made her feel a little better by coming to see her.  They are going to knock her out shortly, and set the bone, and then get her in a good cast for the next six weeks.  We could have had them do surgery to put in a metal plate, which makes the fracture stronger faster, but it would have  required a trip to a specialist, a general anesthesia, a big incision (and the risk of infection), and a BUNCH of money.  They estimated somewhere between $600 and $1000 more for the surgery and plate, as opposed to $150 for just the cast, which she will have to have  anyway.   We figured if she’s going to have to go through the cast ordeal anyway, we’ll just give her a little more time to heal and make sure she doesn’t re-injure it before it heals completely.  They plan to x-ray it in a few weeks to make sure it’s healing properly, and if by some chance it isn’t, we can consider the surgery then.  Meanwhile, it’s going to be rough for us all dealing with having her in a cast.   She’s so used to chasing around and now, she’s not going to be allowed to run or play for a long time.  The really hard thing is going to be keeping her dry.  They line the inside of the cast with all sorts of dressings, and they’re not allowed to get wet at all.  Otherwise, the cast has to come off so they can replace them.   So, no more rainy days, no more pond, no more creek, in fact, she’s not even allowed out when the grass is wet without a plastic bag over it.  Ugh …

Anyway, I’m supposed to go back and pick her up later today.  I’m sure she’ll be a lot happier when she’s back here with us.  Hopefully, they will give us something for the pain to get her through the next couple days, which I suspect will be a little rough.  Lately, I’m finding that it’s really hard to have pets.  Between Dusty’s head injury and this, I feel like a parent.   I didn’t think pet ownership was supposed to be this hard…  I’ve also realized how lucky Sam was when he fell off the roof.  He could have broken BOTH legs with that little stunt, or worse.  He’s lying around here today wondering what happened to his sister.  He knows something bad happened, since he saw the whole thing.  I think he’s wondering if she’s coming back.  Luckily, we have a holiday weekend to spend with her.  Maybe by the time Monday comes, she’ll be over the hump and I won’t feel too bad leaving her here alone ….

Dolly update

The vet just called Guy and told him that Dolly broke both bones in her leg, just above her “wrist”.  It was a clean break, giving us two options.  Have them set and cast it and hope it heals, or the suggested surgery with a plate to secure the bones.

We’ve opted to let them cast it and hope for the best, mostly for financial reasons.  We figure if she doesn’t heal as expected, we could have them do surgery on her later.  I suspect she’ll heal just fine.  She’s young and healthy and the break was clean.

Poor Dolly……

Well,  if it isn’t one thing, it’s another.  This evening,  we took the dogs out for their nightly run to get them some exercise.  When they were nice and tired, we sat down for a minute, and Dolly took up her usual position lying on the chaise lounge chair, and waited for us to go back inside.  When we got up to go in, she hopped up to go in too,  and her leg slipped off the edge of the chair in between the frame and the webbing of the chair.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a big problem, but unfortunately, she was already in motion toward the door, and in the blink of an eye, SNAP … her leg was broken.  Needless to say, she went nuts from the pain, and started thrashing around trying to extricate herself from the chair.  We restrained her, got her untangled from the chair, and began to administer first aid.  Sue brought me some strips of cloth and a wooden spoon, and we fashioned a crude splint for her leg, and started looking for a vet that could take her at 8:00 PM in Morrow County.  Luckily our regular vet agreed to come in and take care of her, so we bundled her up and hauled her over there …..

The vet had her sedated and in a better splint pretty quickly, but the x-rays, setting the bone, and final cast will have to wait until morning, since it takes more than one vet to do those tasks without getting bitten, which I already did.  So, she’s spending the evening in the hospital.  I really wanted to bring her home so she wouldn’t be alone for the night, but the vet thought it would be best to leave her there heavily sedated so she can get a good night’s sleep and so they can get right to work on her in the morning.  Hopefully, she won’t come around and chew the splint off, because it’s a BAD fracture and not keeping it totally immobilized could do a lot of damage.   So, everyone say a prayer for her (and me).  It really broke my heart to leave her there alone tonight.  Hopefully she’ll rest throught the night, they won’t have to do any surgery, and she will be home tomorrow to recover …..

Happy Anniversary to Hank and Jean!

There aren’t many people who can say they’ve weathered the marriage storm for 50 years, but my Mother and Father-in-law are two of them as of yesterday.  We had plans to go up for a family celebration today, but as luck would have it, Jean came down with a bug yesterday and wasn’t feeling up to having a party today.  So, this will have to serve as our Congratulations until we can all get together for a proper celebration.   Our thoughts are with the both of them today, and hopefully, we can get together next weekend and celebrate properly.  Until then, rest up Jean.  We have a lot of cake to eat!

Beer & gardens

For our anniversary, I thought it would be fun to buy us a beer brewing kit. The beer is currently in its primary fermenting stage. We started with a very basic kit and if we like the process will no doubt move to more sophisticated methods, but this one was easy. Boil up some water, empty the cans of “wort” into the bucket, pour the water on it and stir. Let it cool, add the yeast and lock it up. Hopefully I didn’t contaminate it with any germs or bacteria in the process, which would be pretty much the only thing that could go wrong with a kit like this. We have a couple of weeks to wait for it to ferment completely, then we have to bottle it and wait. We probably won’t bottle though, we’re going to use a keg, which we need to buy. Why bottle when you have a kegerator? After the primary fermentation in the bucket, we had to move it off the dead yeast into a secondary fermentation bucket. Ours is a glass carboy, and the process is called “racking”.

It has to sit another week or so to let the yeast finish its work, then we can move it to the keg and carbonate it, or bottles if that’s the way we decide to go.  Haven’t decided yet.

In other news, my garden is coming along nicely. I want to be sure to take a picture every couple of weeks now just so I can remember its progress.

It’s seemed to take forever for stuff to get going, but I imagine with the summer nearing things will go a little crazy. We’ve been eating lettuce for a while now.  It will be  too warm for lettuce soon but the rest of the stuff should be coming in by then. I’m going to try to find a shady place to grow lettuce for summer salads.  The radishes grow like crazy but they’re a spring crop too and will probably be done by the time the tomatoes and cukes are ready.

We have an over abundance of radishes since they were easy to grow.  Guy told me he doesn’t even like them.  I guess I’ll be sharing them with people at work.

Guy has been busy the past few days with work around the yard.  Grass to cut, mowers to fix, weeds to kill, trees to trim.  We decided to take down a few trees that were between the house and the pond.  One was damaged and threatening to fall on the house.  The others were either shading the garden or just scraggly looking and blocking our view so those got the ax, or chainsaw as it was, too.  Our new view is much nicer now and will take some getting used to.

The grass is filling in slowly but surely and the flowers and other random things we’ve done are starting to make the place look more finished.  Lots more to do of course, but we keep moving in the right direction.

This time last year…

Reading a post from this day last year makes me realize how far we’ve come in a year!  At that time, we were still waiting on the house to be finished.  Countertops and painters and all sorts of last minute things were waiting to be done.  And I emphasize waiting.  I was complaining about being tired of building and just wanting to move in already.  A year later, it almost doesn’t seem real that we went through such pains to get to this point.

I was told that we’d forget most of the bad stuff, much like a woman giving labor, but I wasn’t sure I believed them.  After nearly a year of living there though I have to say that most of the stress of building has vanished, at least for me.  Even though we’re far from done (is any house ever really done?) the remaining items can wait as long as they need to wait until we’re good and ready to get them done, and they’ll get done our way, mostly by us, and the stress should be far less than putting our fate in the hands of others.

Time sure does fly and while both of us could probably have lived without the stress of building, the end result has been better than either of us imagined.  It was worth every second of stress to get where we are today.

Turtle eggs

It’s that time of year when the turtles all make their way out of the pond up to the shore to lay their eggs.  Some are very lazy and dig the hole for their eggs the first place they come to out on the shore, others walk great lengths to find a “good spot”.  I’m not sure if they go to the same spot yearly or switch it up.  That would be interesting to track.  I saw a giant, weed covered snapper on the hill by the driveway this morning laying her eggs.   They dig really deep holes with those tiny, turtle feet.  They do have sharp claws though, so I’m sure that makes it easier.

Regardless, I’m surprised we have any turtles in our pond at all because apparently fresh turtle eggs are quite the delicacy to the animals around, who ruthlessly dig up and eat the eggs very soon after the turtle is done laying them.  I will say the turtles aren’t the best at choosing good spots to lay their eggs.  They seem to lay them right out in the open where anyone can find them.  Maybe the smarter turtles hide their eggs better, therefore live to see them actually hatch.  Natural selection you know.

I’d love to catch the ones that do hatch.  It would be fun to see the little ones crawling back to the pond.  Maybe now that we’re living there we’ll be able to see it someday, if any of them survive!