Car Mad House

What an almost-wasted weekend!

The good part was traveling up the road yesterday afternoon and seeing friends I haven't spent time with in many years. They've been in their "new" place for 9 years and this was the first time I've seen it. Let's forget how sad that is and concentrate on the fact that I actually got up there (it's a whole 30 minutes up the road) and that it was fun.

And it was sooooo nice being out of this cat mental hospital for a while. Velcro has totally lost her mind, the cats are in chaos. The old cat has always been most gracious and well-mannered. Now she is a snarling bitch. (No, that's a female dog, what's a nasty female cat called?) She holes up in one of the bedrooms and won't come out. Now, she can live for a long time without food because she's pretty chubby, and she must be getting water somewhere because she's peeing on everything. That's what cats do when they're pissed off.

So I spent the rest of the weekend doing laundry. It's a losing battle. You just get a load dried and folded, and here comes a cat to sleep on the clean pile.


I caught Velcro this a.m. and put her in the soft carrier, then put that on the walker and pushed her to the back porch where there is food, water, and the cat box. When I let her out, Charley and George wouldn't leave her alone so she smooshed herself behind the dryer. I had 8 loads of drying to do today, so that wouldn't work.

When Bob got home for lunch, we teamed up and dragged her out of there. I put her back in the carrier and put it right in the middle of the floor where she just had to deal with life. Charley immediately jumped on the carrier and sat on it for a while, then got off and stared through the netting, anything to be annoying. George watched.


I've totally had it with cats this week.

Do they make drugs for cats? Valium or something? Is there a Dr. Phil for cats?

Bob says bring in the big dog carrier and put all 4 of them in it for a week.

Dusty Works

This is K’s neighbor, riding Dusty so K can see what he’s doing. Dusty does a little of every gait imaginable. It’s not easy to sort them out. This is everyone’s favorite - a smooth little canter. A Tennessee waltz.

It’s hard to explain to a hunt seat rider and a western rider how to get the right gait from a gaited horse. The language I learned 40 years ago doesn’t translate well. For example, “bust him loose,” and “he’s too square.” And I usually heard those phrases with a few cuss words on either side of them. Horse training is so much more civilized these days.

These pictures were taken by K on my new camera.

Gourd Art

Here is the gourd I did in class. Well, I started it in class. It took a good bit longer than that to finish it.

Without the leaves, it looks like a bomb from one of those old cartoons.

Not Enough Weekend

I got a lot done, but ran out of time. This a.m. I went through 3 big boxes of books. These had already made the rounds through my book-trading buddies, so it was my turn to find a home for them. Two friends at work had already rifled through and snatched 2 bags. I pulled out a couple of bags for the kids at SCOE’s court school, then took the rest to the SPCA for their book sale. I also left a little cash there. I’m hoping next time someone will take their unwanted cat to SPCA instead of dumping it on my doorstep.

Green Acres, the flower nursery, is on the way home from SPCA. I HAD to stop there and look at the winter bedding plants and bulbs. Of course I had to bring a few home. I also brought a bag of ladybugs. I know, it’s not the right time for ladybugs, but I felt so sorry for the bugs in the bag. They were begging for their freedom, I could hear them.

Blue Top had a little work this weekend too. He gave pony rides. Brianna and her mom Stacy brought a group of 4 little kids over and BT patiently plodded around for them.


Brianna and Stacy hide behind BT so a mom can take a picture of her young lady “riding.”

I have a picture of Bob at this age on Neva’s horse. He’d been on trail rides before he was a year old. Those were the days between our “old" lives as interesting people and our new lives as “parents.”

I stayed outside until dark and got a few things planted, then I came in and started my new project - decorating a gourd. This is the before picture.

It may be a long time before you see the finished product. I’ll take my camera to work tomorrow, though, and take a picture of the gourd I finished in gourd class. Why did I take it to work? No one to show it to here at home. The kitties and Bob are only interested in things that are edible.

Not Enough Daylight

I have figured out the camera and am eager to send you some wonderful pix. However, when I get home at night it’s actually almost night. Maybe today I can get outside while the sun's shining and convince something out there to move around quickly so I can take an action shot. One of the main reasons I bought a Canon S515 is that I really admire the photos a fellow blogger has taken of her horses and Boxer dogs playing in the field.

I’m beginning to realize there isn’t much action around this place, though. A 20-something horse, a 10 year old goat, sedentary cats and son. Even on my cane, I’m about the most active thing around here. The morning glories grow faster than I move, and the lizards dart around, but they don’t go very far.

So please forgive me for more cat pictures. It’s all I’ve had to practice on. I did take a picture of a bare-chested Bob sitting with his box of Legos, but found it depressing.

Here is Charley, ever vigilant and looking for a good time.


He hasn’t found many of them this week. Velcro is still hissing and spitting at him from the corner of Bob’s bed, where she’s been ever since she returned from the vet. She seems to be suffering from a personality disorder, I hope it’s not permanent.

Here is George, trying to find a place that doesn’t belong to someone else.


He’s had a rough time in some cases - like learning to stay off the counter when people are eating. But mostly he just tries to ignore the hostile glares of the other 3 kitties. Oh, and even though he’s proving to be a superb lap kitty, he hasn’t been welcome on our laps. He’s been very gassy. Gag. Don’t squeeze the orange kitty. I think that’s what Saddam used on the Kurds.

Learning to use the camera stuff set me back a bit. I’ve been pushing this week to make up time and get some stuff done before our big job at work hits next week. But overall I’m coping well. Bob took this picture.


You all know I don’t smoke anything. Weed smells like burning catshit to me, and I need all the wits I have left just for simple everyday functions. This t-shirt is from the little town near Mt. Shasta. It’s so soft and comfortable, I wear it a lot.

Really, the smile and dopey look are genuine.

Age Is No Asset

Every year I become less capable of dealing with life’s little details.

Yesterday my car was due for its 35,000-mile servicing, so I took it to the dealer. They have a nice waiting room with a huge TV. I don’t watch TV, I haven’t had one for 12 years. Yes, I rub this in a lot, and though I long denied it, I AM self-righteous about it, but don’t let that bother you.

Well I thought, since this was in the afternoon, maybe I’d get to see an episode of General Hospital or something. I haven’t seen GH for 20 years. Is Jessie still there? Is that actress even still alive? How about Monica and Alan?

But no, GH was not on the TV. It was Divorce Court. My God. The stuff they show on TV these days. I was embarassed to be in the same room with other people who were watching it. Low life, extremely stupid people on the show, with incredibly dumb problems. Negative, nasty stuff. Even the commercials. I’m not equipped to deal with this stuff.

I picked up my keys at the cashier's desk. She said the car was on the right. I had to squeeze past 2 cars parked in front of the door to get to the parking area, across some nasty tile flooring that was a problem with my cane. Then I looked and looked and couldn't find my car. Had to go back to the cashier. She said she'd have someone bring the car around. So I went to stand at the door, and there was my car already! It had been one of the cars I’d had to walk around to get to the parking area. Some days I’m not even equipped to deal with the obvious.

When I got home, there was a package waiting on the porch. My new digital camera! I spent all evening reading the owners’ manual. By the end of the evening, I’d figured out how to install the shoulder strap. Sigh.

Planning for Disaster

Reading about all the current disasters in the world makes me think about my own life and what I need to do to keep it going – does it have that effect on you?

I’m especially sensitive to other people having to deal with floods. Living here between a river and a creek is like being a spider sitting in a sink. Sooner or later someone is going to turn on the water, and down the drain you’ll go.

This time of year I tend to start thinking about evacuation plans. Mostly that consists of making sure there aren’t too many animals to evacuate, and planning where to take them. The animals go out first. Family pix are in old marked suitcases that can be grabbed quickly. And, of course, you have to just be willing to kiss some of your possessions goodbye. Thankfully, we haven’t had to evacuate very often and the house has never suffered damage. I’d like to wish that luck on everyone.

When I see stories, though, where people who are still in their homes are quoted saying things like “we’re running out of food,” it makes me wonder. I’m sure there’s enough food in my house for at least a week, maybe 2 if you’re not too picky. As long as there’s a manual can opener, life is good. We can handle tuna straight from the can and unheated green beans. Bob eats cold soup and stuff all the time. I don’t stockpile food, mostly it’s from buying food at Costco, you get 6 cans of soup whether you want them or not, and half are stored in the basement.

And how could you run out of water in a record rainstorm? A couple of plastic tubs set outside should do it, shouldn’t it? My favorite quote, though, was “we don’t have any cold water to drink, what are we supposed to do, drink hot water?” Well, gee, if you leave a cup of hot water sitting out it gets at least lukewarm pretty fast. Personally I’d throw a tea bag in it and enjoy a cup of Earl Grey.

There are probably a lot of folks who are coping just fine, but we don’t hear about them. It’s just the whiners who make it on the news – in my case internet news reports. It’s probably worse on TV.

I do believe I’ll get an extra 12-pack of tuna next time I’m at Costco. For when the electricity goes out, as it always does in rural areas. Tuna and Triscuits, yum.

$1100 later . . .

. . . the house is a war zone. Not people vs. cats, now it’s cats vs. cats.

I didn’t realize cats were so much like chickens. You can keep a bunch of cockerels together and they all get along until you take one or two out for a couple of days - like take them to a show. When you return, you can’t put them back in the communal pen or they’ll get beaten up.

These cats have lived together for 4 and 5 years. I could understand if they were all hostile to George, but the sillies are picking on each other.

Gollie is hissing at Velcro, formerly her best friend in the world.


Charley has learned to growl, and he’s growling at everyone. Velcro sits right by the feed bowl and screeches at any other cat that even comes into the room. George just finds a place to sleep and ignores them all. I don’t know if the other 3 are still upset from going to the vet, or because George is sharing the house. Cats are extremely conservative, they just don’t like change.

I dealt with it all by running away for the day. There was a workshop for art teachers at SCOE that I was kindly invited to attend. The topic was painting on gourds. It was fun.



By the time I got home, Charley was trying to figure out a way to get George to play.

Maybe tomorrow will be back to normal.

Winning the War (I Think)

Charley is such a good cat. He sat on the carrier, waiting for us and was a great patient for the vet.

Gollum wasn’t too bad. We pulled her out from under the bedspread and crammed her into the carrier before she had a chance to wake up. I had purchased a new soft-sided carrier, though. If she hears the rattle of the plastic ones, she goes into hiding for a month. She was pretty good at the vet also. For the first time, none of us were scratched or bitten.

Velcro was fine in the carrier until Bob put it in the car. Then she started wailing and didn’t hush until the vet’s assistant carted her off to a back room. Velcro had to stay all night to have her teeth cleaned and have a bath. I was surprised to have the vet tell me (he checked his records) that she’s 10 years old already.

George is another story. He strutted right out of the carrier onto the examining table as if he were on a stage. The vet and his assistant became George’s new best friends in an instant, as he talked to them and cuddled with them. He has absolutely no fear. Feral cat, my foot.

Jen and Emily were right, this cat had been “fixed” and marked with a cropped ear before he was dumped here. So I was saved the cost of neutering. He stayed at the vet’s overnight though for blood tests (to rule out feline leukemia) and a bath, and everything else that will make him civilized enough to live in the house with the other cats.

This evening is so peaceful. Only 2 cats in the house.

Before I came home from work, I got to relax and unwind at an after-work going away dinner for a coworker.

It was really nice, it’s always fun being with the people from work. This time 4 of the mothers brought their young kids and that was even more fun.

Tomorrow I get to pay the vet bill. Oh joy.

Preparing for Battle

Only 30 minutes until it begins.

Today is the day the cats go to the vet. They are wandering around the house this a.m., wondering where breakfast is. Velcro is especially vigilant because she knows breakfast may be late because we ran out of canned cat food. Which means I might feel sorry for them and break out a precious can of tuna instead. Shhhhh. Don't read that out loud, she'll hear you and come running to your house. Don't spell it either, she knows what t-u-n-a spells.

Charley is milling around, dragging out all his toys. Will play for food.

Gollie is already hiding somewhere. The little spook. Well, today we have a net. That will get the cat caught. And probably Bob and I will end up getting scratched and bitten. Better check the band-aid drawer to make sure there's enough.

George (Bob named the orange cat) is outside. Oblivious.

All-in-all I'd rather deal with another runaway forklift.

Justa Monday Morning

Here's what my morning was like: I got up early, washed and doodled with my hair, went to the kitchen and discovered someone (turned out to be Bob's friend Kyle) asleep on the couch in the den, right in the middle of Bob's clean clothes that hadn't been put away. I fed the cats, ate my little breakfast and started out the door to get to work by 7:30.

There was a forklift in my horse pasture and 4 guys from the corn stand and John were fixing the fence. Well foo, so much for getting to work early.

Of course I couldn't get out there with my cane. Had to wait until the fence fixing was complete and the guys came to the gate. "How did your forklift get into my horse pasture?" I asked.

"There was a wreck and the forklift ended up there." John said. Oh grief! I had visions of the corn stand's forklift hitting a car. They use the forklift every morning and afternoon, to set up the watermelon bins. I had heard sirens, but couldn't hear much else because the noisy whole house fan was on. And since we hear sirens all the time, they didn't register. Then Pete said, "that's not our forklift."

Hmmm. "OK, so how did someone ELSE'S forklift get into the horse pasture?" And this is the story:

There was a dad driving a van full of kids who was trying to turn into the yard of the people who live across the road, on the turn quite a ways beyond the corn stand. The sun was in his eyes, and he turned right in front of a truck towing a forklift. The truck hit the van, spinning it around, and spinning the truck out of control. The forklift broke loose and traveled 300 yards down the highway by itself, before it came to rest in the horse pasture.

Pete said he heard the crash and looked up in time to see the forklift headed for the kids who were waiting at the bus stop. It missed them, then it headed for Steve's house, passed that and headed for Robert's house, missed that and veered back toward the corn stand where it looked like it was going to hit the end of the building and take out the Incahoots trailer, but kept going. People on the highway were swerving their cars all over the road trying to miss it. At that point Pete lost track of it because he was running toward the wreck. Later no one could find the forklift. (It was pretty far out in the field, out of their sight.)

No one appeared to be hurt very badly.

I went back in the house and woke Bob up. "If someone comes to get the forklift out of the horse pasture, you're going to have to go out and tie up the goat and the horse." (They had been happily munching their breakfast at the other end of the pasture.)

"Huh? What?" he mumbled.

I explained it all to him. He looked at me like I was telling an April Fool's story. "How could I have slept through all that?" he asked. Beats me. He went to the front door and looked out. The orange cat ran through the open door into the house. Bob stumbled around trying to catch it, it finally ran to the door after a lot of commotion, and he let it out.

Kyle never moved an eyeball. When I left for work, he was still asleep in the middle of Bob's laundry. Oh yes, and the light in the den was on. It had been on all night.

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

The Dumpster Solution

I was talking to brother-in-law Marc yesterday. He has a problem a lot of us have had: the house is a comfortable size, but it's too small for all the “stuff.” Earlier in the week I saw my friend Neva. She had lived in the same house for many years and recently moved. Her solution to this problem was similar to the one I discovered: get a dumpster.

Neva sold lots of stuff to a secondhand store, made her kids take everything they wanted, and dumped the rest. She and her mom moved into a smaller house, but everything is tidy and comfortable. They are 70-something and 90-something and have better things to do than maintain a “stuff” collection. Neva still trail rides, her mom is an active Kings fan.

My own solution, after John moved out and there was room to maneuver, was to get a 20-yard dumpster. It was a perfect time. I had tons of stuff that helped Bob grow up, but he no longer needed it. It wasn’t in good enough shape to pass on. The books I gave away, some family things I passed on to others, some things I donated and recycled, but it was the dumpster that mattered most.

I heartily recommend turning loose of the excess crap in your life. I have friends who are paying storage fees for their “stuff.” Don’t do this. It doesn’t take long for the fees to exceed the value of that stuff. Some poor people build storage facilities as a shrine for their stuff. The 20-yard dumpster was a one-time cost, and the farthest I had to haul anything was out the front door and a few steps across the lawn. If there's something you haven’t needed in a couple of years, you never will. Believe me.

Set yourself free.

Animal Responsibilities

This week has been devoted to trying to get animals taken care of.

Blue Top has been limping a bit and Dusty needed to be shod so Katherine can ride him in the mountains, so both of them were taken to Katherine's house for shoeing yesterday. This is always a treat because we get to see Ron the horseshoer, guru, philosopher, and old friend. I took the morning off from work to make sure there was time to visit, and it was time well spent.

The shoes didn't help BT, so I guess the next thing is a trip to the vet. This is not a critical issue, the horse appears to be in no pain whatsoever, there's no heat or swelling, and he's pretty much a pretty pasture decoration anyway. He's 22. Just need to make sure this isn't something that can be fixed.

I've been preparing to take all 4 cats to the vet next week. Am NOT looking forward to this, it's pure torture. I bought 2 more cat carriers. I needed them anyway, we are flood prone and we need escape equipment for every animal on the place. Here is the dilemma - Velcro doesn't mind a carrier but hates the car, it terrifies her. Catching Gollum and getting her into a carrier is like handling a porcupine with your bare hands. I figure the orange cat won't know better this first time (unless he was in a carrier when he was dumped off). And Charley thinks everything is a game.

I cannot, personally, carry even an empty carrier, let alone one that is full of 13 pounds of cat. Gollie is only 5 pounds, but don't forget that's a 5 lb. rabid porcupine. So I have to coordinate all this for a time when Bob is available. Bob is generally helpful, but he's been in the car with a shrieking Velcro before and isn't keen to do that again. Last time, in fact, I suggested he hold her on his lap and she peed all over him before we were even out of the driveway.

Oh, for the good old days when our vet had a mobile business and would just come to the house and treat everything on the kitchen table!

One Mystery Solved

I neglected to report that the first pigeon we rescued, a week or so ago, did not make it. I didn't think she had a disease, she was fat and healthy-looking, no discharge from her nostrils, a clean throat. It seemed more like she'd run into something and had brain damage.

Then there was the pigeon in the chimney. Pigeons aren't stupid, they don't just run into things or fly down chimneys. I was beginning to wonder if there was a hawk around.

This a.m. I sat out in the sun in the front yard, petting the kitty. I could hear the chickens and the peafowl in the backyard raising a ruckus. Then a Sharp-shinned hawk flew down into the tree about 10 feet away from us and sat there for a long time. Even I, who have a hard time identifying birds, had no trouble with this one. It practically posed.

This is the time of year we usually get hawks coming through to wherever it is they go. Sometimes we get Cooper's Hawks too.

I think the Sharp-shinned (we used to call it a Sparrow Hawk) is after smaller birds, but it's very agile. It's not much bigger than a pigeon, but it has probably scared them into defensive maneuvers that didn't work as planned.

We had a white pigeon many years ago that went down the chimney. It was part California King, a big breed that is used for meat, and it didn't hang onto the inside of the chimney for days, it just plopped right down behind the Buck stove and we fished it out. We've also had a Scrub Jay do that, and a young Barn Owl. That was exciting!

This is good territory for raptors. For the second year, a pair of Ospreys nested along the river, and at least one pair of Turkey Vultures. The Ospreys take fish from the river. The TVs wisely nest near Hwy. 16, where there is a lot of roadkill.

When the guys start plowing the fields there will be Redtail Hawks and the Swainson's Hawks follow along behind the plow, gorging on mice and gophers. They can get pretty bold.

It's quiet outside now. The hawk must have found an early lunch.