Category Archives: Critters and Varmints

Posts about animals.

dumb bird

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This morning a bird got in. I’m not sure how it got in. I had let the dogs out and set about loading the dishwasher. Then I heard Artemis crying to come in, so I opened the door but she didn’t come in. As soon as I went back to the dishwasher, I heard her again. I called to her that she would have to wait, under the fool me once rule. But then Cobie came and bumped the door open. I didn’t leap up to close it again, although I should have. The air conditioning was already running. It turned ugly hot a few days ago, kind of sudden, after a long cool summer so far.

After I finished loading the dishwasher, started it, made my coffee, and took my empty-stomach pills, I went to close the door, and that’s when something really large started flapping around the lamp just above my head. I startled hard, because I thought it was a bat. Then I saw it was only a bird. I closed the door. I decided a bird could wait. Like, until Mr Moth woke up. I had not had coffee yet, for god’s sake. I wasn’t even wearing pants yet.

Nobody should attend a wildlife rodeo without pants.

So I came to The Keep. I gave out morning treats. I opened my laptop without drama, a welcome change of pace since it’s been squirreling around lately. I started to play Pearl’s Peril, which is what passes for morning meditation with me. I heard a bunch of yapping, woofing, and meowing from the kitchen. I wondered if it would wake up Mr Moth. I felt no particular compunction to make sure it didn’t. Then everything went silent. The dogs came back to The Keep and lay down. This did not bode well for the feathered one.

Cry havoc and let slip the ckatten… Here came Artemis the ckatten. She leapt and twisted and stampeded up and down my shelves and across my desk. I looked up, and there was the bird. I’m not sure what kind. It looked kind of hawklike, but regular bird sized. I stood up and ushered out the dogs. I tried to usher the ckatten, but forget that. She had more havoc to wreak. So I snagged her and ejected her forcefully. She twisted in midair and I slammed the door in her face. She sat there yowling. I can’t believe Mr Moth slept through that, given the proximity and all.

So, bird in The Keep. Flying from edge to edge. Crapping. It crapped on my diploma. It crapped on my photographs. It crapped on my Done is Better than Good sign. Damn bird. I decided to hell with air conditioning, there’s a crapfest in here, and opened the window. Bird is too dumb to fly out. It keeps flapping around the top edge of windows and doors, looking for places to perch. Now is not the time to perch, dumb bird. Now is the time to fly the hell out of here. I opened another window. Still it wouldn’t fly out.

Okay, bird. I get that (a) there is a reason for the term “bird brain,” and (2) fear doesn’t make anyone smarter even if they have a magnificent brain to start with. But fly out already!

Dumb bird fails to comply with my wishes. It tries to perch on the upper edge of a poster. Don’t crap on my puppy poster, dumb bird! I pick up a dust mop and try to steer the dumb bird toward an open window. A metric crapton of hamster seeds fall out of the dust mop all over The Keep. I, dumb human, switch to a yard stick. Dumb bird outfoxes dumb human and evades yard stick, crapping in a few more places just for good measure.

It is not too surprising I was outfoxed by a dumb bird. It might not have been in the house in the first place if I had not been outfoxed by the ckatten so thoroughly and often that I gave up trying to keep her indoors.

Anyway, once upon a time I owned two finches. When one would escape, I sometimes captured it by throwing a towel over it. But The Keep is towel-less, as I failed at the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Especially since the only things I remember about that book is the number 42 is important, and something about keeping a towel handy, which I obviously have not done. I don’t know what, if anything, the Guide might say about being trapped in a Keep, besieged by predatorial pets, with a dumb bird. So I had to use my head. Before coffee. Not cool. After a few minutes of chasing the poor dumb bird around with a yard stick, I had an idea.

Since I wasn’t wearing pants, never mind a skirt–I only own two skirts, one I only ever wore to Porfolio Review and the other I have never worn–I decided I would do what heroes always do when bandages are needed. Who knows, maybe a hero would also do this if trapped in a Keep with a dumb bird and no towel.

I took off my shirt. I figured I could use it as a towel, net, dumb bird-catcher. Not that I wanted to, because it’s white and hasn’t any stains on it yet, and I really didn’t want it crapped on. But sometimes sacrifices have to be made. As I finished pulling my shirt over my head, I caught my last glimpse of the dumb bird, streaking out the window and away as though it had caught a glimpse of hell’s depths.

I think I have a complex now. Take off my shirt, terrorize a bird.

I hope you have an idea today, and that it doesn’t result in you needing body image therapy.

mouse tails, ew

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Partly I stay up too late because after everyone else is in bed is the only time I can take my armor off and even somewhat relax, but usually I am not relaxing. There are things I need to get done without being bothered (and without bothering anyone else) and those things also get squeezed in when I should technically be holding down the bed. Like dishes. What is the point in running the dishwasher when people are still eating? And someone is always eating. Also, it is very discouraging to spend way too much time clearing the piles off the kitchen table and then, as soon as I sit down, someone comes in and puts something there. So, although I know it’s poor sleep hygeine, I do tasks late at night.

One other downside is, I am never actually done. I finally crawl into bed, not because I’m half-past tired, but because I feel ready to collapse. Then I usually have to get up again at least once because my OCD convinces me I need to check the stove knobs one more time to make sure none have gotten bumped and that the house is not filling with gas.

At some point late in every night there is usually an OH CRAP moment where I realize there is something I needed to do that isn’t done and can’t wait, some urgent thing that I had temporarily forgot but that my stupid brain is now serving up to me as a convenient dessert. Last night there were two. I had forgot to wash my CPAP cushion, and I had forgot to fill my pill sorter. So I did both those things.

I hate filling the pill sorter. For one thing I am always reminded–chaCHING–of how much this shit all costs. For another, the dogs want to mill around my feet, and Oliver wants me to feed him. He has three feeding stations. One is in the laundry room, and one on my desk. But I keep the Keep door closed at night to keep Tyrion safe from Artemis the ckatten, so Oliver also has dishes on the kitchen table. I know that is gross, but he is old and gimpy and not very vertical anymore. He still tries to jump, but sometimes misses. All three feeding stations are in places where dogs can’t hassle him (or eat the food) and where he can get up in increments, via the kitchen chairs in that room, or via a folding chair I have provided in the Keep. (My desk chair has wheels, so it is not appropriate for incremental leaping purposes.)

So last night I let both dogs and Oliver out around 1:00 a.m. and set up my pill sorter and then let them back in. They hadn’t gone out long because it was raining still and again, and had been waiting in the garage for readmission. And then, just as I was about to shut the door, here came the ckatten, who proceeded to drop a dead mouse on the floor right next the line between the living room carpet and the kitchen tile.

Both dogs run to sniff at it.

I looked for the broom and dustpan, both of which were missing from their usual spot by the door, so I dart into the galley part of the kitchen and snag a saucepot off the stovetop where I had set it to finish drying overnight after taking it out of the dishwasher so I could run a second load.

I raced back to the throng and slammed the pot down over the mouse, but not before noticing it was not dead. It was doing that tail twitch thing that I know so well, both from Oliver’s younger days and another cat I had named Rikki Tikki. Rikki was always and forever bringing live rodents in and turning them loose. Often Hannah would get them while they were in the tail-twitching stage and finish them off by tossing them into the air and chomping them like Cobie does with a Stuffeez. Once Hannah flang a sodden slobbery dead mouse across the room and into my coffee. SPLASH.

Anyway, I thought I would use the dustpan to scoop up the inverted pan and the mousebody both, take the whole shebang outside, and release, even though releasing a tail-twitcher is a crapshoot. Often they die anyway. Sometimes the cat just re-catches them anyway and polishes them off. (Oliver’s MO.) But sometimes they recover–maybe they were only faking? or maybe they were only in shock–and streak off into the sunset…or your house, depending on how successful you are at relocating them before the recovery occurs.

But that plan was a no-go, because as I mentioned, I couldn’t find the dustpan. I have one of those long-handled ones you can use without bending over, and which allows you to remove nasties like rodent carcasses without getting your hands too close. I know it is unreasonable that I have Tyrion yet despise other rodents. It’s the tails. I hate rodent tails. Especially when they twitch. My skin crawls at the sight. So I try not to hate on wild rodents, even though they carry disease and yadda yadda, but then I see their tails, which kind of lash around like worms, serpents, or tentacles, and I’m all, ICK GAG FREAKOUT. Kill it, kill it with raid, kill it with fire, KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT.

I try to overcome that because I know it is unreasonable, but the best I seem to manage is to not set the house on fire because there’s a twitching tail in it somewhere.

Getting back to the dustpans, I also have a regular short-handled one, but it’s downstairs because I only ever use it for sweeping up litter around the litterpans. My feet and legs have been tremendously swollen this week, and the stairs? At going on one-thirty in the morning? No, sorry.

I snarled at the ckatten who was up on the kitchen table polishing off the canned food I had given to Oliver, and which she had chased him off of while I was distracted with the mouse. Why are you up there eating cat food while a live mouse twitches under a saucepan in the middle of the floor, you hellcat? I poked her, and she jumped down and started sniffing around the pan.

So what I did was, I stuck a box of soda on top to weigh the pan down, wrote T-Moth a note, and went to bed.

Then I realized he would not see the note until he had tripped over the moused-up boobytrap in the kitchen doorway, so I got up, wrote him a note, and taped it to the bathroom mirror where I could hope he would see it before he stumbled over the boobytrap, possibly releasing the mouse into the house.

The note apparently worked, because he left me one of his own. It said, “I tried to get [the mouse] but it was STILL ALIVE. Ran into the garage. [The ckatten] followed it. Sorry.”

So this is one of those stories with no satisfying ending. And yet, this is the end.

Have a good idea today.

A Terrier Hears Horton, or cpap with varmints

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This year, for our fifteenth anniversary, Mr Moth and I treated ourselves to a new bed.  After years of being all Dan and Roseanne in a double bed, we went for the king, even though it pretty much eats up all the floor space in our room.  Mr Moth gladly gave up floor space on his side in favor of more sleeping space.  I can’t, because doing so would leave me unable to open the drawers on my dresser, and of course we had to have room for dogs.

The bed is amazing, wonderful, awesome.  We have so much less pain–bordering on none.  I still have my beloved familial bursitis, but pretty much nothing else hurts when I get up in the morning (unless it’s my head, which is either apnea, sinus, or both).  Mr Moth was able to stop wearing his knee braces, of which he has two.  One being for his actual knee, and the other being one of those sold-on-tv things for back pain.

Yes, that actually worked, right up until he didn’t need it anymore.

To save floor space, we went with a bedframe that has no headboard and no footboard.

Dealing with lack of storage was an issue, but more serious to me–hello, Crazy Dog Lady–was discovering the new bed was too high for Kelly.  She used to use the tiny footboard as a toehold and come up over the end, but now she was just grounded.  Furthermore, Cobie was being a giant territorial ass about it, jumping up on the bed and prancing around, lording it over her.

I surfed the internet extensively looking for ideas, but didn’t really find anything that appealed.  While it seemed an obvious solution, there’s no longer enough room in the bedroom for some of those doggy steps, and I think I may have already reported how the bedding I thought was going to fit the new bed did not.  We went to Ollie’s looking for a bedding set that would fit, and when I saw one of those storage ottomans one of my remaining braincells fired off, and I thought aha!  And we got one.

The ottoman fits barely on Mr Moth’s side of the bed.  It gives him a place to charge his phone while he sleeps, and provides a place to stash clutter where I don’t have to look at it.  One turned out to not quite be enough, because Kelly is longer than one ottoman, so we bought another.  The arrangement might look a little odd, but it fulfills all the requirements.

(My own phone charging arrangement is even odder because of the need to keep the dresser unblocked on my side, but that is perhaps a topic for another day.)

So fast forward to Project Horton.  Someone on FaceBook suggested that Cobie, my spooky dog, might be alarmed by the CPAP machine.  I tried not to worry about that, but I worried about it a lot.  He doesn’t do well with change.  If I even change my text message alert tone, he spends days running to the basement every time it goes off until he gets used to it.  When I was setting up Horton, both dogs watched, and Cobie actually jumped up on the bed, so I showed it to him.  He sniffed it for a long while, then went and laid down on his bed.  Kelly was completely disinterested and entertained herself my licking my pillow.

Then, at some point on Day Two, after Mr Moth had gone to work, Kelly climbed her ottomen–haha–and got into bed with me.  She hadn’t done that on the first night I wore the mask, but some nights she doesn’t.  She kept her distance, although that is also not unusual.  Oliver (the cat) has a “territory” on the bed, and even when he isn’t in it, neither dog is anxious to infringe.  If you knew Oliver, you’d understand.

At some point, Oliver joined the bedzoo.  At yet another point, the mask resumed its leaking and farting*.

Kelly went wild.

She started yarking and charging my face, and Tiggering all around the bed.  Oliver was displeased.  He squalled like a ninja.  Kelly bounced and yarked and went gromma gromma gromma.

I lay there thinking about Elmer Fudd and the fly in his bedroom and how one little distraction escalates until he ends up blowing holes all in his house with a shotgun.  That always seemed ridiculous to me before.

Now, not so much.

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    *  Since Zor’s childhood, we have called blowing razzberries on someone’s belly a “zerbert” because at some point she saw it spelled on a cartoon as ZRRBRRRT.  Among classier people this farting/razzberrying is also called burping, and I am ridiculously glad that my family and other people’s families (as reported on forums) notice how hideously loud it is.  People in other rooms can hear this.  Ergo I can conclude I am not being a princess about it.  It is a thing.  A nerve-wracking obnoxious thing.

how robins saved my life

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I promised to tell this story years upon years ago, and it’s shameful that I haven’t done so, because it’s such a short story.

It was early spring, but warm, and I was on my way to college (the first round) and had come off the interstate and was waiting on the traffic light at the bottom of the offramp.  There was a straggly little tree to my left, but it was far and farther in the leafing process than any other tree, I noticed.  But whoa!  They were not leaves at all, but robins! And instead of one or a pair like you normally see in Ohio in the early spring, there were scads!  I started counting them.

I’d got to fifteen or so when the blare of a car horn made me jump, and I scowled in my rearview before returning my attention to the light, which had changed.  Sorry, jerk–I was busy counting robins! I thought, and the signal headed from my brain to my foot, to move from the brake to the accelerator, when a pale yellow Cadillac El Dorado blew that light doing about sixty.  I barely registered that the driver was a cliched pimp, or at least someone who played one on TV, wearing a raked over hat with a feather and some kind of a coat with a fur collar.

That was not the nearest I ever came to death; I have also been saved by a book, by doctors, and by my own wits, but on that day in 1984, a flock of robins get the credit.

oliver

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If you’re connected to me on Facebook, you know that a little while ago, I rearranged my office, and used an online room planner to experiment with the layout. This is what I ended up with. The big round thing wedged in next to the white desk is a floor fan; the site didn’t have one so I made do. The white desk is an old tank of a steelcase, and I should probably dedicate an entire entry to it. Hell, maybe I already have.

The planning site also didn’t have a cat dish to put on the macdesk (the brown one.) Every morning when I get up, I race to pee, and then eventually get dressed, let dogs out, make coffee, etc. Sometimes the Ckatten (Artemis) is in Zor’s room, and if she squalls, I let her out. Sometimes she is loose in the hoose, and if she wants, she goes out with the dogs. Sometimes she is already out, and wants in. The TL;DR of all this is, whatever the Ckatten wants, the Ckatten gets. Oliver, too. Whichever cat is in wants–nay, demands–canned food served in a dish on the kitchen table, and Friskies (junk food) served in a dish on the macdesk, where the dogs can’t reach. Well, Kelly can’t reach and Cobie is too polite to just get up there and steal it, at least while I’m looking.

Both dogs want Friskies too, of course. Sometimes I give them a few, but they have their own other-brand kibble that they think is treats, which I hand out. Cobie has learned to catch them out of the air; someday I plan to video that. Kelly can catch them sometimes too, but she really seems to prefer racing around hoovering up Cobie’s misses.

And so it has slowly evolved that my mornings are not much my own, but more a critter-dictated ritual, most of which happens before I’ve actually got outside of any coffee.

Pretty much only animals can get away with that.

Anyway, the point of all this, what I started out to say, is that Oliver can’t jump so swell anymore, so there is now a padded-seat folding chair in front of the steelcase, so he can jump up on it, and from there to the desk, which he then crosses before making the short leap (about his body’s length) to the macdesk, and the kibble thereupon. Except he doesn’t want to leap; he wants sky trammed over, which I do. Except when he decides he’d rather have delivery, whereupon he sits behind my laptop, reaches over, and claws it. So far he has missed the screen itself, but dammit, cat.

Sometimes I forget why it is I like critters.

Then he sits on my aching shoulder and purrs and I remember that he is 13 or 14 years old—68 to 72 in human years, at which point I decide I can stand him a while longer.

Don’t ask what that is in his headfur, because I have no idea.

the whateveritis in our garage

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We caught the WhateverItIs; it is a WhateverItIs no more.

I suspected a raccoon, mostly because I didn’t think cats, squirrels, or possums could pry the lids off food-grade five gallon buckets of dog kibble that I can’t even get the lids off of half the time, and also because I’ve actually seen neighbor cats in the garage. (And once in the kitchen.) But I never heard any cat noises, not even when Kelly got hurt.

Adding to the doubt is the fact that none of us have ever seen a single ‘coon in this neighborhood in the going-on six years we’ve lived here. (Nor a ‘possum for that matter.) We smell skunks quite often, to the point that I call this neighborhood Skunkridge at times.

Adding to the fun of this week (which events included my accidental overdose on my medication, due to which I am still feeling like death in a bag) was that our visitor, the WhateverItIs, had gone from the garage to the attic, and possibly into the walls. The dogs would just randomly start barking at the walls, or racing through the house whining at the ceiling. And Kelly’s bark would be that full on terrier YARK that people–including me–hate, like a railroad spike through the head, possibly more so when you’ve poisoned yourself with diabetes pills.

I started to worry, because there’s this one wall behind the tub that Artemis the Ckatten got into, and followed it down into the basement’s drop ceiling, crashed through, and landed amid an avalanche of ceiling material, on Mr Moth while he was doing homework. So in between trying to do my (hideous, kill me now) video assignment–not so easy when [a] all the neighbors are using their leaf blowers right up until they put them away and then get out their snow blowers, and [b] dogs are breaking out into random barking sprees, and [c] you’ve poisoned yourself and can’t breathe.

We really didn’t want the WhateverItIs in the house.

Mr Moth asked me if I had any suggestions and I suggested a box trap, and he said he didn’t know where to get one, and I said I didn’t either, and then he thought of Tractor Supply Company, which I always call Quality Farm and Fleet because once your company name is registered in my brain it will never be changed, I’m looking at you too Revco and Lawson’s. So he went and got a trap and we baited it with Oliver’s slightly crusty gooshy fudz leftover from morning. Mr Moth somehow finagled the whole thing into the attic entrance (it’s not a real attic, more of an access space).

We also had some discussion about how, if he didn’t catch anything, he would dis-arm the trap before he went to bed because we didn’t want anything caught for a long period of time out there with no water and it’s ten degrees, ugh. Also he was pretty sure we were trapping a cat. I was pretty sure we weren’t. But neither of us was completely certain.

Forty-five minutes after trap deployment, Kelly YARKed so I got up and went to the door, opened it, and then heard the trap close. I hollered, “You got something!”

It took some wrestling to get the thing out of the attick, but this is what we caught:

Some time ago Cobie caught a turtle in the yard and I took it out to a pond I know of and let it go, and to my surprise the turtle made an about face and hauled ass away from the pond and toward the tree line. Mr Moth took this critter out there and turned it loose and it streaked away across the frozen water. I think–I hope–it is a good place for raccoons, I see a lot of road killed ones there, but I think that is more a factor of the booming population than that the road is particularly bad. There’s water, and trees, and hopefully this ‘coon can make a living there.

However, I am not a huge fan of raccoons, and this one is presumably the varmint that hurt Kelly to the point she had a seizure. I realize she would have killed him/her if she could, so no hard feelings, but yanno…you hurt my dog and you ain’t even paying rent, so Mr/Ms Raccoon, you gotta go.

It looks bigger in the photo than it is. It was actually about Kelly-sized, and she weighs about 20 pounds.

Last night was the first night in I forget how long I didn’t get awaked by dogs barking at something in the ceiling, so hopefully this was the only squatter.

sightings

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My mom placed her Aldi order. She knows I don’t really have time to do that, but my father, who like me is a “little bit Asperger-y” (except he’s a lot Asperger-y) really loves their vegetable soup and eats it every day for lunch, and he also really wants to have two kinds of Aldi crackers, and their brand of margarine in the yellow tub (not the brown). She likes their baked potato chips, and sometime a can of the low-fat mushroom soup, which I also like. It’s somehow creamier than the full-fat kind.

Anyway, I was zooming toward the family home (in the next county; I came here to escape Dead Ex Stalker Husband) and I saw a fox. A red, red fox. It was the color of the stripes on a ginger tabby cat, with various shades, plus accented in white and a tiny bit of black. It’s bottle brush tail was standing straight up. It was taking a crap several yards off the side of the road.

I think I saw a couple of gray foxes once, many years ago, but I have never seen a red fox alive. I see them as roadkill occasionally. Lately roadkill makes me cry and I’m pretty sure someone is going to come revoke my half-breed redneck card if I don’t knock that shit off. But this fox was definitely alive! Quiveringly alive! And red! So very red! It was glorious, I say!

One red fox taking a crap by the side of the road = one moment of grace in a week full of crap.

And then there was another.

On the way home I saw a white tail buck. He was galloping up the road toward me. I hit the brakes. He kept coming. A car–or cars, not sure–behind me blew their horn; in the twilight I don’t think they could see the deer. He was not particularly close when he veered off into the brush on my right, his left. But he was close enough for me to judge his rack was almost as wide as my van, holy toledo. Magnificent.

I am not going to say where I saw either animal precisely, because while I have no ethical objections to hunting for food, and have eaten venison before and would again, I am not going to snitch out the location of this tremendous deer that gave me such a moment on a day when I so desperately needed it.

I saw a bigger buck twenty years ago, at the intersection of Rt 36 and Upper Valley Pike. Standing there under the blinking traffic light, looking quite frankly haughty. We stared at each other for the longest time before he turned and departed. I didn’t actually see where he went, just the turning and then poof! He was gone.

This concludes my wildlife report for today.

a scary critter adventure

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Something has been getting into our garage.

The way the house is laid out, there is no door leading directly from the house to the back yard, so the dogs go in and out through the garage. I don’t like the arrangement much, but on the other hand, it creates a kind of safety valve, an airlock but for dogs–doglock. But I am lazy (not to mention lately also dizzy) and so when I am home and awake (and sometimes not awake) the man door stays open so I can just open the door from the kitchen to the garage and the dogs can charge out gaily and terrorize their back yard. This saves me having to traipse out there in my house shoes or bare feet to open the man door.

But something has been getting into our garage.

At one point I knew the neighbor’s cat was getting in out there, because I saw it. It had climbed Berta (the van) and was lurking in the rafters out there. In fact, here. Have a photo.

cat in the garage rafters

But lately something has been getting into our garage and tipping over five gallon buckets full of dog food. Those things are heavy. And whatever it is has removed impossible-to-remove lids on at least two occasions and made a huge mess, forcing us to relocate the dog food to the workshop, where so far it has remained unmolested.

Wish I could say the same for Kelly.

They hear whatever it is, and go crazy. I try to warn WhateverItIs before I let them out, and give it time to take shelter, but a few weeks ago it didn’t move fast enough. Maybe it thought I was kidding. But for whatever reason, it didn’t, and apparently Cobie and Kelly caught it, cornered it, or something, and all hell broke loose in my garage.

It was roughly one a.m., of course.

There ensued all kinds of yelping and squealing and barking and nails scrabbling on cement, but no noises that sounded like they might come from WhateverItIs. In short order the noises all rushed outside. At first I figured WhateverItIs had escaped, but minutes ticked by and the dogs fell silent and I started to think they had killed it, WhateverItIs.

Then I had to get shoes on, because, oh did I forget to mention, it was storming. Sheets of rain, and huge flashes of lightning in both sheets and bolts, and window rattling thunder. This is why we were still up in wee hours. Kelly is terrified of storms and had been shivering between my feet. Now she was out in her worst fear.

So I put on shoes and went out, and as soon as I got to the deck started slipping because damn that thing is slippery when wet. I have no idea if all wood decks are like that, or if it’s just ours, but regardless, yeah–treacherous. Worse, I couldn’t see. The lightning was blinding, and my eyes couldn’t adjust fast enough between flashes to actually see much.

And then, in between cracks of thunder, here came Kelly, charging toward me out of the dark. “Come on!” I cheered, and skated back into the house. She followed.

In the light, I saw her face. Her right eye was full of blood. I reached for her.

She ran past me and down the hall, threw herself down, staggered, hopped sideways, fell over, yelped, stood, hopped, fell over, began crying, got up, tore past me, fell over by the sofa, and started seizing.

The storm raged outside (where Cobie still was, doing heaven knows what) and in, and I screeched for Tim to wake up and come help me, although help with what, I had no idea. I was not able to think or move or do anything but stare in horror.

By the time Tim got out of bed, the seizure was over. Kelly hopped up on the sofa and wiped her bloody face on the spread there. She panted and panted, and I collapsed next to her, I didn’t touch her because I didn’t want to make things worse. After she cleared the blood from her eye she came and lay next to me.

Somehow, Tim got Cobie to come in. Zor came out to see why I was shrieking. I was able to inspect her and see that her eye was ok, just the blood from the scratch on her face had got into it. We debated the necessity of a middle-of-the-night emergency vet visit.

Kelly has never shown any signs of any neurological problems before. She’s a little high strung, but not really that much considering she’s a terrier and all. She’s already up on her shots, and her annual is coming up soon anyway. I remember the little dog Trickie Woo from the Herriott novels that would get so wound up he would have a “fit”, so it’s a thing.

So I put some neosporin on her, and called the vet in the morning. Barring a whole lot of expensive tests that might not show anything, there isn’t anything to be done at this point, except to worry obsessively, which of course I began at once.

I think she was already wound up about the storm, and then the WhateverItIs, and then blood got in her eye and partly blinded her, and it was all just too much. At least I hope that’s what it was. She has been completely normal ever since. Well, KellyNormal. Her poor face was a little puffy for a couple of days (but not hot, so no infection) and there’s a scab, which I want to go away right now because it hurts me to look at it. It makes me feel like a scared six-year-old:  Get offa my Kelly Doll, you bad ol’ scab!!!

So. We are all keeping an eye on Whee Kelly, and she has been a hundred percent KellyNormal. Which is good, because she is, well…my sunshine? My heart? My light? My joy?  She’s my dog.

Which pretty much sums up everything about her, as far as I’m concerned.

Scamper on!

table war

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This day is off to a bang. First a little dog got caught in my underwear while I was trying to get dressed. So I decided to go let dogs out and THEN get dressed, except I discovered there are linemen up the pole out back, and so I had to backtrack and get dressed anyway so I could make sure the linemen didn’t leave the gate open. Then Artemis the Ckatten decided she wanted some of Oliver’s special gooshy fudz which conflict at least brought Cobie in from trying to eat the treed lineman. Separate dishes interrupted the War of the Gooshy Fudz.

I took a pic of the two cats eating in proximity, but my kitchen table is the only open horizontal surface out of dog range that Oliver can leap to, and it’s currently a shameful disaster area. I mean, expect FEMA at any minute.

Any day that is going to involve running the dishwasher twice is also going to involve a second cup of coffee.

fear of dogs, or how i caught a pit bull

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I know it’s not politically correct, but I don’t like pit bulls. I used to feel hideously guilty about this until I realized I also don’t like a bunch of other breeds, including some traditionally hardcore breeds like Rotts and Mastiffs, but also including some other dogs like Saint Bernards, Collies (yeah, Lassie), and Cocker Spaniels. My dogphobia springs from my years as a pizza delivery driver, where for whatever reason there were just certain breeds that seemed inclined to cause me major problems.

You might think my fear of Saint Bernards comes from Cujo, book or film, but no. My fear of Saint Bernards comes from literally having been trapped in my own car by a pair of them, who proceeded to chew my bumper and body side-molding. Better that then me, but still.

No tip, either.

I was treed on top of a company truck by a collie, and the dog that actually took a hunk out of my thigh was a collie mix.

And pit bulls?  Well I admit I just don’t like the triangular shape of their heads, which reminds me of snakes. But in my serivice area they were also they were the breed most likely to be tied to the porch rail in the dark, and to pop out snarling and nasty at the approach of the ridiculously attired person who smelled like food.

I also once screamed like a girl when a black lab charged at me.

Yesterday while discussing this, a friend said, “I don’t like dogs that bite, and that could be any of them.”

And there you have it, in a nutshell.  My personal experience has made me wary of these breeds, but I also know that (a) my own very friendly hound once bit a pizza driver (although I believe he was just trying to get pizza), and (b) not all dogs of any breed are going to behave like previous dogs of that same breed I have met.  So while I remain very wary of strange dogs, I try to remain open to them as individuals.

This is kind of how I am about people, actually.  Like, here’s an ex-con for example. I have no trust. But if I get to know him or her, I might learn to trust.

Anyway, as previously reported, I am having some serious issues with lightheadedness (CT scan and ultrasound later today) and yesterday I was crossing the school parking lot at the downtown campus like someone recently escaped from the nursing home. Not quite dizzy, but wobbly, and trying not to worry about what will happen if I start getting dizzy while I’m sitting down and thus can’t drive anymore. When I was about halfway across I heard a bunch of hollering, but it didn’t seem to concern me, so I didn’t concern myself with it, just continued wobbling along.

Finally I came to the sidewalk and stepped up onto it, near the corner of the building where I felt a little more secure, because if I needed to, I could lean on the building. Then I turned around to see what all the fuss was about.

Charging toward me was a liver and white pit bull. Behind it came three humans, one of whom was carrying a football-sized dog. The biggest one of the group was a guy and he started hollering frantically, “She’s friendly!  She’s friendly!  She don’t bite!”

Some weird calm came over me, and I thought toward the dog, “This is not a good place to be a pit bull on the lam.”

On she came. I didn’t look directly at her, but looked at the library across the street and kind of watched her out of the edges of my vision. There was just something so familiar about her expression. Something Kelly-like, although her little pointy spy-vs-spy face could hardly be more dissimilar to a blocky pb face in structure. It was not the structure, it was the expression.

And on she came.  Charged right up to me, getting it on with a full body wag, and exuberant leaping and sniffing.

“Sorry, Sister,” said I, “Your freedom has come to an end.”  And I stepped on her leash.

And then I stood there while she tested to see if she could get away, and then she maypoled me, tying my ankles together, and then she sat down good-naturedly and waited for her humans.

“She’s friendly!” the guy said again.

I agreed, but. “I’m not going to bend over her to get her leash,” I told him.  “She doesn’t know me.”

Dogs don’t really like being bent over, and…she didn’t know me.  Also, if I had bent over, I might have just kept on going, and not only would that have let the little dog escape again, but it would have been humiliating and possibly painful.

Her human retrieved her leash and thanked me profusely, and sounded–to my ears, anyhow–surprised that I was a friendly human.  Which gave me pause to consider, is that how the world is to pit bull owners?  Or is it only how they perceive the world to be? Probably a mix, if I had to guess.

So I went about my business and they went about theirs, and later I would think, “I’ve changed (at least a little).” Because years ago when that black lab charged me, my first thought was, “I’m getting mauled.” But yesterday my first thought was this macro:

Much later, I would realize what it was that reminded me also of Kelly in the expression.

It was Whee-ness.

And now when I call her Whee Kelly Doll, maybe you’ll have a little better idea how she came by that title.