Category: Life

Two friends called this morning and asked me if I wanted to go to Happy Apple Farm in Penrose, Colorado. I had never picked raspberries before. The bushes had been picked over, but I managed to find a pint of extremely ripe berries. They were so ripe that I immediately brought them home and made a raspberry cobbler, now baking in the oven.

I don’t believe I’ve ever made a cobber before, either. To judge from the ingredients, it was first made by someone who didn’t have the patience to make a pie.

I lost Dudley for a heart stopping three to five minutes today. I have been letting him off the lead for most of our walks recently. He usually stays within six to ten feet of me except for when he will stop to sniff out the neighborhood news. However, he saw some birds flying up from a thicket when we were nearly home, and took off in pursuit. I couldn’t even hear him crashing through the trees. I wasn’t wearing appropriate clothing for bushwhacking, so I had just about decided to go back home and change into jeans when he came running down the trail to find me.

I haven’t been walking nearly as much as I should to meet my goal of thirty minutes a day. Lody has been a little lame, and hasn’t been keeping up very well. I have been afraid I would lose her if I kept marching along at my normal pace, so today I left her home and just took Dudley. I don’t think she minds, as long as I managed to keep her from noticing that I am taking Dudley. I slipped out with him while she was occupied with her breakfast.

Since I use Mapquest and Yahoomaps a lot, and am also a Tolkien fan, I enjoyed this satire called Hoom! Maps and Walking Directions .

Here is some advice for guys: how to be banned from grocery shopping. I didn’t know they needed lessons. I thought it had something to do with the Y-chromosome.

Bev, of Funny the World, has posted photos from her Australia trip at Sep 9, 2003 and Sept 10, 2003.

In Notes From an Eclectic Mind: Snakebit, Rana writes about rattlesnakes. When we moved to Colorado, I had a live and let live, snakes are our friends approach, but three snake bit dogs later, I lost my tolerance. Lacking a shot gun, Jack drove over the one that menaced me in the driveway several years ago.

I think I may have discovered the best way to give Lody pills. I had cut a chunk of hotdog, and noticed that the tablet was long and somewhat spindle-shaped. I used a skewer to piece the middle of the hotdog, and pushed the tablet in. Lody gulped it down like a treat while I watched closely to make sure she swallowed everything.

p. I’ve been encouraged recently by the move to tasty drugs for dogs, but a lot of medications used for pets were originally developed for people.

This photo of the boardwalk gives another view of the intense green of the Toronto Islands.

Lody spent the night in the mudroom with none of the unpleasantness that I described
yesterday. She did complain several times, but the mudroom is sufficiently far from the bedroom that I was able to harden my heart and ignore her. The antibiotic tablets I am giving her are huge, and a challenge to get down her. I am good at giving pills to most dogs, but the long jaw and small throat of a collie can make it difficult when they don’t feel like cooperating.

You know your day has been odd when you don’t get around to brushing your hair until 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. We got home late Wednesday night to find a note from our critter sitter saying she thought our collie Lody had diarrhea. Both dogs seemed fine and happy to see us. Yesterday Lody soiled in the kitchen, so I didn’t give her dinner. She got me up in the middle of the night, and was distressed enough that I regretfully shut her in the mudroom. She soiled in the mudroom, and I panicked when I found blood and mucous in the stool. Since this was about 5:00 am, I knew it would be a long wait before I could talk to my vet at nine. What I found in the mudroom this morning was very similar to what I found from our last collie Siobhan twenty-four hours before she died.
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