Chani 12/1/2001 - 11/17/2009

Our poor little Chani died on Tuesday. I guess she had something quite a bit more serious than what we initially thought. She became very anemic and thin and we finally had to put her to sleep. We got that cute body suit for her because she was having trouble staying warm and her hair was always standing on end. She seemed to actually like the suit, and it did keep her warm.

We were thinking of some funny stories about Chani, and I remembered that she barely made it past her childhood. When we first got chickens, I forgot to shut the gate to the back area where the chickens live and did not secure the little wire mesh gated area to their coop. Chani (and Findlay) went out there and killed 8 or 9 chickens before I caught them, but it was mostly Chani who did the killing. I thought Paul was going to kill Chani on the spot. He said she had "blood lust" and would never be a good dog after that. It took weeks for him to forgive her.


Findlay and Chani always slept right next to each other. Chani had been sleeping alone for the past few days because she didn't feel well, but on the day that she died she once again curled up right next to Findlay. When I got up in the morning to shower and get ready for the day, Findlay stayed right next to her on the dog bed and didn't leap up to get his breakfast as usual. He must have known she needed him to be with her.

In the last couple days since she died, things have been considerably calmer around the house, though. I always thought Findlay was the one waking up several times per night to go out (on those nights we kept them in). Now that he is on his own, he stays asleep all night. I think he was responding to Chani waking up, and then he in turn would wake us up, making him look like the bad dog.

On a side note, I thought I should mention that the vet actually turned out to be quite good through this whole 2 months. After that initial visit and the remarks about Chani's lack of socialization and needing Xanax, Dr. Ferris was actually very patient with Chani and took good care of her. I could always talk to her on the phone about Chani, and she even called to check on Chani a time or two.

We buried Chani under our bamboo. I guess we'll have some lush new growth in that spot next year.

Trunk or Treat

Our church held its annual Trunk or Treat event on Halloween. I always twist balloons for this event, which is always fun. According to the registration records, over 1000 people attended the event. Luckily, only a fraction of those came through my line. As it was, the event went from 5:00 to 7:30, and I twisted my last balloon at 8:00 while they were sweeping and cleaning up the room around me.


One funny thing happened this year. Living in a military town, swords and guns are a hot item to make with balloons, and no one ever has a problem with it. Well, I was done twisting the sword and was just about to put it into this little boy's scabbard, when suddenly his mother yells out, "No weapons! No weapons!" The poor little boy was taken aback and told his mother, "It's not a weapon, it's a sword." Well she practically had a fit. Needless to say, I had to make something else for him.

The girl in the picture above and her mother did not have a problem with swords. I thought that was so cute... this pretty little princess wearing a sword. She was quite happy with it.


I have been trying to get pictures of me making balloons and children holding balloons for my website. So I asked Paul to take pictures for me. I guess I didn't give clear instructions. He thought I wanted pictures of the event itself. He took a lot of good pictures of the crowd and the kids, but unfortunately many of them were taken from behind me... of my behind.







Again...














Again...















And again.







I guess now when I ask the infamous question, "Is my butt as big as..." I can now just go back to a picture and see if it is or not. Haha!

Oven woes

This is my lovely kitchen complete with harvest gold stove/oven and orange Formica countertop, perhaps one of the most beautiful color combinations one has ever seen.

Last week the oven broke. I was so looking forward to eating a cheese crisp when unexpectedly the broil setting stopped working. I turned the oven to bake so that I could eat something, but that just made my cheese crisp have a dry, cracker-like tortilla with barely melted cheese on top. Yuck!

This was the perfect opportunity to get a new stove and get rid of the hideous harvest gold... but instead we tried to fix it.


It was obvious that it was only the top element that was not working, so we unscrewed it and pulled it away from the back of the oven. Sure enough, one of the wires had broken/corroded and was no longer connected to the element.


The wire had pulled back a bit from the opening, so we had to reach in there with some pliers to grab it and pull it back out. Fortunately, we were able to do that and reconnect it to the element.

Sigh. I guess I'll have to wait a little longer before getting a new oven.

Helping around the house

Saturday morning started like this. I said to Paul, "I have 2 choices. Since Monday is a holiday, I can either work all day today (at my transcription job) since I'll be missing work Monday or I can take the day off and get stuff done around the house."

After a brief period of thought, he told me I should probably do my transcription work.

A short time later, I picked up the conversation again and was mentioning all the various things that needed to get done, like vacuuming, mopping, laundry, etc., hoping that he would get the hint that he could help me by doing some of them.

Again, after giving it some thought, he said, "Well, you could work today and then do the vacuuming and mopping on Monday since you have the day off."

Clearly, he didn't get the hint.

Today, I was laughing about the whole conversation again and asked him about it. He said, "I was helping... I was helping you organize your time."

Needless to say, tomorrow he has a list of things to do. You'd think after 23 years of marriage I would know that I have to be specific.

I love you cutie pie!

Goony and the vet

I seem to be spending a lot of time (and money) at the veterinary hospital lately. The latest saga involves Goony.


Last Friday night Goony was in a fight. This is very unusual since he stays very close to home, and he has not been in a fight in years. We hear cats fighting pretty often at night, but this time we didn't hear anything. The picture above is what Goony looked like on Saturday morning. We could tell that his eye had been scratched and there was the blood on his forehead. He spent the day sleeping and pretty much keeping his eye shut.


By the next day, the eye was not getting any better. So being the kind of people we are, we decided to treat his eye ourselves instead of going to the vet. We did some reading online about eye infections and brewed up some concoctions. We were using boric acid drops and colloidal silver drops in the eye, and actually his eye got better over the next couple days.

The problem was that we didn't deal with the bite on his head. We could obviously see the puncture wound and scab, but it looked okay. Around Wednesday, though, it started to form an abscess. By Thursday, he had a rather large bump on the right side of his head that was full of pus. So this morning we took him to the vet.

The vet, a different one than the one who treated Chani, took a look at Goony and started pulling the scab off and pushing on his head and checking Goony all over. Goony was quite calm through the whole thing. Even when he pulled off the scab, though, the wound was still closed and wouldn't drain. Well, he started talking about how we could give Goony some antibiotics and eventually the body were absorb the pus. We explained about how we have an aversion to giving cats antibiotics since the incident with BD.

For those who don't know this story, Paul ended up in the emergency room with a hematoma in his arm when BD, our other cat, bit into his arm when he was trying to give her an antibiotic pill.

The vet assured us that this would be in liquid form and have a good flavor. I wasn't getting a good feeling about the big lump in his head being able to be absorbed, and apparently the vet was rethinking that as well because after a few minutes he decided to open up the bite wound. Thankfully, he took Goony to the back room so we didn't have to watch.


A couple minutes later, Goony came back with a nice little hole in his head and no lump. The vet said it had drained 2 ounces of pus. Disgusting!!


This is Goony back home and recuperating. He was pretty wiped out by the whole ordeal of driving in the car and getting treated. He pretty much slept the whole day, but he is up and about this evening and feeling a lot better.

Chani update

Atypical Addison's Disease -- adrenal insufficiency. That's what Chani has. Have you ever heard of such a thing in a dog??

To update the story on our poor little doggie, she ended up not eating for 10 days. So we took her back to the vet who took some x-rays and did some more blood tests. They also gave her a steroid injection. That perked her right up, and she started eating again. This made them think that perhaps she had an adrenal gland problem, so we were to take Chani back to the vet and have a specific test for this. Finally, they let us give Chani a tranquilizer. Apparently, the tranquilizers would not affect this test... or maybe they got tired of muzzling her. In any case, we gave her a tranquilizer before taking her in on Tuesday.

The above picture is what she looked like that day. It's a pretty horrid sight, but it didn't seem to bother her much. You can see what they call the "third eyelid" and of course the droopy lids, but really she was okay. She was walking around but not very coordinated, slipping on the tile floor a little. The funniest thing, though, was that she became incontinent of urine. At first I didn't notice, but after she laid down for a while and then got up, I noticed that there was a puddle and her hind end was all wet. So I went to clean her up, and while I was washing her off I noticed that a drop of pee would form and then drop off and immediately another drop of pee would begin to form and then drop off -- like a leaky faucet. And then I accidentally pressed too hard somewhere (not sure where) and this stream of pee came shooting out. I have never seen anything like that in my whole life. Needless to say, she was sleeping on a blanket with plastic underneath for the rest of the night. Thankfully, all was back to normal the next day.

Chani and the vet

Today we took Chani to the vet. For those of you who don't know, Chani is just a wee bit insecure and can behave badly around other dogs and scary situations. Chani has been sick for a few days and not eating any food or drinking water, so we called the vet's office to see what we should do. Of course, they said, "Bring her on in." So Paul (he makes all my phone calls for me) mentioned that Chani gets a little "excited" when she goes to the see the vet and asked whether we should use the tranquilizers that were given to us before. They looked it all up on the computer and told us those tranquilizers were so old that they probably wouldn't work anymore. Well that tells you how long it's been since we've taken her to the vet.

To be honest, Chani gets a little bit more than "excited." About a year ago I had taken our other dog, Findlay, to see the vet and right in the examining room was a computer with all the dog's information - a very nice feature. As they brought up my file, this huge warning popped up about Chani. I don't remember the exact wording, but I remember being instantly horrified.

At today's visit, a new vet saw Chani. She wisely had brought a muzzle with her, and even though Chani wasn't feeling well, she felt well enough to express her dislike for the vet. The vet, Dr. Ferris, immediately made a remark about how Chani needed to be socialized - as if we hadn't heard that before. We tried to explain that she was actually considerably better than she used to be and that she had been through 16 weeks of training classes, etc. Of course, she just looked at us and didn't say anything.

She led Chani off to have some blood taken, and we could hear yelps, a curse word, and other noises coming from the back room, and finally someone brought her back. Then she wanted a urine sample. So we were supposed to walk Chani around outside until she provided a sample. I thought I had mentioned to them that Chani hadn't been drinking any water, but I guess they were hoping. Needless to say, they didn't get a sample. Later when we got home, I was able to get a sample, and we had to drive all the way back to town to deliver it.

We don't know what exactly is wrong with Chani. She had a fever and a higher-than-normal white blood count, so they suspected some kind of infection. Consequently, they gave us antibiotics to feed Chani. The vet, perhaps thinking this was a positive thing, gave us large chewable tablets. Again, I thought I had mentioned that Chani wasn't eating anything, and certainly not huge pills. I don't know how we'll ever get her to eat those.

The final issue Dr. Ferris brought up with us was Chani's "anxiety" problem. She gave this spiel about how some dogs do very well on alprazolam. They lead a much happier life, blah, blah, blah. She wanted to give Chani Xanax! Poor Chani. I love my unsocialized, insecure dog.

I'm on Fire!

I set myself on fire yesterday while trying to burn the trash. I won't go into the gory details. Just be advised that using gasoline, even in small quantities, is not a good idea. But I can vouch for the "drop and roll" technique working. Here is the only real burn from the ordeal. It is on the inside of my left leg just above the ankle. I was very fortunate!

Goony

Is this not the strangest way for a cat to sleep? I'm not sure if it is more comfortable for him to sleep this way because he is so fat or because of his arthritis. This picture makes me want to bury my face in his fur and snuggle with him.

The Last Scrap

Today, I finally have some news to report regarding the craft fair that I hope to enter in October. I finally got all my paperwork back from the state and city that is required to participate. I had to apply for a TPT with the state of Arizona. That stands for Transaction Privilege Tax license. Somehow the state of Arizona has managed to twist everthing around and make it a privilege for me pay taxes on anything I sell. They lost my first check and application, so I had to send it in a second time. Then I found out I had to get a license from the city of Sierra Vista -- an occasional use permit. It has taken 6 weeks to complete the necessary paperwork. I hope it was worth the trouble. Today I sent in my application, and hopefully it's not too late to participate in the craft fair. I'll be trying to sell origami boxes, paper wreaths, and paper stars. Some examples of the boxes can be found at my Etsy shop.

I figured I would get some business cards to hand out at the fair in case I got accepted. So I went to a website to get "free" business cards. Clearly, my mind wasn't firing on all cylinders when I went through the ordering process. I needed my sister/advisor to be here to help me. I chose a lovely card and entered all the information. I didn't want to pay any extra to change the font or anything (after all then it wouldn't be free), and it looked fine on the computer screen, so I ordered them. Of course, I also had them shipped the slowest way possible, which took 3 weeks. When I finally got them today I discovered that people may need a magnifying glass to read the information. Well... at least they were "free."

Canning 101

Okay, so I copied that title from The Pioneer Woman. She had a lovely description of canning strawberry jam. I, too, have been busy canning. Last week, we canned the rest of the tomatoes. Of course, I didn't bother taking pictures. It was all I could do to manage the canning. If you want to see lovely pictures of canning, click on the title "Canning 101," but instead of strawberries and sugar imagine tomatoes and lemon juice.


The garden has pretty much come to an end for the year, so we let the chickens go into the garden to play and eat whatever they wanted, bugs mostly.


Here's an example of one of the bugs that the chickens enjoyed. We pulled this huge caterpillar off one of the tomato plants. The chickens loved it!



I'm glad we had the garden and have enjoyed the delicious vegetables, but I'm ready for a break.

Lizard poop and other thoughts.

Today's blog will be a mishmash of various events from this week.

Today while I was walking outside I found this lizard poop. It was about an inch long, so this was obviously from a large lizard. You can see a crack in the poop. I had already broken it open before I thought to get my camera. Anyway, this poop was near an ant hill. In the past, we have seen lizards just sitting by the trail of ants and picking them off one by one as they walk by.




And as you can see, the poop is full of ant carcasses.










I've been asked to post pictures of the dogs, but their normal pose is sleeping, which is not very interesting. I was able to get them playing a couple days ago, but every time I got the camera out they would stop what they were doing and come over to me.

So this is the best I could do from far away and the dogs moving around quite a bit. I thought this was interesting because Findlay is actually the one chewing on Chani (usually it's the other way around). Now, just imagine them chewing on each other and making the Wookie noise from Star Wars for the full effect.


Last, but not least, one of the chickens has started jumping on our shoulders whenever we squat down. When we stand up, she won't jump off. She just kind of arranges herself so that she can go for a ride while we walk around. It can be kind of painful when she digs her "talons" into your shoulders for balance, and you do have to either wear glasses or not look directly at her. She tends to want to peck at your eyes.

Family Reunion

I would have posted last night, but I was suffering from a near-comatose condition from having taken the "less drowsy" formula of Dramamine. I hate to think what would have happened had I taken the regular formula. Anyway, the plane rides were great since all I did was sleep from the time I sat in the chair until we landed.

The reunion was great! Paul has an interesting family genealogical chart. His grandmother, Theresa Sundal, married Henry G. Dybvig. Theresa's sister, Agnes Sundal, married Henry's cousin, Henry N. Dybvig. So 2 sisters married 2 cousins. The Henry G. family had 7 children, and the Henry N. family had 11 children, so that made for a lot of relatives. This reunion mostly consisted of the Henry G. family. Of these 7 children, all were there who are living except one who lives in a nursing home in Dayton, but many people were able to get over there and visit him.


In this picture is Eugene, Elaine, Talman's widow Carol, Philip, Roger, and Stanley (my father-in-law). Stan is the oldest at 89 years old.

Two sisters from the Henry N. side of the family were also there -- Rhoda and Ruth.

Many of Paul's cousins were also able to attend the reunion and even 2 of the their children. Below is a picture of the whole group.



The highlight of the reunion this year was not a bath and massage in the hot springs (another story for another blog) or anything nearly as funny. What we did do was a bus tour of the Dayton area to see many of the houses the Dybvig family had lived in over the years, some of the schools, and even the cemetery where family members are buried. Grandpa Dybvig was a patent attorney in Dayton, and apparently based upon his financial fortunes or misfortunes (the great depression, etc.) the family moved to a lot of different houses. We got a lot of history and interesting stories from the siblings as they revisited their old homes. Several of the siblings had also written up short memoirs that provided interesting anecdotes.

We also were able to sneak in a quick visit with Paul's cousin from his mom's side, Doug, and his family. We had not seen them for 8 years, and it was wonderful to get reconnected with that side of the family again and learn some family history.

A highlight of Friday morning was the trip to Dorothy Lane Market, which is a specialty market known for its "killer brownies." Of course, we had to sample one just to make sure they were as good as we remembered. They were! A "killer brownie" is made from multiple layers of chocolate brownie, rich caramel, and chopped pecans. That certainly is killer. Can you imagine the sugar content?!! It was very good, though.

One of the granddaughters who attended this reunion has volunteered to organize a reunion for next year. We will look forward to attending that reunion.

Hmmm... Am I Pregnant?

I knew that title would get your attention! This picture reminds me of the women who don't know they're pregnant and give birth in the toilet. I think one of the little chickens wondered what was going on and just squatted and plopped out the egg right there in the dirt. Perhaps next time she'll know what's going on and lay the egg in the coop.

R.I.P.

Today we mourn the death of one of our pet spiders. I'm sure all our family members will be happy about this since they only have one spider now to worry about crawling on them at night -- okay, one of the black spiders. There are still plenty of daddy longleg spiders to crawl on them at night.

I think we may have inadvertently led to the death of the spider. Here's what happened. A few days ago, we saw one of the spiders caught between the curtain and the lining of the curtain. Being the conscientious pet owners that we are, we rescued the spider and put it back up in the window track where it lives (on the same side we found it). For those who don't know about our spiders, one lives on the left side of the large window in our living room, and the other spider lives on the right side. I think perhaps we put the rescued spider back on the wrong side of the window, though, and into the home of the spider that already lives on that side. The reason I say this is because last night I saw a live spider come out at night, and the dead spider was unceremoniously plopped on the bottom window track just beneath it. I think maybe they had a fight to the death.

Ah well, it was probably some deadly species of spider anyway. Now if only I would vacuum up all the daddy longlegs.

Golden Barrel Cactus

Paul tried something new this year. For the 20 years that we have lived in this house we have had a beautiful golden barrel cactus in the front yard (now with a pup that is also quite large). So this year we decided to try to grow some new cactus plants from seed.











The first step was to gather some seed pods from the top of the cactus. Each of the seed pods had hundreds of seeds in them.


We soaked the seeds overnight, then used an eyedropper to pick up the seeds in the water and deposit them in the soil. Then we put the tray under the grow lights and waited to see what would happen.







About a month later we finally saw the first signs of life.





After another 2 weeks, we could clearly see the needles. The little cacti are now about a centimeter tall, and it is time to transplant them to their own little pots where they will live for another couple years before being ready to transplant outside.

I Spy

Many years ago, I heard a radio broadcast about looking for God's presence in everyday life. This could include answers to prayers, evidence of God's care, help in doing God's work, or unusual timing, and they are called "I spies." Today I had an "I spy." I was craving a BLT, but I had no tomatoes, and it was too far to go to town just for tomatoes. Then, just around lunch time, Paul went out to water the garden and to his great surprise found a ripe tomato buried deep within the plant, our first of the year. Mere coincidence or "I spy," I'm not sure, but thank you Dear Father for letting me have a BLT today.

Chicken Egg Update

Just a followup on the young chicks. We have gotten only 2 eggs from the little ones. As you can see, the first eggs are much smaller than a full-sized egg. The green egg is from one of the Ameraucana chickens.




Another characteristic of the first eggs are that they seem to have double yolks more often. The bowl contains a double-yolk egg and one regular-sized egg. They taste the same, though -- very delicious.

Bumblebee

This is just one portion of our garden. We have 10 rows of bush beans. We planted Blue Lake heirloom seeds, but some of the seeds were obviously some other variety because we have several pole beans growing. We are staking them up using some bamboo poles from our bamboo grove. Interestingly, we found that all the beans are being pollinated by one lone bumblebee. Every day we see it flying around all by its lonesome self from plant to plant. Now that's one busy bee.

Bugs

Today, Paul discovered a very odd situation involving bugs. Very close to the shed was an area about 3 inches in diameter that looked like iron filings. Upon closer inspection, he found that the mass was moving and was actually hundreds and hundreds of very, very small bugs of some sort. By the time I got my camera, the mass had spread out and was crawling along the base of the shed. Each of those bugs is about 1 mm. We have no idea what they are.


Stranger still, a few hours later a dead beetle was in the same location upside down (also unidentified). This was about an inch long. We didn't try to figure out what it was.


We don't know if the two things were related, but it was strange that they both occurred in the same location.

Chicken Eggs

I'm not sure what to think about this really, but I think one of the chicks has laid her first egg. She is only 14 weeks old, and I think she is still quite small, but I clearly heard her clucking and sitting in the coop (photo above), and later there was a small egg. I think 20 weeks or more is a more appropriate age to start laying eggs. I'll have to keep a close eye on this to see what is going on.

Also, I think one of the "hens" is a rooster. He/she is developing quite large wattles and a large comb. I hope he is just maturing more quickly than the rest and is actually a she.


In any case, the chickens are growing and developing their own personalities. There is one chicken who has a dark circle on the tip of her tail. She is curious and friendly in the sense that she comes running out to greet us each time we go outside, but when we reach down to touch her she bites our finger (not hard), then she lets us touch her.

Goony's new bed

Isn't this cute. I've been working on the computer while sitting on the couch, and Goony likes to sit near me. I guess the couch wasn't comfortable enough for him, and he wanted even more cushioning.